Alice Cooper

Close your eyes everyone. Think about where you live and what you have. What kind of job your parents have. How difficult is it? I want you to think about when you become an adult. What do you want to do? It starts now. I challenge every one of you to dream, focus, study do your homework, and read one hour a week. It will enhance your ability and you can be a tutor for yourself. What are you not good in? Be better. Find someone that is good in that area that can help you. This is where I end my life story of growing up in the south. Hope you’ve learned something. Be the best you can become!

Alice Cooper

My name is Alice Cooper. I was born in 1953 on January 25th in Crawford, Mississippi. My family is the product of sharecroppers. I had a challenging childhood. I had a lot of chores to do. I have six sisters and three brothers. We all have college degrees. I now teach fourth grade at Earle Brown Elementary.

We are going to start in the south with Negro Spirituals. The spiritual was a tool used for communication. In the fields, slaves used a choice of spirituals to communicate with each other. Slaves [who were] due to escape, took the lead part in certain songs so everyone would know who was going to escape that night.

My great grandfather was Alford Short. He was born in 1864, one year after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. The South did not get the news. Slaves were still being sold even though the emancipation document was signed. His mom was sold as a slave.

Let me tell you about my mom and dad. Mom was more of the overseer in the house. Dad ran the fields. He operated the farm. He was the one who got the seeds and borrowed the money. We were poor, but we always had plenty to eat. We grew potatoes, cotton, peanuts, corn and cabbage. We raised turkeys, chickens and beef. We had pigs that we butchered for our own pork. We milked 60 cows a day by hand!

My family is very religious. We believe in God and church-going. We never had a chance to say “no.” We got up early to milk the cows, feed the pigs and put new straw in [the stalls]. We got ready for Sunday school after breakfast and sometimes we stayed all day.

During the harvest season I couldn’t go to school like you. You can go every day, unless sick. I couldn’t attend school from the second week of August until the end of October or November. It depended on how plentiful the harvest was. We had to be in the field from 6:00 am to 6:00 pm. We had a sack in the back and hand-picked the cotton we raised. We worked and brought our lunch. We had 20-gallon cans we put water in to take to the field to drink. I can’t explain how it felt to see the school buses go by without me. The bus left. During the harvest season we only got to school when it rained.

When we couldn’t attend school, my mom house-schooled us. She would drive twenty miles to the school each day. She would take homework to the teachers and meet with each one of them. We’d come home after work, eat, and then go through our schoolwork. She’d collect the bundle of work and take it into the school the next day.

When we went back to school, after missing so many days, we weren’t behind the other children. I went from first grade to third grade missing all of those days. I didn’t go to second grade. I moved on. In our school we had a one-room school with 50 students.

On the farm Dad would say I don’t want you guys to work as hard as I do. I don’t want you to work as hard as Ma and me. Get an education! We had to set goals and tell them what we wanted to do in life. They would guide us through. They tried to guide us so we would know how to prepare ourselves.