Deep Well, Sweet Water
by
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After Ma and J.B. disappeared down the road, I sat on the couch, gazing after them. I tried to push away the things we’d talked about, but they kept crashing back into my mind like a twister on a warm night in March. Pa’d been gone almost seven months, and I’d never really allowed myself to grieve. It didn’t seem like the right thing to do, for Ma’s sake. Now I knew that she’d felt the same way about me, although I had heard her crying in her bedroom one night after J.B. was born.
And now, sitting alone in the living room of the house that didn’t belong to us, the silence broken only by the ticking clock and a few birds twittering outside, I began to cry. It started with one tear, which I didn’t bother to smear from my face. And then another, and another, until I was crying harder than I’d cried since I was a little kid.
I wasn’t just crying over me and J.B. not having a pa and Ma not having a husband anymore. And not just because I was going to lose Buck.
I cried for folks everywhere hating each other because of the color of their skin. I cried for Sonny Peachtree, who was running from the law even though he was innocent. For Lattie, who was afraid of her own brother, and for my ma and Ophelia, who had to be strong for everybody else. For a little Vietnamese girl lying dead on a muddy hillside and a nineteen-year-old boy named Mike, who didn’t get to go home to his family and his girl. All the buckets whose ropes would never be long enough.
And I cried for myself, because I knew too much and couldn’t change any of it.
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About the Book
The year—that’s what his mother called 1967 after everything that happened. Junior’s pa died on the first day of January, his house was blown away in March, and his baby brother is due in August. His mother must sell what’s left of the farm and move to a city to live with family members Junior hardly knows.
What can thirteen-year-old Junior Tuttle do to keep from losing everything, including his dog Buck? Because most of the young men are off fighting in Vietnam, Junior manages to talk cranky old Elvis Crabtree into giving him a job as farmhand. He learns about job insurance from the black housekeeper and risks doing what’s right even when it feels wrong and could get him into worse trouble. But is it enough? Will Junior and his mother ever reach the sweet water?
About the Author
In 1970, the author graduated from Arkansas State University, accepted his first teaching job, got married, and received an invitation from Uncle Sam—all in the space of four months! After two years in the Army, which included eleven months in Vietnam, he resumed his career as business teacher (BC—before computers!), and he and his wife Jan raised two sons. He later earned a master’s degree in school counseling and worked with kids K-12. He became a Licensed Professional Counselor, retired from the school business in 2006, and spent nine years at a juvenile facility, working with incarcerated and DHS kids. He retired again in 2016.
Inspiration for Deep Well, Sweet Water came from the author’s memories of being raised in the south by poor, working-class parents. Racial problems were a daily part of life. Lillie Tuttle is loosely based on the author’s own mother, a stay-at-home mom who somehow managed to feed and clothe four boys.