“I loved my Big Mama, just like I loved my Big Daddy.” Cedric reflects on his grandmother and R.L.’s wife, Alice Mae Burnside.

He has returned to his seat after stirring the peas and setting the lid to the side. Shaquonna is back in the house, leaning over the back of the couch, her eyes fixed on Cedric, like mine.

“Big Mama was the sweetest lady.” Cedric’s voice was light.

“What do you remember about her?” I ask him.

He describes a scene from a thousand Mississippi mornings.

* * *

A pot clangs — soon followed by the soft crack of an egg, the blunt clink of a plate on a countertop, the sound of a fork in motion.

It’s early, around 4:30 in the morning. The sun isn’t up yet, but Alice Mae Burnside is. She moves around the kitchen with precision, her feet and hands in sync like drums. She hums to herself. The smell of Jack Mackerel creeps through the house. The bite of sliced onion cuts sharp and hangs heavy. A pot of white rice bubbles and pops.

Alice Mae knows it won’t be long before the house stirs. The sound and smell of cooking food will do that. There will soon be 16 children — or 12, or 19, depending on the day — Cedric among them, all energetic and hungry.

“The house we stayed in was a sharecropper house,” Cedric tells me. “Like, a shotgun house. It had four rooms, and when I say four rooms, I mean four rooms.” He pauses for effect. “Total.”

Through most of his adolescent and teenage years, Cedric grew up in and around Chulahoma. The main house that he lived in (the family moved between a few) had a kitchen and living room, two bedrooms, a porch, and a lot of outside. The elders in the family — primarily R.L., Alice Mae, and Cedric’s mother, Linda — kept a garden out back. Sometimes Cedric worked alongside them. More often he watched in wonder close by.

“I used to love the smell of the fresh dirt,” he says. “That smell when you first plow up that garden. Me and my uncle Gary used to just sit out and watch.”

Around Cedric and Gary were anywhere from 20 to 30 other folks — Cedric’s two siblings, Sonya and Cody, and a legion of cousins, aunts, uncles, and family friends. Like many other black families making their way in Mississippi in the 1980s and 1990s, the Burnside family lived a strained life. Until Cedric was 13, the family house did not have running water.

“No bathtub, no sinks. None of that,” he tells me. “We hauled water for a bunch of years. … We had to walk to our neighbor’s.” Cedric explains the nearest source of fresh water was a neighbor’s house a quarter of a mile away, the next nearest a mile further than that. “We walk three, four ...” — his voice gets louder as the distance gets longer — “five, six miles sometimes. I know because we had to tote them water jugs on our back.” He smiles and chuckles to himself, though it didn’t seem from humor or amusement. “We did what we had to do.”

“How often do you go back?” I had asked him in an earlier conversation over barbecue from a soul food restaurant in Holly Springs, Mississippi.

”I try not to go back,” he said quickly, almost before I could finish.

“You try not to,” I repeated him.

“I try not to go back. There were some chaotic situations there; and every time I see the house I think about those situations, the things we had to go through, all the people that stayed in that house, that slept on the floor and slept on couches, the struggles that my mama and Big Mama went through in that house. I don’t need to go back to remember that.”

Reflecting on that conversation, I ask him, “What’s your happiest memory of then? … What’s the happiest memory of you and Big Mama?”

A thin smirk creeps over Cedric’s face. This one is for real.

“Me and my Big Mama, we used to trade $20 every year on our birthdays. She would give me $20 on my birthday, and when her birthday come, I would give her $20 right back, every year until she passed.”