Death Sentence Read Online Free PDF Page A

insecurity and inferiority. If anything, it accentuated them.
    At school she encountered children from families more well off than hers. Some regularly got new shoes and wore bright, pretty clothes from department stores in Fayetteville. Velma could not suppress her envy. She got new shoes when school started—sturdy, clunky shoes, never anything pretty—and they had to last until school began anew the next year. Her mother made her clothes and she thought them shabby and shameful.
    All students had to bring midday meals to school. Some brought sandwiches made on sliced bread bought at the grocery store—“light bread,” country people called it, and it was considered a luxury. These children often had store-bought cookies and other treats. Velma’s meal sack usually contained a biscuit, or a hunk of cornbread with a slice of fried side meat or sausage in it. Other students sometimes made fun of her meals and she began slipping off to the woods to eat alone.
    A small store across the street from the school was a constant lure to students with its displays of candies and other goodies, but few could afford its enticements. Velma saw the store as a means of paying back her tormentors. She began stealing coins from the pockets of her daddy’s overalls and used them to buy candy at the store, making certain to eat it in front of those who made fun of her.
    Velma’s success at petty theft gave her bolder ambitions. When an old man who lived on the other side of the river reported that $80 had been stolen from his tiny cabin, Velma, who had been visiting relatives nearby, was discovered with part of the money. She claimed the old man had asked her to keep it for him, but a session with her daddy’s strap caused her to recant, apparently ending her budding career as a thief, for no more such incidents were ever reported.
    By the second grade, Velma began complaining of headaches and stomachaches, both to keep from having to go to school and to relieve her of chores. She loved the attention that her ailments brought, but when the increasing frequency of her complaints convinced her father that she was malingering, prompting him to order that she go to school and do her chores sick or not, the number of complaints diminished drastically.
    Even though school had its drawbacks, it still offered one great advantage in Velma’s eyes: welcome relief from her father. She left for school soon after he got up, didn’t return until he’d gone to work. By the time he got home, she was in bed. Still, Velma walked the quarter mile home from the spot where the bus dropped her off each day filled with dread because she abhorred the chores that awaited her.
    All the Bullard children were assigned specific chores from the time they were old enough to perform them. In the beginning, Velma’s were sweeping the sandy yard, which was kept free of all growth, feeding the chickens and bringing in wood for the kitchen range. But her duties increased as she grew older.
    All the children had to work on the farm. As soon as the boys were old enough, they were taught to handle the mules, to plow and set rows. Velma had to work in the fields, too, planting, hoeing, and harvesting. Murphy grew less than an acre of tobacco, but to Velma it seemed much more. The plants were as tall as her head, and she had to pick worms from them and snap off the pungent blossoms when they flowered. She had to strip the huge, sticky leaves from the stalks—priming, this was called—and tie them to sticks so that they could be hung in her uncle Jim’s tobacco barn and cured with wood fires. Late in summer, Murphy hauled the crop to the markets in Fairmont and Dunn.
    After the tobacco was in, the cotton harvest began. Murphy grew six acres of cotton. Velma hated picking it, but she was good at it. Her speed was motivated by two factors: she wanted it to be over with, and Murphy never let Velma and Olive start school until the cotton had been picked. School began in