First Frost

by Conrad Person

 

In the spring of 1961, Dad bought a postage stamp farm in Western Pennsylvania’s hill country. We were the only Black family in the area, and my parents worried that we wouldn’t be welcome. In truth, the reaction was mixed, but our closest neighbors were farmers and happy to see the long fallow land back under the plow. Their children didn’t comprehend the intricacies of prejudice, so we were accepted and, in turn, accepting. There were six of us, four boys and two girls, and more kids meant that every game was suddenly more fun to play.

By Hallowe’en the bulk of the harvesting was done, and Mrs. Samson, who lived a quarter mile down the road, invited all the neighborhood kids to celebrate at her house. Tall and round with her hair worn in curlers every day but Sunday, she knew a thousand games, and all of them seemed to require an apple. We bobbed for apples. We carved faces into apples to dry into heads for rag dolls. We put on blindfolds to bite at apples hanging from a string. The winners of the games were rewarded with first choice from a tray of apples on sticks coated with jaw-breaking, bright red candy.

As a special treat, she boiled cane sugar and corn syrup to make hard tack candy. As the mixture reached “hard crack” stage, Mrs. Samson poured in a spoonful of peppermint oil, creating a cloud of mint so strong that we children poured screaming from the house into the cold night air as if we were escaping tear gas.

“Come on, kids, and grab your spoons!” Mrs. Samson called. She drizzled the hot candy onto sheet pans then showed us how to butter two spoons and use their backs to work the puddles into snakes as the candy cooled and hardened. She sent us all home with pillowcases of homemade candy, oatmeal cookies, popcorn balls, and fudge. What a feeling of excitement to be laden with treats, then turned out of a bright house into the autumn darkness. It was a deliciously spooky walk home down the narrow dirt road by the light of a nearly full moon.

Along the way, my oldest brother Greg scared us with talk of ghosts and maniacs, but as our shepherd, he also hurried us off the road when he saw the approaching headlights of a car traveling too fast for dirt and gravel. We waited in the roadside weeds and endured the slurs and beer cans the passengers hurled at us as they passed.

 

Currently a member of the Manuscript Workshop, Conrad Person lives in Mt. Airy, Philadelphia and draws from his personal experiences to craft fiction and memoir. Hailing from a family tradition of farming and steelworking, his perspective on American life comes through the lens of African-Americans who are children of the great migration from the rural South to the industrial North.