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Disciplined, orderly, productive -- they could be counted on. Soldier-straight rows of perfectly mounded rows sprouted green at the first sign of spring warmth. By early summer, we could fill colanders with baby greens, tender snap beans and tiny potatoes for supper every night. As the season bloomed, the garden became a produce stand from which we could fill jars with food for the winter and still have luscious fresh corn, beefsteak tomatoes and okra for the kitchen table.

Daddy was a man of great talents. He was sensitive and artistic, told good stories and sang like an Irish angel. He had friends in every corner of every county we visited. He just couldn't earn a living.

Also Today Sunny's delectable fried okra It's hellish in the picking, divine in the eating. By Sunny Hemphill

These days, I laugh and say that my daddy was "employment challenged." But when I was a child, there was nothing funny about his shortcomings. By the time I came along in 1957, Daddy had been fighting too many demons too long. Some were the work of a genetic tendency to fragile nerves. Most he picked up while he was in North Africa during World War II.

We lived precariously, teetering on the brink of constant disaster and sometimes falling all the way in. We hid from the milkman, dodged bill collectors, lied to the landlord. When the electricity went dead or the water stopped running, my mom took one of us kids down to beg the utility company for sympathy.

We grew accustomed to living with certain kinds of scarcity -- shoes that had holes in the toes, dresses too short and tight under the arms. I suppose, in some sense, we even got used to a scarcity of kindness -- being called white trash by teachers and the parents of our classmates. But we never got used to the times when food was scarce. More than once, we stayed alive because somebody took pity and brought us a bag of groceries. Once we lived four months on nothing but grits and fruit cocktail. But when Daddy put in a garden, we knew that we would eat.

For a man who had a hard time holding a job, Daddy had a remarkably strong work ethic. He rose early, usually before dawn, to commune with God and the outdoors. The finest part of a summer morning, Daddy believed, was the hour or two just after sunrise when a man and his daughters could toil together in the garden. And toil we did. We hoed, pulled weeds, repaired rows, applied fertilizer and gently hand-watered delicate seedlings. And late in summer, when the Texas heat and humidity combined to create a place that the devil rented out so he didn't have to live there, we cut okra.

Okra is a vegetable that proves the existence of a God who deals in both wrath and mercy. The inside of each little pointy-ended okra pod is filled with thick, runny slime and dozens of slippery round seeds. Outside, the delicate green skin is covered with fuzzy, almost microscopic hairs. Those little okra hairs burrow through sleeves, through gloves, through shirts and shorts and into the skin, where they itch with a fury unrivaled in my memory.

I hated okra -- at least until it was enshrined on the supper table, dredged in yellow cornmeal and fried in bacon drippings, crunchy and delectable beyond belief. When scooped onto a plate beside snap beans cooked with thick bacon, fresh yellow squash still sweet from the vine and little shallots served raw, and sprinkled with salt and crunched with bites of cornbread, that okra was the taste of grace.

Next page | If Daddy planted a garden, my heart sang