Leslie Sibley has never cared much for cornbread.  However, “I’ve never seen anything I couldn’t with a biscuit.”   And he’s never been crazy about syrup. “Oh, if the weather gets cold I may (sop some mop corn sops in it.” Speaking of cold, he’s never found heaters to be to his liking. “ I could always used a fireplace.”  Sibley is 85, and at 86 one is entitled to one’s particular likes and dislikes.  Sibley’s likes in particular seem to reflect an earlier way of life.  He lives at the end of a mile-long, one lane gravel road a few miles east of Liberty.  He lives in a house he’s owned for the past 27 years, but his acquaintance with southwest Mississippi is lifelong.; he was a short distance from his present home.

His house is simple but tidy.  No power lines run to it, but on a chilly day smoke rises from the brick chimney. Woods and thickets roll away in every direction around it, but the yard and hedges around the house are neatly trimmed. Hawks screak in the woods and in a pen below the house a sing pig grunts.  “Have you ever heard of that Liberty=White Railroad?” ask Sibley.  The railroad is now defunct but once was an important link to Liberty. “It ran right down that ditch there.” He saysm motioning to a thicket of young pines near his house. “I worked on that railroad 10 years.  I never had any idea I’d own a house on this land where it was.  Never had any idea.” He says, laughing.   Years later the railroad was taken he recalls.  He then worked on the ?Cocomo-Columbia line of the railroad for awhile.

But much of his life he has churned cotton.  “I had to take it all the way to Ruth.” He recalls.  “That was just too far to take it, so I quit doing it.”  He refers to the old Clifton Clark Company cotton gin at the Lincoln County Community of Ruth, where many a bale of cotton was ginned. Sibley recalls making 21 cents a pound on cotton, with a bale weighing in at around  500 pounds.  He also raised corn and, for a while, sugar cane.  “When I lived at ?jlertown I raised cane.  I made 437 (gallons) one year.  I didn’t fool with no “?” I just raked over that stubble, and the next year I made 377 gallons.  I didn’t have anybody to help me, just me and y wife.  That wrapped that up for me,”  he says, referring to the hard work of raising, cutting and hauling cane. Sibley never cared much for syrup anyway.  “A gallon would last me five or six years.” He says.  Syrup back then sold for 25 – 30 cents a gallon – far less than the $7-8 price tag it commands at some area syrup mills,

When World War I broke out Sibley was too young to join the armed services “Sheriff M. Causey came up to the house and arrested me for being a slacker”, he remembers.  “I was two months too young to register.”  S check on his records secured quick release, however, he says.  He remembers the “dipping vat wars” of the 1920’s, when government edict required farmers to drive their cattle to be dipped twice a month to kill parasites. Sibley with 17cows was such and such... “It was a mess,” he recalls.  He had to herd his cattle to a dipping vat near Peoria two iles away,  “I had to drive them right down the middle of the road.”  That was before open range laws were passed in Mississippi and vast reas of the South were then inforced.  Some farmers protested the governmental edict and a few violent incidents, including bombing of dipping vats occurred.

Sibley’s wife, Myrtle Allen Sibley died about seven years ago, and it was around that ? timewhen Sibley himself had to be hospitalized for health problems, particularly asthma. He has been plagued with the ailment all his life, he says.  The illness interfered with his schooling.   “I never did finish ?one session of school,”  he says.  “On a rainy day I couldn’t walk from the fireplace to the front door hardly” he recalls. He cant go too far now, either. “I do all right on flat ground. But if I was to try to walk up that hill my knees would get weak and I’d like to give out.”  Sibley raised cotton up until his five month bout in the hospital. But after that he gave it up.  Since then he says, he doesn’t do much of anything.  He does go to town now and then.  “Most everybody around Liberty knows me,” he says.