An American Harvest Read online

  Thursday, 19. Suckered tobacco. Went to preaching, cleaned out tobacco barns. Weather fair.

  Friday, 20. Cut with disk, sowed turnips at tobacco barn, sowed crimson clover in late corn. Suckered tobacco and gathered a load of melons. Weather threatening.

  Monday, 23. Ploughed for wheat and went to preaching at night. Weather clear.

  And so on it goes.

  I’ll reflect back on the importance of those spoke trees I mentioned. I was closer to it than the younger boys, for it was in our time that most of those oaks were cut for spokes. The younger generation folks can hardly appreciate this.

  We may live too well today—a very different economic situation—but we would run out of money on the farm. I mean run out of money! There wouldn’t be any money. And it would be the fall of the year, the tobacco not yet ready to sell, and eight children to buy shoes for. We bought some ready-made clothes, though Mother made most of our clothes in the early days.

  We’d get down to the last penny, and Papa would decide whether we had a load of hay we could take to town. If any hay could be spared, we’d take it to town. If we didn’t have hay, there was something else we could depend on and that was to cut a spoke-tree. We would go cut straight, smooth, white oak trees into blocks a little longer than wagon spokes, and split them up into hunks of wood, two inches by three inches.

  Out of each of these, the Nissen Wagon Company at Waughtown would make spokes for wagons and carriages and such. Papa would take me one time with him when he went to sell the spokes, take Arthur the next trip, and Ralph the next. That was one of the few ways we got our social life, going to the city. Each load would give us a few dollars. Fifteen or twenty dollars would buy enough pairs of two-dollar shoes, and that’s how really close we ran sometimes.

  How our parents kept their composure as well as they did under those conditions is more than I can now understand. At the time it seemed to be normal, for everyone was doing more or less the same thing.

  Homestead and barns on eroded turf.

  The horse barn outlived all the others.

  Grandchild, Billy, learns one of the chores.

  Tending the curing shed fire. PHOTO ARCHIVES

  Tending the tobacco crop. photo archives

  Curing the leaves. photo archives

  CHAPTER 2

  Be Always Learning

  RALPH:

  I remember money was always scarce at our house,

  So my brother and I decided we would show Papa he could save lots of money

  By not putting any fertilizer under the tobacco.

  In making up the ridges

  We skipped one row and gave the row next to it a double serving.

  When the tobacco in the field was ready to top, about thirty inches high

  The tobacco in the “convincing” row was only a foot high

  But in the double row, had by then been topped.

  You remember this, Arthur?

  ARTHUR:

  I do, and this is what I have on that.

  Every spring, I remember from early childhood, there was the strain of getting enough cash to buy commercial fertilizer, particularly for the tobacco. This seemed to me a very hard condition to meet. The truth is I didn’t believe the fertilizer was so badly needed, but Dad did.

  So, each late winter or early spring, he went to the woods and chopped down a virgin white oak tree or two and sawed and split them into size for wagon spokes (Luther made mention of that). I’ll never forget how hard and how cold these spokes were as we hauled them, often leaving home before daybreak, to the Nissen Wagon Works at Waughtown, a couple miles southeast of Winston-Salem. It took two or three day’s work in the woods to get a load of spokes ready, and then another full day to take them to Waughtown.

  Well, the point is, as I said, I didn’t really think that the fertilizer was that important, and then at about eight years of age and having the conviction of my doubts, I decided to prove the situation.

  The opportunity came late one evening just before dark in the lower part of the field where the schoolhouse now stands. I was putting fertilizer into the open tobacco rows by hand from a bucket; Luther or Ralph, I forget who, was ridging a couple of rows behind me. I put a double dose of fertilizer in one row, and left the next without any. Since it was nearly dark, the ridging was completed with nobody but me knowing about the experiment.

  When the tobacco plants began to grow I, naturally, watched to see what would happen. Every day or so I would go by and look, and shortly it was perfectly clear to me that the plants on the doubly fertilized row were looking fine, and the plants on the other were small and irregular in size—in fact, puny. Well, a week or ten days later, at the dinner table one evening, Dad said, “You know, something happened out there in the lower part of that tobacco patch. It looks to me like somebody put double fertilizer on one row and skipped the next.”

  Well, that was that. I too found out we did need fertilizer, and this became all the clearer by the time the tobacco was ready to harvest, for then, the doubly fertilized row, having matured early and evenly, was the best tobacco I had seen on our farm. As a matter of fact, the next year, I could have been sold on putting double fertilizer under every row.

  Now here, see how differently this is recalled. It is essentially the same story as Ralph’s, but the details have become changed over the years, with some of them having wobbled off here and there.

  BLANCHE:

  I remember hearing about those tobacco rows, but this is the first time I ever knew it was done deliberately.

  LUTHER:

  Well, I have another kind of fertilizer story. As I grew up, and you boys will remember, I accumulated quite a library of US Agricultural Bulletins; in fact, I had 2,100 of them at one time. I had them indexed, and double indexed. In those days, we had what we called Farmers’ Institutes, and, at that time, super phosphate was called “acid.” At these Farmers’ Institutes we heard a lot about acid soils to grow clover and crops and what have you.

  My face still gets red when I think about it, but I had quite an argument with Papa once, that he shouldn’t be putting the acid on the soil, because it needed lime instead of acid. Well, it turned out later, the name “acid” was changed to super phosphate, and it was an essential and important plant food.

  He was right all the time. I never apologized—yet I did know better before he died, for I had gone to college and studied some of these things, so knew something about it. But I was so ashamed that I never did make mention to him that I was mistaken. I’ve been sorry ever since for being such a smart aleck. I was at an Agricultural College, and I graduated from that thing with reasonably good grades—I guess I thought I ought to know—but I was dead wrong, and Papa was right.

  ARTHUR:

  I recollect a time along in there when you were right and dad was wrong—out of sheer orneriness. You sent home a new scientific formula for feeding a pig. Kenneth was to be the fellow to perform this particular experiment.

  KENNETH:

  That’s how I earned my first ten dollars.

  ARTHUR:

  That’s right. Well, Kenneth fed the pig out and it weighed very much heavier than any other pig in the whole countryside for the length of time that it had been fed. Considering the cost of the feed, it was perfectly clear that here was a better way to feed a pig. Dad, having three or four of us smart alecks in college by then, must have gotten tired of us trying to show him the way. I expect he must have thought to himself, I’ve adjusted to as much of this as I’m going to; I’m going to hold on to something myself. Well, at any rate, he took a position, and just disposed of it with one decisive statement: “That’s no way to feed a pig.” And so, we didn’t feed any more pigs that way.

  KENNETH:

  Our father was right on the button though when it came to insurance. None of us would have called it so well. He took out insurance one year for damage by hail to the tobacco crop. For the first time in all the years of growing tobacco we got one huge
hailstorm. It riddled the crop and Father collected for damages. He never bought hail insurance again—and we never had any more damaging hailstorms.

  BLANCHE:

  Why, Papa just cried when he lost that crop to the hail. I remember him standing there by the window looking out on it, and I remember the tears streaming down the sides of his face on into his big bushy mustache. I don’t believe he had any insurance; leastwise I didn’t know he did. I just felt so sorry for him, I went to my room and wrote a poem about it.

  I don’t have it—I didn’t keep it—but I remember something of what was in it. I imagined him talking to Mama about the cash the tobacco was going to bring in— he called her Sally in the poem—and how it would have been enough to pay off the second mortgage on the farm and to keep the boys in college. Then he went on to explain a lot of things about what he thought was important in life: working together with others for the better of the community, educating people, and all those attitudes that made him a special person.

  JOHN:

  You’re an incurable romantic, Blanche. In the first place, the tobacco crop couldn’t even be seen from any window in our house. In the second place, Kenneth was right: Father did have the crop insured that year, and I don’t remember any other time we had hail. ‘Course there could have been an earlier hailstorm, before I was born.

  BLANCHE:

  Well, I think you’re both wrong.

  HOWARD:

  Sister Blanche, come on and admit it; you know you’re given to fancy.

  ARTHUR:

  This one I don’t believe I can help settle out, for I wasn’t there at the time. We must have weathered it all right.

  KENNETH:

  Oh, Arthur!

  ARTHUR:

  What I mean is I don’t recall anyone having to be taken out of college at that time. In any case, tobacco farming was a risky business. Let me read something I have here, a bit of sociological commentary relating to just what you’ve been talking about. It’s nothing profound, just a little something I brought along in case it seemed appropriate.

  KENNETH:

  Seems to me you brought a lot of “little somethings” along, and my guess is they’ll all seem appropriate before the evening’s out.

  ARTHUR:

  Well, brother Kenneth, you might have done likewise; then we could be listening to yours.

  KENNETH:

  I didn’t realize this session was going to turn into such a documentary.

  ARTHUR:

  We don’t have many opportunities to go on together about some of these things. I believe we should take advantage of it while we’ve a mind to.

  As Arthur says this, I’m thinking he reminds me of my middle brother Luther who, born ‘The Professor,’ did a lot of pontificating, even as a child—he just knew too much and had to let it out. Brother Jonny (the youngest) and I figured Lute bested us in IQ scoring because, when asked to name all the nouns he could think of within a minute’s time, he rattled off a memorized list of all the US state capitals.

  Then, when Lute actually became a bona fide university professor, he plied us with annual treatises on serious topics, like governmental development of newly planned towns. Despite his know-it-all bearing, I loved him dearly, and, incidentally, learned a lot.

  ARTHUR:

  I’ll just get on with what I’ve written about neighborly practices and how we shared.

  When hail insurance could be had, first from a private insurance company and later as a public service, most farmers in our community took advantage of it. A farmer who did not insure his tobacco crop was soon looked upon as not deserving of neighborly assistance when hail did strike. In short, a man was expected to do what he could for himself and after that should come neighbors’ help. Earlier, a hail storm that damaged the crop was looked upon as a warning from the Almighty that the victim hadn’t been living right . . . providence, if you will.

  But the folks in the community did help each other frequently. Mutual aid was a common practice when a man’s barn burned down or when he and his family were sick and couldn’t plant or harvest their crop. Our mother, especially, believed that anybody who was in trouble needed to be pitied and helped, rather than censured. Her notion was borne out when, upon the death of a local ne’er-do-well, the doctor stated he had been suffering from a weakening ailment for more than a decade.

  Essentially, insurance—before people could buy it— was in the responsibility the folks felt for each other. In fact, a major part of our group activities was the informal swap-work arrangements among neighboring families. Besides barn-raising and crop-planting or harvesting, under unusual circumstances of fire or illness, we got together for hog-killings, corn-shuckings, and wood-choppings.

  Hogs were killed on cold mornings, usually two or three families pooling their labor. A dish of “haslets,” a stew of viscera—lungs, heart, liver, kidney, and pancreas—was served piping hot at the noon meal on the day of the killing. Later, liver-pudding and souse—a gelatinous head-cheese fixed from various parts of the hog’s head and feet—were made.

  Then, the women and children prepared sausage by squeezing the contents from the long casing of the small intestines, scraping off the musculature, attaching the casing to the spout of a grinder, and filling it with ground scraps of lean meat, some fat, sage, salt, and black and red pepper. The sausage was tied off at appropriate intervals and hung in the smokehouse to cure and dry for a couple of weeks. It would keep a couple of months.

  The women also cleaned the large intestines and soaked them in vinegar to make chitlins, which appeared as a milky-white flaccid hose, looped back and forth upon itself and tied with a string. These were sold at the market. We didn’t eat them, and I don’t believe many other white families did either. Fried crisp in fat and properly seasoned, they were a favorite dish in Negro households.

  The men did the butchering. Some fresh meat—chops and roasts—was saved for immediate consumption as were the hocks, feet, and ears. I have fond memories of the special crunchiness of boiled up pig ears. Hams, shoulders, and side meat were salted down for a time, then cured by hanging in a tight smokehouse over a smoldering hickory fire. These would last for many months.

  My John tried in vain to have our children and me cherish pig ears and feet. I went along for a bit—he did the cooking, boiling them up with a bit of celery, onion, salt and pepper— but the kids rebelled. John couldn’t win. As with calf brains for breakfast, even he agreed, brain preparation involved just too much sliminess first thing in the morning.

  Wood-choppings were scheduled when a family had cleared some woods to make a field. The trees were most likely felled during the winter months when there wasn’t so much else to do. The neighborhood group assembled on some agreed-upon day to cut up the logs for fuel. Much wood was needed not only for heating the homes but also for firing the tobacco barns.

  Our house was particularly drafty, and on a cold, blowy day a roaring wood fire in the fireplace did not keep us warm; it only helped. During the curing process those fires in the furnaces of the tobacco barns had to be fed day and night so as to maintain just the right temperature: 100 degrees Fahrenheit for two days then slowly increased over four or five days to 210 degrees. We’d take turns tending—maybe cook up some sweet potatoes, roastin’ ears, or chestnuts to induce wakefulness during the long dark hours.

  Communal pie supper.

  Corn-shuckings happened in the evening. The men, boys, and girls stripped the husks from a mountain of ears while the women might sew on a quilt together and then serve up a luscious pie supper for all to enjoy once the work was done. These were especially sociable occasions, for there’d be a chance to chat and joke whil’st the work was getting accomplished.

  RALPH:

  Those pie suppers made all the work seem worthwhile— except over at Julius Jager’s. He’d have us over to a corn-shucking, slaving away, and he’d never come out to work himself. He’d have his hired man pitch in, but we’d never even see Jager. T
he women didn’t take to his place too kindly, so the food, if any at all, was inferior also. That man never even went to his neighbors’ corn-shuckings. He didn’t know the meaning of the word exchange.

  KENNETH:

  I don’t remember him. Did anyone bother to go a second time to his corn shucking?

  ARTHUR:

  Oh, I guess we went two or three times before we smartened up. He’d send out his hired hand to other shuckings, but Ralph is right, he didn’t go himself. He lost out in the end, I reckon.

  There is one particular corn-shucking event that has stayed with me over the years:

  It was at Thanksgiving time. Luther, Cletus, and I were home on vacation from high school—we were the only three boys, I guess, in the community who went away to school at that time. We went with Dad and the younger boys to a corn-shucking down at Henry Perryman’s.

  Along with everyone else there, we shucked corn and carried shucks into the barn and put them away in the mow for cow feed. Toward midnight, as we were carrying shucks into the barn, three of us boys—and I am not sure but that I was the leader—decided to pull a prank by pouring water on the other boys who were carrying shucks. The roof on the barn had holes in it, and maybe it was when we looked up through the roof and saw the stars that this nasty little idea came into our heads, or my head.

  Well, at any rate, we went down to the well, pumped two buckets of water, and the three of us scrambled to the top of the barn with them. Now, this night would be the first frost of the year; it came late that year. When the other boys came in with their shucks, we waited until they got directly under us, and then we doused them. They didn’t have any change of clothes there, and they near froze.

  The parents did the natural thing; they very quickly asked one another, “Where were your boys?” We knew we were going to get caught—I think that encouraged me to confess a bit earlier than I normally would. It was a crazy thing to have done, just back from high school, in a sort of privileged position, and doing a fool thing like that.