The First Of Two Farm Workers

 When farm work was too much for the family Daddy hired help. Some by day only. But on two occasions live in help. The first was Mr. Hall, the father of Imogene Melton just down the road from us. Mr. Hall’s wife lived several miles away in their family home in which Mr. Hall was no longer welcome. Her reason- Mr. Hall was a weekend drunk.

But he was a hard worker, a considerate tenant and good friend to us kids. Sitting on the front porch after a hard day’s work and supper, with us gathered around him he mesmerized us with stories. Then he sat alone brushing his teeth with a brush he fashioned from a peach tree twig .

Monday through Thursday Mr. Hall’s schedule never varied. But Friday after work, pay in hand, he left. He spent the weekend and his pay on a drunken spree. Sunday night he appeared just in time for bed and a new week.

Sorry One More Tobacco Story

 I had decided definitively to let any further mention of tobacco to be left  behind forever. But as my memory churned and after I checked with my sister (Ivy then- Iva now) to make sure I was not hallucinating, one more scene screams for telling.

Tobacco as already said was THE CASH CROP. There was no room for getting it wrong.  One season the sporadic cold days threw off the stripping activity. There were days when our fingers we so cold our tied tobacco hands were sloppy and loose. Auction day was approaching and there were unstripped stalks.

Daddy whose fear he would not get the crop to market on time moved the tobacco into the house. He moved the living room furniture aside and set up the stripping table.  We worked tirelessly all morning, all afternoon and into the evening. We were in sight of success  a knock came on the door.  Mommie answered. Two neighbors had brought meat from the heifer they butchered that day. Mommie was humiliated by the sight of tobacco trash, tobacco hands, tobacco dust  on our living room floor.

Mommie got over it. The tobacco made it to the auction. We had the money from our CASH CROP.I am now done with tobacco.

Let's Finish With The Tobacco

I am having a little trouble getting fired up about this. I suspect that is because I never got that enthralled with tobacco. Except for the money when it came.
At any rate the tobacco had been doing its curing thing in the barn-- the one we called the Backer Barn. The cool autumn weather and the damp rainy days ushered in the final tobacco tasks. It was a family project. It needed little equipment- only the sorting table. A long rectangular table partitioned off into four bins.
Daddy and Mommy stripped the leaves from the stalks and placed them in the bins according to size and color. RAGS were the leaves at the bottom of the stalk and the least valuable. Then came LIGHT RED and DARK RED-- differing only by color. These two were the choice tobacco. Lastly came TIPS the smaller leaves from the top of the plant.
We kids neatly arranged a handful of leaves and securely bound the top with a good leaf. The repetitive handling of the tobacco covered our with brown waxy sticky muck. Gather, arrange, tie and toss into the proper pile.
The completed hands of tobacco were packed on the square baskets, with the tied ends to the outside. It was ready for market.
All the farmers took their packed baskets to the tobaccp auction house where it was sold at auction. And then came the only nice part about tobacco farming. We had money-- the big cash crop of the whole farm.

Salvaging Our Only Ball

4. The tobacco accounts written in the last two entries may rest for a while. The tobacco must hang in the barn for curing. Thus  I will return to our little one room school. We had little play equipment. There was a seesaw, one basketball hoop with a ring but no net, a bat and an old tennis ball.  Creative games can be and were worked out.  It helped that Miz Harrison was too busy with lesson plans and grading to interfere with our games,  past settling the serious squabbles .  It was to our advantage to avoid squabbles since her way of settling them was –“End of recess- get back to the books”. For the most part we played creatively  and cooperatively.

Cooperatively and creatively certainly applied the day we lost our tennis ball. The play yard was in front of the school house. Two outhouses—boys to the left—girls to the right were behind the school. Recess time.  Tennis ball version  of baseball or softball or some kind of ball. Two chosen teams faced each other. Bigger better hitters got to go first. Estel Oakes was up—Marvin Goss was on first base. Estel hit a doozy—into the side of the school house—off to the right—into an oak tree—into the girls’ outhouse- down the hole.

Forlorn disbelieving pupils filed to the outhouse. Marvin Goss, shucking aside the fear of entering the girls’ outhouse investigated. The ball, he reported, was floating in the cess pool.

It was as if the world of recess had ended- we had no ball.

But we come from a survival people and we all knew it. We had seen our fathers fashion tools for a task. We had experienced mothers turning fertilizer bags into bed covers. We could solve this. Tomorrow- for today recess was over.

The next morning Cordell came to school with our salvation. He had attached a Pork and Beans can to a tobacco stick with a roofers nail. He had made a great long handled dipper.

Recess—the great ball retrieval began. Cordell with an adeptness not typical successfully fished our tennis ball from the cess pool. Grungy, stinky and a ‘Now what do we do’ situation.

What we did was clean it up. It was the only ball we had.  Willie Davenport just across the road from the school had a rain barrel. All pupils, without garnering Miz Harrison’s attention managed to carry their water glasses (full of water) from the barrel to pour over the slime stink soaked ball. The next morning the ball smelled of lye soap and was stain free.  So mush for fooling Miz Harrison.

Second Stage Of Tobacco Farming

The dirty demanding work of tobacco comes when the plants are about two to three feet high. Ivy and I got the less than enviable task of removing and destroying the Tobacco Hornworm larvae which had a voracious appetite for tobacco leaves. The process is messy. With the thumb and forefinger of one hand you grasp the larva near the center of its body. With the other hand you repeat the process—thus holding it firmly with both hands. The you pull the larva into two halves—and try not to mind the gooey guts as they moisten your hands and sometimes squirt on your chest or face. Dirty--? You agree?

Mostly Mommy and Daddy removed the suckers—until we were considerably older and more trustworthy.  Where the leaves join the stalks grow suckers which have to be removed. The waxy substance on the leaves and suckers cling to clothing and hands and face so thick it could be rolled up into mini balls and dropped to the ground

These two tasks had to be repeated time and time again. When the plants sent out  blooms at the top, the blooms are cut off. The larvae and sucker removal required continued attention until harvest time.

At harvest time a tobacco stick (a small pole about six feet long)is jammed into the ground; a conical metal spear is put on the top. Each plant is cut, speared onto the stick until the stick was full. Then on to the next. All full sticks are hauled to the barn, hung up and left for open air curing.

We had a reprieve from tobacco until the curing was done.

Tobacco Farming First Step

Although tobacco farming is a dirty demanding job the first steps are clean and full of the promise of life. Early in spring, long before the threat of frost was over, Daddy piled felled trees and shrubs in a four by twelve foot area in an open field with good soil. He set fire to the pile at each end and in the middle. We kids stood by marveling at the intense heat and light; we relished at tossing twigs and leaves into the fire.

When the fire was done, the ashes cool, Daddy framed the area with long straight logs and raked the ash covered soil smooth. He hammered headless nails around the perimeter at eight to ten inch spaces. Some days later he spread his carefully saved Burly tobacco seeds in ten feet of the bed. The other two feet was reserved for leaf lettuce seeds. Cheese cloth was stretched over the bed and secured on the nails of the frame. We waited and prayed for rain.

Seeds have their own schedule for sending up green shoots as the conditions and time dictate. But magically the tobacco came.  First a thin green shoot – then a separation into two leaves. The plant was on its way.  Lettuce  meanwhile was doing its own thing, growing at its own pace – dreaming, no doubt, of the day it would grace the dinner table – garnished with crumpled bacon in a sweet vinegar dressing.

Weeks later the lettuce was meeting its desired end, and tobacco plants hardened by the removal of the canvas and exposure to the elements  were gingerly pulled from their comfortable bed and transported to the field. Dig a hole, put in the plant, add a bit of dirt, add a cup of water, add more dirt, tamp it down. Then hope and pray. Plant a few beyond the state’s allowance for  replacement  of any that might not survive. Every living plant was money in the pocket.

Now the long hard work of summer tending the major cash crop we had.