Riegelwood, NC (Part 4 of ??)
First I gotta tell you this. I was waiting for the home to work bus this morning at 0515 and saw something I'd never seen before. There was a little sparrow, who I nicknamed "Little Sparrow", and he was kinda half hopping, half flying after a moth. The moth was taking evasive actions (that's what I had never seen before) and was terrible at it. I don't know if it was this particular moth's day to die or that moths as a species are unskilled at evasive maneuvers, but it wasn't pretty and it wasn't very long before he was breakfast.
I was playing in or near the street with my friends in front of our house on Church Street. I don't remember the street number, but the house was white and right there as the curve started. You really can't miss it. And anyway, we got our mail at the PO Box, which I want to say was Box 186, but heck if I'm sure about that either. The street number is fairly unimportant.
I know. If you remember where Ricky Deffendorf lived, well we were right across the street.
Well, were were playing in or near the street when an old Ford pickup truck comes creeping down the street. An old man in coveralls and a work shirt was driving it. He stopped when he got to us and leaned out the window. "You boys want a job?" Now we were not too old, maybe 13. I'm not sure. (I didn't keep notes on these things. I never knew I'd be writing down all this crap when I got old.) "A job doing what?" "Making movies in my motel near the beach. No need to tell your folks. Just hop in."
OK, I'm messing with you. Start over.
"A job doing what?" "I need some boys to help me crop tobacco for a few days. Pays $20 a day or $2 an hour if we work long." I thought about it and said hang on. We all split up and asked our folks and while I don't really remember that conversation at home, I came out and we all hopped in the bed of his truck. So we must have got permission. (Not that I'm keeping score, but it seems swimming in creek: Bad. Driving off in the back of a stranger's truck: OK.)
He tells me, "I need about four more boys. Know anybody else might want to work?" And I did, and they did and we all headed out to his farm to crop tobacco, which we didn't understand what that meant a lot. But we understood $20. Soon we'd understand why Donna Summer sang "She works hard for her money" and the (paraphrased) line "Breakin' my back in the hot sun/ I cropped tobacco and the tobacco won".
Now this guy kept going on and on how he had had some [a word that predates today's usage of the accepted term African-American] working before, but they were not trainable and they didn't listen and they dang near ruint everything and anyway, if you want work done right you just have a white man (or, I suppose in our case, boys) do the job in the first place. Mumble. Mumble. Cuss and grumble. I took that to mean he was glad we could come.
He took us straight out to the first row, first plant, and showed us how to cup our hand, move down and around grabbing leaves, and push the leaves up under our arm, all in one smooth motion. He showed us what a ready leaf looked like and what one that needed another few days looked like. It only took a couple of minutes to learn. It was pretty easy.
We got started and in about 20 minutes I realized, "Man! These rows are long. I can't even see the end of it." I was sweating and sticky, my hands were already getting a bit raw, and the leaves oozed this sap or something that just made a mess of my underarm where I was holding the leaves until I had enough to tote over to the sled and deposit. It was a couple of hours before we got to the end of that first row and took a break.
It is at this point, our first break, that an adult worker gave me a Pall Mall filterless, showed me how to inhale it, and pretty much started me on a crappy habit that was a bear to kick. If you count puffing cigars (I don't inhale, so I don't *), I still haven't. But that encounter is another story in itself, and so I move on.
Once the sled was full, we'd all hop on the edges of it and the tractor would pull us back to the tobacco barn. There were a lot of women sitting there. We'd unload our load of leaves and then head back out. They would sit there and string the leaves up on curing sticks. In the SHADE, mind you. With a radio that was tuned to WHSL, the country station. Dang women.
After about 5 hours we stopped working and all headed up to the farmhouse, where the Mrs. had laid out fried chicken, biscuits, corn, green beans, butter, honey and sweet tea on a big table outside under a tree. It was, of course, complimentary and we had a nice, unhurried meal of it. I remember those meals very fondly. It was just a nice thing in my life. Peaceful and friendly. Like me.
Then we headed back out to the field. You know how the work goes already. At the end of the day, or rather, what we THOUGHT was the end of the day, we loaded onto the skid and headed back to the barn. There we found pile after pile of strung curing sticks. It was our job to monkey on up to the top of the curing barn and hang the sticks, working our way down til the barn was full. That took a while but was much, much easier than cropping it in the first place. Then we were done. He took us home after a day of honest work.
And it was hard work. I did it about 6 days before we had got the whole field finished. But I went every day. The money was good and I didn't mind working. Plus, I liked the lunches and climbing around in the barn.
In fact, really, the worst of it was the last day. And that's not saying that the last day was unbearable, just that it was worse than the days before it. Last day we picked what he called "the sand lots". Those were the big, bottom leaves that got sand all over them. You had to spend all day stooped, because bottom leaves typically grow near the bottom of the plant, and the sand just added extra irritation to an underarm that already was convinced it was being punished for something. But we survived, collected our cash, and as the farmer would attest, were better white men for it.
These are the things that make us who we are, I think. And this is one of the things that made me who I am. I know.
* My doctor, just this year, told me that, while not having any "bad habits" was ultimately the best thing for you (so you can leave behind a dour, skinny corpse, I suppose), that enjoying cigars was not such a bad thing. His exact words to me were, "As a doctor I'm supposed to tell you that you really ought to quit. But realistically, there's a lot worse habits. Don't worry too much about it." I think from now he's the doctor I want when I need a medical opinion about things that are fun.
Handless, out
Travelin' Ed
I was playing in or near the street with my friends in front of our house on Church Street. I don't remember the street number, but the house was white and right there as the curve started. You really can't miss it. And anyway, we got our mail at the PO Box, which I want to say was Box 186, but heck if I'm sure about that either. The street number is fairly unimportant.
I know. If you remember where Ricky Deffendorf lived, well we were right across the street.
Well, were were playing in or near the street when an old Ford pickup truck comes creeping down the street. An old man in coveralls and a work shirt was driving it. He stopped when he got to us and leaned out the window. "You boys want a job?" Now we were not too old, maybe 13. I'm not sure. (I didn't keep notes on these things. I never knew I'd be writing down all this crap when I got old.) "A job doing what?" "Making movies in my motel near the beach. No need to tell your folks. Just hop in."
OK, I'm messing with you. Start over.
"A job doing what?" "I need some boys to help me crop tobacco for a few days. Pays $20 a day or $2 an hour if we work long." I thought about it and said hang on. We all split up and asked our folks and while I don't really remember that conversation at home, I came out and we all hopped in the bed of his truck. So we must have got permission. (Not that I'm keeping score, but it seems swimming in creek: Bad. Driving off in the back of a stranger's truck: OK.)
He tells me, "I need about four more boys. Know anybody else might want to work?" And I did, and they did and we all headed out to his farm to crop tobacco, which we didn't understand what that meant a lot. But we understood $20. Soon we'd understand why Donna Summer sang "She works hard for her money" and the (paraphrased) line "Breakin' my back in the hot sun/ I cropped tobacco and the tobacco won".
Now this guy kept going on and on how he had had some [a word that predates today's usage of the accepted term African-American] working before, but they were not trainable and they didn't listen and they dang near ruint everything and anyway, if you want work done right you just have a white man (or, I suppose in our case, boys) do the job in the first place. Mumble. Mumble. Cuss and grumble. I took that to mean he was glad we could come.
He took us straight out to the first row, first plant, and showed us how to cup our hand, move down and around grabbing leaves, and push the leaves up under our arm, all in one smooth motion. He showed us what a ready leaf looked like and what one that needed another few days looked like. It only took a couple of minutes to learn. It was pretty easy.
We got started and in about 20 minutes I realized, "Man! These rows are long. I can't even see the end of it." I was sweating and sticky, my hands were already getting a bit raw, and the leaves oozed this sap or something that just made a mess of my underarm where I was holding the leaves until I had enough to tote over to the sled and deposit. It was a couple of hours before we got to the end of that first row and took a break.
It is at this point, our first break, that an adult worker gave me a Pall Mall filterless, showed me how to inhale it, and pretty much started me on a crappy habit that was a bear to kick. If you count puffing cigars (I don't inhale, so I don't *), I still haven't. But that encounter is another story in itself, and so I move on.
Once the sled was full, we'd all hop on the edges of it and the tractor would pull us back to the tobacco barn. There were a lot of women sitting there. We'd unload our load of leaves and then head back out. They would sit there and string the leaves up on curing sticks. In the SHADE, mind you. With a radio that was tuned to WHSL, the country station. Dang women.
After about 5 hours we stopped working and all headed up to the farmhouse, where the Mrs. had laid out fried chicken, biscuits, corn, green beans, butter, honey and sweet tea on a big table outside under a tree. It was, of course, complimentary and we had a nice, unhurried meal of it. I remember those meals very fondly. It was just a nice thing in my life. Peaceful and friendly. Like me.
Then we headed back out to the field. You know how the work goes already. At the end of the day, or rather, what we THOUGHT was the end of the day, we loaded onto the skid and headed back to the barn. There we found pile after pile of strung curing sticks. It was our job to monkey on up to the top of the curing barn and hang the sticks, working our way down til the barn was full. That took a while but was much, much easier than cropping it in the first place. Then we were done. He took us home after a day of honest work.
And it was hard work. I did it about 6 days before we had got the whole field finished. But I went every day. The money was good and I didn't mind working. Plus, I liked the lunches and climbing around in the barn.
In fact, really, the worst of it was the last day. And that's not saying that the last day was unbearable, just that it was worse than the days before it. Last day we picked what he called "the sand lots". Those were the big, bottom leaves that got sand all over them. You had to spend all day stooped, because bottom leaves typically grow near the bottom of the plant, and the sand just added extra irritation to an underarm that already was convinced it was being punished for something. But we survived, collected our cash, and as the farmer would attest, were better white men for it.
These are the things that make us who we are, I think. And this is one of the things that made me who I am. I know.
* My doctor, just this year, told me that, while not having any "bad habits" was ultimately the best thing for you (so you can leave behind a dour, skinny corpse, I suppose), that enjoying cigars was not such a bad thing. His exact words to me were, "As a doctor I'm supposed to tell you that you really ought to quit. But realistically, there's a lot worse habits. Don't worry too much about it." I think from now he's the doctor I want when I need a medical opinion about things that are fun.
Handless, out
Travelin' Ed
That's what I'm about. Ramblin' Ed at 4:32 PM
4 comments:
Ed,
I know the story well. Except in my version, I was 18 or 19 years old and a friend and I went to pick apples. We didn't get paid by the day nor hour, but rather by the apple bin. A bin is about 4 x 4 x 3 feet square and I think we got 6 dollars for filling one up. (You couldn't just dump the apples in, but nice and slow so as not to bruise them.) Anyway, we were in an old orchard, which means the trees are larger and a picker has to use and move a ladder more often. The apples go into a sack that hangs around your neck. Starting off at 7am, we knew we would never be able to keep up with the Mexican men, but we hoped we could pick as fast as the women. We fell behind both. They worked faster of course, but they also knew how to place the ladders better than we did. At lunch time we thought we would catch up by only taking 15 minutes for lunch. (We were counting on the Siesta) As I was eating my sandwich I watched a pair of Mexican men, already working the next row over going in the opposite direction, and their lunch hour consisted of this: A man with a full apple sack ran down the ladder, ran over to the bin, gently emptied his sack, ran over to his knapsack two rows of trees over, grabbed two refried bean burritos, ran back to his friend still in the tree, threw him one burrito and stuffed the other in his mounth while racing up the the ladder to continue picking.
Now mind you, there were very few white folks who would pick apples, its hard work. And we thought we were fairly hard workers, but we were babes in the woods when compared to the professionals.....
Pipedragger
Wow... me and a friend had THAT same experience except the fruit was oranges and I don't know what flavor the hispanics were. Oh, and we didn't have a ladder so we had to climb into the limbs.
When we showed up and asked to work the foreman smiled and said "sure". We thought that he thought that we couldn't hack it.
Like the apples, I think we were getting $6 per bin. And we were working together. By lunch time, after a couple hours of working, we had almost $3 to split. The migrant workers had all filled multiple bins, and they were all working solo.
We never came back from lunch. I'm pretty sure the foreman didn't expect we would.
A few months later I got a job planting orange trees. Much better.
Ed
Well, you fellows had some work experiences there. I can't talk tobacco cropping or apple picking, guess I wasn't fur enough out in the country for that sort of labor. My first "real" job was mixing mud and humping block/brick for a mason, but that was 17 yrs old. I must have been pampered growing up.
But, Edward, I can talk Pall Mall unfiltered. The first cigarette I ever had was a Pall Mall stolen out of my Dad's pack. But once I got seriously into smoking, I switched to Lucky Strikes, those were fine, fine cigarettes in my opinion.
Cherish those memories, fellows. It all goes by very quickly, trust me on that one. :-)
Gunner. Amen to time flying. I'm right behind you, brother.
I went from Pall Malls to Winstons to Camel filters to "Oh my God...WHY CAN'T I QUIT??"
It was after a night out in Brisbane, when through the course of the evening I had smoked 2 full packs and had woke up with a throat and head feeling like CRAP, that I was finally able to just set them down and walk away. I guess that's the day I finally reached to proper level of "want to".
Oh, and I remembered after the fact that those Aussie cigs (I want to say Phillip Morris) were 30 to a pack, not 20. Youch!
Ed
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