A Turn in the South

  “Typically, the land would be owned by landlords who didn’t any longer live precisely on the farm. Like my grandfather. People who had left the Civil War farmhouse homeplaces built by their grandparents or great-grandparents and had moved to town, to small hamlets, such as the one I was born in. And in those houses on the farm there would be living a sharecropper, the tenant farmer. He could be black or white. Typically in my experience, they were white. They farmed on shares. The farmer got half the proceeds on the crop. The owner furnished the supplies and the capital. Typically, there might be one or more black families living in smaller houses on the farm, living rent-free. They were not participants in the sharecrop deal, but worked as a kind of distanced retainer. They worked for money, and their large families provided the many hands required for housing tobacco.”

  “Housing?”

  “The whole thing of getting the tobacco from the field into the curing barn and then the packhouse—where it was packed up and stored until brought to market. It was important to have a good tight packhouse that wasn’t too humid and above all didn’t leak—you couldn’t afford to have your tobacco get wet after it had been cured. If it had too much moisture it would ‘mold’ and lose its value radically.

  “This housing involved whole teams of people with different ranks of hierarchical importance and responsibilities. The croppers, those who actually broke the leaves from the stalk, they were in a sense the most important. They had to do two difficult things. Hard physical labor, and they had to make the decision about which leaves to gather. And they had to work very fast. There would be two or three or four of them going through the field, breaking the leaves. It was most difficult when they were breaking the leaves at the bottom of the stalk. Then they would have to work bent double all day long in very hot temperatures.

  “Some of them would go along the row walking on their knees, to avoid bending over. But that is hard too. Following the croppers would be a mule-drawn or a tractor-drawn ‘tobacco truck.’ These tobacco trucks were really small wooden wagons with wooden wheels. They had stakes at the corners and burlap sides to hold the leaves in.”

  I told him what Howard had said about the tobacco tar on his hands, and what Howard’s mother, Hetty, had said about the tobacco smell making her sick.

  “Most of the workers complained about the way the gum got on their hands and arms. It usually wouldn’t make anyone ill from the nicotine unless it was wet.”

  Hetty had said the opposite. She had said that to avoid the smell she and her husband had gone to work in the tobacco fields in the early morning, when the dew was still on the leaves.

  “The other persons of most importance were the ‘loopers.’ They worked in the barns. They tied the tobacco leaves with cotton twine on to the sticks, which were then laid horizontally on racks in the barns, with the leaves hanging down from the sticks, stem ends up. Again, this had to be done rapidly. The loopers were always women—they might be the wife of the tenant farmer. And there would be ‘handers.’ They would hand the tobacco leaves from the tobacco trucks to the loopers.

  “Some people nowadays have even taken the whole tobacco truck with the wheels and made coffee tables out of them. An old-fashioned tobacco truck was only half again as large as a coffee table. They were made small to go down the rows. And possibly one truck packed up with about five feet of tobacco leaves was very heavy, enough for one person to manage. Tobacco, before it was cured, was heavy.

  “The looper would receive five or six tobacco leaves, stem end towards her, in her left hand, and with a few swift motions wrap and secure the stem ends together. And then she would flip the bundle”—he made a gesture, but the thing he was describing was not easy to follow—“so that it straddled the tobacco stick and hung there. It was very important that the leaves not fall off the stick, because if several leaves fell and landed on the galvanized steel flue beneath them they could start a fire, and the whole barn could be consumed in fifteen or twenty minutes.”

  “Did that happen a lot?”

  “It was not unusual for a tobacco barn to burn. You would expect one or two barns to burn down in a growing season.”

  He went back to talking of the various jobs in tobacco. Then he said, “A certain social stratification resulted. The sons and daughters of the owners became the town boys and girls. The sons and daughters of the tenant farmers were the country boys and girls. We went to school together. I really admired these country boys and girls, because they worked harder than I did.”

  I asked about the effects of mechanization. His reply was unexpected.

  “The technological innovations that did away with much of the hard labor also did away with some of the quality of the tobacco. No ‘hands’ are tied now. Leaves are clamped together in bulk barns and cured.” He spelled out the word “bulk” for me, as though the word itself contained some of the grossness of the new method. “Tobacco is no longer graded. The leaf is placed in canvas sheets and sold.”

  A lot of the ambiguities of his attitude to tobacco came out in that expression of distaste for the new methods, which spared men but were bad for the tobacco. I put that to him. He didn’t reject it.

  He said: “It’s a mystery and a paradox. For me it has a certain resonance, the whole tobacco business, and it is close to the paradox of civilization itself. That this essentially poisonous substance formed the basis of a way of life that had so many attractive aspects—a formalized, seasonal cycle to it, which left the land combed into its even furrows after the stalks had been cut in the autumn. Which had the spectacle of the tobacco market, with the golden piles of aromatic leaf being sold for what were really considerable sums of money.”

  Jim Applewhite’s wife came from a tobacco family as well. They had been talking recently about tobacco, he said, and his wife had said that in the old days it was possible to tell, just from looking at a hand of tobacco leaves, who had tied the hand—so individual were the loopers’ tying styles.

  “Tobacco was a product which allowed the South at a time of pretty serious economic disadvantage to bring in cash money from the whole country and even from abroad. No other crop brought in so much money per acre, and was so lucrative in return for effort expended. In a sense, as a poet who didn’t know he was going to be a poet, the fact that the product was a folk art and nonutilitarian must have appealed to me. The final use of tobacco was as a social gesture. From production to consumption, it was a style-bearing medium. The life style has changed. I don’t think the South absolutely needs to produce this poisonous substance any more.

  “I think of tobacco as an Old Testamentish aspect of a past way of life, a kind of traditional, conservative, fallen world, a world marked by original sin, of which tobacco was a kind of symbol.”

  I asked whether members of his family smoked.

  “Father smoked a little. Not much. That’s part of the paradox. The workers mostly smoked. Two of the sharecroppers who worked on the family farm during my teenage and adult years died of lung cancer.”

  Those deaths worried him. He had spoken of them with feeling at our first meeting, almost while he was showing me the ripening tobacco field on the old road to Chapel Hill. But, as always in his talk, there was another side to the poison.

  “One can argue that any successful agrarian economy has most of the aspects of tobacco-farming. What it doesn’t have is the handcrafted, graded, aromatic, sold-by-auction quality that tobacco has. The issue of quality, as determined by color, scent, and flavor, was central to tobacco. There’s a region specificity to wine, and tobacco is in a sense analogous: there’s a region specificity to tobacco as well.”

  He said that there was something he had wanted to show me in his house, but he had forgotten. “The wallboards of a tobacco barn from my family farm are in my sitting room. And the ceiling beams were posts in the barn.”

  But I had noticed the planks on the end wall, broad planks, set diagonally.

  He said they were of pinewood, and had been made so hard fro
m the years of heat of the curing process that he had had to use an electric drill to get nails into them.

  “The industry changed in its desires when the filter tip came in. The classic cigarette was the unfiltered Lucky Strike or Chesterfield or Old Gold. That’s the kind of cigarette the companies wanted the most beautiful tobacco for, the most beautiful, lemon-yellow, ‘bright-leaf’ tobacco. When the filter came in they wanted a heavier kind of tobacco, less bright, not as good a quality. So the premium for growing the most golden bright leaf lessened. The whole mode of production has been degraded by different kinds of demand and, most flagrantly, by altered growing practices. Chemicals are used to inhibit sucker growth and to artificially increase the bulk, the weight of the leaf. It’s called MH 30. It was developed in North Carolina. And of course tobacco doesn’t support as many people in its mechanized aspect. Formerly tobacco-growing would support whole countrysides of people. It was the chief cash source for the rural descendants of slaves, white Southern farmers who owned no land of their own, as well as for the landowners. Today there’s simply so much more money, and the importance of tobacco is less.”

  His past had been more or less abolished. But it was this past that gave him eyes for the landscape he now lived in—though there could be no landscape like the first.

  “I am now able to write about the landscape of Durham County.But I realize that that is in part the case because the landscape has been historicized for my imagination by the evidences I can still see there of an older agrarian economy, before the land was covered again with trees.

  “A Southern field, if you leave it alone, will grow up in broom sedge, and in a few years young pines will be bristling up, scattered through the broom sedge. After twenty or thirty years it’s woodland again.” Hardwood trees then grew up in the shelter of the pines; and then the hardwoods killed the pines. He lived in a landscape of second-growth timber, eighty to a hundred years old. “But in places the old farm rows are still there, like small waves in a bay frozen by time. They were the rows of the last crop planted by some farmer, in the last century perhaps, or the early part of this. And deep in the trees you see fallen chimneys, areas where in spring jonquils still come back where there had been family gardens. A few old tombstones in places. Some beech trees with names and dates still legible from being cut into the bark, in 1908 or 1911 or 1914. This is about the period when this change we’ve been talking about began—electrification, roads, motorcars.”

  Every stage of history marked by small ruins, a landscape of small ruins—this had been my first impression of the South when I had come down at Easter with Howard, to see the place that to him was home, not very far from here.

  Jim Applewhite said: “The landscape of eastern North Carolina was always to me a kind of landscape of the past. There was this dichotomy in my own life between my father and my grandfather. My grandfather had been born in that Civil War-era farmhouse, and he was always associated in my mind with the agrarian economy. My father ran a service station and believed in progress and sold electrical appliances for a number of years. He was always in a hurry. My grandfather was never hurried.

  “It was in my grandfather’s house—just across the road from our house—that we went for the ritual occasions that marked the farmer’s year. My grandfather represented a kind of permanence for me. He had a packhouse—that’s where they packed the meat. That’s where they cured hams and shoulders. And they did lovely things like rendering lard, making sausages. Very hard work. But formalized, because people were in direct contact with the necessity that constrained them to do what they did. The hogs had to be killed on a very cold day in winter. Otherwise the meat would spoil. Corns and beans had to be canned when they were ripe, or they wouldn’t last.”

  Canning

  In kitchens with pots large as vats

  Wrinkled aprons and skin with the steam.

  Pigs were strung up from timbers in December.

  Their blood steamed like ghosts in the cold.

  “One has this romanticism, but when one goes and looks at it, it’s not a fiction. It does exist. A quarter of a mile away from this farmhouse of my grandfather’s is a graveyard, and there my grandfather’s parents are buried with some other people.”

  THE WORD “tobacco” is thought to have come from Tobago, the dependency or sister island of Trinidad. And before “Virginia” became the word in England for tobacco, tobacco was sometimes called “Trinidado,” after the island of Trinidad, part of the Spanish Empire since its discovery by Columbus in 1498. Tobacco was a native Indian crop. But after the discovery and plunder of Mexico in 1519–20 and Peru fifteen years later, the Spaniards were interested only in gold and silver; they were not interested in tobacco. It was the English and the Dutch and the French who went to Trinidad to load up with tobacco. There were hardly ever more than fifty Spaniards at a time in Trinidad in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

  The Gulf of Paria, between Trinidad and Venezuela, a vast safe harbor, was nearly always full of foreign ships. An English explorer and diplomatist, Sir Thomas Roe (who later went to the Mogul court at Agra in India as the representative of King James), came to the Gulf of Paria one year and saw fifteen English, French, and Dutch ships “freighting smoke.” Another English official reported that the tobacco trade might in time be worth more than all the Spanish gold and silver from the Americas.

  The trade was illegal, however—even though crops were grown in Trinidad with the complicity of the Spanish governor. Under Spanish law only Spain could trade with a Spanish colony. Occasional sweeps were made by the Spanish navy against foreign interlopers in the Gulf of Paria; and foreign sea captains and sailors who were caught could be hanged on the spot. And the Indian tobacco fields—tobacco a crop requiring such great care, as I was to see in North Carolina—were flattened: part of the process by which in three hundred years both the native Indian population and tobacco were to be rooted out from Trinidad.

  The island that the British captured (without a shot) in 1797 was a sugarcane slave colony. And it was to work in the sugarcane estates that, thirty years or so after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834, Indians were brought over from India on indenture. It was sugarcane that gave a rhythm to the life of rural Indian communities. Tobacco was no longer a local crop.

  I would have been disbelieving, and delighted, to be told as a child that Trinidad had once been known for its tobacco. To me tobacco was glamorous, remote, from England (in absurdly luxurious airtight tins), or American (in soft, aromatic, cellophane-wrapped packets), something from an advertisement in Life.

  SHE HAD a name tag on her blouse: Paula in white on black plastic, drawing attention to itself, and making you see that she was almost flat-chested. She was a waitress in a newish salad-and-quiche “gourmet” bar in one of the rich towns of the Research Triangle.

  She said, “Would you like a cocktail or a drink before your lunch?” It was a formality. As spoken by her, it held no invitation at all. There seemed to be as little zest in her for these restaurant refinements as there was in me, after months of restaurants and hotels. “Now, let me tell you about our specials.” Mechanically, she recited the specials.

  At first on this trip, for the first month or so, during these recitals in restaurants, I used to smile: the recitals seemed ironic, to be a kind of joke between the waiter and the customer. But the recitals were always perfectly serious; the waiters were doing, often doggedly, what they had been told to do.

  Paula got through to the end of what she had to say. It was then, unexpectedly, that life came to her voice. She said, “I’m leaving today.”

  “Leaving the restaurant?”

  “After this serving. Leaving here. Leaving the town. Going to Wilmington. Tomorrow.”

  “Have you packed? You don’t have much time now.”

  “I’ll just throw it all in the Chevy. One of those little subcompacts. Like a Pinto.”

  “You won’t take a U-Haul?”

  ?
??I’ve been throwing away things for like a month. You throw away and throw away and then you find you still have things you want to throw away.”

  “You really think it will all go in the Chevy?” It had become one of my own little anxieties about traveling and the hotel life: telephoning for the bellman, emptying the safe-deposit box, loading up, wondering whether it was all in, whether there was going to be a doorman at the other end, to help with the many bits and pieces: so many books and papers and files and notebooks now, so many little bags and sacks.

  She said, “Well, you see. My husband and I had like a fight about a month ago. And he took half the stuff, and I had, like, well, the other half. But God gave me the strength to see that through.”

  “What are you going to do in Wilmington?”

  “Peter’s there. I’m going to De with him.”

  “Your husband?”

  “God worked the miracle. Let me bring you your salad.”

  When she brought the salad I said, “The U-Haul people have a depot here. I saw it yesterday.”

  “We have a lot of bills. I want to pay those off first. It’ll all go in the Chevy.”

  “Bills. I know.”

  “It was one of the things we used to fight about. He’d pay some. And some he’d outright refuse to pay.”

  “Why did he do that?”

  “Exactly. He said he was saved. Like me.”

  “Are you saved?”

  Her voice trembled. “Oh yes. But he didn’t, like, grow. Grow in Jesus, as they say.” The last phrase, and its tone, suggested that she was slightly mocking what she was talking about, or keeping at a certain distance from it. But, as with the specials, she was speaking seriously.