WE HAD heard much, from Dee Grimes and from Jim Applewhite’s father, of Dan the neighbor, the lucky man with the irrigation system and the mechanical harvester, who was that day “putting in” tobacco. And when we left Stantonsburg we went to see Dan.
He was a friendly, well-exercised middle-aged man with glasses, in pale-brown clothes and with a dark-brown baseball cap (“Pride in Tobacco”)—through he himself didn’t smoke. His hands were black with grease and also with tobacco tar, from the leaf he was “putting in”—the green-leaf tobacco tar I had first heard about from Howard.
His harvester—with a black man at the controls—was at work, straddling many rows. It was fascinating to watch this large, awkward-looking, but delicate machine, which had done away with the brute labor of tobacco-cropping. The wheels of the harvester, and the driver’s seat, moved along furrows; on either side two long rubber rollers with a little space between them caught the tobacco stalks and rolled off the leaves up to a certain height. The rolled-off leaves fell into bins and were taken up fast-moving bands to the leaf basket. The tobacco stalks with the uncropped upper leaves snapped back into their upright position; and at the end only an occasional yellow-green leaf remained on the ground to show that the harvester had just passed.
In the shed outside Dan’s bulk barns four black people, two men and two women (casual workers, to judge by their goodish clothes: no overalls), unpacked the leaves, fixed them into metal clamps, and slid the clamps along the racks in the bulk barns. To “put in” in a bulk barn was easier than in the tall old barns, where a man had to climb on a ladder to hang the sticks on the upper racks. Some years ago, Jim said, Dee Grimes had fallen off a top rack and fractured his hand. The racked leaves in the bulk barns looked like gigantic green salads.
It was easier with the bulk barns. But some of the ritual of the old days that the boy had studied on the Applewhite farm had also gone—the many black women looping tobacco leaves on sticks, the heated barns tended all night, the sweet corn roasting in coals, the pig being barbecued.
The field with the old Applewhite family graveyard no longer belonged to the family. But there is always a right of way to a graveyard, and a grass track led to it from the road. It was a small enclosure, about thirty feet by twenty. The iron rails were overgrown with weeds and orange trumpet vines. The oldest stone, very nearly indecipherable, had been put up in 1849. Small stones marked children’s graves. There were two wooden markers.
Jim said, “Probably heart of pine. What they call ‘fat lightwood.’ Possibly a slave. Sometimes slaves were buried with wooden markers.”
These markers looked scorched. I thought it might have been from age, but Jim said there might have been a fire in the field. The softer wood had worn away around the ridges of the harder grain.
Across the grass track from the graveyard there was a field of tobacco, the veined, resilient, umbrellalike leaves drooping a little after the weeks of drought. These small fields and rusting old tobacco barns—picturesque when I had first seen them—spoke now of great, detailed labor. And in the graveyard in the center of the field it was easy to imagine how confining it would have been in the old days, before roads and motorcars and electricity, and how the country town of Wilson, ten miles away, made a day’s journey.
… Closed in by miles
Which sandy roads, pine barrens, swamps, made
A limit to curiosity. The stars’ light,
The King James Bible and Wesley’s hymns,
Traveled equivalent distances, unquestioned.
But now there was an easy road to Durham.
OUT OF his intense contemplation of the physical world of his childhood—an act that made me feel close to him, though his world had not been at all like mine—and out of his separation from that first world of his, Jim Applewhite had gone beyond the religious faith of his father and grandfather and arrived at a feeling for “the sanctity of the smallest gestures.”
It was an imaginative, poetic resolution, quite different in its calm, its positiveness, and its import from Barry McCarty’s feeling, as a politician and a Church of Christ minister, for the beauty of the simple life—which, with him, seemed also linked to the idea of a world threatening to get out of control.
Such different men; yet they had certain important things in common. They had been made by the same history. And it was that sense of a special past, the past as a wound, that I missed almost as soon as I went north to Virginia, to Charlottesville.
There was history there in quantity—Jefferson, Monticello, the University of Virginia. But that was history as celebration, the history of the resort, the history that was causing the subdivisions (or housing developments) to multiply in Virginia, and was even threatening the fox hunt (where already the hounds were trained to hunt foxes and foxes alone in special rented fox-compounds with deep-buried fences; and where the huntsman knew where all the foxes were in his “country” and inoculated all the cubs against rabies).
I had been living until then—and this perhaps had made the people of the South or Southeast so congenial to me—with people coming to terms with a more desperate kind of New World history, and a poorer land reflecting this history—the history that, in his poem “Southern Voices,” Jim Applewhite writes of as “defeat,” putting the word in italics, the defeat that he hears in Southern speech:
This colorless tone, like flour
Patted onto the cheeks, is poor-white powder
To disguise the minstrel syllables lower
In our register, from a brownface river.
V. S. Naipaul, A Turn in the South
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