Good Tobacco

The first time I saw a field of tobacco—in the middle of the Kentucky harvest season in 1998—I flushed with the impatient curiosity I felt as a child, puzzling over fur-swaddled Eskimos or sea-drifting manatees on the cover of National Geographic. The field was big enough for a soccer game and was filled with hundreds of yellow-leafed lean-tos. "It's tobacco," the friend I was visiting told me as he pulled the car off the road to take a closer look. "They spike six or seven entire tobacco plants on a long wooden pole, and then lean several poles together and leave them there to dry for a day or so." The leaves of the uprooted plants were withered and slouching in the sticky heat, but the field of lean-tos boasted a neatness, an attractive organization—like a patchwork quilt or a row of windmills—that indicated generations of practice.

Only two people asked me if I was a smoker during the time I spent looking at tobacco in North Carolina. Neither of them was a farmer. The farmers I met were not interested in smoking, or anti-smoking. They were more interested in helping me understand what they saw when they looked at a field of tobacco. They would rather explain no-till farming or the way Georgian tobacco farmers use MH30 or what happens when lightening strikes a tobacco field. They'd rather tell a story about an older friend who once found a nearly frozen grasshopper in his field and warmed it in his hands until it could fly away. Or hoot when my dog, Hank, was chased by a herd of cows. They'd rather reminisce about the days when there was always a half-pint of whiskey tucked under the scale at tobacco auctions. Or describe how they helped farm tobacco when they were only about "this high." And I was happy to hear all of it.

In the 1950s, Reidsville, North Carolina, had a downtown. There was a shoeshine parlor, two movie theaters, and a corner drugstore known for its fresh lemonade. There was a JCPenney's, a Belks, Rose's Five and Dime, and the Broadway Bargain House, which the local kids called the "gyp-joint." Reidsville also had an American Tobacco Company manufacturing plant and three tobacco auction warehouses. Today, most of the buildings downtown are vacant, and the manufacturing plant shut down in 1994. The Smothers Warehouse (a.k.a. The Money Box), which was once on the outskirts of town, now stands at the crossroads of Reidsville's fastest growing section: a mile down the road is a mega Food Lion and a bursting Lowe's Home Improvement store, and a mile in the other direction is a run of home-cooking buffets, nail salons, self-service carwashes, and insurance agencies. Named for its original owner, Tom Smothers, the warehouse's brick facade now reads, "Smothers Warehouse: Stacy, Robert, and Garland Smothers" in a deeply cured, yellow paint.

Tom Smothers's 40-something great-nephew, Robert Smothers, gave me a tour of the warehouse in May 2000, a month after North Carolina's tobacco farmers had transplanted thousands of five-inch sprouts from greenhouses into their fields. The Smothers Warehouse sits about 50 yards back from the road and is surrounded by a dusty, gravel lot, big enough for 50 pickups and several tobacco-toting flatbed trucks. Robert unlocked the front door and then coaxed it open with a shoulder nudge. I followed him through a string of dim rooms that were originally offices for bookkeeping and cutting checks, but had apparently grown into storage areas for dusty file cabinets, old appliances, and stacks of sagging cardboard boxes. It smelled like very old cigarette smoke. Robert's small, cinnamon-colored mutt, Mimi, surveyed the corners of the offices.

"Would you like a Coke?" Robert asked. Mimi followed him into the warehouse's kitchenette, her nails clacking on the cement floor. I...