Hogs, Mules, and Yellow Dogs: Growing Up on a Mississippi Subsistence Farm

Thad Hill

49 Thad Hill In 1935, my parents moved the family from the teacher’s home in Avera back to Neely, the geographical center of Greene County Hillman origins. Employment possibilities as teachers were bleak, but they decided to build a house. They started construction at a spot that overlooked Highway 24, the Neely-McLain highway, located at the southernmost border of the historic Thaddeus Green homestead. What faith. The entire farm and our home were called the “Thad Place,” using Thaddeus as a namesake. The family of “Tinner” Green, an Irish settler, had acquired the original property. Thaddeus, son of Tinner, born in 1843, was brother to my paternal grandmother, Virginia Green Hillman. The homestead had been proved up sometime after the Civil War, cleared and used as a place for Thaddeus to raise a family, most of whom migrated from the farm soon after the turn of the century. Mother dubbed the place “Thad Hill” when we first moved in, and the name stuck. After we moved to Thad Hill, our lives became a flurry of activity, a new venture for the family. My parents for more than a decade had occupied teachers’ homes, and houses owned by others, including Grandpa Charlie. Since marriage, Mother had never lived in her own house, and she hit the ground running, beginning life on the farm with vision and exceptional energy. She never stopped until forty years later a heart attack stilled her restless energy forever. Aunt Lora, one of Father’s sisters, once admonished Mother about always working so hard, being so fastidious, and so strict of etiquette: “Agnes, why do you work like you do? Why not relax and get Bud to hire you some help? Y’know, when you die, and when they lay you out there in the church, people will pass by yo coffin and say under their breath, ‘There’s ol Agnes. She wuz from Georgia and a hard workin old bitch’!” Old Washington School (Neely), ca. 1880. Thad Hill 51 Thad Hill entered my consciousness almost at birth as a place-name for family cultural identity. It had been an important reference point in local lore ever since settlers swarmed the area after Mississippi statehood in 1817, and the homesteading that followed. It ultimately became part of the Charles Hillman estate, but in the years that followed our arrival from Avera it became the center of my lifelong sentiment. It was little more than a rise in Earth’s crust, but it was a hill to us. I liked the term “Thad Hill,” and the association even more; it evoked space and location, as well as geomorphic relevance, and time. We knew about Saint Paul’s sermon on Mars Hill, and I had read about Nob Hill in San Francisco and Boar’s Hill in Oxford. Then, in our family vocabulary there were Bald Hill, Chinquapin Hill, and Hickory Hill that had been at sometime, somewhere located on one of Grandpa’s properties. The Hillman Hills and the Geedee (goddamned ) Hills were in Skull Fork, a finger of land bounded by Skull Creek and one of its tributary branches, part of the original Greatgrandfather Pinckney George Hillman homestead he had settled in the 1840s. Hills were an important feature in our family’s lexicon of geography and sentiment. Possibly, we gave the idea of a hill disproportionate importance because male members of the Hillman clan liked to use prominent terra firma for expansive dreaming. Atop hills my male elders fantasized about their rural settings. They dismounted from automobile or pickup truck to summon hogs, to chew tobacco and spit, and to observe buzzards soaring high above the next ridge while circling carrion. Ponderous in thought, my father and grandfather mumbled between themselves on Bald Hill what to me as a child were indistinct phrases about hogs and the land. On these various high spots, they gazed at the next horizon, studied the surrounding biosphere, and secretly wished that they owned the entire lot, or at least the “forty” bordering their own. Mountaintop experiences, indeed! A hill also distinguished the important from the trivial when male dreaming turned to serious conversation in the porch swing on Sunday afternoons, after everyone had accommodated the friedchicken -okra-collards-cornbread dinner. Earnest conversation about the land and its proprietorship gave dignity to those who could look Beginnings 52 down from an imagined summit, a high hill on...