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description in an interview of the difficult nature of the work and the deprivation suffered by his family that included the following interesting revelation: It’s something I wouldn’t want to see my children have to do, but I wouldn’t mind having to do it again . . . that was such a good time for me.And I’m constantly comparing life today and life back then . . . Back then, nobody had anything; there were only two classes.The ones that had everything and those that didn’t have anything.And it didn’t bother us.We didn’t care. The people we knew didn’t have any more than we did so we thought that’s the way everybody lived. People loved each other.You could go to a neighbor’s house and if they had anything they’d give it to you.They wouldn’t expect it back . . . If we were hungry and a neighbor had food, nine times out of ten we didn’t have to ask for it.They would bring it and share it.And that’s what I miss. I miss the love between neighbors.22 It is tempting for those looking on from outside to view the lives of tenant families as a constant struggle in unmitigated misery because of our inability from our perspective to know of the pleasures and rewards that made life tolerable. For example, again, Riley recalls the pleasure that went with it as well as the pain.This is a seventy-year-old man recalling following a plow as a child: The first thing I remember about it was the aroma, a very nice aroma, you following mules all day. But it was beautiful. The smell of that land, that new land turning over was great. But what it was, we would first take what you would call a turning plow,a plow pulled by two mules,and you would take one row at a time.It would actually turn the dirt upside down. And my brother would be following me doing the same thing, or he would be in front and we would do this,we had twentyfive acres of cotton land, and it just took forever to do it.We would spend ten or twelve hours a day doing it. Then we would take this little riding disc,and we had only one of them and we would fight over who was going to get to ride, then we would go over the land with that,and we would take a harrow and smooth it all off,get the clods out,then we had what  The Boss and Sallie Generation 1BOLSTERLI_pages.qxd 2/6/08 3:51 PM Page 98 you call a two-row hopper, and it had a little seat and it had little hoppers filled with cotton seed, and one guy would be planting while the other would be waiting on the end to fill up those hoppers, and then we would put fertilizer down the same way.And then we would wait for cotton to sprout and when it got about two inches high we would get out there and chop it and then the cotton would grow.We would chop it twice while it was growing and a third time when it was about two feet high . . . and then you would run the middles with this cultivator we’d been using to plow the cotton .After we’d run the middles, farming was over until harvest time. So it was a big job.23 The best way I can think of to describe our lives and those of the people around us in those days is to think of our inhabiting different spheres that behaved like bubbles.There were spheres for landowners, black tenants, white tenants, et cetera, that coexisted sometimes as discrete entities and sometimes merged for periods of time,and there were characteristic modes of behavior for each with certain levels of respect expected for all.It was the function of manners to negotiate transactions between the inhabitants of all the spheres according to certain codes; there was trouble when these codes were violated.The social landscape, including race relations and relations between landed and landless whites, was a minefield too complicated to go into here as fully as it deserves.It was a hierarchical , racist society, and our family was as involved in these societal expectations as it was in all the others.We were snobs where “common” people...

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