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Living Lean and Country Values I was only three years old when I first found out that fire and hunger are sometimes the same thing.That was back in 1934, in a time we now call the Great Depression, and we were a family named the Browns. Like so many poor people who had to endure those hard times,we were more than just a family.We were a strong clan,solid as native stone,living together and laughing and loving and singing as we tried to survive down there in the poor piney woods of southArkansas. Uncle Harvey and Daddy hunted and trapped for a living.We ate the wild game and sold the hides for a few dollars a month, and that’s all we had to live on. For a mink, they could get two dollars, for a fox, a dollar twenty-five, for a coon, seventy-five cents, and for a big possum twenty-five cents.One year there was no game,and all daddy caught in his traps was a red fox.With the money for its skin, he went into the town of Sparkman and bought a sixty-four-pound sack of flour, a one-pound can of coffee and a bucket of lard, all for a dollar twenty-five. But in all the bad times, I don’t think any one of us Browns ever complained or even thought about being unhappy. We didn’t know it then, but living off the land must have made us stronger in the long run and given us something special to carry through the years.It’s like the time someone asked HankWilliams Jr. what the difference was between his songs and his daddy’s music. “What’s missing is the poverty,” he said.And maybe that’s the difference between the music we made and the songs you hear today. When I was three years old, we were visiting at Uncle Harvey’s house. My brother J. E. was just a baby then and asleep in the bedroom ; I used to have to take care of him some.When I went in to check on him, I saw fire all around him on the floor and walls. I ran to the kitchen to tell Aunt Ester, who was cooking a big supper of 3 1 turnip greens, fried potatoes, and cornbread.All I can remember is that they got J. E. and put him out in the middle of the gravel road. I had to stay with him and watch everybody running in and out of the house trying to save a few things.That old house burned to the ground.The smell of that fire lingers in my mind to this day.Aunt Ester’s cooking, like my Momma’s, had the most delicious aroma in the world,though it somehow gets mixed up in my mind with smoldering timbers and ashes. Of course, no one got to eat any of Aunt Ester’s cooking that day. Uncle Harvey needed sixty dollars to buy fertilizer and seed to plant his next year’s crop. He went to the bank, and they wanted to know what he had for collateral. He said,“I’ve got a horse, a cow, a calf, some one-horse plow tools and, of course, the crop when it’s harvested.”The bank president told him,“If you will assign us all these assets you just mentioned, and get two upstanding citizens to sign your note,I will let you have the $60.”Uncle Harvey told him,“You kiss where I can’t and go to hell.”He didn’t get to plant his crop that year.We were all hungry after that. • • • Daddy finally got a job working on a farm for a family called the Butlers for twelve dollars a month.We lived in a dirt-floor shack out in the middle of the farm.Uncle Harvey andAunt Ester came to live with us after they lost their house.Then, after Grandpa Tuberville died, GrandmaTuberville lived with us too.The house didn’t have a single shade tree, and the cracks between the boards on the porch were so wide that if you stuck your toe or hand down there too far, a chicken would peck it. Somehow we all found ways to make it through. I loved sneaking up to the landowner’s big house and smelling the aroma of rich food coming out of the kitchen.I...

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