Tobacco

Tobacco_____________________________ Jamie Griggs Tevis As a young man my dad smoked. He used to come to the house and sit down in a rocking chair to rest before noonday dinner. He took out a sack of Bull Durham and carefully stuck a little tobacco into a cigarette paper, spit on it to close it and then lighted up. I often rolled one of the papers around his match, and we had a "smoke." His minister convinced him that smoking was harmful to his health. One day he said to me, "I'll quit smoking if you will." I agreed, but I missed our cozy times together. Daddytried to stop growing tobacco. Ifitisharmful to smoke it, itmust be harmful to raise it. He looked into the matter with the Farm Bureau and found that his land would not be worth much without the tobacco base. It would have been difficult to make a living without the cash crop. We lived on a fifty-acre farm in Madison County, with less than an acre of tobacco base. Early spring, daddy dragged up a pile of wood and then plowed the 9 ? 100-foot tobacco bed. It was a festive time, when the whole family and neighbors gathered to enjoy the warmth of the fire. He dragged the coals over the freshly plowed ground to kill the weeds, fertilized, scattered the tiny brown burley seeds, framed the area with poles and covered it with yards of white canvas. The year's cash crop depended on getting a good stand of plants. Drought, hail and worms also had a part in determining the outcome of the harvest. A man from the government came around and measured the farmer's crop. If a farmer planted too much, the extra plants had to be cut down. This was necessary to control production and regulate the price. We depended on our allotment to supply most of our year's cash—supplemented with the sale ofbeef cattle and hogs. Weeding the beds was work for women and children. A board was put across the bed, resting on the side poles so we could reach the plants without stepping on them. If it didn't rain, water had to be carried in barrels to keep the precious plants alive. The conversation wherever men gathered—outside the church door or around the potbelly stove at the country store—was, "How are your tobacco plants coming along?" If a neighbor was short of plants, a person with a good supply would share his leftovers. In later years my dad acquired more land and had tenants to help with the tobacco crop. He owned a tobacco setter that was pulled by a 12 mule, with two people sitting inback and alternately putting a plant into the prepared earth. Before that, Daddy carried a bootleg planter with two compartments—one for the water and a shoot for the plants. My sister and I took turns walkingbeside him with a basket ofplants and dropped them in one by one. As we walked down the long rows, Daddy used his feet to firm the soil around the plant to assure it was standing upright. Sometimes there would be a school function such as a pie supper that we wanted to attend, but Daddy would say he was too tired to take us. Then came plowing to kill the weeds and to keep the soil loose around the tender plants. As the plants grew, so did the worms—big, bright green, greedy things the size of a man's finger. They left telltale holes that indicated where they were chewing under the leaves. It again fell to the women and children to walk down the long rows, find the culprit and squish it under foot. We usually did this task in the early morning, when the plants were damp and sticky. For this process I gave up the joys of going barefoot and wore shoes. Next came the suckering-off of the blooms and waiting for the plants to mature—turning the patch into shades of golden yellows and browns. This was called the "laid by season," meaning the work is done for awhile. This was...