Tom Collins: A Mother’s Beans

“I am a hillbilly from eastern Kentucky,” Tom told me in the first minutes of our interview, laughing but gently defiant, too. “My family is from Breathitt County. I grew up very poor in a huge family. I’m lucky number 13 out of 14 children.” His directness appealed to me. “Where in Breathitt County?” I asked him. “The tiny little community of Barwick.” Even though I know little about that county I remembered that Barwick was one of Robert Kennedy’s stops on his 1968 tour of eastern Kentucky, just months before he was assassinated. Tom, who was born two years before in 1966, can’t recall his visit. But in one of his family’s photograph albums is a picture of his sister Melinda with the senator when he visited the community’s one-room school. Kennedy came to eastern Kentucky to investigate the effects of the War on Poverty, the social and economic programs first imagined during John Kennedy’s administration but realized during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency. Tom entered first grade in that same school a few years later.

By then he was already working in what he calls “a feed your family garden.” One of his earliest garden memories is a vision of his mother and older brothers and sisters working as he sat in the grass at the garden’s edge. He remembers listening to his siblings “complaining and crying and wanting to get out of the garden” as he watched them hoe. Soon Tom himself was old enough to pull weeds and be tutored by his mother in garden ways. The garden was her domain.

“The major lesson I learned from my parents was self-sufficiency, that you have to be able to take care of yourself. I saw that everything [my mother] was doing was a lesson [in] how you take care of yourself.” Her “feed your family garden” was carefully calculated to be productive for seven or eight months out of the year. “The first things that would go in in the spring would be Black Seeded Simpson lettuce, mustard greens, onions and sweet peas,” followed shortly by Irish Cobbler and Kennebec potatoes. “We would have tons and tons of cabbage. Cabbage meant sauerkraut.” Then came other garden staples like tomatoes, corn, and green beans. The latter were often planted where the lettuces had grown a month earlier. At the end of the summer when the onions were “lifted,” the Collins would plant a second crop of cucumbers in that space “to get a very quick last stand of cucumbers before…frost.” Once the potatoes were dug, they would immediately sow “seeds for mustard greens and turnips. And the turnips would grow right into the winter,” Tom recalled. “I can remember snow being on the turnip tops and going out and pulling up turnips to eat.” The term for this efficiency of scale, Tom informed me, is “double-cropping.”

The family’s subsistence relied on more than a vegetable garden. They raised soybeans and corn to provide feed for their milk cows, pigs, and chickens. Lest any space be wasted, Tom’s mother planted pumpkins, gourds and cushaws to crawl their way through the corn patches. “It was magical walking through the cornfields.” Marveling, he remembered “the shapes, the textures…and the colors” of his mother’s design. What might be considered unusual about Tom’s family given they had such a large and productive enterprise is that they owned hardly any land. The house and about an acre around it was in their hands. Otherwise, the land they cultivated was owned by the Pine Branch Coal Company for whom Tom’s father had long worked and some “large river bottoms,” the richest land, belonged to extended family. Without this borrowed land, the Collins family livelihood would have been sparse and extra money needed for academic pursuits might have been impossible to raise without it. As Tom explained to me, “My mom would have a roadside stand and sell sweet corn to give me the money to buy textbooks” for college. Tom, himself, picked wild blackberries, a hot and...