I Came Out of the Eighteenth Century

Chapter III GRANDMOTHER RICE’S PLANTATION

CHAPTER III Grandmother Rice's Plantation M y FATHER'S FAMILY LIVED IN THE LOW COUNTRY, A HOT MUGGY malarial land that sapped the strength and drained ambition from all except the toughest. The sandy soil, shading in color from grey on hillock and hammock to deep black at the swamp edge, merged into canebrakes and slow-moving rivers, whose black waters were tinged with ocher from the tannin of cypress stumps. The sand was the home of the hookworm, and from the backwaters came death-bearing mosquitoes; but no one knew of hookworm yet, and the mosquitoes were merely a nuisance-and not to all at that, for wealth accumulated to vendors of tonics for chills and fever. (Except in textiles, the only fortunes made in the South have come from putting things into the human mouth: patent medicines, Coca-Cola, tobacco.) Farmers planted the same crops on the same land year after year and spent most of their earnings on fertilizer, invoking experience-"Cain' tell me nothing 'bout farmin'; ain't I done wore out more'n one farm?"-and tradition, in their scorn of this new-fangled thing called science. The "faith to the fathers once delivered" was inclusive. Occasionally one of them pulled himself together and cleared a piece of new ground-this was all right-inviting in his neighbors to a logrolling; but, when they had cut down his trees and hitched them to the edge of the clearing and eaten his food and gone home, he was left with a forest of resinous everlasting pine stumps that meant years of broken plow points and prying and 108 Grandmother Rice's Plantation 109 pulling and hauling, for dynamite was not yet a farmer's tool. But in winter these roots and knots-"light 'ood" knots, we called them-were a comfort; they make a fierce and brilliant fire and have a wonderful clean smell. Everyone was poor and everyone accepted poverty as an act of God, like too much or too little rain, and children. Home-grown corn and pork and store-bought sow-belly, flat slabs of tallow white, were standard diet. The corn was ground in the slow-moving water mill, so slow that taking corn to mill was a prized task, for it meant half a day's fishing. One had to wait one's turn; there were always others ahead of one, or alleged to have been. The siftings of the ground corn were meal, the rest grits, which we had for breakfast every day. From the meal were made oval pones, dunkers' delight, baked in oven or spider, or dropped into pot licker and then called dumplings. These sank to the bottom of the stomach and stayed there. Pot licker was the water and grease in which cabbage or its cousin, collards, the only winter vegetable , had been boiled for hours, with a piece of pork siding or, rare treat, a ham hock. Biscuit and undunked corn bread were softened with pork drippings; butter was unusual, for the cows were as poor as the people. Only the visiting preacher could count on a chicken in every pot. Men lived from Sunday to Sunday, when they drove over roads bumpy with roots and twisted from years of dodging fallen trees and mud puddles, to arrive at last at the church and hear the promise of a better life to come. Poverty is the seedbed of piety. My father's kin were sunk in the double poverty that comes of having seen better days. Colleton County, named after one of the original Lords Proprietors, retained some remnants of a gentry, to which the Rices had belonged and still made a tenuous claim of belonging. Even so, it was county as distinguished from state gentry, and very distinguished from Charlestonian, who, while they lived all of fifty miles away, dimmed other lights with their reiterated superiority. In the low country, you were best or you were nothing. This may explain why 110 I Came Out of the Eighteenth Century my Grandmother Smith, who had a teaspoonful of the snob in her, said that she asked only one thing of her children, that none of them should marry anyone from Colleton County. (Three of the five did.) My father's father, who died before I was born, had been a doctor in Charleston before he moved his growing family to a large...