A Turn in the South (45 page)

The crop that required such labor, slave and free, the crop that gave the region a special calendar and culture, was a narcotic, dangerous to men. Commercially it was on the way out: another little disaster for the South. Jim Applewhite didn’t smoke, had smoked only for a short while many years before. But the culture was so close to him that,
almost in spite of himself, the tobacco product in the poem comes out as tempting. The idea of rum and molasses and tobacco, the sweet and the bitter, made me think of Will Campbell’s aromatic, moist, licorice-sweetened Beech Nut chewing tobacco, and made me think of the cellophane or clear-plastic-wrapped squares of tobacco, as dark and rich as fruitcake, at the checkouts of Southern supermarkets.

He liked tobacco as a culture, for the formalities that went with the growing and curing and selling of the crop. And when, later that evening, I read his poetry in my hotel room, I found it enriched by his talk and the sights I had seen, and already half familiar.

In “For W. H. Applewhite” he wrote of his grandfather. (And in my imagination I saw the tobacco field he had shown me at the edge of the Research Triangle Park.)

“How to Fix a Pig,” a celebration of a “pig-picking” at the end of the tobacco harvest, was also a celebration of the man who “fixed” or barbecued the pig, a man called Dee Grimes, who was—still—the sharecropper or tenant on the old Applewhite farm.

Agricultural communities are conditioned, given a calendar, by the crops they grow, and the origin or first purpose of the crop becomes unimportant: rice in Java, tobacco in North Carolina, sugarcane in Trinidad in the old days. The talk in that poem of celebration at the end of the crop—the hard crop, originally the slave crop—brought back very faint memories of something called “crop-over” in Trinidad, when the sugarcane had all been cut, and the horns of the black water
buffaloes that drew the cane carts were decorated and there was something like music in the main road of the small country town where I lived, at the very edge of the sugarcane fields, acres upon acres, scene of bitter labor: memories like snapshots from very far back, when I was six or seven, memories seemingly spread over a long time, but perhaps in reality the memories of no more than a week or so.

T
HE GREAT
size of the land, the distance between places—this was one of the things that would have separated Jim Applewhite’s comprehension of the world as a child from my own comprehension of things in Trinidad. Was it oppressive or frightening sometimes, in the old days? Did people feel lost? I asked him some days later, when we met at the hotel where I was staying.

He said, “For my grandfather to go a buggy ride to Wilson, the county center and center of tobacco sales, ten miles there and ten miles back, was a day’s journey.”

And even that was already familiar to me from the poetry:

“Automobiles began to come into that area in the 1920s, and electric lights. Electrification tended to follow the roads. My wife’s mother was reminiscing earlier this year, remembering when electrification got to the country. People did feel lost here. The sense of needing to form a life that had its own regularities, its own formalities—that was a reason that religion had the contour it had. That’s why the formalities of tobacco-growing were so important.”

I asked him about the tobacco field he had shown me. I had seen that when I had just arrived in the area and was in a geographical haze.

“We were on the boundary between Orange and Durham counties. The old road from Durham to Chapel Hill. There was a little soybean growing too, a little soybean nearby. What is happening in this area is that the rural agrarian economy is being replaced by another economy. Which made that farm unusual. It was five or six miles from Duke University campus.”

Then he spoke about the formalities of tobacco-growing.

“Tobacco was associated with an older mode of living. Associated for me with my grandfather, with a kind of ritualized cyclical time order, where the cycle of the seasons was marked by sowing the plant bed, preparing the land in the spring, setting out the plants in early summer, harvesting in midsummer. You’d be finishing up curing and grading in August.”

Grading?

“Grading involved separating the leaves from the different levels of cropping. And actually different levels of ripeness. So that the best tobacco was placed together, wrapped together, in these ‘hands,’ to bring the highest price at auction. There might be three or four tobacco companies, or five maybe—in flush times—bidding for the tobacco whose quality they liked. The buyers would travel to different markets. There would be a kind of marketing sequence. The market would begin south and go up north, following the pattern of tobacco ripening and harvesting, roughly.

“I think that tobacco in its best incarnation was a sort of folk art. An art practiced by people who were extremely good at it but who might not be able to read and write. I remember when other areas, like Canada and Rhodesia, were trying to get into tobacco-growing, they would come to North Carolina to get to these folk experts—who might not be able to sign their own names, but who knew how to harvest, cure, and grade tobacco.

“The artful thing about harvesting is knowing when the tobacco should be cropped. It won’t cure properly if it’s picked too soon or too late. You can’t make a perfect leaf some seasons. That’s why tobacco has a vintage, like wine.”

“Are you an expert?”

“No, no. I just know what is involved. I saw this around me all my youth. Mostly, I think I was impressed by the aesthetic contour of the tobacco ritual. Planting had to be done at the right time, with hand care, individually. A handcrafted mode of agricultural production. It’s much more mechanized now. But this handcrafted aspect of tobacco was predicated upon cheap labor in the South at a time when the South was economically disadvantaged.

“Typically, the land would be owned by landlords who didn’t any longer live precisely on the farm. Like my grandfather. People who had left the Civil War farmhouse homeplaces built by their grandparents
or great-grandparents and had moved to town, to small hamlets, such as the one I was born in. And in those houses on the farm there would be living a sharecropper, the tenant farmer. He could be black or white. Typically in my experience, they were white. They farmed on shares. The farmer got half the proceeds on the crop. The owner furnished the supplies and the capital. Typically, there might be one or more black families living in smaller houses on the farm, living rent-free. They were not participants in the sharecrop deal, but worked as a kind of distanced retainer. They worked for money, and their large families provided the many hands required for housing tobacco.”

“Housing?”

“The whole thing of getting the tobacco from the field into the curing barn and then the packhouse—where it was packed up and stored until brought to market. It was important to have a good tight packhouse that wasn’t too humid and above all didn’t leak—you couldn’t afford to have your tobacco get wet after it had been cured. If it had too much moisture it would ‘mold’ and lose its value radically.

“This housing involved whole teams of people with different ranks of hierarchical importance and responsibilities. The croppers, those who actually broke the leaves from the stalk, they were in a sense the most important. They had to do two difficult things. Hard physical labor, and they had to make the decision about which leaves to gather. And they had to work very fast. There would be two or three or four of them going through the field, breaking the leaves. It was most difficult when they were breaking the leaves at the bottom of the stalk. Then they would have to work bent double all day long in very hot temperatures.

“Some of them would go along the row walking on their knees, to avoid bending over. But that is hard too. Following the croppers would be a mule-drawn or a tractor-drawn ‘tobacco truck.’ These tobacco trucks were really small wooden wagons with wooden wheels. They had stakes at the corners and burlap sides to hold the leaves in.”

I told him what Howard had said about the tobacco tar on his hands, and what Howard’s mother, Hetty, had said about the tobacco smell making her sick.

“Most of the workers complained about the way the gum got on their hands and arms. It usually wouldn’t make anyone ill from the nicotine unless it was wet.”

Hetty had said the opposite. She had said that to avoid the smell she and her husband had gone to work in the tobacco fields in the early morning, when the dew was still on the leaves.

“The other persons of most importance were the ‘loopers.’ They worked in the barns. They tied the tobacco leaves with cotton twine on to the sticks, which were then laid horizontally on racks in the barns, with the leaves hanging down from the sticks, stem ends up. Again, this had to be done rapidly. The loopers were always women—they might be the wife of the tenant farmer. And there would be ‘handers.’ They would hand the tobacco leaves from the tobacco trucks to the loopers.

“Some people nowadays have even taken the whole tobacco truck with the wheels and made coffee tables out of them. An old-fashioned tobacco truck was only half again as large as a coffee table. They were made small to go down the rows. And possibly one truck packed up with about five feet of tobacco leaves was very heavy, enough for one person to manage. Tobacco, before it was cured, was heavy.

“The looper would receive five or six tobacco leaves, stem end towards her, in her left hand, and with a few swift motions wrap and secure the stem ends together. And then she would flip the bundle”—he made a gesture, but the thing he was describing was not easy to follow—“so that it straddled the tobacco stick and hung there. It was very important that the leaves not fall off the stick, because if several leaves fell and landed on the galvanized steel flue beneath them they could start a fire, and the whole barn could be consumed in fifteen or twenty minutes.”

“Did that happen a lot?”

“It was not unusual for a tobacco barn to burn. You would expect one or two barns to burn down in a growing season.”

He went back to talking of the various jobs in tobacco. Then he said, “A certain social stratification resulted. The sons and daughters of the owners became the town boys and girls. The sons and daughters of the tenant farmers were the country boys and girls. We went to school together. I really admired these country boys and girls, because they worked harder than I did.”

I asked about the effects of mechanization. His reply was unexpected.

“The technological innovations that did away with much of the hard labor also did away with some of the quality of the tobacco. No ‘hands’
are tied now. Leaves are clamped together in bulk barns and cured.” He spelled out the word “bulk” for me, as though the word itself contained some of the grossness of the new method. “Tobacco is no longer graded. The leaf is placed in canvas sheets and sold.”

A lot of the ambiguities of his attitude to tobacco came out in that expression of distaste for the new methods, which spared men but were bad for the tobacco. I put that to him. He didn’t reject it.

He said: “It’s a mystery and a paradox. For me it has a certain resonance, the whole tobacco business, and it is close to the paradox of civilization itself. That this essentially poisonous substance formed the basis of a way of life that had so many attractive aspects—a formalized, seasonal cycle to it, which left the land combed into its even furrows after the stalks had been cut in the autumn. Which had the spectacle of the tobacco market, with the golden piles of aromatic leaf being sold for what were really considerable sums of money.”

Jim Applewhite’s wife came from a tobacco family as well. They had been talking recently about tobacco, he said, and his wife had said that in the old days it was possible to tell, just from looking at a hand of tobacco leaves, who had tied the hand—so individual were the loopers’ tying styles.

“Tobacco was a product which allowed the South at a time of pretty serious economic disadvantage to bring in cash money from the whole country and even from abroad. No other crop brought in so much money per acre, and was so lucrative in return for effort expended. In a sense, as a poet who didn’t know he was going to be a poet, the fact that the product was a folk art and nonutilitarian must have appealed to me. The final use of tobacco was as a social gesture. From production to consumption, it was a style-bearing medium. The life style has changed. I don’t think the South absolutely needs to produce this poisonous substance any more.

“I think of tobacco as an Old Testamentish aspect of a past way of life, a kind of traditional, conservative, fallen world, a world marked by original sin, of which tobacco was a kind of symbol.”

I asked whether members of his family smoked.

“Father smoked a little. Not much. That’s part of the paradox. The workers mostly smoked. Two of the sharecroppers who worked on the family farm during my teenage and adult years died of lung cancer.”

Those deaths worried him. He had spoken of them with feeling at our first meeting, almost while he was showing me the ripening tobacco
field on the old road to Chapel Hill. But, as always in his talk, there was another side to the poison.

“One can argue that any successful agrarian economy has most of the aspects of tobacco-farming. What it doesn’t have is the handcrafted, graded, aromatic, sold-by-auction quality that tobacco has. The issue of quality, as determined by color, scent, and flavor, was central to tobacco. There’s a region specificity to wine, and tobacco is in a sense analogous: there’s a region specificity to tobacco as well.”