15Th Post 'THE PAST IS MYSELF"

Photo below: The Adams Family Tobacco Barn as it stands today. The Lost Dream

Located on the East side of the Edgewood, “one room” Elementary School was a semblance of what today is called a playground. On this dusty, rutted, hard packed and in places, weedy piece of earth, was a “ball diamond“.

I don’t know whether it was a softball or a baseball diamond, but we tenants of that school only had a softball and two very old ball gloves. I don’t know if those gloves were manufactured for softball or baseball, but I can look back now and believe, because of their condition, they were manufactured about the time Abner Doubleday laid down the rules for baseball. At least my memory of the worn out pieces of leather jogs my memory in that direction, they were old.

The type of glove really didn’t matter, because, beside the two old gloves, all we had was a beat up softball and a broken bat which was wired together with baling wire.

The school ball diamond was not what most folks would reference as a ball diamond, nor a sandlot ball diamond for that matter. There was no “catcher” only a “back stop” made from slabs of oak and nailed to two upright cedar posts. The bases were trees and the topography of the area went downhill from the “batter’s box” to the outfield, which was limited by two red out buildings, the boy’s and girl’s toilets. Beyond the toilets was Mrs. Pearl Hunt’s vegetable garden. We gave her free underground fertilization.

I anxiously awaited the arrival of the annual Sears and Roebuck Catalog; I would go and drool over the fine sports equipment for sale. I would lay at night in the big feather bed and dream of owning one of those beautiful sewn leather ball gloves. I never asked for much as a child because I knew nothing would come from my asking, but I did let my desires and dreams for a ball glove be known.

The big cash crop for the agrarian families of the Yellow Creek Valley was “Tobacco”. All the valley raised “Dark Fired” Tobacco, which is commonly known as “Flue Cured” tobacco. Dark Fired Tobacco, when harvested and hung in the tobacco barns would have a fire of Hickory Wood built under the Tobacco and when burning properly, wet sawdust was piled over the fire to create a heavy Hickory Smoke to cure the Tobacco.

Every winter a “plant bed” would be burned to eradicate any weed seeds and sterilize the soil, then tobacco seeds would be planted. The plant beds were sealed at the outer perimeters with logs and then a muslin material would be stretched from log to log and “nailed down” to prevent birds and varmints from disturbing the seed. As the weather warmed in the spring, the plants would be inspected daily to ascertain their growth was progressing properly.

The Tobacco Field would be plowed, spread with barnyard manure, harrowed, leveled out with a drag and then checkered, much like the pattern of a checker or chess board. In the center of each square was placed a tobacco slip. The tobacco slip was the small seedling dug from the plant bed and placed in a bucket with spring water and then planting would begin.

Planting tobacco in my time was hard, laborious and back breaking work. The planter, which would include several of us, children included, would be armed with a peg, shaped similar to the letter “L”, only upside down. The peg would have been cut and whittled from a sapling tree and used year after year until it became smooth and polished from the sweat and calluses of the planter’s hand.

We would walk, bent over, peg in hand and make a cone shaped hole, drop in a tobacco slip, root side down, then a dipper of water poured into the hole and dirt pushed back around the little plant. This went on all day long in the heat of a Springtime Sun on the planter’s back, and your back feeling as though it would break.

Tobacco, being the type of crop it was, came under direction of the Department of Agriculture. Rules were set by Federal, State, and County Agencies. Farmers were granted a “tobacco base” according to the total number of cultivatable acres on their farm. A formula existed which also took into account total acreage of the farm, timber land included, but I never had to do that figuring, the adults tended to that.

All summer long, every day, even on Sunday after attending church, the tobacco field was inspected. The only herbicide was a “gooseneck hoe”, daily each plant was inspected for “Tobacco Worms”, the only insecticide was the thumb and forefinger pulling the worm off the plant and mashing it. (The only humane way we knew to dispose of the worm).

As the summer lazily moved forward in the hot, humid fashion of the South and the Yellow Creek Valley, the tobacco plants grew. As they grew, they formed “sucker leaves” on the main stalk, which if not removed, would sap the strength of the adult leaves of the plant. So the only sucker eradication was to daily inspect and break off the suckers from the plant.

Finally the tobacco plant sprouted a seed pod and bloom on the very top, the farmer would go into the field and break off the bloom and seed pods; this was called “topping the tobacco”.

As summer neared the last days, tobacco cutting would begin. Every farmer realized there would be a loss to some of his crop due to natural causes, therefore several more rows of tobacco were planted than allowed by the government. On the week of the cutting, word was sent out to the County Agricultural Agent to come and measure out the allotment.

When the agent arrived he would measure out the allotted tobacco and ask the farmer what rows of tobacco he wanted to destroy. Workers, armed with tobacco sticks, would beat down and trample all the plants over the allotted amount. To me, the rows that were beaten down had, in my mind, always been the hardest to maintain during the growing season, but that was a way of life and it had to be done.

Tobacco knives similar in shape to the letter “Z “ were used to cut straight down through the tobacco stalk and then at the ground level, pull up with an angled cut, these cuts prepared the plant to be hung on a tobacco stick which was about six feet in length, with other plants to be hung from the many horizontal poles in the tobacco barn. Then the “smoke curing” would begin.

Usually around November when the weather was damp from Autumn Rains and a definite chill was in the air, word would get out that the tobacco was “in order”. The tobacco, now cured from the smoke would be brought down from the poles in the tobacco barn and the leaves stripped away from the stalk. This was called “stripping tobacco” and the leaves would be tied and the “hand” of tobacco gently laid out on a big tarpaulin and prepared to go to market. The stripping was done in the damp humid fall weather because under these conditions the leaves were pliable and would not crumble by handling.

This was the big payday on the farm, when the tobacco went off to market. This was the annual promise of, “when the tobacco goes off to market, you’ll be able to get your baseball glove”.

There seemed to always be something of a “pitfall” in the way our tobacco was raised. If too much rain came, the tobacco would get “rust”, (a fungus) and not bring a good price on the market. If there was not enough rain and the hot summer sun baked the ground, the tobacco would be “burned”, (dried, dead looking leaves, light tan in color instead of dark green).

Every year I heard the excuse, “Well, the tobacco didn’t bring what we thought it should bring, so there’s not enough money for you to get that ball glove this year, maybe next year will be better and you can get it then”.

That dream never came to pass, I never owned a ball glove.