SPORTING LIFE

“Hey, you guys. Did y’all see that special last night on tobacco barns? I think it was on PBS.” Bill Burger was holding forth. As the leader of our church men’s breakfast club that meets twice monthly at the venerable Sizzlin’ Steak or Eggs restaurant, he always has a good question to bring the conversation to the forefront, with everybody usually joining in.

The everybody includes seven or eight guys, or geezers if you will, with most of us in our 80s pushing forward, hoping to hit 90.

My ears perked up at Bill’s question because tobacco played a huge part in my formative years.

My grandfather was a big tobacco farmer in the early days. Early meaning when tobacco was king on most farms in the South. In my pre-teen years, I would spend a lot of each summer on the farm in South Carolina. Then, everything rotated around the tobacco crop. A labor-intensive cultivation, when planting time came, it was all hands on deck.

It was fun listening to the guys around the breakfast table talk about their experiences with tobacco. Bill Dixon, a retired Air Force colonel, said, “What about tobacco barns? I grew up near Wilson, the tobacco capital of the country. I know tobacco farms and barns.”

“Well,” Berger replied, “the TV report said that a lot of folks are remodeling the old barns into new houses. But since tobacco farming has gone away, there are not many barns left.”

It got me thinking about tobacco, my Grandad’s farm, and my education as a hunter and fisherman. All began right there in the swamps and Lowcountry of South Carolina. First, it was the acres of green tobacco, the money crop, special to the South, which brought wealth back to farms and enabled my outdoor learning.

Most folks who have hands-on experience with the harvesting of tobacco agree on one thing: It’s a hard, hot, dirty, intensive period of farming that requires constant attention. In those days, there was no room for error or slackness.

Bill Hamel, sitting right across from me, said, “Man, when harvest time came, it was everybody working, even the women and children. Nobody could sit at home. The ladies did the tying of the tobacco to the sticks, and then the sticks were hung in the barn where the curing took place.”

“Yeah,” Dixon said. “Once the fire was started, constant care was required to keep heat at a certain temperature necessary for curing. Many barns went up in smoke because of a fire stoker falling asleep.”

I was more an observer than a worker during harvest season, although Granddad did let me get dirty, literally, trying different jobs involved with bringing in the tobacco. A day of priming tobacco will make a person wonder if he will ever get clean again. Priming the stalks means breaking the leaves off the bottom of the stalk, leaving the rest to ripen further. There’s a real art to it, and after a day of back-breaking, dirty work, I decided I needed to do something else to help lighten the load. So, I asked if I could drive the sled pulled by Peanut, one of the farm mules.

Now a tobacco sled is about 16 feet long and 3 feet wide, with high sides and runners underneath. The sled fits perfectly in the tobacco row and holds all the leaves put there by the primers. When full, the sled is pulled to the barn by the mule, under the direction of the handler. Then the leaves are ready to be tied on tobacco sticks and hung in the rafters to cure.

When I asked Granddad about driving one of the sleds, he hesitated but then said, “OK, you can handle Peanut, but get one of the boys to make a couple of runs with you to make sure Peanut is doing right.”

One of the boys was Beau-weevil, the son of one of the tenant farmers who lived on the farm. I don’t know how he got his nickname, but he lived up to it. He was excited about showing me the ropes of mule driving because it got him away from priming for a bit. I also think Beau-weevil had a little evil in his heart. When I asked him about any peculiar traits ol’ Peanut might have, he said, “Naw man, he’s as reliable as an old dog. You just tell him what to do.”

He failed to tell me that you had better be on the way to the barn when sundown came, because Peanut was gonna go that way, like it or not. And worse than that, if it meant crossing a few rows of tobacco, so be it. Peanut knew when it was quitting time.

As a result, I ruined a few stalks of tobacco, but not enough to bother Grandad. He did say a few words to Beau after the fact, and I relished that.

My favorite time of tobacco season was July. The crop was in the ground and as Grandad said, “There’s not much more for us to do around here, son. We’ll leave the growing to the good Lord and let’s us go fishing. You run down to the tobacco patch right across from the barn and pick us a mess of tobacco worms. I’ll check out the catalpa trees and get some worms off them.”

Tobacco and catalpa worms were great fish lures. My Uncle Tom showed me how to turn a tobacco worm inside out to make it more attractive to a big bream. I’ll admit I really didn’t use that bit of advice, especially after eating a sardine sandwich. I was a straight worm-to-hook guy. And there’s no telling how many redbreast fish I hauled out of that fast flowing river using the worms for bait. “We’ll get Grandma to rustle us up some groceries, and we’ll be to the river by nightfall,” he said.

Now Granddad had a river cabin on the Little Pee Dee River. Not much as a cabin goes, just one room with bunk beds on one side and a corner, more or less, dedicated as a kitchen. An ancient sink dumped directly outside the cabin. And whatever water we had for washing dishes and ourselves we hauled from the artesian well located close to the river. The boats were pulled up on shore and chained to cypress trees to keep them away from wandering thieves and summertime floods after thunderstorm downpours.

We would usually be there for about a week, then Grandad would get a little antsy about seeing how the crops
were doing.

“Get a good night’s sleep, son. It’s back to the real world tomorrow,” he’d say. “We got to leave some fish in this old river for the next time.”

I was reading an article recently in SC Farming, a magazine put out by the South Carolina Farm Bureau, and a statistic in the story caught my attention: in 1987 there were 90,000 tobacco farms in the country; in 2022 the number had dropped to 3,000.

Tobacco farming has gone away, especially the way my grandfather did it, but it’s as fresh in my mind as if it happened yesterday. Peanut, the mule, my nemesis, has long been dead and buried close to the fields where he toiled for so many years. I haven’t touched a cigarette in over 40 years, can’t even stand to smell them. But they were part of my life experiences.

I can still remember going to sleep on the cot in the screened-in sleeping porch of the ancient farmhouse after a blistering hot day in the fields, listening to the night sounds as a barred owl called down close to the barn where Peanut rested. And I would think about the river and the big bass that got away and wonder what tomorrow would bring and if it could possibly get any better.