Chapter 4

Back to Work

After a season of rest came more work.  All the farmers pulled fodder, tying it into “hands”, then so many hands to a bundle.  They let it cure in the fields and at night when it was damp with dew and not so crisp, they hauled it in and put it in the barn loft.  How good it smelled and how the horses, mules and cows loved it.

Corn was pulled and put in the crib and peas picked.  Those who had enough peas took them to the thresher and had them threshed– and some had their grain threshed.

There were not many threshers in the country.  In fact, they were so scarce they were a novelty.  One time at school, we heard a steam engine blow its whistle on top of the hill above the school house and the teacher said we could all go and watch it go by.  It was pulling a threshing machine and the driver tooted the whistle several times to give us a thrill.

Peanuts were pulled up and hauled in, cabbage and collard kraut made and put in jars in the smokehouse.  Pumpkins were hauled in and put in the crib to be eaten in the winter and fed to the cows, and potatoes dug and hilled up.  “Potatoes” in the valley meant just the opposite of “potatoes” in Texas—ours were sweet potatoes.  In Texas it is “potatoes” and “sweet potatoes”—in Shinbone, it was “potatoes” and “Irish potatoes”.

The potatoes were plowed up and picked up and put into baskets, then piled up near the edge of the back yard.  A cover was built over them with planks (usually rough lumber from the saw mill) something like the shape of a teepee, with a door on one side.  A layer of corn stalks were placed over this, then dirt piled over it all making a round “potato hill”.  They could go through the coldest weather in this hill without freezing.  We raised bunch yams, the sweetest, waxiest and best potatoes I have ever known.

Sometimes on cold, cold nights, Mama would bury some potatoes in the ashes in the fireplace and pile coals on them to roast them or bake them in the skillet with legs.  She would rake out coals, put the potatoes in the skillet and put the lid on it, then set it on the coals, piling more coals on top and they would bake.  For supper we would have potatoes and butter and drink sweet milk while sitting around the fire.  We never tired of potatoes.  Mama cooked them so many ways.  Baked, fried, potato cobblers—and we liked them raw, especially scraped.

Now, it’s cotton picking time.  The cotton is picked and put into short sacks, maybe long enough to touch the ground while hanging from the shoulder.  Most men used guano sacks.  The women tied the bottom corners of their aprons together behind their backs and picked in them—and the children used flour sacks.  When the sack or apron was full, the cotton was emptied into a split basket.  Every picker had a basket of his own, homemade from oak splits.  When the basket was full, it was weighed on the steelyards and carried to the cotton house, usually on the shoulder of a man, but if there were many pickers and they were very far from the cotton house, a wagon was driven to the field and the baskets were hauled to the cotton house.  When a bale was finished it was loaded into the wagon by the basketfuls and tramped down and carried to the gin.  After ginning, the cotton was packed into the press by men tramping round and round, then the press was tightened on it.  The bagging and ties were fastened by hand.  I can recall seeing Grandpa Strickland packing cotton in the press.

Fall was syrup making time.  Papa, Mr. Jeff Davis and Larkus Strickland made more of the sorghum syrup in the valley.  Mr. Enos Pate was the ribbon cane syrup maker.  The sorghum makers took their mill and evaporator from place to place, making each man’s syrup as they came to him.  The mill was set in an open space big enough for a mule, fastened to a long pole, to walk round and round.  A long pit was dug with one end sloping from the top of the ground.  The pan, or vaporator, was set over this pit.  A trench was dug along the side of the pan, deep enough for the syrup cooker to stand in and work at the pan comfortably.

The pan was made of copper, and had partitions in it, making compartments.  In the end of each partition was an opening or little door, alternating from one side of the pan to the other.  As the syrup cooked, it was pushed from one compartment to another with an apparatus made with a piece of board having a long handle attached to it.  A scoop-like skimmer, made of copper, with a long handle was used to lift the skimmings as they rose to the top.  A hole was dug in the ground near the pan for the skimmings to be thrown into.  This was the “skimming hole”.  Long poles of wood were poked through the sloped opening at the end of the pan, into the pit, where the fire was built under the pan.

When things got going good, fresh juice was brought regularly from the mill and poured into one end of the pan with syrup running out at the other end constantly.  There was usually a sample of syrup sitting there for anyone to try.  The syrup was put into barrels, kegs, or buckets, and was a staple food in the valley.

Papa could cook the prettiest sorghum syrup I have ever seen—a beautiful golden color, almost amber, and oh, so good!!  He enjoyed making syrup and always said there was an art to it.  I would say he really mastered that art—he made some syrup in Texas, and was the best syrup maker in the country.

There must have been a lot of fun around the syrup mill.  People enjoyed visiting it, though we seldom did.  There was always a dipper in the juice barrel and a welcome to drink all you wanted—and it was good—though you might get squirted with juice from the canes in the mill as the mule went round and round.  Occasionally, someone would actually fall into the skimming hole—and that was really funny.  One night, Joseph Strickland and Hubert Garner were wrestling at the syrup mill and Joseph broke his collar bone.

Sometimes Papa would take his pay from syrup making in syrup; and if didn’t need it all, he would sell part of it.  I recall once we had a barrel of syrup in the smokehouse.  It sat on a scaffold made in a way that the barrel was rolled forward to pour the syrup from the hole in the middle of the barrel, then rolled back and fastened so it couldn’t roll.  Papa or Mama would take the gallon pot and fill it, and keep it in the house to fill the syrup pitcher.

We had bees and hone most of the time.  Our bee hives were made of hollow trees sawed into the proper lengths, with holes bored and sticks put through them to hold the honeycomb in place, and ears nailed to the top with holes in them to put a stick through and a lid made of a plank that slid under the stick.  One time Papa and Mama went into the woods to look for some hollow trees to make “bee gums”.  Before they left, they put us all up to the table, put a big lump of sugar in a plate, and gave us spoons, so while they were gone we ate sugar.

No one used granulated sugar.  This was a beautiful cream color and would crawl instead of run.  It was called “Y C sugar”, and after I could spell I wondered if the Y C meant “yellow crawley”.  Anyway, it was yellow and crawled and good to eat like candy.  One time, Uncle Tol Strickland went to town and brought back some granulated sugar.  Aunt Martha Jane didn’t like it—she didn’t want that “old white sugar”, it didn’t have any taste but sweet.

Papa and Mama found the trees they were looking for and came home and loaded us in the wagon and went way back in the mountains after them.  They were in a blackgum thicket.  (Blackgum made the best “bee gums”.)  These were dead, hollow blackgums.  Papa cut them down and he and Mama sawed them up with a cross-cut saw and loaded them on the wagon while we played in the woods and watched Trailer, the hound, hunt squirrels.  He walked up stooping trees until he was high off the ground and we yelled for Papa and Mama to come and see “Trailer up a tree”.

When the bees swarmed, Papa would wash out a “gum” with salty water and rub it inside with crushed peach leaves, then shake the bees down from where they had settled and knock on the gum, and in they would go.

When bee robbing time came, Papa would put on his gloves and hat with mosquito netting over it, tied down.  Mama would put on her bonnet, but no gloves, and nothing over her face and they would take a dish pan, a roll of rags to smoke the bees with and a crooked knife and go after that honey.  Soon they would be back.  Papa usually with a string or two in spite of his coverings—they never stung Mama—and we would all gather around with forks and spoons to sample the honey.  Fresh hone was better.  Honey in Shinbone Valley was not like honey in Texas.  The comb was dark as was the honey and it was stronger than Texas honey, which is amber or sometimes almost clear.  I never liked Alabama honey too well.

Most people bought their flour, but everybody had their corn meal ground.  There were three mills in the valley, all water mills.  Smith’s Mill, the largest, near town on the Big Kichemedogee; Mitchell’s Mill up the road about two miles back in the hills east of the big road.  I don’t think it had a pond, but a big wheel that was turned by water from the little stream that tumbled down from the hill behind it, and McClintock’s Mill in the east part of the valley.  Uncle Tom Strickland was running it the only time I ever saw it.  It was in the woods with a lot of rocks as large as bales of cotton lying around the house.  I don’t know if it had a big wheel or not, but Smith’s Mill didn’t, only a lot of small wheels and cogs in the dam.

Mitchell’s Mill was owned and operated by Tom Mitchell.  “Uncle” Dave Smith owned and was the miller at Smith’s Mill.  This mill had a large bell, probably the others did, too, that was rung when a customer wanted grinding done and the miller was not around.  Papa was a miller there for a short time and said that as sure as he got tired waiting for someone to come and went squirrel hunting, that bell would start ringing.

Most people in the valley ate, and liked, opossum meat.  Papa and Mama did.  I don’t know that I ever tasted it, but the odor of it cooking made me sick.  Papa caught one once and put it in the chicken coop.  We kept it fed with food from the table and ripe persimmons.  We were very careful when feeding it to be sure it didn’t get hold of our finders.  Someone had told us that “if a possum gets a hold of you, he won’t turn loose until it thunders”.  When we went to feed it, we were extra careful.  I liked that old ‘possum and thought it was cute and wished we could always keep it.  But when it got fat, Papa got it out and killed and dressed it so Mama could cook it.  We had a squirrel and dumplings for dinner that day, also, and I really liked that, but could hardly sit at the table with that opossum on it.  That afternoon I wanted some dumplings so badly, but the possum was in the safe with the dumplings and I wouldn’t open that safe door for anything.  So I just went hungry until that opossum was gone.

There was an abundance of birds—of every kind—so many that sometimes they did damage to crops.  I don’t suppose there was a law against killing any type of bird, for people trapped partridge to eat, and broke up their nests to get the eggs, sometimes having quite a feast from one nest.  Once Chester found a partridge nest with twelve eggs.  We often saw baby partridges in the fields running with their mothers, so little, round, brown and soft.  Unlike other baby birds, they leave the nest when only a few hours old and go with their mothers.

One of my first memories is of Papa taking us to see a whippoorwill’s nest.  He carried Elsie, and Chester led me and we went down through the field, across the branch and along a trail over the pine hills toward Grandpa Strickland’s.  There, beside the trail on the ground was the nest with two baby birds==the only baby whippoorwills I ever saw, but, as I remember them, they were yellow and soft looking.  Papa wouldn’t let us touch them.  We squatted and held our hands over them, almost touching and wanting to so very much.  They were so sweet.

Mama and Papa taught us not to bother bird nests.  Said the mother bird would desert it if we touched it and the babies would starve to death.  Papa recited this little poem to us that showed his kindness and taught us a lesson in kindness to God’s creatures.

If I ever see on a bush or tree,
Young birds in a pretty nest,
I will not prey, or steal the young birds away,
To grieve their mother’s breast.
My mother, I know, would sorrow so
Should I be stolen away.
So I’ll speak to the birds in my softest words,
The pretty birds, the pretty birds,
I like to hear them sing.
I like to see them hop about,
And rise upon the wing.
…(two lines I have forgotten)
When I am sad it makes me glad

To know they’re happy and free.

And another:

Good morning, little bird,
Was it your sweet song I heard?
What was it I heard you say?
‘Give me crumbs to eat today?’
That I will, and plenty too
Here are crumbs I kept for you.
Eat your dinner, eat away,
Come to see me every day.

Blue birds built nests in our apple tree.  We would climb up and look at them, but never touch.  One day recently, remembering those baby bluebirds, I wrote this:

BLUEBIRD BABIES

 Some bluebirds live at our house,
In a hold in an apple tree.
They’ve got some baby bluebirds,
I know, for I looked in to see.
But I wouldn’t disturb the babies,
Oh no, not I,
For it would simply break my heart
To see a mama bluebird cry.

One day Papa held us up and let us look at a yellow-hammer’s nest in a hole in a dead pine tree.  And I remember a huge red-headed woodpecker that Papa called a lobster that used to come to our peach orchard and make more noise than any bird I knew of.  And, there were robins that stayed around the wild cherry tree, eating cherries until they were so drunk they wobbled when they walked.  There was a catbird that sat in the red haw bush by our chimney and meowed like a cat.  And, I remember an oriole’s nest that swung from a hickory sapling on Big Kichemedogee, and a beautiful redbird without a crest that ate our bees.  It would come every day and sit by the hives, and, as the bees came out, catch them.  Papa watched it for a long time to be sure what it was doing, then he shot it.  It was such a beautiful bird.  Papa called it a goldfinch, but the dictionary saw a goldfinch has yellow stripes on its wings, and this bird was solid red.  I am wondering now if it could have been a carmine bee-eater.  I recently saw a picture of a carmine bee-eater riding on the back of an Arabian bustard, and the bee-eater, so far as I can recall, looked like that bird.  The bustard is a very large bird in the Ethiopian Danskill Desert.  I don’t know if the carmine bee-eater is in this country or not.  Ornithologist Roger Tory Peterson says the cardinal and summer tanager are the only two birds in the eastern states that are all red.  The cardinal has a crest and the tanager does not.  Could it have been a tanager eating bees?

I am not a bird watcher in the modern sense, but I have always been a watcher of birds and wild things, and I learned many

SECRETS OF THE FOREST

I loved to wander as a child
In the forests, deep and wild
Where spicy fern-draped thickets kept
The secrets of wild things that crept
Along the forest trails.

Where deer stopped to rest
Where the eagle built her nest,
Where the wily bobcat slept
All those secrets safe were kept
Hid beneath a darkling veil.

But the mysteries of the birds
Were revealed to me in words.
The pine whispered to the oak,
And I heard the words she spoke,
And I think she meant then to be heard

How the robins wear red vests,
How the orioles swing their nests,
How the cardinals sing sweet love songs
To their mates the whole day long
All the secrets and mysteries of the birds.

Sweet Williams spread their carpets, gay
Beneath the pines along the way.
Wild strawberries, rich and sweet,
Hid ‘mongst the leaves about my feet.
Just waiting for my hand
To pick and crush them to my lips.

Ah, sweet the cup of wine she sips,
Who has the privilege as a child
To roam the forest, deep and wild,
Where God and nature holds her hand.