That Devil Crop
When I was 13 yo, I got my first job “pulling” tobacco. This was back in the 1980’s when everybody still smoked, tobacco was huge in Missouri and every farmer had at least one field of the Green Gold.
Farming tobacco is honestly kind of cool, from a horticultural POV. It has multiple stages to harvest: plant a small 10 x 100-ish bed with seed, wait a number of weeks, pull up any new growth that has approximately the circumference of my little finger or a #2 pencil, and stack the seedlings in a burlap sack. Transplant those little shoots via farm machine into neat little rows of fragile plants that would soon grow to robust leafy greens that, when dried and smoked, rolled into paper with chemicals added to “enhance flavor and burning longevity”, would bring great destruction to individuals and families, the likes of which wouldn’t be seen again until alcohol became the legal drug of choice capable of, again, great destruction to individuals and families. I'm still sorting all that out. It's...complicated to be a part of the cycle, yet apart from it.
Anyway, every spring/early summer (until I schlepped over to the local truck stop to get a job as a waitress, which is another story for another day), I would sign on to make, all told, approximately $113 pulling tobacco (paid by personal check!), which was a lot of money in those days. It included lunch at the truck stop at which I would later work, and if there’s one thing’s that my jam, it’s someone buying my lunch.
I remember the farmer’s wife met the group out on the field one afternoon with a car trunk full of cold colas. When her white Caddy rolled up, Mr. Farmer rolled up his tractor for a quick talk, and we farm hands sucked down the RC colas like it was the most refreshing of beverages ever consumed. At the break, the workers switched around; although I’d been feeding the machine with tender tobacco shoots for the last few hours, I was now one of the workers who walked behind the farm machine, plugging any missing holes in the row of seedlings.
For some reason that day, I was barefoot. Black dirt plowed up into rows sounds a lot earthier and more wholesome than it actually is. What it is, is hard clumps of dried earth that feels like walking on gravel, but in my innocence, I was happy. I was hydrated, funded and had a song in my heart, so I started the next row singing a song by my favorite country-and-western band, Alabama. “If You’re Gonna Play in Texas, you gotta have a fiddle in the band,” I warbled in all my pre-teen optimism.
“That lead guitar is hot but not for a Louisiana man
So rosin up that bow for faded love
And let's all dance
If you're gonna play in Texas,
You gotta have a fiddle in the band”
The farmer’s wife laughed. “You’re aDORable!” she said. “I’ve never seen a child singing while doing manual labor.” You know, I’ll be honest: I don’t remember *exactly* what she said, but I remember her marveling at how happy I was…a barefoot child singing during spring planting with nary a care. I remember how happy I was: to make her happy, to be happy, to make my parents happy at having a child who was so damn HAPPY:
Planting tobacco. Doubtless someone went on to smoke that excellently-transplanted leaf, and I hope to no detriment. But I always remember how happy the farmer’s wife was, and how happy I was that day…walking in the black MO dirt, planting that devil crop.
