My Summer Job

When I was a teen, I worked in tobacco. A time before the harvesters, when every thing was done by hand. Some areas hung the whole stalk in a barn I think. Here, in Georgia, we had to pick the bottom leaves off every week, haul it too a table where it was strung on a stick. The men always cropped the tobacco and a mule pulled a sled between the rows. When the sled was full it was brought to the table, usually under a shade tree or a shelter at the barn. The tobacco was taken out of the sled and stacked on a long table. You stood beside this table, picked up tobacco leaves, three at a time, and passed it to a stringer. Usually there were three handers per stringer and they kept the stringer pretty busy. My mom was a fast stringer, and we had some fast handers too. I learned to be pretty fast too. Anyway, all during the summer we would work in different farmers' tobacco, sometimes all day for three dollars a day. Sometimes we would finish by dinner and go pick off peanuts and have a big peanut boiling that night. That was a lot of fun too. We would sit around and eat peanuts and talk or listen to the radio. When we finished up a crop of tobacco, that farmer would have a big fish fry for everyone there. We always had fish because everyone in my neighborhood liked to fish. So the wives would cook fish and have lots of tea and hush puppies, and home made syrup if you wanted it. It was a great ending of the tobacco season and a way for the farmers to show their appreciation for all the help to get his tobacco ready for market. It taught us youngsters how to work hard too.

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