Sharecropper

This is another Bob from way back, when I was still flailing around deciding what I wanted to do in the space.  I suppose I still am.  But back then I was doing it, you know, worse. 

Sometimes, especially in the beginning (as you’ll see if you read down to the next entry), Bob’s Little Acre was – take a deep breath – actually trying to impart useful horticultural information.  Latterly, with the economy collapsing and Americans waddling around consuming equal amounts of Fritos and insulin, BLA puffed out its chest and started giving some lip to the consumer ethos and Big Food.

But more typically, Bob would just give up and tell long, fantastically boring stories about beer, life and  its brother Frank.  This is a story column, but it did anyway make a feeble effort to relate to horticulture.

SHARECROPPER

By Robin Ford Wallace

Sharecropper.

            The word makes you think of a thin, miserable man who lives in a tumbledown shack on an estate owned by a rich man with a big belly and a cruel laugh.  The thin man toils and the fat man reaps the benefit of his labor.

            I have never been, precisely, thin; yet, for one summer I was certainly a sharecropper.

            It happened like this.  I was young and newly married and I lived in a downtown Atlanta neighborhood.  Our yard was so tiny that it would fit into your downstairs bathroom, but I used every square inch.  I had petunia borders along the sidewalk, and on the side of the house I had a postage stamp garden precisely big enough for four tomato plants and two peppers.

            Across the street, in a house divided into apartments, dwelled my friend Mary Hart.  Mary Hart had a degree in the agricultural sciences and the story of how she came to live in downtown Atlanta, which we don’t have time for here, would make a good country song because it involves wind whistlin’ over lonely prairies and good lovin’ gone bad.  Anyway, she had her own postage stamp garden but she was jealous of mine.  Once I came home to find shovel holes in my plot.  It turned out Mary Hart thought my dirt was better than hers and had decided to take it by force.

            So there we were, two frustrated farmers going crazy with our itty-bitty gardens to the point of stealing each other’s dirt.  I remember we were constantly putting things in Mason jars that had no business to be there, and using the word “harvest” to mean “these three tomatoes.”  Something had to be done.

            It was Mary Hart who found the ad in one of those government farm publications.   The ad had been placed by a sweet couple in their 80s who lived on what had been one of the last dairy farms in the Atlanta city limits.  Now the husband was dying of cancer and the wife was taking care of him, but they missed having fresh vegetables in the summer.  The deal was, they would supply the land, we would come after work and garden, and we would share the vegetables.  We shook on it and were happy, except for two things.

            Thing one was the garden plot.  It was as big as five or six football fields, and there were no trees around to shed leaves for mulch.  It was just a huge red dry patch baking in the sun, and it might have been manageable with, say, a tractor and a crew of migrant workers.  We had hoes.

            Thing two was something that you would never imagine a couple in their 80s would inflict on two young, female sharecroppers:  a teenage son.

            Jimmy was not really a teenager, of course; he was 65 if he was a day.  But he was one of those boys who marry early and often and ricochet home to Mama after each divorce.  So as we tackled the Dust Bowl with our little hoes, Jimmy was always underfoot, trying to boss us around and look down our fronts. 

Why, might one ask, had the elderly couple not just asked their live-in son if they wanted a garden?  For the same reason the parents of real teenagers have to hire landscaping services to mow their lawns.  Teenagers are worthless. 

            Worthless as he was, Jimmy had plenty of opinions.  Once we managed to get a load of horse manure from a riding stable, and Jimmy explained to us why it was useless.  When weeds were choking out our crops, Jimmy would explain it was too wet to work the land.   When we planted tomatoes, he would explain why they were the wrong variety.

            As we worked, he would crouch beside us, smoking cigarettes and talking endlessly.  One story was about how one of his ex-wives had died on I-285 when hit by a semi.  “They found a little piece of her in the left-hand lane and a little piece of her in the center lane and a little piece of her northbound, and then southbound …”   Do you know how many lanes I-285 has?

            We usually let him drone on, but I do remember once saying, when we were planting peppers, “No, Jimmy, we do not want to know why they call them Peter peppers.”

            Jimmy never helped us with anything else but he was intensely interested in our cornfield and he did participate in that.  I remember particularly the planting process.  Mary Hart and I walked down the furrows dropping seed corn as we went.  Jimmy followed behind us, solemnly covering the kernels with fertilizer.  I thought then, if I think too hard about this it will turn into a symbol and I’ll vomit.

            Jimmy always called the corn “our corn” or “Mama and Diddy’s corn.”  But then he would call us at home and say, “Get over here quick!  The squirrels is eating your corn!”

             When we finally harvested, though, it turned back into his corn.  He actually accused us of taking more than our share.  It was finally more than we could bear and we did the worst thing we could think of:  We told his mother.

            Well, this has somehow turned into a story about what a jerk Jimmy was, but it wasn’t really a case of oppressive landowners.  Jimmy we could ignore, and the parents were lovely.  What really oppressed us was that huge, unmanageable field.  I remember “weeding” once with a lawnmower.  Even the harvest overwhelmed us.  We had plenty of stuff to put in Mason jars, but often by the time we got time to do it, the produce would be crawling with maggots.

            So we reached the end of our summer of sharecropping and never looked back.  Mary Hart got married and began raising children, not corn.  We never saw Mama and Diddy again, but I hope if they wanted a garden the next year, they hired migrant workers and kept old Jimmy out of their hair.

            As for me, I moved to the country where I still garden happily, and if anybody offers me helpful opinions on how to do it I chase them away with my hoe.  It is the great advantage of having one’s own little acre.

Robin Ford Wallace lives in Deerhead Cove, where she plays quietly in the dirt, disturbing no one.