Free Leaving Cold Sassy (9780547527291) by Olive Ann Burns Page A

Sanna he’s hepped go to school. Many a boy with folks havin’ hard times—well, who ain’t these days—he heps ’em finish high school. I heard about a family on hard times, their boy got the promise of a job in the freight yards in Atlanta, but they couldn’t scrape up enough train fare to get him there. He ast the mayor to lend him ten dollars for his ticket and to see him through the first week. He said Mr. Jolley give him twelve and said, ‘You don’t owe it back. Just go make sump’m of yourself.’
    â€œYou never saw anybody want chi’ren bad as the Jolleys. They always used to be takin’ in somebody—orphans and nieces and nephews and all like that. Then Miss Maggie, she adopted her a little baby boy they call Lonzo. His mama died when he was born and nobody thought the baby could live and the daddy said she could take him if she wanted him. Well, that baby warn’t no bigger’n a fryin’-size chicken. Miss Maggie brought him home on the train on a pillow, and wadn’t nothin’ but her wantin’ that baby so bad kept him alive. Bout a year later they finally had a little girl of their own. Annie Laurie started at Shorter College last week, and Lonzo is a junior at Mercer. And Miss Sanna, well now, she’s gone, too.”
    I looked at that big white house and tried to imagine Sanna Klein as a little girl, maybe sleeping upstairs while the mayor of Mitchellville got drunk and played cards in the parlor below. I had no idea, then, that I’d soon be spending a night in that house myself.

8
    A T THE time I met Sanna, I’d been a county agent for two years.
    Part of the job was treating sick livestock. Since farmers didn’t trust college boys or book learning either one, they never sent for me till an animal was about dead.
    Tell the truth, I didn’t know all that much about veterinary medicine. The way I got by, I’d examine a sick cow and say to the farmer, “You called me too late. But I’ll try to save her.” That way, if she died it was his fault. If she lived, I was the greatest doctor in the world. The Ag School furnished me just one medicine, and no matter what the disease, I drenched with it. Drenching means you put the liquid medicine in a bottle, pull the animal’s head way up, and pour the stuff down its throat. My first week as a county agent I found out you can’t drench a hog. A hog will choke if you try to make him swallow with his head up. They never taught me that at the university.
    Eventually I was doing everything from breeding and midwifing cows to castrating bulls, horses, and hogs. Most of them lived.
    Manufacturers would send fertilizer or cow feed to the Ag School so we could give out samples to farmers. A lot of politics was involved. The college wanted the commissioners to support its new county agent program, so in actual fact it was the custom for free shipments of fertilizer or other products to go right to the commissioners for their own fields. We’d invite other farmers in the area to come see it poured on, and later to see the results.
    Of course part of my job was talking. What Clarke County farmers didn’t know from experience, they were supposed to learn from me, based on work being done at the agricultural experiment stations. I’d hold night meetings at schoolhouses for these strong men with rough hands and leathered faces, who came in the same overalls, denim shirts, and mud-caked brogans they’d worn in the fields all day. I’d tell them how to feed out their hogs and cattle to get more meat in a shorter time, when and what variety of corn to plant for the best yield, why they ought to quit pulling fodder for cattle when the corn is still green. “As all y’all know, the kernels are bigger if you let the ears mature,” I explained. “And in the long run you’ll produce more animal feed. We’ve proved