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

it.”
    Naturally I talked about ways to head off the boll weevil. “Plant your cotton early, fertilize it good, and cultivate once a week so your crop will grow faster. Destroy the old cotton stalks this winter, and get rid of weeds and rubbish.”
    Because of the boll weevil, the 1917 cotton crop in south Georgia was off by more than three-fourths. In northeast Georgia half the cotton was damaged. That was reason enough to urge farmers to start diversifying. Go to hogs, beef cattle, more grain crops, field peas, white potatoes, watermelons, turnips, sugar cane. Some cotton farmers didn’t even raise enough hay or corn for their own livestock feed, much less to have any to sell. With no cash crops, they had to let their cotton go on the market as soon as it got ginned and baled, regardless of price.
    Farm labor was becoming a serious problem. In the past year and a half, sixty to seventy thousand Negroes had left Georgia and moved to cities like Cincinnati and Philadelphia. Once I made the mistake of trying to sympathize. “With so many colored folks leavin’ and so many enlistin’ in the Army or gettin’ drafted, y’all are kind of up against it.”
    Angry voices rumbled in the room. “That shore is the truth!” yelled one man, his face flushing red. “How them colored think we can run a farm without no hep?”
    â€œIt makes me madder’n hell,” said another, “the way they sneak off in the night. Anybody sneaks off, they know they doin’ wrong. If we find out a nigger’s plottin’ to leave, Mr. Tweedy, we git us up a posse and go to the depot with guns.”
    â€œYeah,” said another. “Yeah, them colored boys git the message real quick. Real quick. They see us a-comin’, they know they go’n miss that train.”
    A giant-size farmer, laughing, added, “And them that do git away, what’s go’n happen to’m up North? They ain’t go’n know nobody. Ain’t go’n have no pickled pig feet or hambone or fatback, ain’t go’n have no collards, no turnip salat. And come winter, they go’n freeze to death.”
    A short stocky man stood up. “Well, now, how I look at it, are we Christians or ain’t we? They got a right to go if’n...”
    â€œSet down, Worth Haley! We talkin’ bout crops rottin’ in the fields. We talkin’ bout plowin’ for spring plantin’. A whole fam’ly of cotton pickers left out from my place the night I paid’m off, and never a thank-you to nobody for all that’s been done for ’em.”
    â€œThe State Department of Agriculture,” I said, talking loud, “is lookin’ into ways of addressin’ this problem. They’re encouragin’ white mill hands to try sharecrop-pin’, or hire out for field work. Most used to live in the mountains, and—”
    â€œMr. Tweedy, I’d a long sight rather have colored hands and tenants than sour-lookin’ whites,” retorted the red-faced man. “Last year a sorry no-count white sharecropper on my farm shot his wife in the chicken yard and then kilt hisself in the hog pen. That goes to show what kind of trash they was. I’d of lost half a-their crop if I hadn’t set my own farmhands to pickin’ the dead man’s cotton.”
    There aren’t any better people in the world than farmers. But these men felt betrayed. The colored could leave, but they couldn’t. I didn’t bring up that subject again anywhere.
    I spoke often to meetings of farm wives, telling them how to store corn for the family by brining, urging them to dry more fruits and vegetables. “And y’all put Leghorns in your hen houses. They’re the best layers.”
    One night a gray-headed lady in a dress made out of feed sacks got up and told how to get rid of flies. She said, “Spray lavender water. Put it in one a-them glass atomizers,