A Year in the South by Stephen V. Ash

Author:Stephen V. Ash
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250112354
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

CORNELIA MCDONALD

Just before summer began, harry McDonald took a job as a farm laborer, working for a man named Reid who had an estate on the outskirts of Lexington. Cornelia tried to talk him out of it, but she could not deny that the family needed the money badly, and at last she gave in. She was never really happy about it, however. It hurt to see her son trudge off just after daybreak each morning and then slump home fourteen hours later, exhausted and grimy. Harry was not unused to hard work—he had spent much of the winter and early spring chopping wood—but this field labor was grueling. When he returned home at dusk he would collapse wordlessly into a chair, doze for a while, and then head upstairs to bed, too tired to join the family’s evening get-togethers or even to read. He never complained, however, and he stuck to the work manfully despite the long hours, the increasingly hot weather, and the paltry wages.1

Cornelia was unhappy about Harry’s job not only because it took such a physical toll on him, but also because she thought it degrading. Here was her first-born hoeing and plowing some planter’s cornfield, side-by-side with blacks, when he should be in school preparing for a profession. Not only that, but Allan, the next oldest, had now taken a job, too, doing yard work and running errands for a family on the other end of town. And Cornelia herself, of course, was working as a private tutor. Just four years earlier the McDonalds had been ensconced among the South’s propertied and cultured elite, possessed of land, slaves, money, self-sufficiency, and a fair amount of leisure. Now they were crammed into a rented house, laboring from morning to night, wearing patched and repatched clothes, counting pennies, and scrambling to make ends meet. Thinking about it made Cornelia sick at heart. “To see my noble sons, little daughter, and pretty little boys dragged down so low, how could I bear it.”2

She felt even sicker when she contemplated the future. If her financial situation did not improve, the family might well slide further into society’s depths. The house rent was coming due, and she had no money to pay it. Every bit of income was going to buy food and pay the cook. Even so, the family was not getting enough to eat, particularly Cornelia, who was growing noticeably thin and hollow-eyed. “At times,” she recalled, “I was so weak from hunger that I could scarcely go up and down stairs.”3

In her desperation, she took a gamble that she soon regretted. A man came to her one day offering to take over the cultivation of her garden if she would let him have the produce from half of it. With Harry and Allan both away all day, the garden was being worked solely by Kenneth, Roy, and Donald, who were small and woefully unskilled. Thinking it over, Cornelia calculated that she would get more in the long run from a well-tended half-garden than a poorly tended whole one.

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