An Hour Before Daylight by Jimmy Carter

Author:Jimmy Carter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

7

Breaking Ground, to Be a Man

My father, 1941

EVEN FOR US CHILDREN, personal problems and pleasures were always secondary to economic concerns. We realized that everyone on the farm was affected by the interrelationship of prices, crops, noxious weeds and grasses, moisture, and the condition of the soil in our fields. I felt that mine was a special role, because for the first thirteen years of my life, until Billy was born, I was the landowner’s only son, and I was increasingly proud when my father discussed farm management decisions with me.

Daddy sometimes worked in the field with us when I was a little boy, but by the time I was big enough to plow a mule he was strictly a manager of the land he owned, except for a few special tasks: cutting ripe watermelons, weighing picked cotton at sundown, operating the syrup mill, and sometimes working around the peanut picker. I was eager to grow bigger and to learn as much as possible, to become like him, able to oversee the farm’s complex and interconnected processes.

On rainy or other “off days,” I would often wake up to Daddy’s question, “Hot, do you want to ride with me today?” Even if I had something else planned, I always replied, “Yes, sir.” I relished the times we could be alone together, and felt that a refusal would be disrespectful of my father. These were the times when Daddy drove from one field or farm to another, and examined carefully what was happening in each one or what needed to be done. I listened carefully to exchanges between him and the tenant farmers on the other farm we owned in Webster County, and as we drove to the next destination he would analyze what we had just observed.

One day when we were riding together, I asked Daddy how he got started in business. He seemed eager to respond.

“Well, your godfather, Mr. Edgar Shipp, had an interest in a packing plant, and was one of the first men in Sumter County to buy and sell meat and lard on a big scale—several railroad boxcars at a time. In the spring of 1914, he bought several carloads of salt-pork sowbellies at a low price, and happened to have them when the war broke out in Europe. The market skyrocketed, and he made a killing on the meat. He traded for a good bit of land with the money, but he was not a farmer and got tired of fooling around with tenants and sharecroppers, so he sold it and then owned a grocery store and a warehouse.

“One day, I think about the time you were born, he invited me over to his office in Americus and asked me if I wanted to run my own store in Plains. I was eager to do it, and rented an empty building down where Main Street runs into Bond. I proposed the name of ‘Shipp & Carter,’ but he insisted on ‘J. E. Carter & Company,’ saying that he would be the ‘Company.

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