Georgialina by Tom Poland

Author:Tom Poland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 2015-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

I’ll never pass that way again that I don’t think of the murders and Sue Logue. On the evening before her execution, she cried softly as her long black hair was shaved off.

Oh! I almost forgot. The price of gas on the old pump was sixty cents a gallon. That pump must have last dispensed gas circa 1974, about the time I first passed this store where a mule’s kick set a series of tragedies in motion.

TENANT HOMES

A trip down a secondary road through farm country used to turn up elegant little houses resting on rock piles. They stood alone, sentinels looking over fields. Now they are rare. Referred to as saltbox houses, catslides, and pole cabins, they long stood with grace and character in pastures and fields. In their heyday, a sea of white cotton surrounded tenant homes in summer, but as tractors relegated mules, plows, and hoes to obsolescence the homes were abandoned. Today, nothing makes its home in them but wasps, mice, and birds. Weather, vandalism, and sheer neglect have long been destroying them, and few remain. All that’s left of many are chimneys and fieldstones.

For generations, plain folk in the South lived in such homes. Many sprang up during Reconstruction, an era of upheaval when being a tenant farmer meant a step up the social ladder. Sharecroppers exchanged a crop for a house and a share of the yield. Still, a tenant farmer often had nothing to show for his efforts at year’s end. Many writers portrayed life in the little homes as unbearable. Rita Turner Wall, author of The Vanishing Tenant Homes of Rural Georgia, wrote: “life in the old houses was what the occupants made of it: a vegetable garden and a flock of chickens or hard fare, a yard full of flower beds or blank emptiness, a tablecloth or bare boards, a good life or a bad life.”

Tenant homes had no plumbing, no built-in sinks, no cabinets, no closets. Generally, only functional furniture such as pie safes, beds, and chairs graced these old homes. Jars and simple containers on crude shelves held the staples. Kerosene lamps broke the darkness. Buckets hauled water up from wells.

Wall wrote that “there is in the pitch of the roof, the shape of chimney, the whole mass, an orderly disposition pleasing to the eye.” She’s right. I see more beauty in a weathered tenant home than in some sparkling vinyl-sided house. No wonder so many artists and photographers find them fascinating.

Farming changed, jobs went north, and after decades of painting them, patching them, and stuffing newspaper in cracks in the walls, people left tenant homes alone, and that sealed their fate. Few are left to tell their story, but two, it so happens, remain.

I wrote about tenant homes for the newspaper back home in Georgia. Murray Norman read my column and found one he could relocate to the hometown history village. Part of the home’s story, we discovered, was told in “The Miracle of a Friendship,” an autobiography written by James Robert Colvin, known as J.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.