Washing Our Hands in the Clouds by Bo Petersen

Author:Bo Petersen [Petersen, Bo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, African American & Black
ISBN: 9781611175523
Google: LSr-CQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Univ of South Carolina Press
Published: 2015-08-11T03:12:48+00:00

Chapter 9

The Last Plantation

WITH MORE MONEY to be had, the big tobacco growers by the 1970s had turned to harvesting machines. Bulk barns—long windowless aluminum curing barns that look like off-site storage compartments—were built on the bigger production farms. It was the edge of the cliff for the little guy, who couldn’t afford either big equipment or the big barns and who had to work by hand, with hands.

Unlike bulk barns, packing houses look like the barns they are, usually two stories high. They have canopy roofs extending out either side to shield the trucks unloading or loading tobacco or any other crop. Livestock are sometimes kept in them too, along with the traditional hay-in-the-loft feed. In either the barns or the houses, tobacco gets hung out on racks and dried by a heater. But in the bulk barns, the tobacco can be racked in tightly and handled by fewer workers. A bulk barn can hold a lot of tobacco, and that’s one of those economies of scale. The barns cut in half the labor hours and consequently the number of laborers needed. By 1991, Prince continues, only one in every fifty tobacco farms still harvested by hand.

Bulk barns “took away from the old tying ways,” Joe says, the hands-on tradition of tying the tobacco into wads and hanging it out to dry. Those were the ways of the little guys like Joe, and the little guys took a beating. The Pee Dee lost seven of every ten tobacco farms, and because most black-owned farms were small they made up most of the losses. The farmers who hung in there continued to dangle off the short end of the stick.

“Federal agriculture policy and laborsaving science and technology became tools that ruthlessly eliminated sharecroppers, tenants and small farmers,” wrote the historian and North Carolina native Pete Daniel in the Journal of Southern History in 2007. “The increase in USDA programs had an inverse relationship to the number of farmers: The larger the department, the more programs it generated, and the more money it spent, the fewer farmers who survived.”

Then, in the 1980s, the bottom fell out of the sale prices for tobacco. Those were the years Joe got the Cotton Grove acres. And it wasn’t just tobacco.

By the time Joe rented those first nine acres, out there by the highway, nearly all the crops that could make a profit were subject to some kind of allotment. For him, allotments were just one more set of jigsaw pieces he had to somehow fit onto his fields to make farming work. He had to work from those pre-set limits to figure out just where he could plant what, instead of working from what made the best farming sense for the land he had. Each “off-season” winter, Joe sat down with pencil and paper to match up crop allotments with the land he would have in the spring. It was all experience and hunches, and it was critical to get it right. He had to do it while trying to nail down loans to pay for it all.

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