I left Granny’s garden and cut through a gap in the hedge to the backyard of the house next door, where Miss Effie Belle Tate and Mr. Bubba used to live. Their niece, Miss Hyta Mae Brown, had a few boarders and ran a public dining room. Miss Love’s three teachers took all their meals over there.
The smell of vegetable soup drifted from the kitchen window as I walked by. One of the cooks, Evaline, came out to the side of the back porch and poured her soapy dish water on the fig bush. “Evenin’, Mist’ Will!” she called. “Dish water sho’ do make figs grow. You wont som’a my good ole soup and cawnbread, son? Come on in de kitchen, I dish you up some. Hit’ll put meat on dem bones you got for laigs.”
“That’s hard to pass up, Evaline, but I got to catch a train.” I walked as far as Miss Hyta Mae’s pigeon cote before I turned towards South Main, far enough to avoid being seen from Miss Love’s veranda.
If I passed anybody on the sidewalk, if any children were playing in their yards, if any lady waved at me from her porch, I didn’t notice. Walking fast, puffing furiously on the cigar, I kept repeating the name Progressive City, over and over. At the depot, I stared at the sign as if it had been put up only that morning. For ten years it had declared this was PROGRESSIVE CITY to train passengers, and for ten years I’d kept reading it COLD SASSY.
Well, no more. All of a sudden the name Cold Sassy was as dead as Grandpa and Granny, and my old dog T.R., and Miss Effie Belle and Mr. Bubba. Growing up, I’d been made to feel like I was the town’s great hope for the future. Everybody proud of me, ready to make allowances. Now this was Progressive City, and I was just somebody who used to live here. My home town had gone on without me in the six years I’d been in Athens. And I had gone on without it, except for family.
The truth was, I had outgrown Progressive City. I wondered why I never understood that before.
***
The next day I saw the house in Mitchellville where Sanna Klein’s sister lived, and where Sanna had grown up.
7
THERE’S NO direct railroad line to Mitchellville. You got there by train; then somebody has to meet you five miles away at the depot in 1888, Georgia, a town named for the year it got incorporated. When my train pulled in, old Mr. Charlie Cadenhead was already there, waiting in a battered Model-T Ford.
Mr. Charlie ran a dairy farm just south of Mitchellville and had done considerable cross-breeding of cattle. And Professor Harris, who ran the county agent program, wanted the dairyman’s figures regarding increase or decrease in milk production.
Mr. Charlie was a short, white-haired, peculiar-shaped man. Had a big square head, thick neck, massive chest, bulging stomach, small hips, short arms, and short thin legs. He had on a blue denim shirt, a big straw hat, and overalls, and he smelled of chewing tobacco and hay.
Soon as he found out my home town was Progressive City, he said, “Y’all got a new teacher this year, Miss Sanna Klein. She’s the prettiest little thang I ever seen. You met her yet?”
“Yessir.”
He didn’t give me time to say more. Spitting out the window as we bounced on a rough dirt road with nothing but woods and farmland to either side, he shouted above the motor’s racket, “I tell you what, Mr. Tweedy. Iffen I was fifteen year younger and not marrit, little Sanna wouldn’t never have even got to P.C. I said so to her, on the steps of the post office, day before she left here. She just smiled and patted my arm.” Mr. Charlie honked at two boys walking on the road, and waved as we passed, leaving them in a wake of dust. “I told her, ‘I reckon you heard how teachers don’t last more’n a year in that town.’ Just teasin’, you know, but Miss Sanna thought I meant they git fired. I told her, ‘No’m, they git marrit.’ She cain’t blush, Mr. Tweedy, on account of she’s got that dark complexion. But she looked mighty flustered, sayin’ marriage was the fartherest thang from her mind. I said, ‘Yes’m, but everybody knows a town’s got to keep gittin’ in good new bloodlines if it’s go’n keep a-growin’—just like me with my dairy herd.’”
We were on the little wagon road that led up to his farmhouse, and Mr. Charlie turned to give me a wide grin and a wink. “Are you a single man, Mr. Tweedy?”
“Look out, sir!” I shouted. A big white hen, frantic and squawking, was back-and-forthing across the road not knowing which way to go. But when she decided the only way to go was up, she nearly hit the windshield in a panic of squawks and flailing wings.
Mr. Charlie stuck his head out the window and shouted back at her, “You dang dummy!” Then he turned to me and grumped, “That one’s ready for the pot. Too old to lay aiggs, but she’s Miss Emma’s pet.”
I saw the herd, copied Mr. Charlie’s figures, helped him and Miss Emma eat a big dinner, and asked her if she’d give me the recipe for her whipped cream and chocolate pie for my mama—“that is, if you don’t keep it secret.”
Driving back through Mitchellville, Mr. Charlie went down a side street and slowed almost to a stop in front of a large white frame house. “That’s where little Miss Sanna Klein growed up,” he explained. “Come here when she was a little girl to live with the Henry Jolleys. Miss Maggie is her older sister. Mr. Henry’s mayor of Mitchellville and has got his hands in just about every business around here. Owns the bank and sawmill and a little factory makin’ shuttles out of dogwood for textile mills, and a furniture factory. That one’s turnin’ out rifle butts now for the U.S. Army. The mayor owns considerable land, too. Buys it cheap on the courthouse square whenever his bank forecloses on somebody. They’s some that faults him, with good reason, but he shore done right by little Sanna, sendin’ her th’ew four year at college like she was his blood kin. Well, you got a train to ketch.”
Going on through town, Mr. Charlie waved towards a building and said that was Mayor Jolley’s bank.
“The mayor is sump’m to see. Must weigh four hundret pounds. Everthin’ bout him is big, cept he ain’t tall. His whole face and head is fat—fat ears, fat lips, and his eyelids so swole up with fat you cain’t hardly see his eyes. His face is always red, mainly cause he’s bad to drank. That’s his main fault. He thinks bootleggers are man’s best friend. They say he told the sheriff to let them stills alone long as the boys don’t hurt nobody. They pay him back in free moonshine.
“Now, Mitchellville ain’t a place to think well of folks drankin’ licker, but he’s so friendly-like and heps so many folks, they just keep a-votin’ for him. Course it heps a politician if he’s got plenty of money and spreads it around. Like on Sarady mornin’...well, ever Friday night he and his drinkin’ cronies play cards in Miss Maggie’s parlor, which she don’t like, but on Sarady mornin’ he goes uptown, after a little nip to cure his hangover, full of jokes and generosity. He’s really funny when he’s had a little to drank. The deadbeats lay in wait for him. Always got hard-luck stories, and he’s always ready for ’em with a pocketful of bills. I mean, he’s ready for them and they ready for him.
“He’s always had a soft heart for young folks. But it ain’t just Miss Sanna he’s hepped go to school. Many a boy with folks havin’ hard times—well, who ain’t these days—he heps ’em finish high school. I heard about a family on hard times, their boy got the promise of a job in the freight yards in Atlanta, but they couldn’t scrape up enough train fare to get him there. He ast the mayor to lend him ten dollars for his ticket and to see him through the first week. He said Mr. Jolley give him twelve and said, ‘You don’t owe it back. Just go make sump’m of yourself.’
“You never saw anybody want chi’ren bad as the Jolleys. They always used to be takin’ in somebody—orphans and nieces and nephews and all like that. Then Miss Maggie, she adopted her a little baby boy they call Lonzo. His mama died when he was born and nobody thought the baby could live and the daddy said she could take him if she wanted him. Well, that baby warn’t no bigger’n a fryin’-size chicken. Miss Maggie brought him home on the train on a pillow, and wadn’t nothin’ but her wantin’ that baby so bad kept him alive. Bout a year later they finally had a lit
tle girl of their own. Annie Laurie started at Shorter College last week, and Lonzo is a junior at Mercer. And Miss Sanna, well now, she’s gone, too.”
I looked at that big white house and tried to imagine Sanna Klein as a little girl, maybe sleeping upstairs while the mayor of Mitchellville got drunk and played cards in the parlor below. I had no idea, then, that I’d soon be spending a night in that house myself.
8
AT THE time I met Sanna, I’d been a county agent for two years.
Part of the job was treating sick livestock. Since farmers didn’t trust college boys or book learning either one, they never sent for me till an animal was about dead.
Tell the truth, I didn’t know all that much about veterinary medicine. The way I got by, I’d examine a sick cow and say to the farmer, “You called me too late. But I’ll try to save her.” That way, if she died it was his fault. If she lived, I was the greatest doctor in the world. The Ag School furnished me just one medicine, and no matter what the disease, I drenched with it. Drenching means you put the liquid medicine in a bottle, pull the animal’s head way up, and pour the stuff down its throat. My first week as a county agent I found out you can’t drench a hog. A hog will choke if you try to make him swallow with his head up. They never taught me that at the university.
Eventually I was doing everything from breeding and midwifing cows to castrating bulls, horses, and hogs. Most of them lived.
Manufacturers would send fertilizer or cow feed to the Ag School so we could give out samples to farmers. A lot of politics was involved. The college wanted the commissioners to support its new county agent program, so in actual fact it was the custom for free shipments of fertilizer or other products to go right to the commissioners for their own fields. We’d invite other farmers in the area to come see it poured on, and later to see the results.
Of course part of my job was talking. What Clarke County farmers didn’t know from experience, they were supposed to learn from me, based on work being done at the agricultural experiment stations. I’d hold night meetings at schoolhouses for these strong men with rough hands and leathered faces, who came in the same overalls, denim shirts, and mud-caked brogans they’d worn in the fields all day. I’d tell them how to feed out their hogs and cattle to get more meat in a shorter time, when and what variety of corn to plant for the best yield, why they ought to quit pulling fodder for cattle when the corn is still green. “As all y’all know, the kernels are bigger if you let the ears mature,” I explained. “And in the long run you’ll produce more animal feed. We’ve proved 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?”
“It 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.”
“Yeah,” 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...”
“Set 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.”
“The 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—”
“Mr. 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, you know like per-fume comes in? I spray it all over my kitchen and dinin’ room. They say flies jest cain’t stand it, the smell, I mean. My husband says he cain’t stand it either, and I ain’t sure it heps, but the Progressive Farmer magazine said so. What you think, Mr. Tweedy?”
“Since your husband don’t like lavender water, try using blue tablecloths. Flies really hate the color blue.” They knew I was joking. “Or try to get you some screens for the windows.”
“I know a lady got screens,” said the woman, “and she is forever chasin’ after flies with a swatter. You git screens, them flies cain’t git out.”
That just about covers my experience with county agenting. On October 2, 1917, I got fired.
***
In actual fact I was asked to take up a state job with the Agricultural Extension Service.
In the new job I traveled over the whole state, helping farmers and students learn how to build barns and silos and chicken houses, put in drainage ditches, and so forth.
One of my first assignments was at Young Harris College in Towns County. Boys studying agriculture had put up framing for a cow barn, and their professor wanted me to come cut the pattern for a gambrel roof—which I didn’t know how to do. I found blueprints for a dairy barn but not for any gambrel roof. So I went out to Banks County to see old Mr. Luthie Fletcher, a carpenter. He used to take me fishing on the Hudson River when I was a boy. I said to him, “Mr. Luthie, let’s go up to the mountains next Monday. I got to mark off timbers for a barn roof, but if you hep me, we can get in some fishin’.”
I didn’t tell him I’d never designed a gambrel roof. I put the emphasis on time to fish.
We got to Young Harris real early Monday morning and I handed him a pencil and said, “Now, Mr. Luthie, I’ll look over my blueprints while you mark off timbers for a pattern. Do it light, and then I’ll mark over them again while
the students watch.” Mr. Luthie grinned at me. He knew what I was up to. But he marked the timbers light, and when the boys arrived, I’d ask one to bring me a plank and I’d go over the marks, and pretty soon me and Mr. Luthie were off fishing.
When we got back to Young Harris, those students had cut and mounted the timbers and were ready to nail on the tin. Prettiest thing you ever saw. The president of the college wrote me a letter saying it all fit just perfect.
People wanted blueprints for everything, houses and privies, barns and chicken houses. The president of the Central of Georgia Railroad had a farm at Orchard Hill and he wanted a concrete silo. I’d never even seen one. Silos had always been made out of wood. I didn’t know what I’d do, but I just happened to see an ad in the paper for a company in Atlanta that had started selling steel forms for concrete silos. I got to Atlanta early the next morning and presented myself as a representative of the University of Georgia’s Agricultural School.
“We’re doin’ a demonstration project at Orchard Hill for the president of the Central of Georgia Railroad,” I said, “and I think it would be the best advertisement in the world for y’all if you’d build it with your new form.”
The day they started on it we had a crowd of farmers over there. The steel form was like a doughnut with a big hole. They’d pour in the concrete, let it set up, then raise the form and pour in some more. They did that over and over, clear to the top.
If that silo is still standing, it’s got my name on it. I scratched it in the concrete. I thought about adding Sanna’s name to mine, but I didn’t do it, even though I had already asked her to marry me. But all that came later.
9
I SPENT the week after the watermelon cutting hoping that Miss Sanna Klein would get cold feet and not go to Jefferson, in which case she’d have to attend Sunday school and preaching in P.C., as is expected of teachers. In that case, I meant to be waiting when she and Miss Love and Sampson came in from the Methodist service. I took the train to P.C. Sunday morning and walked up to Miss Love’s house. Sunday school hadn’t let out yet, much less church, so I sat down on the porch swing, lit a cigar, and opened the Atlanta Journal wide.
Leaving Cold Sassy (9780547527291) Page 6