The Foxfire 45th Anniversary Book

by Inc. The Foxfire Fund

  PLATE 121 “I cried and cried when we left.” Bobbie Dills Carter

  At Christmas, most of the Farm Families would go up to Buddy Gibbs’s store on Wolffork to buy stuff for their kids. You could get good stuff and get it cheap! So we’d gone up there and bought BB guns for all the boys and big ol’ dolls for our girls. We hid it at the house and while we was gone one day, the kids found it. We found out years later that they would get the guns out and shoot birds while we was gone. The girls would get the dolls out and play with them. One day, Elizabeth had her doll out playin’ with it, and it was really cold. So she took the doll in the livin’ room, set down by the stove, and put her and her doll’s feet out toward the stove to warm them. Well, the doll had on plastic shoes and the shoes melted!

  I remember one year, I growed a big garden of okra! Ever time I would go pick okra, I’d come back with a bushel hamper full! I don’t remember what I done with all that okra—sold it, give it away, I can’t remember!

  One day, a couple was a-visitin’ us. Every few minutes Jay Bird or the other man would leave the room. They just keep a-doin’ it! After a while, I told his wife that I was gonna see what they was doin’. So the next time they got up and went out of the livin’ room, I snuck over to the dining room door and watched. Jay Bird had a quart of liquor hid in the closet, and they was goin’ in there to get them some. Jerry had a little chicken, and after a while they put some of that liquor in a saucer and give it to that chicken! It would take a sip, pull its head up to swallow, walk around a little, and go back and take another sip. It was sort of staggerin’ around and after a while, it just fell over! Jerry thought his chicken was dead, but it come to after a while, got up, and went on its way!

  I really hated to leave the school farm! I cried and cried when we left. We had really good neighbors, and the school was really good to us, but Jay Bird decided it was time to go back to our little log cabin on the hill!

  “They provided the house, and we provided the labor.”

  ~Marjorie Robinson and her son Morris Robinson~

  Marjorie Robinson and her husband, Ralph, raised two sons and a daughter. They lived in Gastonia, North Carolina, for several years. Their son Morris hated living in Gastonia and especially hated going to school there. By the time he was a seventh grader, he was waiting for the day he turned sixteen so he could quit and never go to school again. Fortunately for him, times were hard and Ralph lost his job at Firestone Tire and Rubber Company. The family moved back to Rabun County, eventually settling on the school farm, where Morris discovered a renewed passion for learning.

  —Kaye Carver Collins

  Marjorie: I lived in Rabun County all my life until I was married. I graduated from Rabun Gap–Nacoochee School in 1937; then I was lucky enough to attend junior college there. I got two years of junior college, and then I taught school two years here in Rabun County. I’d been dating my husband for four years, and he got tired of waiting, so we got married. He was living in Gastonia, North Carolina, at that time.

  While we lived in Gastonia, things got slow just like they are here now. Ralph was working for Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, and I was working at a sewing plant as an inspector. The children were all in school. The only place they had to play was a small yard.

  Morris: It was a very small yard, plus we went from a grammar school of one hundred twenty-five students to a grammar school that had about twenty-five hundred in it. Now, talking about a culture shock, that was a culture shock. There you had kids, I would say, that came from broken families, and they were just allowed to do anything that they wanted to. When we say that you literally had to fight every day just to exist, that’s the way it was. I wanted to move back. I had told Mama that I longed for the day that I turned sixteen years old because when I did, I was quitting—that was going to be my last day of school.

  Marjorie: He was coming to live with my mother and daddy.

  Morris: I was in the fourth grade when we moved to Gastonia, and I was in the seventh grade whenever I made that revelation. I had been through three years of it and hated every day of it and wanted to come back to Rabun County.

  Marjorie: I worked at a cotton mill.

  Morris: Daddy had been with Firestone for fifteen years when they laid him off. I remember we was sitting there at the table one night, and Daddy said something about “Well, Margie, this is it. We’re going back to Rabun County because I do know that, in Rabun County, I can raise enough food to feed my family.” So sure enough we moved back. We moved to Clayton, Georgia.

  Marjorie: We lived right there at the shirt factory [Clayburne Manufacturing], so I went and put in my application. My husband went everywhere and put in applications, and he hadn’t got a job. I got on the evening shift, and he was at home with the kids till I got off.

  Morris: Ernest and Bernice Holt lived on the school farm. Bernice was Mama’s niece. They told Mama and Daddy that the school might have a couple of openings coming up on the school farm. They told Daddy that he and Mama should go up to Mr. H. L. Fry, who was in charge, and put in an application if they were interested. Daddy did. In December of 1958, Mr. Fry came and saw them and told ’em they had been accepted for the Farm Family Program.

  Marjorie: We had to apply to the program.

  Morris: They asked Mama and Daddy questions like were they thinking about continuing their education? Had they had any experience farming? Were they raised on a farm?

  Marjorie: Of course, your daddy did have experience farming when he was growing up.

  Morris: Yes, he did. The first house that we lived in on the school farm was where the beef cattle barn was. You know, it’s burned down now, but when it was there, we lived in that house right there next to it. I remember that house well. We moved in on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1958. It was exciting getting a new home and setting up the furniture so that we could live there, but most importantly was going to the woods and finding a Christmas tree. It was a long day, but we were ready for the visitor from the North Pole by ten o’clock p.m. We stayed there about a year, and then they moved us over here, off Highway 441, where Green Pond is. That first house you see there is where we moved. We tended all of that land from the house to the road and then all the way back to where you turn and go back to Indian Lake. We had that in corn. At that time, Bernice and Ernest decided that they were going to leave the school, and they had a dairy farm. The dairy farm was over there where the Gap Manufacturing plant is today. I think Daddy went to the school administration and talked to them to see if we could do the dairy when Bernice and her family left. They told us yes. We took and gathered all of our corn up that we had in the barn and took it all over to the dairy farm.

  Marjorie: Rent was included in all of that. We didn’t pay rent. They paid my husband to farm.

  Morris: It was fifty percent. They provided the house, and we provided the labor, and it worked out good. You bought your own seed and equipment. The first tractor we bought was a little Farmall A Cub. It was fine just for corn, but when we got to the dairy farm, we needed something bigger because not only were we doing the hay for the cattle, but we were also raising corn and cutting it for silage. So you had to have power takeoff, which that little A Cub didn’t. Then he got an Allis Chalmers tractor.

  Marjorie: Then you got a percentage for the milk.

  Morris: We got a percentage of the sale of the milk. We averaged right at about fifty to fifty-five cows that we kept milked. By then, we had electric milkers. It was the type where you just changed the top off. You washed ’em, changed the top off, and then went to the next cow and put them on it.

  Monday through Saturday we were at the barn milking at five o’clock in the morning. The first run went in at five. The reason I say Monday through Saturday is because you had to know my dad. My dad was a teaser, and he’d always say on Saturday night, “Boys, I’m gonna let y’all sleep in the morning. Get you some rest. We’re not going to start milking until five thirty in the morning [laughs]!”

 
Marjorie: They got thirty minutes’ extra sleep.

  Morris: We’d get thirty more minutes [chuckles]. So we started at five and we finished at about seven or seven fifteen. We had time to quit milking, come to the house, eat breakfast, get our baths, and go to school.

  Marjorie: Now, no profit was shared out of your own garden, and we had a huge garden.

  Morris: We had an acre and a half to two acres. It was huge. We had everything. It started out with the little onion sets, so you had the little spring onions and English peas. We had green beans, carrots, radishes, turnips, turnip greens, mustard greens, cabbage, lettuce, and, of course, your tomatoes.

  Now, on the school’s part, we planted mostly corn, but they didn’t tell us, as I remember, what to plant. A lot of people would raise the corn because they got half of the corn crop, which could be used to feed their own animals. Whenever they divided the crop, what you did with your half was yours. You could sell it, if you wanted to, or you could keep it to feed with.

  We would usually average between ninety to a hundred five bushels per acre of corn. We did. I’d have to say one thing: We were very fortunate, but I think that was due to my dad being raised on the farm. I can remember one time that we had a really rainy spring, and corn got so high that we couldn’t side-dress it and lay it by because it was so wet here in Rabun County. We had to do it by hand, and we walked through every row of corn. We started at nine o’clock every morning. We come home at noon to eat, and then we’d go back and do it again that afternoon. Some years as we added the ammonia nitrate to side-dress the corn and laid it by for the year, we would throw out soybeans. When you harvested the corn, you would plow in the soybeans. This was done to enrich the soil for a better crop next year.

  Marjorie: I worked during the day. In the summertime, Ralph and the boys would gather in tomatoes. We grew a lot of tomatoes. They took ’em to the cannery and canned them—took their jars, and they put ’em through the sieve and canned them in big half-gallon cans. As far as green beans and things like that, they would have a run of them ready when I got home. Ralph would put ’em on, you know, to blanch ’em. When I got home, I would put ’em in jars that had been scalded good and ready to put ’em in. Ralph sealed them, and I put ’em in the pressure cooker. I would take the last run off, some nights, about twelve thirty. Ralph and I would stay up, and we’d can two or three runs because, in the pressure cooker, you didn’t have to cook ’em but about thirty-five minutes under pressure. Then you had to let ’em cool down till you could open the canner.

  Morris: One year Daddy sent me over here to Dillard, me and my brother, Gary, to the farmers’ market to see if they had any tomato plants. I said okay. I went and I heard Furman Vinson tell this guy that he didn’t have any tomato plants, so me and Gary, we started to turn and walk off.

  PLATE 122 “Their daddy always insisted that they get a good education where they wouldn’t have to work like that for the rest of their lives.”—Marjorie Robinson

  “Somewhere in the conversation with Daddy, it would always come up. He’d say, ‘You know you need to get you a good education, then get you a job.’ ”—Morris Robinson

  He said, “Hey, Morris, hold on a minute.” He walked on over to where we was at. He said, “Can I help you? What are you looking for?” I said, “Well, we were looking for some tomato plants, but I heard you tell him that you didn’t have any.”

  He said, “Let me finish up here. Don’t you go anywhere; stay right here and talk to me.” So he finished up with them and they left. He came over and he said, “Morris, let me show you what I’ve got.” He went over there, and he had about a half of case a tomato plants. Now they were drooped, and he said, “I’ll tell ya, these are good. They’re just drooped. They need to be watered, and I think they’ll be fine. If you want ’em, take ’em and set them out because I’m gonna throw them away. I’ll give ’em to you.” So I took them and went back to the house. We had the land already fixed ready to plant. I said, “Daddy, here’s what Furman gave me.”

  Daddy said, “Huh, it’s fixin’ to rain. Let’s get a little rain on them and by tomorrow morning these will be pretty.” So we set in to set them out. We set out a little over three hundred. I can’t remember the exact number, but we set out three hundred plants, and that’s why Mama will tell you we had plenty of tomatoes. I gave them away; I sold some, too. I had a guy from Florida drove up in the yard one day and asked if he could buy some tomatoes. I guess he got a half of bushel or a little more of tomatoes.

  He said, “What do you want for them?”

  I said, “Whatever you want to give me for them.” He handed me some money. I can’t remember how much, but Mama comes out there and she said, “Did I hear you say you sold them to that guy?”

  I said, “Yes, Mama, I did.” She said, “Well, Morris, you know we are giving these away.”

  I said, “Mama, he didn’t ask me if I would give him some. If he had, I’d have said yes. He asked me if I would sell him some.” She said, “Yeah,” and I just reached and handed her the money.

  I said, “That goes on the fertilizer [laughs].” Just like that and, like I said, if he had asked me to give ’em to him, I’d have give ’em to him, but he didn’t ask that. One thing about it was, it ended up that a friend of his ran a truck route of produce out of South Carolina, so he started coming over and buying from us. So we did pretty good off tomatoes that year.

  Marjorie: That’s true. It was real good, but it was hard. It was a blessing, too, because all of the farmhouses had running water.

  Morris: We had a bathroom with a bathtub there. The house where we were living in Clayton only had an outhouse, so the house on the school’s property was a step up for us.

  Marjorie: We had three bedrooms, an indoor bathroom, kitchen, living room, and an upstairs, and, like I said, we had running water to the house.

  Morris: Plus, everybody worked together. If Doc Phillips over there needed hay cut next week, different ones would go from their farm to Doc’s farm. They would cut all the hay, get it ready, bale it, and then we’d all show up after school or after milking, and we’d get in a few loads before dark. The men would work together during the daytime, too. Then when we got ready to cut our hay, they’d all come over to our farm and help us out.

  Marjorie: They worked as a team.

  Morris: And I think that I really and truly had more fun, if you can have fun, doing hard work during that time because all of them were big teases. They’d cut up, and the things that we did to each other were so funny. Like when we were cutting silage, Raz Mason and Jay Bird Dills drove the truck. Tommy Lee Norton drove the tractor with the cutter that was cutting the corn for silage. We had to ride the trucks, me and my brother did, and keep the corn pulled back so we could get a good load on there. Every time you’d come to the end of the field, Raz or Jay Bird would put us under the blower. They did it just to be doing it, so I got to the point where I would take my big fork that I was raking back with, and I’d get me up a shovel full, and as I went under the thing, I put a big shovel through the truck window. So when we got the truck loaded, they may be sitting in about three feet of silage, but, of course, now I was the one, too, that was covered. You can imagine when we got home at night, and we’d take our clothes off with all that corn juice on them, they would stand up by themselves! Like I said, we enjoyed it. It was hard work, but I think really and truly it taught us a lot. We could accomplish anything that we set out to do, but it wasn’t just the situation; it was all of your neighbors, too.

  Marjorie: Their daddy always insisted that they get a good education where they wouldn’t have to work like that for the rest of their lives.

  Morris: I don’t think I can remember a time that at least four times a week, somewhere in the conversation with Daddy, it would always come up. He’d say, “You know you need to get you a good education, then get you a job.” Education came first and then a job. Daddy would say, “Now, you can’t go anywhere unless you got that education.” I
don’t think children today are taught or told that enough. I think kids today need to hear more of that, and it needs to come from the homes, not just from the school system.

  Marjorie: That’s right. The parents ought to say your education comes first because you’re gonna use that for your living when you’re grown and have a family.

  Morris: It was emphasized at home to get an education, but then also at school with people like Morris Brown, Billy Joe Stiles, and Dr. Karl Anderson. They talked about getting your education, finding your profession that you wanted to go into, and that would prepare you for the future, but you did it through education! We not only heard it, but we also saw examples of it because that’s what they did. Billy Joe Stiles, of course, he was Farm Family. He was raised there, and he had gone on to Berry College and then came back and taught at Rabun Gap. He didn’t mind to tell you that he was raised right there on the school farm. So you saw an example through him. They worked here. He worked here. He knew what it was to work, but yet he went on and got his education, and look what he’s doing now! It was inspiring. Then, of course, Mama was raised with Morris Brown. We knew what kind of upbringing he had. It was the same as the kids in this area at the time had, but he had gone on and got a college education, and he was back teaching and then became principal.

  Marjorie: He and I started the first grade together and graduated together. And then he went off to college, but I couldn’t afford to go off. I got to stay at home, which meant sometimes I had to walk two and a half miles to and from school. In the wintertime, we had chemistry, and it was extremely cold. I wouldn’t get out until late because we had lab after the three o’clock class was over. One time I thought I was going to freeze to death. It was cold and a north wind blowing, and I had to walk about three miles. Back then, girls couldn’t wear pants; we had to wear dresses. I got to Dillard and Mr. Miller Grist had a store, and we bought all of our groceries there. So I stopped in there to get warm ’cause I thought I was going to freeze to death, and he gave me two pairs of lady’s long cotton stockings. He made me sit down and put them on. I got them on and started on home. I got about halfway from the store, and my first cousin, his wife, and his mother lived together, and I stopped in at their place and got real good and warm again. I made it home, but I thought I wasn’t going to.