At one time Simpson County was like most of the rest of Mississippi – a place where families grew what they ate and much of what they used in other ventures. Because farming is labor-intensive, many folks didn’t have time to work in town. They worked the land if they wanted to eat.
There isn’t much old-time farming done here anymore. I know some truck farmers and chicken growers and a few folks who supplement their incomes with cattle ranching, but I don’t know many families here who farm in the traditional sense of raising their daily bread.
Still, when I smell dirt being turned over for a late summer garden or see bales of hay and pumpkins piled around for decoration in the fall, I get a little nostalgic.
My paternal grandparents had a farm in western Alabama. My dad and his six siblings had grown up on this “grow-your-daily-bread” farm but had left it for jobs in town by the time I first began visiting it as a child in the early 1950s. By then most of the work was done by my grandfather and grandmother and my spinster aunt. They raised most of what they ate and had a little left over to sell.
They were aided in their labors by Dot the horse and Bob the mule, who supplied my first opportunity to be around real horse flesh rather than the film kind I had seen in western movies.
Though Bob and Dot pulled plows and wagons in worn harness instead of dashing away with Roy Rogers and the Lone Ranger in their silver saddles, Bob and Dot still fired my imagination. I spent as much time as I could watching them plod around the barnyard and dreaming that I might saddle up and gallop off across some of those vast western plains I had seen in Technicolor.
Unfortunately for me, Bob and Dot were finally replaced by a smelly red Ford tractor, which was much less noble than anything Roy or I would have thrown a leg over.
Even though I’ve always considered myself a city girl, I did get some farm experience on these visits to my grandparents’ homestead.
Granddaddy raised some cotton to sell. After I had watched the seasonal workers pick it for awhile and learned that they were paid by the pound, I talked Granddaddy into letting me drape one of the long cotton sacks over my shoulder early one morning, and I set off down the first row to get rich.
Grubbing along in the dew and dirt and scratching myself on the briars and stalks, I pulled out the fluffy wads of cotton as fast as I could and stuffed them into the long canvas bag, where they seemed to disappear into all that cloth trailing on the ground behind me. I picked harder and faster. Twenty minutes, thirty minutes, an hour.
The bag caught in the brambles as I dragged it along. My shoes were muddy and my back hurt. As the run rose higher, so did the temperature. Surely by now I had enough cotton to buy all the horses in Texas!
When I couldn’t take it anymore, Granddaddy hoisted my sack onto the scales. With a grin he handed me 35 cents, my pay for my only morning in a cotton field. I decided that my original career goal of western movie star might be more lucrative than that of cotton baron.
The cows, while not as glamorous as Bob and Dot, fascinated me too. I loved their dusty smell and their placid dispositions. They didn’t mind at all if I shoved into their circle around the salt block in the barnyard and found myself a relatively clean place to lick along with them. While I couldn’t match their expertise at sculpting the salt into soft slopes, I found them convivial friends and quietly accepting of my 7-year-old presence.
After watching my aunt milk those cows a few times, I became enchanted with the milking process. It was one of those chores the adults deemed too dangerous for a kid, but I had observed the technique and it looked like so much fun!
I slipped into the barn alone one morning and selected a small bovine to practice what I had seen my aunt do. Cornering what appeared to be a little black heifer, I reached under and gave her my best tug. HE kicked me across the barn. Heifer, yearling bull – apparently the plumbing on a cow was more complex than I had figured. Maybe the adults were right about that job.
I didn’t know then that my experiences on the farm, including my rude introduction to bovine science, were teaching me to love the land, the animals, the quiet. When conservation became a “cause” in the 1970s, no one had to convince me of the need for it. The farm had taught me that soil and water and trees feed us and comfort us. Licking salt with the cows taught me that animals have their own nobility and kindness if you respect them. Getting kicked by a yearling taught me that animals have boundaries too.
Back then, though, I thought that despite its pleasures, farm life was a little confining. My grandparents had to be at home most of the time to feed the chickens, milk the cows, harvest the crops, churn the butter, cure the meat and fire up the wood stove to cook what they had raised.
Now, from the perspective of this chaotic 21st century, farming seems a valuable way to live. Farmers had something worth confining themselves for.
After years too close to the chaos, I’m glad I’m in Simpson County, where at least there is a remnant of the kind of life that taught me so much on a farm where folks grew their daily bread.
