Animal, Vegetable, Miracle_ A Year of Food Life - Barbara Kingsolver [38]
The mountainsides of our farm stand thickly wooded with poplar, beech, and oak. Two generations ago they were clear pastures, grazed by livestock or plowed for crops. This used to be a tobacco farm. It astonishes us when our neighbors look at our tall woods and say: “That’s where we grew our corn. Our tobacco patch was on top, for the better sun.” Such steep hillsides were worked with mules and a lot of hand labor (a tractor would roll like a boulder), which is exactly why so much of the farmland around here has now grown up into medium-sized stands of trees. The deciduous eastern woodlands of North America can bear human alteration with a surprising grace. Barring the devastations of mining or the soil disaster of clear-cut logging, this terrain can often recover its wildness within the span of a human lifetime.
Farming a hillside with mules had its own kind of grace, I am sure, but it’s mostly a bygone option. The scope of farming in southern Appalachia has now retreated to those parts of the terrain that are tractor-friendly, which is to say, the small pieces of relatively flat bottomland that lie between the steep slopes. Given that restriction, only one crop fit the bill here for the past half-century, and that was tobacco; virtually no other legal commodity commands such a high price per acre that farmers could stay in business with such small arable fields. That, plus the right climate, made Kentucky and southwestern Virginia the world’s supplier of burley tobacco.
That plant works well here for cultural reasons also: it’s the most labor-intensive commodity crop still grown in the United States, traditionally cultivated by an extended family or cooperative communities. Delicate tobacco seedlings have to be started in sheltered beds, then set by hand into the field and kept weed-free. Once mature, the whole plant is cut, speared with a sharp stick, and the entire crop painstakingly hung to dry in voluminous, high-roofed, well-ventilated barns. Once the fragile leaves are air-cured to dark brown, they must be stripped by hand from the stalk, baled, and taken to the auction house.
On the flat, wide farms of Iowa one person with a tractor can grow enough corn to feed more than a hundred people. But in the tucked-away valleys of Appalachia it takes many hands to make just one living, and only if they work at growing a high-priced product. The same small acreage planted in corn would hardly bring in enough income to pay the property tax. For this reason, while the small family farm has transformed elsewhere, it has survived as a way of life in the burley belt. Tobacco’s economy makes an indelible imprint on the look of a place—the capacious architecture of its barns, the small size of its farms—and on how a county behaves, inducing people to know and depend on one another. It makes for the kind of place where, when you walk across the stage at high school graduation, every person in the audience knows your name and how much work you’ve been known to do in a day. Tobacco even sets the date of graduation, since the end and beginning of the school year must accommodate spring setting time and fall cutting.
This was the context of my childhood: I grew up in a tobacco county. Nobody in my family smoked except for my grandmother, who had one cigarette per afternoon, whether she needed it or not, until the day in her ninth decade when she undertook to quit. But we knew what tobacco meant to our lives. It paid our schoolteachers and blacktopped our roads. It was the sweet scent of the barn loft where I hid out and read books on summer afternoons; it was