The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks - Donald Harington [165]
Unconsciously no doubt, in planning his factory, Oren Duckworth preserved the bigeminality of the original barn: the left crib was where the women cleaned and prepared the snaps and ’maters and put them into cans; the right crib was where the men sealed the cans and cooked them, and the male-female division of labor was always clear in the minds of those who worked there. Snaps and ’maters were the only products of the factory; the former were canned during June and the latter during July and August; both vegetables grew abundantly all over the place. Additional jobs were provided for the pickers. Farmers hired women, teenagers and even children to pick, paying them usually a few pennies per bushel, and hauled the bushels by wagon to Oren Duckworth’s factory, where a stout girl unloaded them into a trough around which sat a dozen women who cleaned, snapped the snaps or peeled the ’maters, pressed them into tin cans being loaded on the chute up in the loft by another person, also female, and placed them on a conveyor belt which carried them over into the other crib, where a group of men manned the machine that put a lid on each can and then arranged them in large iron bails that were lowered into a vat of boiling water; after the cans had cooked and cooled, they were conveyed up into the loft of that crib where another person, also male, packed them into cardboard cartons.
In the early days of the operation, the cans bore Oren Duckworth’s own gaudily chromolithographed labels, imprinted with the legends “Duckworth’s Finust Snaps” and “Duckworth’s Finust Maters,” but, even though the former clearly pictured a luscious mound of plump green beans while the latter showed a huge red tomato, nobody in the cities, where the cans were shipped, appeared to know that “snap” means green beans and “mater” means tomato, and the cans did not sell. Eventually Oren Duckworth made contact with a large and well-known food processor in Kansas City, a company whose lawyers will not permit me to mention its name, and thereafter Duckworth’s finust snaps and maters were sent in unlabeled cans to Kansas City, where the Big Name Food Processor attached his own label, and you and I were unknowingly eating them when we were children, although the Cannon Fact’ry closed down before we were grown up.
The Stay More ’mater had of course not retained its full aphrodisiac properties, although the ’mater of that time was surely far more erogenous than the hybridized objects that are marketed as “tomatoes” today.
Whatever might be said against Oren Duckworth’s materialistic motives for operating the canning factory, it must be acknowledged that the operation granted Stay More a reprieve, to live as a town a little longer. Without the canning factory, people would have been forced to leave Stay More and search for work in the larger towns and cities. The canning factory not only created jobs but also, because the big motortruck which came to get the cans and take them to Kansas City had to ford Banty Creek where it crosses the main road and because Banty Creek overflowed its banks six different times during the first summer the canning factory was in operation, making it impossible of passage not only for the big motortruck but also for any wagons hauling snaps and ’maters from the north side of the creek, and because Oren Duckworth’s crews had to construct a raft and laboriously float not only the raw product but also the finished product back and forth across the creek when it was flooded, which caused Oren Duckworth not only to curse but also to moan, and because he was noticed cursing and moaning not only by his employees and family but also by a federal government agent, a “spotter” from the Works Progress Administration, who wore not only a pair of binoculars but also a telescope suspended from leather thongs around his neck, and who spotted