Tobacco Road - Erskine Caldwell [28]
The passing of winter and the slow growth of early spring had its usual effect on Jeeter. The warm late February days had kindled in him once more the desire to farm the land. Each year at that season he made a new effort to break the ground and to find means of buying seed-cotton and guano on credit from the merchants in Fuller. His attempts had always ended in the refusal of anybody to give him a dime’s worth of credit. However, he burned a field here and a field there on the farm each spring, getting the growth of broom-sedge off the land so it would be ready to plow in case some one did lend him a mule and give him a little seed-cotton and guano. Each year for the past six or seven it had been the same.
There was an inherited love of the land in Jeeter that all his disastrous experiences with farming had failed to take away. He had lived his whole life there on a small remnant of the Lester plantation, and while he realized it was not his legally, he felt that he would die if he had to move away from it. He would not even consider going elsewhere to live, even though he were offered a chance to work another man’s farm on shares. Even to move to Augusta and work in the cotton mills would be impossible for him. The restless movement of the other tenant farmers to the mills had never had any effect on Jeeter. Working in cotton mills might be all right for some people, he said, but as for him, he would rather die of starvation than leave the land. In seven years his views of the subject had not been altered; and if anything, he was more determined than ever to remain where he was at all cost.
When Lizzie Belle left, Ada had said she wanted to move to Augusta, too; but Jeeter would not listen to her argument. There had never been a time when he wanted to leave the land and live in a mill village.
“City ways ain’t God-given,” Jeeter had said, shaking his head. “It wasn’t intended for a man with the smell of the land in him to live in a mill in Augusta. Maybe it’s all right for some people to do that, but God never meant for me to do it. He put me on the land to start with, and I ain’t leaving it. I’d feel just like a chicken with my head cut off living shut up in a mill all the time.”
“You talk like an old fool,” Ada had said angrily. “It’s a whole lot better to live in the mills than it is to stay out here on the tobacco road and starve to death. Up there I could get me all the snuff I needed. Down here I ain’t never got enough to calm me.”
“God is aiming to provide for us,” he had answered her. “I’m getting ready right now to receive His bounty. I expect it to come most any time now. He won’t let us stay here and starve. He’ll send us some snuff and rations pretty soon. I been a God-fearing man all my life, and He ain’t going to let me suffer no more.”
“You just sit there and see! This time ten years from now you’ll be just like you is now, if you live that long. Even the children has got more sense that you has—didn’t they go off and work in the mills as soon as they was big enough? They had better sense than to sit here and wait for you to put food in their empty mouths and bellies. They knowed you’d never do nothing about it, except talk. If I wasn’t so old, I’d go up to the mills right now and make me some money.”
“The Lord sends me every misery He can think of just to try my soul. He must be aiming to do something powerful big for me, because He sure tests me hard. I reckon He figures if I can put up with my own people I can stand to fight back at the