The Rod That Spoilt The Chile

From what he told me, my father never smoked tobacco. I got no reason not to believe him, but he did plenty to prove to me that he was still cool at the age of forty. I never was so cool myself, so I didn't really know what he meant. He talked to me about his life when we worked together in the gardens and fields he rented.

He moved to North Carolina from eastern Mississippi with a Model T truck that hauled a trailer. On the old two-lane road system, it was a thousand miles one way. He drove up here by himself to get the job and rent a place for his family to live. Then, he went back and got his family and moved them away from the only people they knew in the world to the coastal plains of Carolina popularly known as Tobacco Road. He brought a wife and two children, two cows, a suckling calf, and three hound dogs on the same trip, and went back again a couple of times by himself to bring more stuff. He took a huge risk, and nearly failed more than once. He couldn't have afforded to do that today. He couldn't have paid for the gas for that many round trips alone. The casual mobility the American society has experienced since World War Two is already a thing of the past, and it'll never be that way again. Just moving across town will cost a small fortune.

We moved from town to town when I was a kid. We rented the houses we lived in. Some of them had the facilities to keep his cows and raise a big garden my father needed to supplement his meager teacher's pay. Most of the houses didn't have a barn on the property or land for a five-acre garden. He had to rent them separate, and our milk cows and garden was sometime a mile or two away from the house we lived in. He needed a small farm in the worst way. I was fifteen years old before that happened.

While it's true I wasn't actually raised in the country, the towns we lived in were not much but small villages, and because my father kept cows his whole life and kept a large enough garden to be at least a wannabe farmer, and the fact that he made a living teaching high school agriculture, and was indeed raised on a farm deep in the backwaters of Mississippi, then "we" were farmers, despite the fact that until I was fifteen years old, I was raised in town.

His father had a right good-sized farm in Mississippi up to a little over a thousand acres, maybe, until the Great Depression came along, and his father's father had thousands of acres over in Alabama before the Civil War, and his father's father's father migrated there from his father's plantation in the coastal plains of the Carolinas where I live now. If we're living in town, it's just a matter of necessity, and we won't be there long, or so I"ve been raised to believe. It's just what I got when I swapped for this body.

My father used to tell me about his father when we worked in the fields. Particularly after he was able to buy his first small farm of fifteen acres when I was fifteen years old. Maybe I asked him to tell me because I'd just gotten this body myself, and I needed to know what to say in order to pass myself off as the boy he'd raised.

He told me his father used to use him as an errand boy to run down to the country store his father owned to "Git me some siggy-rettes." He had an odd way of pronouncing cigarettes. Seeegy-rettes. "Bill, go down to the store and git me some seegyrettes, and hurry back, or I'll whip yo' ass, boy." My father hated cigarettes with a passion. I believed him when he said he'd never smoked.

He confessed to many of his misdeeds to me while we worked alone together in the fields. He swore me to secrecy, and I more or less keep my promise to him. He too had sinned. He wanted me to know that. But, he had a double-standard. It wasn't alright for me to be a sinner too. I had to hurry back too or he would whip my ass. It's a family tradition. It ain't cigarettes I hate because of my father's failings.