By Jerome Pearson
January 2014
Although working in tobacco was not as bad as picking cotton, I was not fond of either. Working in tobacco could mean many things, as there is more variety to it than there is with picking cotton.
One of the first tobacco jobs I had was planting. This job was not too bad, even for me, because it merely involved riding on a machine that would dig a hole in the ground; drop water into the hole, and all you had to do was drop a tobacco plant in each hole. Simple enough, right?
Planting usually occurred during the spring season; the weather was usually no problem during the spring because, unlike summer, temperature and humidity are, for the most part, bearable. Moreover, we rarely had to miss school to do this job even though school had not ended for the year. Basically, we would do this job a few hours in the afternoon after school.
The worst tobacco job I had was “suckering” tobacco. As the plants grow, they usually require topping and suckering. “Topping” is the removal of the tobacco flowers while “suckering” is the pruning out of leaves that are otherwise unproductive. Both procedures ensure that as much of the plant’s energy as possible focuses on producing the large leaves that are harvested and sold. The suckering aspect was not quite easy and very often it would take a knife to cut those leaves that were difficult to remove. Plus, your hands would be covered with tar that came from the tobacco. For some reason there was more tar on those parts. It would sometimes take a couple of minutes to even move from one stalk to the next.
Around the second week of June would be the start of tobacco harvesting. My first job in this arena was called a “toter.” Basically, “toting” means to “carry”. Therefore, as a “toter”, my job was to take the tobacco away from the croppers, and carry it to the drag or wagon, or whatever apparatus being used to transport the tobacco. In essence most fields were divided into sets consisting of four rows, and between each set of four rows, there would be enough space for a tractor and wagon. If available there would be 8 men cropping the tobacco, one on each row and four on each side of the tractor. Rather than having these men leave their particular row to load the tobacco they had accumulated in their arms, they would have the “toters” run to each cropper, grab their tobacco, and then run to the trailer and then load the tobacco in the trailer. There would be one runner for each of the four croppers. Therefore, throughout the day when the cropper’s arms were filled, they would yell out “toter!” So, there was a constant echo throughout the day: “toter”, “toter”,” toter”,” toter” … and so forth.
And if you did not come in time, they would complain that you were preventing them from doing their job because you were not taking their accumulated tobacco fast enough to allow them to continue. There was one occasion where a man name Ivory (who was called I.B., for whatever reason) complained to me “you no wanna tote my bacca?” As if I had some ulterior motive for not getting to him on time.
“Cropping” was the term used for removing mature leaves from tobacco-plants. Leaves are cropped as they ripen, from the bottom to the top of the stalk. The first crops of leaves located near the base of the tobacco stalk are called “sand lugs” in more rural southern tobacco states. They are called “sand lugs” because these leaves are close to the ground and get splashed with sand and clay when heavy rains hit the soil. Usually, a field is harvested on a weekly basis; each week you returned to crop the next set of ripe leaves, and this would continue thought-out the summer until the stalk was finally bare. The croppers were men, and the stringers were usually women or young girls.
Smaller farmers would have the women situated at a designated area awaiting the arrival of cropped tobacco. Upon receipt, they would have one person hand them the tobacco, usually 3 or 4 leaves in a bunch, and they would proceed to string the bunch on a pole that was 4 feet long. Some women were good at this and there was often a beautiful art to the way they could string tobacco on one side of the pole and whip it over to other side as if they were tying a not. The women were paid by the number of poles they completed.
Larger farmers would have an apparatus that pulled by a tractor that would contain the croppers and the stringers. There were no “toters” in this type of apparatus, as the croppers could hand the tobacco directly to stringers who were sitting on seat above the cropper; more efficient, right? The harvesters had places for one team of ten workers: eight people cropping and stringing, plus a packer who moved the heavy strung poles of wet green tobacco from the stringers and packed them onto a pallet that was connected to the tractor as well.
There was a group of guys responsible for the loading the tobacco into the barn. The pallets of stringed tobacco would be loaded on a trailer and carried to the barn. The barn contained several rows and several levels which were call tiers. You would begin loading the barn from the top, and then levels 2 and finally level one. In order to do this, there would be a loader on the top tier and one loader on the middle tier; these two individuals would straddle two rows (legs apart) and the sticks of stringed tobacco would be handed from the bottom level to the person on the second level, who would then hand the to stick to the person on top level. The person at the top was responsible for hanging the tobacco on the columns. This process continues until all rows and all levels had been filled.
When the tobacco had been cooked (cured),usually around 3 days after starting burners, the process would be reversed when unloading the tobacco; this was more fun than loading because the tobacco would also now be much lighter, as all of the liquids would have been drawn out by the heat, leaving only a dried yellow leaf. At this stage, it is as close to a cigarette as it would ever get. Once unloaded, there used to be a process of separating the cooked tobacco by “grades.” This would require examining each leaf by looking at its color to determine if it was a higher grade or lower grade. There would piles of beautiful yellow tobacco, some brownish color tobacco, and third pile of very brown tobacco, which I think was used for cheap cigars. Obviously, the higher grade would garner more money than a lower grade, although all of it would be sold.
