Spirited Scriveners

Working in the summer was a rite of passage, growing up. Weekly allowance only went so far, and if we really wanted to buy something, that money wasn’t coming from our parents. We had to work for it. My sister babysat, typed term papers and tutored. My brother cut grass, and when he got older, sold encyclopedias and worked for the city Street Department mowing grass along the roadways. I babysat, and mostly worked on farms. Daddy was a tobacco buyer and knew all the farmers. So, it wasn’t hard for me to get a job working in tobacco.

I must have been 14 years old, the first year. And so naïve. I didn’t know the first thing about what tobacco work entailed, and boy, did I learn fast! Here’s how mornings went. Get up, put on old clothes; not nice play clothes because whatever you wore would get ruined soon enough. Eat a quick breakfast, pack a snack, and sleepy-eyed at 5:30 in the morning, ride with Mama out to the Shivers’ farm. Now that I look back on it, I realize this job made Mama’s day longer, because she had to get up early enough to drive me out there, but I never thought of that until years later.

In the cool of the dawn, I stood around outside the Shivers’ farmhouse, with the others, waiting for the pickup truck to arrive. Mr. Shivers, a friend of Daddy’s, was a huge muscular upbeat redheaded man, and his daughter, the peroxide-blonde Heidi, had him wrapped around her little finger. She whirled around the farm in her red Corvette Stingray, cigarette dangling from her lips, and did whatever she pleased. Other than the Shivers and me, everyone else I spent that summer with was Black. They all lived on or near the farm, had been working in tobacco all their lives and knew tons of things I didn’t know. I was a townie, and everything I knew was irrelevant on the farm. They were disgusted at my slowness, my ignorance (why, I didn’t know which tractor was which, how to tell a ton-truck from a pickup truck, and all the steps of processing tobacco). They pitied me and were openly derisive. Defensive, I became a quick study, and learned at the speed of light. I slowly earned their grudging respect. But I was never as fast as they were. And fast was what mattered.

Here’s the way it worked…

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