My earliest memories on the farm are dear to me. It was a lovely place. The two ancient brick buildings, our house and the old slave quarters and kitchen, stood side by side as they had for some 150 years. The homes and barns were connected with a network of dirt paths that had been worn bare by many generations of owners and slaves. I will talk about the often traveled paths of my youth. I so wish I had photographs of them.
Perhaps the shortest and most used path led from our back porch to Aunt Mary's. The pitcher pump was on the back porch, and it was used many times a day. Aunt Mary would pump water in buckets and pitchers for her needs and carry them up the steps to her kitchen. There she heated water in a kettle on a iron, flat-topped woodburning stove with a warming oven above it. She made the best biscuits I have ever tasted, and she used plenty of lard which made them brown nicely in a skillet on top of the stove. She made tea daily, and contrary to my Mom's instructions, she would sneak me a cup of sweetened tea with a hot biscuit.
In the evenings, I would sit on Aunt Mary's steps and talk incessantly to her as she puffed on her small clay pipe and muttered ‘"Humm" every now and then. She often took care of me as a baby, and when I grew a little older, she would send me to the marsh to cut her reeds from which she made pipe stems for the clay pipe that seemed to remain clenched between her teeth. As a very small child, I was at her side when she suffered a severe stroke. Her face became distorted and with a strange intuition, I blurted: "Aunt Mary, you are having a stroke." I ran for my Mama and my diagnosis proved correct. We arranged for a well respected woman, Sadie Fuller, in Queen City to care for Aunt Mary, and I used to visit her there weekly to take food and small items she needed. When Aunt Mary died, she willed to me a lot in Queen City.
(As an aside: My Mother read to me daily as a child, long before I attended school. She read good books too, one of which was Treasure Island. I remember her reading about old pirate "Finn," a drunken sot who died of "thundering apoplexy" which, she explained, was a stroke. That is how I knew Aunt Mary had had a stroke.)
One path led to a mammoth oak with outstretched limbs that shaded the barn and the iron kettle used to boil clothes. The ravages of time had hollowed the trunk and changed the giant limbs into gaunt scrags. I could stand in the hollow of the trunk where mature black snakes made their home. The failing structure of dead limbs that occasionally fell with a crash threatened the barn and Aunt Mary's life as she scrubbed clothes under its shade.
So, one winter my crippled Dad and I, with the assistance of Julian Ross, a gray bearded black man and ex slave, undertook to take the giant down. It was a winter's job of heavy labor, but, that is another story. Suffice it to say, we sawed it through with a two-man hand saw that was eight feet long. But the saw was still too short to reach through the trunk of the tree, so we sawed a ring around it to make it fall. The limbs were as large as most trees, and splitting these massive pieces into fire wood kept us warm doing the job and later when it was burned in the tin heater.
Another short and frequently used path was that from the back porch to the woodpile. We tried to burn hickory and oak when we could get it. But, in a pinch we would burn our own sycamore and cherry cut from our chicken yard which was large and led down into the marsh. The chickens really enjoyed the yard and marsh which was a veritable smorgasbord of chicken delicacies.
During the great depression, the grates in our coal heater burned out, and we did not have the funds for a new coal stove, nor coal for that matter. So, we bought a cheap tin heater and started burning our own wood. The trouble was, that the wood fire would not carry through the night, and the house would be ice cold in the morning. In fact, the water would actually freeze in the glass at the bedside. I would get up early and hurry down to kindle the fire in the tin heater and then finish dressing by the radiant heat. It was my job as a child and during my youth to see that the wood was split and brought into the house before going to school.
As far as heat was concerned, the old home originally had four fireplaces. One for each room. But, three of the fireplaces had been sealed up, and our stove was downstairs in the living room. Needless to say, our winter evenings were spent roasting first one side and then the other in front of the tin heater. Then we retired to deep feather beds, which became quite comfortable once the sheets were warmed up from body heat. But, it really took discipline to get up in the morning.
Today, it seems almost incomprehensible, but there were no bedroom closets, and no bathroom. But what did we need a bathroom for? We used a chamber pot and a slop bucket when we had to go at night. There was no water in the house anyway. We did have a pitcher pump on the back porch. In the winter we "sucked" the pump each night so that it would not freeze and burst. In the morning, we would prime the pump for the day's water. What about winter bathes? They were only taken on Saturday. We would put the large kettle on the stove to heat the water, and then pour the water into a Number 2 round galvanized wash tub to take a bath.
Another short, but well used path led from the back porch to a ramshackle privy that stood over an open ditch in the back yard. Awful, wasn't it? The storms would flush the ditch occasionally. We kept a bag of lime in the privy to reduce odor and used selected pages from the Sears & Roebuck catalog for essentials. That was prior to the time around 1928 when health regulations were imposed. Then we tore down the ancient privy and built a nice modern backhouse over a pit in the chicken yard. It had ventilation and a lid.
Another local path was from the back door to the chicken house. We always had chickens, both for eggs and for food. The chicken yard was quite nice. It contained a beautiful Red Radiance rose, a bountiful apple tree, several pecan trees, and a scuppernong grape arbor that the Shumadine kids and I used to enjoy so much in the fall after returning from school. The chicken yard was dominated by a very large sycamore tree on the edge whose white bark used to gleam in the moonlight. And, it was a favorite spot for the hooting owl to survey his domain.
One of the longer paths lead from our back door by the Magnolia, beneath the Japanese Walnut trees, and out past the barnyard to Hattie Williams' tenant house. There was a lot of traffic on this path. Hattie had a bunch of children, but no husband while I was alive. The youngest was Boney, my playmate. Then there was Eva, Maryland, Bea, and Toast. The older children had left home. I think Eva had two children my age, Duck and Sarah. They were my playmates too, and we used to play in the barnlot and along the edge of the marsh. As the depression bore down upon us, and after Hattie's house burned down, we no longer had Hattie and her tribe as tenants and helping hands. And, I was no longer able to play with Duck and Sarah.
An additional well used path extended from our back door , along the edge of the chicken yard, down a gully populated with hackberry trees, and along side a pine woods on the way to the Shumadines'. At the second gully, there was a weathered, wooden tenant house where Blanch Benson and her children lived. Her husband had abandoned her. Blanch was a good and hard working women who struggled to put food on the table for five children. Two of her boys, Roe and Gussy, were about my age, and the pine woods was our home. Well, the marsh was too. We spent time climbing trees, picking grapes, fishing, crabbing, and digging caves. In the winter, we would build little fires and pretend to be pioneers .
A much traveled public path led from our place through the Birchard Dairy farm to Queen City. The hands we hired from Queen City often used this path to our farm to pick strawberries, pull carrots, cut cabbage, pick snap beans, or spoon the beds. This path led along and through the woods. There were two gambling spots in the path where the colored men would shoot craps and drink moonshine on pay days. And, they would get into fights when things went wrong. I can well remember seeing blood gushing from the forehead of one who had received a gash during an altercation. He swabbed the blood away and washed the wound with kerosene. Queen city probably consisted of a dozen or so homes of colored people who owned their places. There were only mud lanes leading into queen city, and they were frequently impassable.
I traveled the path to Queen City many times. Most of Queen City residents would help us harvest our crops and work the fields, and I knew them well. There was a little country store in the middle of the congregation of houses that were bounded by woods and marsh. The store was run by the Walter Carrington family and it provided a place for public gatherings. Fights and violence often took place there, and there was even a murder committed at the store. Queen City also had church where the choir's voices rang out. Julian Ross, and Sadie Fuller were two outstanding residents that meant much to us. I hope to meet them in Heaven. They were both fine people and served us well over the years. Sadie and George Fuller took Aunt Mary in, and cared for her after Aunt Mary's stroke. Julian Ross and I worked together cutting wood, driving wells, and growing pole beans. We shared in a working fellowship and in the meager return from selling shelled butter beans.
A winding path led from the end of our lane and down through the woods to a ravine that contained our "radish hole." We had dug out a water hole in the marsh about the size of a small room used to wash radishes. We grew radishes by the truckload, and after they were pulled and tied into hundreds of bunches by colored women with aching backs, we placed them in a wagon and hauled them through the woods to the branch to be washed. The radishes were dumped into this hole and soused up and down and rubbed to remove the soil from the roots. Occasionally a water snake would slither among the floating radishes. After washing, the scrubbed bunches were packed in bushel baskets for shipping to Baltimore or New York. A block of ice was placed into each basket to slowly melt during shipping and to keep the radishes fresh and cool.
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