| Summary: | (9:40) Ms. Sharp describes her father’s job at a sawmill and her work on a molasses farm.Florence-Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive
Interview with Artie Sharp
September 20, 2011
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Rhonda Haygood and Patti Hannah
(Also present are: Lee Freeman and Mrs. Sharp’s son, Jack Sharp)
Clip 7
Artie Sharp: Daddy finally got a call on the WPA. And there was a man had his crop ready to pick. The cotton was ready to pick. It was open. And he said, “If you take your family,” he said, “just quit the sawmill work, quit your job and take your kids and gather my crop, I’ll pay you for gathering the crop.” So much a hundred picking the cotton. Well, Daddy said, “Well, we’ll do that.” Said, “I can go back to the sawmill anytime.” And Daddy was a offbearer. Whenever you’re cutting logs, you put a green pole up there well the big saw will cut four sides off. That’s your slabs. And then you’ll cut off strips off of the planks, then you cut off the slabs off of each side of your log. That leaves you a lump like a crosstie, a square thing. And then you lay it up there and you cut you, the sawmill man knows what he’s doing and he sets whatever size planks he’s gonna cut and whatever length. And they got a sawmill man there, the one that rides the carriage and there’s a big ol’— what’d they call that big ol’—, circle saw?
Jack Sharp: Yeah.
AS: It’s a circle saw as big as that, it cuts all that. And this man, the sawyer pulls a big lever and that saw is screaming and you can hear it all over the woods and that sawdust flying everywhere, he’s riding right beside it, he’s in the seat right beside that saw and one little bobble he could cut his leg off, kill him. Well my daddy’s out yonder when he’s cutting that, the planks off of the slabs and Daddy’s taking the waste and throwing it down the hill and getting it out of the way and when he comes to a plank he’ll stack that somewhere out. Well, Daddy decided to quit the sawmill long enough to pick this man’s crop and he had about three bales of cotton in the field. It takes a long time to pick three bales of cotton. Fifteen hundred pounds to the bale. And so we went on and picked it and my oldest brother was home then and he helped pick it. Me and Daddy and Polly, my little sister gathered that crop. Three bales of cotton. Well, we got it all together, the man took it to the gin and he said, “I’ll pay you each time we take off a bale of cotton.” And, ah, he’d take off a bale of cotton; well we wouldn’t see the man. And Daddy was making fifty cents a day. And we was struggling. So, to eat, I’ve heard my mama tell Daddy, “When you leave to go to work, don’t you come back here unless you can bring some food. We’re starving to death.” “Well, honey, how am I gonna bring it if I can’t get it?” “Well, we got to have food.” Anyway, come every weekend, every time he took off a bale of cotton we didn’t get nothing. And Daddy tried to find the man and he couldn’t him. He lived off on another ridge out there. He’d stay hid out. Well, we was about to starve to death and it come winter and it was cold and the man had killed hogs. Daddy found out through somebody else that he was gonna kill hogs that day. And that man told Daddy, said, “Go out there and make him give you some meat if he won’t pay you.” He wouldn’t pay us a dime for gathering his crop. Not one dime. And my brother just got disgusted and left. He just went, he went to Lawrenceburg. Anyway, Daddy said, “I got to go to work. I’m going back to the sawmill.” Said, “You and Polly go out to where—”, had to climb hills, down the hollers, uphill to get out there, “and go before daylight. Get him before he goes to work.” Well, we went on the next day. It was on Saturday. And we hadn’t had no breakfast. We hadn’t had no supper. All we had for supper was parched meal. We had a little meal we put in a skillet, put it on the stove and browned it and we stirred it till we parched it and poured a little milk in it. That’s called corn mush. That’s all we had for supper. And we’re just about to starve. Didn’t have no breakfast at all. And we went on. We cried the most of the way out there. I dreaded going because Daddy ad done sent us several times and he wouldn’t be there. And so, went in and they was killing hogs. They’d killed three hogs and had big ol’ tables like this just laying full of shoulders and ham and scrap meat, you know like ribs and things like that. Tenderloins. And I said, “Look, Daddy said to come out here and tell you that if you didn’t aim to pay us for that, gathering your crop, give us some meat. We’d be glad to get anything. We haven’t had no breakfast.” He got up and went, walked off in the kitchen. And I heard him talking to his wife. I could tell he was mad. And I waited around and waited around and I thought we was gonna get some meat to bring home to cook. And his wife and his mama was off in there and none of them would come out and talk to us. Finally his wife come out. And I heard him say when the door opened, “You take that oat box setting there,” a pound oat box, “and put two cups of meal in it and you hand it to her and tell her she better get out of this house and don’t ever come back here again if she knows what’s good for her.” “Now you mean to tell me that’s all we gonna get for gathering three bales of cotton? It took us all fall.” “Get out of here. Don’t you ever come back here.” And slammed the door in our face. You talk about hard times. Honey, I’m telling you, there was just, there was nothing. There’s just nothing. Come home and Mama just took some grease and put it in some water, little bit of lard we had and made some grease dumplings. Later Daddy hired me out to a famer to work for him, fifty cents a day and I walked three miles to go from where we lived on Pea Ridge and it was molasses making time. At first I’d start in the molasses field and stripping the leaves off of the stalks of molasses, off the standing molasses cane, molasses cane, sorghum cane. And then there’d be a crew come on behind me and they would cut it down and lay it in the middles. Two boys would cut it down with big ol’ machetes and lay it in the middles. Well, there’d be a wagon coming behind them and they’s picking it up and throwing it on the wagon and hauling it to the molasses mill. Okay, and we’d get that patch ready and they’d say, “Now, come on. You gonna have to go up to the molasses mill and cut the heads off of these sorghum cane so they can run it through the juice mill.” And I’d go up there then—Polly wasn’t big enough to do that. She’d have gotten cut on that big ol’ sharp knife. And I’d set her down there and try to pacify her and wouldn’t have a thing to eat for dinner nor nothing. And I’d set to cut them sorghum heads off and I’d have to pile them up over here and he’d feed them to the chickens or the cows. Just be big piles of sorghum heads. And I got fifty cents a day equivalent to a gallon of molasses. I’d get a gallon of molasses would be equivalent of fifty cents. What they sold for. A day. All day long and then walk back three miles. Anyway, I’d do that in the fall. Daddy’d say take a gallon of molasses every day till you work out enough of molasses to do us in the winter. And I, as long as molasses making lasted, I’d have to do that. Well, I’d pile up several gallons of molasses for us. Well, whenever that was over he told me, said, “Mr. Skinner said he’d give you a pig a day if you’d keep working for him. Other work I’d do, I was stripping corn to get the fodder. Now fodder is the blades off of the corn and he’d want that fodder off the corn stalk and you’d pull it down they call hand the fodder and stripping the leaves off and you’d get a big bundle and you’d take up a leaf or, ah, blade or two and wrap it around it and hang it back up on the cornstalk, break over the corn stalk and hang it up there. That’s for the winter food for the cows in the winter. Well I’d strip fodder. And I got a pig a day. Pigs sold fifty cents apiece but I got a pig a day. And Daddy said, “Now you work out enough of pigs that we can have some to butcher and I’ll pick out the ones that I want to, got long, slim bodies for breed hogs, breed sows. And that’s how I got us through the winter with molasses and pigs to kill. It just went on and on and on and on. It didn’t seem to be no end to it. I don’t know how I stood it. I really don’t. And we didn’t have no dinner. Them people cooked a big meal at that farm everyday and they never did ask us and they’d quit and go in and eat. “Do you kids need something to eat?” Never said a word. But that’s just part of the hard time. That’s just part of it.
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