Tobacco farming was work intensive. Once you cropped it, it had to be graded, divided, bundled, tied to sticks, then hung high in the rafters of a tobacco barn where the green herb would be slowly cured.
What a process. Once the tobacco was cured he loaded the beautiful golden velvet soft leaves onto his wagon and transported them to the Tobacco Market to be sold. My grandmother could not accompany my grandfather to the Tobacco auction, she was deemed too dark.
I do know my grandfather was a proud black man but on the days he went to sell his tobacco, he posed as an Indian, a Crow-a-tan, a Lumbee, anything but a damn nigger.
For some reason the auctioneers always gave black farmers the lowest possible price for their tobacco. Whites got the best prices, then Indians. My grandfather was an Indian or mostly Indian, he passed.
Granddaddy did a lot of thinking truding behind that mule. I know he thought about me, about his family. I know there was not one single day that I knew my grandfather that he did not say the exact same thing; "Don't sell the land! Don't nevah sell the land!"
My mother could not wait to sell the land , to have the house burned to the ground. Why? She could not face her guilt. Never could. Shot him in the heart! Laughed, got clean away. Mocked him by "preaching" like him, by stealing his "sermons".
Before my mother would admit that she got pregnant by her lover while married to a pervert that she purely hated she deliberately brutalized and destroyed that love child. He will never be right. The horrible ideas she deliberately planted in his head was Martha's brand of revenge. She tried to abort him. He was born alive, two pounds, two ounces in 1957! He lived! Martha hated him! Hated him with a passion, never let on.
My mother was truly a sick demented sadist! Vile! Foul! Repugnant! I promise to get up and celebrate her death every day that I live.
Praise the LORD!
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