My Cotton Picking Family

My mother grew up in the forties and fifties in Southeastern Alabama and Southwestern Georgia. Her father, my Grandaddy, was a farmer for most of her childhood, raising cotton, peanuts, and children alongside my mother’s mother, my Granny. My mom is the third of six children.

Like my father, my mother grew up in a house without running water. I wake up in the middle of the night many nights and have to convince myself to get up to walk the few feet into the bathroom to “go” and get a drink of water from the faucet. My mother and her siblings learned not to drink too much in the evenings so they would not have to light a lantern and hope to find a willing sibling or two to accompany them to the outhouse in the middle of the night. Have y’all ever been to South Alabama? There are some deep, dark woods there that can be creepy enough in the daytime!!

We have lived in San Saba County for 15 years, and for most of those years I have tried to grow vegetables. Until this past summer, I have not had much luck. Thankfully, I can go to the grocery store and buy fresh tomatoes, green beans in a can, or some frozen collard greens and still have a meal, but my grandparents did not have that option. Just the other day I took a sweet potato that had been on my counter for so long that it had foot-long sprouts and threw it in my compost pile. My mother has told me how my grandfather would build mounds of sweet potatoes and pine straw to preserve them throughout the year. Having put in the work to grow them himself and relying upon them to feed his family, he made sure they would last.

Back when I was kid, my Granny always had a can or jar of cane syrup on the kitchen table. Cane syrup is similar to sorghum molasses, but runnier. The runny part made it soak into whatever bread it was put on or in, which was delicious. We would poke our fingers in the soft side of biscuits and fill the hole with cane syrup. Making syrup was a community event when my mother was growing up. Everyone brought their sugar cane to have it milled on a mule-driven press, then would cook down the juice in huge fireheated pans. My mother talked about the games the kids would play during the day and how they would pour the hot syrup over popcorn to make candied corn.

I have always loved those stories of the community working together whether it was gathering to boil syrup or everyone moving from farm to farm to help get the cotton picked and to the gin. We had a small taste of that community this past weekend with our annual Opening Weekend gathering where family and friends gather around the deer camp for a visit and a potluck meal.

While I am really glad for modern conveniences and abundance, there are some things my grandparents did way better than we do. That hard-earned, home-grown food was definitely healthier than most of what we eat these days, and “sustainable” before sustainable was a thing. The community, the neighborliness, the willingness to help and to be helped—all are things that are becoming more and more rare, even before the pandemic. Speaking of rare, does anyone know where I can get some cane syrup?

SpringCreekArtsGuild@ gmail.com