Everyone grew tobacco, because it was the only cash crop. (Still is, grandma says). Every family ahd between five and nine kids to help on the farms. The whole area was very communal. The neighbors all helped one another out.

My great grandmother grew food for her family, aside from the tobacco. She grew corn, and sugar cane, and had a huge garden of vegetables, and usually there was a pig, (but not ever a cow). My great grandmother made her own syrup from sugar cane, or had someone make it for her. She would send my grandma and her sister to the mill to have corn ground into meal. My grandma also helped pick and shuck ears of corn, and her palms were constantly sore from it. Across the road from my great grandmother's farm lived a black family. My grandmother and her siblings played with the black kids, and they also switched off working on one another's farms. She said she was envious that the black kids got to walk less than a mile to their school, while she had to ride a bus. My grandmother went to a one room school house that her aunt ruth was the teacher of at first, then another woman. grades one through six were all in that room. in the fifth grade, she started going to a school seventeen miles away, by bus. she was skipped up to the sixth grade, because she had already learned everything the fifth graders were being taught at her new school. Children began the first grade at three, back then. The law at the time said that you had to go to school in your county, which was inconvenient for my grandma and her sisters and brothers, because they were five miles from a school in another county. the law was changed when she was in the tenth grade, and she went to the closer school. she was in the last class of kids to graduate after eleven years of school. after that it was twelve. she went to work, waiting tables at a restaurant to pay for her room and board at a two-year college, which her mother paid the tuition for. when she graduated, she was still too young to work, so she got her permit from the state of North Carolina, to work at sixteen.

All the The tobacco was planted in March, and everyone helped care for the crop, preparing the soil, planting the tiny little seeds in ash, so they were evenly distributed. The tobacco was treated with chemicals, to keep the fat, three inch worms off it; one worm would devour a field of tobacco in one night, otherwise. The wormies had to be pulled off, and the tobacco harvested and then cured. To cure tobacco you hang it in a barn specially made for curing. A small fire is kept burning for three days, and then a large one; you have to be by the fire the whole time it is burning. Golden tobacco, which has yellow leaves, (used in mild and gold cigarettes/loose tobacco kinds) were grown in north and south carolina, while the dark kind was grown in arkansas and other places. The leaves are about one foot by two feet. After the tobacco was cured, it was rolled into bundles, tied with leaves and taken to market for auction. Companies such as R. J. Reynolds, American, and Philip Morris bid on the tobacco bundles, which were unrolled and shown by the auctioneer. Those bundles were bought for special, good cigarettes. The other bundles, which were brown, or sandy, or filled with worm holes, went for two or three cents a pound. This is bought for crappy tobacoo, like McClintock, Midnight Special and Bugler, in stead of Drum or Bali Shag. My grandmother's mother's father (my great-great grandfather), liked to do something called pin-hooking. He bought the tobacco that nobody else bought, the worm-hole, too dry tobacco, and got out the good leaves and sold them for a dollar a pound to make money. My grandmother and her sisters and brothers would tag after him, when they were very little (four or five). After that my grandfather would; he got a real kick out of my great-great grandfather's pin-hooking.