6:15. Breakfast. Microtel Inn, Hillsborough, North Carolina. The breakfast room/lobby is filled with Mexican or Central American men dressed in work clothes and boots. The early shift (ca. 10 men) was there before me, another shift (ca. 10 more) arrived about 6:30. All carry bags with water jugs and food. The television blares local news. A story on Cary and woes associated with rampant development there. A report on yesterday’s mayoral election there: the incumbent was voted out, his rival elected on a “slow growth” platform. In search of Zollie Lyons’s farm, it seems I arrived yesterday, my first morning in North Carolina, at the epicenter of Research Triangle growth: Cary.
9:00. Drive to Hester’s Store to meet Donald Hester. Donald is my friend Randy Hester’s cousin, the one he calls the consummate tobacco farmer and to whom he refers in the last chapter of my book, Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Reports from the Field. One summer, Randy was back at his family’s farm in North Carolina working on his book about the landscape of Person County. As he sat at his desk, he saw his cousin Donald drive by with a truckload of tobacco on the way to his tobacco barns. “I’m writing three pages for every barn of tobacco you primed,” he later told him, and Donald replied, “You’d be better off priming tobacco than writing if you’re not getting more done than that.” Donald’s is the first brick house on the right side of Gordonton Road after Nate (Randy’s son) and Sara Lynn’s house.
There is no walkway across the lawn; nevertheless, I go to the front door. Push the doorbell. Doesn’t seem to work. Look for a knocker on the door, try the storm door. Locked. Knock on the glass storm door. No answer. Finally, Donald opens the door, unlocks the storm door, and laughs: “Guess you’ve never been here before. We never use this door.” Out in the country, I’m often torn about which door to use when I arrive at a house for the first time. It’s hard to shake my city “front door” habits. As in many homes here, Donald’s back door is through the garage on the inside wall.
I haul out my notebooks of Dorothea Lange’s North Carolina photographs from 1939 and spread them out on the kitchen counter to show Donald and his wife Susan and to explain what I want to learn about tobacco farming, the differences between 1939 and now. Donald grew up with the old methods and now farms in the new.
Donald grows between 100,000 and 125,000 pounds of tobacco on 50 acres. He employs one man year round (the same man for years now) and contracts for others, paying $1000 for transport (from Mexico) plus wages. The “hands” are all Mexican, the same guys every year. They arrive about the second week in July to “top” the tobacco by hand and stay until the last tobacco is “put in” in early October, then travel north to harvest sweet potatoes and to the mountains to cut Christmas trees before heading home. Donald says he can’t find American Whites or Blacks to do the work and has hired Mexicans for the past thirty years.
He finished harvesting his tobacco last week, is in the midst of curing it, and has already taken many bales of tobacco to the warehouse. But Mickey Clayton, a friend of his, is still harvesting, needs help, and Donald’s workers decided to stay for a few extra days and make some more money.
We head for the tobacco field where Mickey is harvesting this morning. The green tobacco leaves are brown at the edges, this year’s heat and drought sucked the moisture out. Donald points out that the field already has been topped twice before today. From the bottom up. Although tobacco is picked and cured starting in July, the choicest leaves are those at the top so the final harvest is important. In July, all the tobacco flowers must be plucked off by hand in order to force the growth into the leaves and to control the growth of suckers. There are some blossoms on these plants, but on suckers not the main stem. Once the last leaves are picked, the stalks are left standing in the field until they can be turned under and disced. The steep hills and valleys of the furrows will be smoothed out and winter wheat planted to hold the soil. Tobacco takes a lot out of the soil, so fields are on a rotation: one year in tobacco, one year in winter wheat followed by soybeans. If you have the land, it’s even better to grow tobacco on a three-year rotation, says Donald.
Dorothea Lange. “Tobacco field, early morning, where white sharecropper and wage laborer are priming tobacco.” “Reject.” July 7, 1939
We walk down the deep, steep-sided furrows to where one man is driving a tractor very slowly down the “skip row” between two rows of tobacco, pulling a wagon full of tobacco leaves. The skip row is where one or two rows out of every eight rows are left unplanted to make room for the tractor. Mickey’s skip row is one row wide; Donald skips two rows so that he can use a bigger tractor. Other men are working their way down the surrounding rows, stripping the last leaves off each stem, bundling them under their arms, then dumping armfuls of leaves into the wagon. They work efficiently, steadily, and silently.
Dorothea Lange. “Mr. Taylor [or] wage laborer slides the tobacco to the barn from the field, about 1/4 mile.” “Reject.” July 7, 1939
The tobacco leaves are taken from the field to the bulk barns where they are packed in and cured. The bulk barns are metal trailers with no windows, a gas burner and flue at one end, the doors at the other. Donald installed the gas burners on his own and on Mickey’s barns. The going rate was $400 per burner for four hours’ work, so he learned how to do it. Each barn is about 35 feet long and holds 2600-2800 pounds of tobacco or about 3 ½ bales. It takes five men eight to nine hours of hand-picking to fill one barn. With a mechanical harvester, the process goes more quickly.
The wagons pull under a roofed over space between newer bulk barns and an old barn. One man stuffs leaves into a metal basket, presses them down, then swings the rack of leaves into the bulk barn using a chain horse. After curing for seven to eight days, the leaves are a golden brown and are compressed and baled with a baler. It’s got to be good tobacco when you put it into the barn, explains Donald. But there’s an art to curing too. Controlling the temperature is key. He starts the process with a temperature of 90 degrees, checks the thermometer once a day. The whole leaf has got to be dry and golden brown; otherwise there is danger of mold. On the other hand, the drier the bale, the lighter the weight, and tobacco is sold by the pound.
Dorothea Lange. “Refer to General Caption No. 6 (section on ‘putting in’) and General Caption No. 7. Sam’s son handing up strung tobacco inside the barn.” July 7, 1939
Driving back to Hester’s Store, Donald takes me to visit the Whitfields’ fully mechanized tobacco farm. They use a mechanical harvester to pick the tobacco and haul the leaves from the field in a converted school bus fitted out with a “live” floor (like a conveyor belt). Another conveyor belt carries the leaves from the bed of the reconstructed school bus and dumps them into a basket on a scale. The baskets go directly into the bulk barns, which hold about twice as much tobacco as Donald’s and Mickey’s barns. There are 5,000 pounds of tobacco in one of the Whitfields’ barns, and with the mechanized system, four men can harvest and pack a barn in four to five hours.
Richard Whitfield (born 1934) is the farmer along with his son Phillip (who arrives later with his son Garrett). Phillip is the only one of Richard’s children who farms, though others live on or near the farm in their own homes. This is a well laid out operation. Richard says that his son has a way with machines; certainly someone with imagination transformed the school bus into a tobacco wagon. The center of operations is a roofed over area adjacent to an old building, a sharecropper’s cabin, now a tool/workshed against which the roof rests. A telephone pole, which supports part of the roof are, sports an electrical outlet and hooks for tools.
Do you know a Dewey Whitfield, I ask of Richard, well aware that there are hundreds of Whitfields in Person County. He was a tenant farmer who lived in on Route # down the road from the Gordonton store. No, he doesn’t think so. Dewey was the father of the family that Dorothea Lange photographed in 1939, but the children would have been Richard’s age.
While I photograph, Donald and Richard walk off, talking. Richard tells Donald, “I do know a Dewey Whitfield.” When I catch up to them, they are looking over the notebook of Lange’s photos from 1939. I pulled out her general caption with the names of the children. Richard says he knew Dorothy Lee and played with Millard, but they didn’t live on Route 49 (now 144). They lived in a white house behind the Hesters Store fire station. Millard lives in Burlington now.
Richard’s son Phillip and grandson Garrett arrive and look through the photos. Donald introduces us, then says “she’s here to take photos.” He’s a great person to have as a guide: doesn’t mind photos taken of himself and let’s others know they’ll be photographed. Makes my job much easier.
We head back to the house. Susan, who came with us, has been reading Lange’s general captions and looking through the photos. Her grandmother was a member of Wheelers Church, and she thinks her mother would know folks in Lange’s photographs from 1939.
Back at the house, Donald calls the tobacco company in Oxford where he contracts his tobacco (he signs two contracts for 100,000 pounds each, which gives him flexibility to take one or the other depending on prices). The buyers have the farmer over a barrel.
On the photographs:
The black and white photographs were taken by Dorothea Lange in July 1939, the color by Anne Whiston Spirn in 2007. Read the stories behind these photographs in Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Reports from the Field.
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