molly mooching 73trees. The deciduous eastern woodlands of North America can bear hu-
man alteration with a surprising grace. Barring the devastations of mining
or the soil disaster of clear- cut logging, this terrain can often recover its
wildness within the span of a human lifetime.
Farming a hillside with mules had its own kind of grace, I am sure, but
it’s mostly a bygone option. The scope of farming in southern Appalachia
has now retreated to those parts of the terrain that are tractor- friendly,
which is to say, the small pieces of relatively fl at bottomland that lie be-
tween the steep slopes. Given that restriction, only one crop fit the bill
here for the past half- century, and that was tobacco; virtually no other le-
gal commodity commands such a high price per acre that farmers could
stay in business with such small arable fields. That, plus the right climate,
made Kentucky and southwestern Virginia the world’s supplier of burley
tobacco.
That plant works well here for cultural reasons also: it’s the most labor-
intensive commodity crop still grown in the United States, traditionally
cultivated by an extended family or cooperative communities. Delicate
tobacco seedlings have to be started in sheltered beds, then set by hand
into the field and kept weed- free. Once mature, the whole plant is cut,
speared with a sharp stick, and the entire crop painstakingly hung to dry
in voluminous, high- roofed, well- ventilated barns. Once the fragile leaves
are air- cured to dark brown, they must be stripped by hand from the stalk,
baled, and taken to the auction house.
On the flat, wide farms of Iowa one person with a tractor can grow
enough corn to feed more than a hundred people. But in the tucked- away
valleys of Appalachia it takes many hands to make just one living, and
only if they work at growing a high- priced product. The same small acre-
age planted in corn would hardly bring in enough income to pay the prop-
erty tax. For this reason, while the small family farm has transformed
elsewhere, it has survived as a way of life in the burley belt. Tobacco’s
economy makes an indelible imprint on the look of a place—the capa-
cious architecture of its barns, the small size of its farms—and on how a
county behaves, inducing people to know and depend on one another. It
makes for the kind of place where, when you walk across the stage at high
school graduation, every person in the audience knows your name and