74 animal, vegetable, miracle
how much work you’ve been known to do in a day. Tobacco even sets the
date of graduation, since the end and beginning of the school year must
accommodate spring setting time and fall cutting.
This was the context of my childhood: I grew up in a tobacco county.
Nobody in my family smoked except for my grandmother, who had one
cigarette per afternoon, whether she needed it or not, until the day in her
ninth decade when she undertook to quit. But we knew what tobacco
meant to our lives. It paid our schoolteachers and blacktopped our roads.
It was the sweet scent of the barn loft where I hid out and read books on
summer afternoons; it was the brown powder that clung to our jeans after
an afternoon of playing in old outbuildings. It was the reason my fi rst date
had to end early on a Friday night: he had to get up early on Saturday to
work the tobacco. For my classmates who went to college, it was tobacco
that sent them. Me too, since my family could not have stayed solvent
without other family economies that relied on tobacco.
From that society I sallied out into a world where, to my surprise,
farmer was widely presumed synonymous with hee-haw, and tobacco was
the new smallpox. I remember standing in someone’s kitchen once at a
college party—one of those intensely conversational gatherings of the ut-
terly enlightened—listening while everyone present agreed on the obvi-
ous truth about tobacco: it should be eliminated from this planet and all
others. I blurted out, foolishly, “But what about the tobacco farmers?”
You’d have thought I’d spoken up for child porn. Somebody asked,
“Why should I care about tobacco farmers?”
I’m still struggling to answer that. Yes, I do know people who’ve died
wishing they’d never seen a cigarette. Yes, it’s a plant that causes cancer
after a long line of people (postfarmer) have specifically altered and
abused it. And yes, it takes chemicals to keep the blue mold off the crop.
And it sends people to college. It makes house payments, buys shoes, and
pays doctor bills. It allows people to live with their families and shake
hands with their neighbors in one of the greenest, kindest places in all
this world. Tobacco is slowly going extinct as a U.S. crop, and that is prob-
ably a sign of good civic sense, but it’s also a cultural death when all those
who grew it must pack up, go find an apartment somewhere, and work in
a factory. What is family farming worth?