torian of medicine to him, Bass became a minor celebrity—at least among
folklife devotees—with publication of his reminiscences, which included
recipes for plain meals and his personal catalog of valuable wild herbs.
Bass in old age collected and sold junk, but he also peddled containers of
herbs, many for the making of teas that improved digestion and mitigated,
at least, a host of ailments. In earlier times he had been a farm laborer, a
cotton picker, and a timber getter, but at all stages of life Bass was a gar-
dener, a cook, and a relentless seeker of herbs. Surely there was no copy,
white or black, of Tommie Bass, but the hardscrabble, self-sufficing world
that somehow produced him must have yielded many like him. These will
likely never be known to us.^19
Among early-twentieth-century Afro-southerners, Booker T. Washington
(–) relentlessly promoted self-sufficiency among the rural masses,
and Washington was not infrequently photographed, in suit and tie, in his
own garden, chicken yard, and pig pen at Tuskegee. And among Tuske-
gee’s longtime faculty, during Washington’s time and for years after, was
the tireless laboratory genius and writer of agricultural experiment station
pamphlets, George Washington Carver (–). Carver was famously
preoccupied with soil building and conservation and with money crops that
might save the South from cotton. The best-known and enduring of these
was peanuts, and Carver is immortalized for his inventions of a remarkable
number of uses of peanuts, as a means of increasing demand. All the while
Carver was also the humanist-agrarian whose talents were devoted to the
elemental subsistence of the region’s poor.^20
The best-known black farmer-gardener of the era, however, was Neb
Cobb, who is called Nate Shaw in Theodore Rosengarten’sAll God’s Dangers
(). Cobb was illiterate and became a sharecropper while still very young,
then a tenant farmer, and finally a farm owner. All the time, too, he was a
gardener determined to provide for himself, his large family, and his cows,
chickens, mules, and hogs. ‘‘I didn’t never want for no vegetable, what I had
I growned em,’’ Cobb declared. ‘‘Okra, anything from okra up and down—
collards, tomatoes, red cabbages, hard-headed cabbages, squash, beans,
turnips, sweet potatoes, ice [Irish] potatoes, onions, radishes, cucumbers
—anything for vegetables.’’ And there were also fruits, watermelon, canta-
loupes, and more. Cobb declared he wished he could abandon cotton and
grow only vegetables, but the latter were so plentiful and the markets so
mediocre; he generally persisted with self-provisioning while sustaining his
lifelong battles with boll weevils.^21
Tommie Bass spoke of sharing garden produce, and sometimes milk
avery
(avery)
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