Hagood no small concern: the smartest and most aggressive among them
seemed too much like men, being more interested in commercial crops
than in self-provisioning. Yet overall, the statistician discovered that tenant
women had been and continued to be the principal feeders of their fami-
lies, from their kitchen gardens, flocks of fowl, and cows.^22
One of Hagood’s subjects, a single mother of five, was so extraordinary
that she deserved four pages of text inMothers of the South, yet she illus-
trated much of the social scientist’s general findings. Forty-nine years old
when Hagood interviewed her and spoke with her neighbors, the tenant
farmer, unlike most, was neither born nor reared on a farm but in a textile
mill village. After minimal schooling, she went to work in the mill at age
eleven, finally marrying late, at twenty-five. A bit later, her husband was re-
ported killed in France in the Great War. He reappeared, like Enoch Arden,
after her remarriage. The woman chose to stay with the new husband be-
cause, as she put it, at least he ‘‘wouldwork sometimes.’’ They set to farming
about , but the husband’s health began to fail. She took on more and
more farmwork while he stayed home with their baby, drinking liquor. After
the husband sank into full-time self-medication, the wife sent him off to
a government sanatorium and divorced him. This was about . By then
there were five children under twelve and no man to seek a tenancy con-
tract. But the mother found a kind landlord with a vacant three-room log
cabin on his property. She set her oldest boy to plowing, while the other chil-
dren contributed what they could at home and in the field. As other tenants
left, the mother became principal tobacco grower on the landlord’s farm.
All the while she and her children voluntarily, and without pay, performed
labor in the landlord’s garden patches. All the while, too, she maintained
her own garden, canned, and kept animals. Beetles were her bane the year
Hagood met the mother. There would not be enough preserved vegetables
to last the coming winter, and the one hog she was able to slaughter would
not quite provide enough meat, either. Yet except for her oldest child, who
was nineteen when Hagood visited and had had rickets and become un-
fit for farmwork, all the children were healthy. By then the youngest was
twelve, and the mother felt more at ease, even though Hagood fretted that
her blood pressure was high. The mother was nonetheless happy. Her chil-
dren were nearly raised, she was indispensable to her employer, and she
had even acquired a used automobile—‘‘my car’’!
My own favorite gardeners from this era are not anonymous. There are
three, and I first met each of them in luminous print while looking for
things remote from vegetables, canning, and ornamental plants. The first