“This farm kept us alive during the Depression,” Momma said. From her tone, I knew this was not idle chatter.
For me, the Depression was the dim past of my early childhood. I thought instead of how the war—which, at first, had seemed like a big, bright party—was taking everything. I had done my share for the war effort: helped neighbors in their victory gardens, donated my pennies, and collected cans, newspaper, toothpaste tubes, and grease. But these seemed like such small things. In the year before her death, when I should have been helping Eva, I’d worked the mill instead, standing in deafening noise, watching the birth of thread for the war effort. At night, I’d pulled cotton from my hair and the creases of my neck. In the mornings, I pinned my underwear to my skirts because all the rubber for elastic went to the war.
Momma raised her voice to get my attention. “Careful, Evelyn. We don’t have rations for more jars.” She motioned for me to remove the jars from the next shelf. “During the Depression everybody helped everybody else. And we traded what we could. But it was Eva and Lester who gave us the most, and they could afford to only because they had the farm. You kids didn’t get so skinny or quiet as some did.”
She stopped dusting, as if expecting an answer, then continued, “Land’s a terrible thing to waste, Evelyn. We’ve felt the lack of Eva’s work this year. Your brother and sisters are still growing. The government didn’t have growing kids in mind when it started the rationing.”
I understood then where she was going.
“We need at least a good garden crop this coming spring. Somebody needs to tend the house and barn, slop the hogs, and milk the cows. This war will be over one day and we don’t know how things will be then. Jobs can be lost. Wages can go down. But land will keep giving, if you work it. We may need every ounce this farm can give.”
Through the small, cobwebbed basement window, I saw the apple tree and the wild brown tangle of the roses Eva had abandoned in her grief.
“We’ll all come up to help. Until your cousin Ricky gets back—if he gets back—it’s this or the mill, Evelyn.”
We looked at each other. I was seventeen. It was 1944. I was a farmer.
We went outside to watch Joe and Daddy burn the stuffing and upholstery they had pulled off the sofa Eva died on. Momma held her hand up to shade her eyes, as if the fire was the sun, as if restricting her vision would diminish the stench of burning horse hair, the loss of her aunt.
“I know we are all flesh—as much as the hogs and chickens we eat. And we go to dust. But it was hard finding her that way. A hard reminder,” Momma said softly as she stepped sideways to loop her arm through Daddy’s.
Though I wasn’t cold, I stood near the fire and held my hands out to its heat. The smoke wafted up. Parts of Eva were in that fire and smoke—probably a hair or two from her head, a sliver of fingernail, a thread from one of her dresses, along with what had drained out of her while she lay dead on the sofa. All of that rose above us, spread out, and joined the sky.
The next day was a Sunday. After supper, I carefully packed my clothes, my Bible, and the few possessions that I did not share with my siblings. Everything I owned fit into a bushel basket and two small suitcases.
Momma walked me to the car, carrying the last suitcase. Daddy waited, the motor running. She took my arm as she slid the suitcase into the backseat. “You’ll be fine, Evelyn. The land on Eva’s farm is tough, but better than most of the farms around here, and you know that farm better than you know your own bedroom. Eva always told me how hard you worked. Your daddy or I will come up with your brother and sisters every Saturday to help you. Sundays you’ll be at church and then have supper here.” She kissed my cheek.
I hated the monotony of the mill work and was happy to leave it, but the farm was now the means to fulfill a responsibility, not the solace it had once been. Later that evening, I folded my clothes and put them away in the newly emptied wardrobe Aunt Eva and Uncle Lester had shared for decades.
Soon, it became clear to me how much of Eva’s work I had taken for granted. The stove was cold when I got up in the mornings, the kitchen pump stiff or frozen. I had to do the milking and feeding both morning and night. The garden needed to be revived. The dead were a heavy absence.
Not long after I moved onto the farm, a man in uniform showed up at the back door, his hand raised, ready to knock when I spotted him. Before he spoke, I knew the news. Ricky wasn’t coming back; my laughing blond cousin was gone. There was no son to take over the farm.
The farm had always been
the farm
to my family. It lay an hour’s walk outside of Clarion, and about twenty-five miles from Charlotte, North Carolina, where the rest of my family, the Roes and the McMurroughs, lived. If you took Clear Lake Road from the mill and, when it veered west, continued up the narrow dirt road ahead, you crossed a creek. Then the simple clapboard house appeared perched on a small cliff formed by the railroad cutaway. At the end of the steep driveway, between the well-kept, generous barn and the creek, were Aunt Eva’s three-acre kitchen garden of table vegetables, herbs, and her one frivolity—tea roses. East of the barn were the smokehouse and the outhouse. A lone tart apple tree graced the barnyard. Just past it, the land took one more short step on its rise toward the Appalachians and then settled into 150 acres of blessedly flat fields. It was open land, seemingly without mystery, clad in the same hard, demanding red clay found throughout the Southeast. If you squatted to take a handful of that soil, you would feel its strength, smell its clean sweetness, and know that it would give back if given to.
Clarion, where I was born and lived with my parents, Robert and Lily Roe, was a one-business town. Narrow streets hugged the Lenford cotton mill, and the identical, mill-owned houses of the neighborhood everyone called the mill-village stood in curved rows. Not long out of the Appalachian hills, the mill workers who lived there were a rough, hardworking people, mostly Protestant and Sunday-school literate. They had lost their Celtic accents and immigrant hope for prosperity long before they came to the cotton mill-village for the luxury of electricity, indoor plumbing, and a weekly paycheck. During World War II, they bent to the rhythm of their work, seven days a week, in shifts that spanned the clock.
Clarion was not a tolerant community. Racism was the most glaring intolerance, but even small differences were noted. My father was known for his unusual habit of smoking a pipe as he pushed the dope wagon through the mill, selling the candies, colas, and tobaccos that helped the mill hands keep the stupor of their work at bay. What set my mother, my sisters, and me apart from everyone else was our height—even the women in the family were near six feet—and our copper-red hair from the McMurroughs, my mother’s side of the family. I was teased without mercy for what I could not control. The public library and the farm were my escapes.
I had hardly been more than a toddler when I first wandered away from our mill-village home. Dual lines of flapping sheets hid me from Momma’s sight while I made my getaway, past the streets and the other houses, across a meadow and through woods to a creek. Nothing beyond the meadow was familiar. The rapid purl of creek water made a comforting sound, sweeter than the noise of the mill and the chattering voices. Ferns lined the narrow bank of the creek, some open-handed, others still furled tight. Overhead, in the cathedral of the bright spring canopy, a woodpecker rapped. I sat on a tree root and watched pale butterflies siphon water from the sand. An owl’s bell-shaped call rose, then fell. I was happy. I was at the center of the universe, certain I had found the place where everything began.
A low branch lifted nearby, and my mother, stooping to go under it, emerged. She stepped out, scanning the underbrush and the creek, her face knotted in concern. A lock of her red hair caught on the branch behind her. I followed her glance down the creek but saw nothing unusual. Then she screamed my name and ran toward me.
I bolted, slid across a flat rock, and plunged neck-deep into icy water. Scrambling to the opposite bank, I choked on a mouthful. Momma scooped me up and turned me toward her, shaking me. Instead of scolding, she stared at me as I dangled, dripping in her extended arms. Wordlessly, she looked me over as if I was an unexpected stranger, a child she had never seen before. For one terrible moment, my mother did not know me.
Then she clutched me to her chest, her face inches from mine, fear in her eyes, an old, large fear. Her whole face opened into a wail and she crushed my head against her breasts. Her hand covered my ear, pressing me into the cacophony of her sobs and heartbeat, inside her sweet, milky odors. She stumbled back through the woods, clutching me. I could not have been more than three years old.
After that, the world began its split into twos: the spoken and unspoken, the known and unknown, home and not home, my mother and myself. Curiosity locked into my soul and put me at the edge of my tribe, an observer more than a participant, scouring the land for words and clues.
I was still very young, not in school yet, the first time I made my way to the farm by myself. Unsure of the route that appeared different, more spacious, without my family, I hiked from familiar point to familiar point. Then, there it was: the house on top of the hill. Following the narrow road up and around to the barn, I presented myself to Eva, who stood at a chest-high trellis of roses.
“I was wondering when you’d make it up here on your own. Figured you’d show up one day,” she said. Then she did something she had never done before. She knelt and took my hand.
I was a well-cared-for child, and so took those who cared for me for granted. Adults were simply part of a world that moved to rhythms and needs invisible to me. Large boots or full skirts to stay out of the way of.
As Eva knelt in front of me, sunlight glinting in her clear green eyes, she took me in with a long, assessing gaze. It was as if she had stepped out of the vague ether of the adult world into a full and separate being before me. The sweetness of her tea roses surrounded us. For the first time in my life, I was conscious of loving another person.
So it was I who became compensation for Eva’s lack of a daughter and my labor on the farm payment for the cans, baskets, and sacks full of food that Eva and Lester brought down the hill to my family.
On the farm, my three older cousins called me Little Sis. There, I could forget the children in the mill-village who teased me about my height and my bright red hair. I slept on a cot in the corner of the parlor. With no little sisters to complain about the lantern’s glare, I could read as late as I wanted. I learned to chop wood, sew, milk cows, cure hams, make butter, sauerkraut, and biscuits, bleach apples, store or preserve almost anything, and to make a toothbrush out of a hickory stick. Eva combed out my hair in the evenings and told me I should be proud of its new-penny brilliance.
Each time I came up the hill and saw the house, its front half shaded by the chinaberry tree, the farm seemed full of possibilities and far from the drab mill-village. My love for the farm set me further apart from my peers. While other children were fascinated with everything modern and aware of the deprivations of the Depression, I collected eggs and churned butter by hand and thought myself privileged, wealthy. It was a good place to be a child, the best place to be a child during the Depression.
During my first months alone on the farm after Eva’s death, I thought of these two events frequently—my mother’s pained gaze in the woods and my first solo trek to visit Aunt Eva. They seemed the first points in a line that led me to where I now was as the farm’s caretaker. Gradually, I also came to realize how much freedom and trust my parents had always given me. A kind of special dispensation. While other girls my age, particularly those with younger siblings, had been kept home with chores, I had been allowed to wander.
At times, I felt guilty about the pleasures I took on the farm while the suffering of war persisted. But I relished the luxury of my solitude. I worked hard. I ate when I was hungry. I took naps in the barn and, on one particularly cold night, made myself a pallet on the kitchen table and slept there to soak in the dying warmth of the stove. Whole days passed in which I saw only my neighbors, Mildred or one of the McAverys, when I took the eggs down the hill to them. Some days, I saw no one at all.
Having never had so much as a closet of my own, I now had a whole house, a whole quiet house. At night, cranky Bertie wasn’t there pulling quilts off me as I slept. Rita didn’t kick me in her sleep or wake me up because she heard some little noise. No radio blaring, no doors slamming. No neighbors arguing.
Privacy also had its smaller, vulgar privileges. Alone, I cursed out loud. I checked my armpits and crotch to find out if it was time for the trouble of drawing a bath in a house without indoor plumbing. Momma never would have tolerated such. On the first warm night of 1945, I slept naked, something I’d never done before. Moonlight spread across the sheets and over my bare belly, a thing not possible in a Baptist house with sisters crowded in a bed.
Later that year, when the Germans surrendered, the whole mill fell silent. Then a cheer burst from the office and rolled through the workers who ran outside, whooping and hollering, kissing and hugging each other. Kids poured out of the schools. I wasn’t there. Everyone told me about it later.
But up on the farm, I heard the car horns blasting. Church bells clanged. The mill horn blew as if calling God Himself to the cotton. I stopped mucking the barn stalls and dashed outside to the road. Louellen McAvery, who lived down the hill, knelt in the middle of Clear Lake Road, praying. Her boy, Tom, was still overseas. When she finished with God, she jumped up, danced a little jig, and waved to me, shouting. The war was over!
I jumped and ran back to the barn to tell—tell who? The chickens? The cows? The chickens, the sky, the barn were all the same, as indifferent to the end of the war as they had been to the war itself. I stopped halfway across the yard. The land I had worked stretched out before me and the blind sky above.