Her Family Worked the Land Near Millport Alabama
And She Walked Five Miles To and From Liberty High School
A well-swept yard was once the mark of a well-kept house and property, owned or lent
Her Family Worked the Land Near Millport Alabama
And She Walked Five Miles To and From Liberty High School
I was reminded of my mother's family's background this weekend when we visited the Southern Tenant Farmers Union Museum in Tyronza Arkansas. They, the family of Will and Jessie Daffron, moved about central and northern Alabama farming lands as they went. They had no union. They often struggled and they moved regularly.
I wish they had had a union. They had the close-knit family, but I mean something more than that. Such as
My Granddaddy Daffron wrote all his life. Here is something that has come down to me in typescript (one of the daughters began typing up Granddaddy's "poems" years later and unless somebody else in the family has the original handwritten copy then I am afraid it has disappeared.)
I will date it to 1934 because of the reference to the Bankhead law.
And by the way, "dope" was a term that Granddaddy used for "medicine".
The Hayseeder’s Lament
By Will Daffron, Millport Alabama
What do you think
About the gink
And all this high-brow clan
Who congregate
And advocate
Bankhead’s reduction plan
We raise our cotton
For markets rotten
We freely will admit
But it’s a fact
This Bankhead Act
Don’t help a doggon bit
We plant the seed
And tend the weed
Side dress with guano
We plow and hoe
Keep on the go
No rest so help us Hannah
We work and sweat
Just fume and fret
And worry every day
Haul it to town
And with a frown
Give half the stuff away
We have to sign
On dotted line
At every turn we make
Then buy permits
And send remits
With that we can rake
We pay the ginner
The real winner
In this old game of chance
His biz is brisk
He takes no risk
Your see that at a glance
We count our dough
And hope to go
Right out and buy a shirt
Some calico
And thread you know
To make the wife a skirt
We heave a sigh
And almost cry
To find we’re in a pickle
A note past due
For 10-2-2
Don’t leave a blessed nickel
No shoes, no socks
No calico frocks
Nor just an old straw lid
Not even a hope
To buy a dope
Or candy for the kid
Can’t sell a cow
A pig or sow
A turkey, goose or guinea
Everyone broke
Their stuff in soak
Nobody’s got a penny
No money to spend
No one to lend
A penny on our note
All of us busted
No one trusted
To lead a billy goat
Everybody knows
We have no clothes
Our children underfed
So tell us quick
What stunt or trick
We’ll pull to get some bread
My father, Julius Page Allen, was a man of few words. Maybe as a consequence, I remember many of the things that he said.
He said to me one day, "I just want to wake up dead."
That is a marvelous attitude, thinking on arrival at that moment without thinking about suffering or guilt or any of the other things that often accompany dying.
He had watched many people die. He knew. He knew that dying could come as the conclusion of a long days of suffering and insufferable visits from relatives who check in on you to see if you are dead yet.
As it happens, he woke up on the day of his death. He had a nice breakfast. I think he did a reasonably good job of running a Norelco around his chin. "I'm ready for a nap." He liked a good nap and took one as often as he could.
At any rate, he lay down. I hope he went to sleep. He did not get up.
Sweeping is an old custom and for many people a lost skill. Done properly, sweeping creates a mood, a feel, a culmination of well-put effort. Done poorly, sweeping leaves a mess and causes people to reach for the medicine cabinet.
Time was, and not so long ago, sweeping, sweeping with a broom I am speaking of, was an indoor skill (please do not mention "indoor" and "yard" and such--all in due course) that would make quick work of tidying things. Patent offices worldwide must have millions, maybe billions, of replacements for the broom and for the act of sweeping. Some of the claimed replacements are plain silly. Racking my brain I find no replacement of the broom as pleasing as the broom.
Swish is nice. Swish is more agreeable to the ear than vroom. Vroom. Need I describe? Of course not. You agree even if you sell Electrolux door-to-door. I am not sure that anybody does that anymore.
I have never tripped over the cord of a broom and my limbs are less broken than otherwise they might be for the absence of a broom cord. Life is full of things nobler than to have broken one's bones for a Hoover.
I fear I stray. That's okay. My cat does the same thing, though with more grace.
If I stray it is because I am more interested in the beauty of the form and choreography of the broom and sweeping than I am in the lore that has grown up around sweeping. And that, now that I begin to unstray, is where I began writing this. Broom and sweeping lore is plentiful. Maybe some of it is useful. Maybe. I read in Shelby County Today a piece by Neal Murphy called "Broom Lore and Old Wives Tales." I recommend it if you have time and you will have time if you simply give up on trying to get the cord to retract.
Timely to the season is this advice, "To prevent an unwelcome guest from returning, sweep out the room they stayed in immediately after they leave." Done. We may have missed this chance. "Do not sweep at all using a broom on New Year’s Day or bad luck will follow you all year long." I am safe.
Advice and admonitions abound. Enjoy. And one day I will tell you about the title of this blog. Actually, I already have, at least partially, doing a little is better than doing nothing at all, but the description is so far back that you probably cannot find it. Don't fret. That is almost as bad as leaving the broom leaning against the bed.
But he himself went a day's journey into the wilderness and came and sat down under a broom tree. And he asked that he might die, saying, "It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my fathers.
Kings something
A Speech Delivered by The Daughter of A Tenant Farmer In Her High School Junior Year, 1927 Her Family Worked the Land Near Millport Alaba...