Lucille

A Speech Delivered by 

The Daughter of A Tenant Farmer

In Her High School Junior Year, 1927

Her Family Worked the Land Near Millport Alabama

And She Walked Five Miles To and From Liberty High School

Page 1

Sweeping the Yard and Pulling the Sprouts

This is what my mother told me about a family obligation to take care of the yard during the time when she was growing up. The yard of the house was neat and cared for by sweeping leaves, twigs, or anything else from the yard to some other place. I forgot to ask where the other place was. Anyway, in addition to sweeping, everybody in the family understood that they shared a duty to pluck any growing thing that appeared in the ground. A blade of grass stood no chance. The yard was a point of pride.

The swept yard should not be imagined a field of dust. With care, the dirt was compacted by use. The yard usually had a tree and under the shade of tree a family spent time in the yard, the coolest domestic space available during long, hot southern summers. With her usual grace, Sharon Astyk describes the beauty and utility of a living, used packed-earth living space. 

Instead of attempting to grow grass or other ground covers in the hot south often on red clay, rural southerners would sweep and tamp down that clay until it baked hard as a rock, reducing dust tracking and making the space suitable for yard work. Houses, hot during the day, were abandoned and people moved outside to shaded yards where they could do the washing, cook, eat, butcher animals, and do other heavy work in the shade of trees.

I remember as a child our house in the city had a sparse front yard. The yard had patches of growth but it also had bare spots. Two large oak trees shaded the yard and maybe whatever grass the yard had could not compete with the oaks. 

Eventually the front yard was lush with St. Augustine grass. But that's another story.