“How Much Would You Charge Us?”

Posted February 9, 2020

Midsummer 1953, my friend Tommy and I knew farmers were hiring kids to work in tobacco, so we made a plan.  We’d see Crosby, and ask for jobs.  

            Bright-eyed and cheerful, Crosby was one of the rare adults that we children called by his first name.  He was a regular at our Methodist church, and most importantly, he farmed the fields where Tommy and I searched for arrowheads.  Often, we’d see him out working, and occasionally he’d give us an artifact he’d recently found.  

            Set on securing employment, Tommy and I rode our bicycles the mile-or-so to Crosby’s farm and found him in the shade tacking burlap to the sides of one of his tobacco sleds.  Following the usual greetings, Tommy and I became quiet, both reluctant to actually ask for a job.  We didn’t feel eleven and twelve, we felt like children.

            After uncomfortably looking over Crosby’s work, staring at the ground, and twisting our bare feet in the sand, Tommy finally blurted out, 

“Crosby, how much would you charge us to work in tobacco?” 

            Crosby stopped, looked up with a one of his big grins and said, 

“Why I wouldn’t charge you boys anything.  You can come work for free.”  

            We were stunned, confused, silent.  We wanted jobs with money, and now we were to work for free?  Finally, after a few very long seconds, Crosby laughingly replied, 

“Sure, I’ll hire you two, 50 cents and hour.  Come with your lunches tomorrow morning.”  

            We were thrilled!  

Racing home on our bikes, we talked of money.  And, when we began working, it was fun.  Ours was the easiest work on a tobacco farm.  When Crosby and the other pickers had pulled the prime leaves from the plants, they brought a sled full of tobacco to a shady grove and we began our work as “handers.”  Tommy and I would pull three leaves at a time from the sled and hand them to one of the women or teenage girls who were looping string around the stems that attached the tobacco to five-foot sticks.  The talk was fun, lively, and full of laughter.  And, Tommy and I were getting an adolescent glimmer of the attraction of teenage girls.  

The job Tommy and I did in center, https://www.digitalforsyth.org/photos/search/tobacco+barn

Mid-afternoon one sled would show up with a watermelon underneath all that tobacco, and in the late afternoon we got to ride the trailer to the barn where we helped hang the leaves to be cured.  All was good, and after two days, Crosby paid us $8.00! 

             That afternoon Tommy and I planned to get together the following day to talk about going to town on Saturday.  But, when Tommy arrived next day, he wore a frown, 

“I have to give the money back.”  

            “Why?” 

            “My mother says I’m not worth $8.00.”

“What?”

 “I have to give it back to Crosby at church Sunday.”  

Well, Sunday came, and we were both apprehensive that somehow the money wouldn’t be ours.  Yet, we were saved.

Crosby assured Tommy’s mother that he had worked and earned the $8.00. Once again, it was midsummer, we were out of school, and life was fine.  

Oddly, I don’t remember it being hot on those days of summer.