Gotta Work
In 1934 during their courtship in rural Georgia, someone made a photograph of my parents at a church singing. Daddy was afraid Mamaw or Papaw would see and disapprove so he stuck the picture in his pocket and ruined it, much to Mother’s regret. The chemicals used in those days for photography had to dry thoroughly before anything touched the picture. Mother was seventeen and Daddy had told her that was his age, also, though he was actually only fifteen. He was as big as a man and worked like one so she believed him.
After they married, Daddy earned as little as twenty-five cents a day. Later he did odd jobs and day labor for the Civilian Conservation Corps. President Roosevelt and Congress had established the CCC to help unemployed men support their families during the Great Depression.
When Daddy was nineteen, the year I was born, he began sharecropping for one of Mother’s uncles. Uncle Davis provided the land, seed, mules, plows and any other equipment while the tenant farmer, Daddy, provided the labor. In the fall, the owner got half the money when cotton and corn were sold and half of any other crops.
When I was around eight years old and not yet old enough to understand the sharecropping concept, I noticed this crop division taking place. I resentfully wondered why Uncle Davis should get half of our peanuts and sorghum syrup. In my eyes he was quite well off, owning several farms. My parents had produced five children by then, I
was sure we needed the fruit of our labors more than Uncle Davis.
In late spring, after the crops were ‘laid by’, Daddy worked at sawmills. The Georgia pine woods echoed with the sound of the mills, surrounded with huge piles of sawdust as mute evidence of the many tall trees reduced to slabs of rough lumber. They were dangerous places and many men lost fingers, toes, even limbs and lives to the
voracious round saws.
Daddy left farming when I was about eleven and worked in factories. Most small towns in the South boasted one or more textile or cotton mills. The work was hard, the hours long, and the mills hot. Even so, many women, including several of my aunts, took jobs in them, too. Some worked because they were single through loss of husbands from death or divorce, or less commonly, to help make the family’s
financial ends meet.
Today minimum wage is twenty times higher than the average job paid in the forties. But obtaining the seeming necessities of twenty-first century life dictates that, even in two parent families, both work outside the home. The old saw, ‘a man’s gotta work’ seems to apply to men and women these days.
©2004 Sylvia Nickels
