My Friend Mary Lou, Many Moves and Tobacco Farming

There were times when I would dream of another world.  I do not remember where I got the though because we never had a newspaper or magazine.  

I was the oldest of the last four children in my family and for some reason I became    almost the sole caretaker of my two small brothers and later a little sister and brother.  I guess the good Lord showed me how to do the things that I had to do because there was only one bad accident to one of my little brothers and he survived that to live many years.  

On this little mountain where we lived we had some neighbors living down in the valley.  This family whose father worked for the county, I think.  Anyway they had a real nice house with curtains on the windows and rugs on the floor.  And most of all, they always had fruit and good things to eat and pretty clothes.  One of these children was a little girl close to my age.  She had beautiful red hair and very blue eyes.  I loved her very much.  Her mother was so good to me and I enjoyed going down to her home.  One day her mother got very sick and they had to take her to the hospital in the city.  The mother died and then things changed for my friend.  I will call her Mary Lou.  Mary Lou's life changed very much after her mother died.  Her father worked for the county I think and had to be gone a lot of the time, so her older sister became the keeper of the house and took care of Mary Lou.  Soon it became winter and the weather as very cold in West Virginia.  Mary Lou's sister had built a fire in the fireplace one cold morning and when Mary Lou sat in front of the fire her dress got on fire.  Mary Lou ran out the door and down the road and it make the fire burn worse, so Mary Lou was burned so bad they had to send her to the hospital in the town.  She died a few days later and I never got to see her again.  The little grave yard where they buried Mary Lou was on the top of the little mountain where us kids liked to go to walk and gather mountain tea.  After Mary Lou was buried in the little cemetery on top of our hill, after that I would take my two little brothers and later my new little sister to visit and talk to my friend in her grave.  Just after Mary Lou died, my mother had a new baby.  It was a little girl and I called her Tootsie.  I had another little person to take care of now.  Baby Tootsie. I do not remember how I learned to take care of this baby, but I guess the gold Lord knew what he was doing.  I did not let her get hurt or die from an accident. 

When my little baby Tootsie was still very small, my mother decided to move away from our mountains.  I can't remember the move or how it happened, but one day we were in a place called Henlawson.  This was very close to the place where my Papa worked.  It was near the coal mines in Logan County and the trains that carried the coal out of that valley is where my Poppy worked.  He did something to the cars to keep the wheels rolling.   I think he used oil or grease.  We lived in a pretty good house here, but it was very near the railroad tracks and it was real noisy.  There was also lots of dirty air and train noises and Mama didn't like it.  

There was one nice thing about Henlawson which is the name of the town where we lived.  I had found some new very dear friends who lived nearby.  There were two girls near my age and I learned to love them.  There was also a church house across the street and the back end of the church stuck out over the river bank.  Under this church was enough room for us girls to build a play house  We carried boxes to our make believe house and soon we had a real little home under the church.  The mothers of these girls would give us food to take to our little make believe home.  It was a very wonderful time for me.  I started to school there, but I was very unhappy because the other children called me hillbilly and made fun of me.  

Then a miracle happened for me.  We moved again back to the wonderful hills of my earlier years.  The reason was one day there was a bad gun battle that took place at the depot where the passenger train stopped.  In that part of West Virginia there were two families who didn't like each other.   Their business was bootlegging.  They wanted all the business and I guess they decided to eliminate the one or the other.  There were many gun battles with shotguns.  Lots of bootleggers were killed and it became rather dangerous for anybody to go out of their house.  We could not do our very special activity of the day.  We could not go meet the train.  That was the main activity of the town.  Everybody went to meet the train. The passenger train.

My Mother made a decision to go back to Cabel County.  As usual I can't remember the move back down the river.  This is hard for me because I can't remember any of our numerous moves.  Someday maybe I will know why.  We moved back to the little house on the mountain where we lived when Mary Lou died.  

One day in the early spring us kids decided we would not be poor anymore.  We would plant us some tobacco and hire someone to take it to the city where the tobacco market was.  We would make us a few dollars and then we would have some money to spend.  We maybe would get rich.  We had great dreams.  I had a brother who was about three years older than me that I have not told about before.  Us younger children talked him into helping us get our tobacco crop going and he borrowed an old mule and plowed up a real nice tobacco plant bed.  First we had to pile lots of chunks of old wood and limbs on the ground to burn to sterilise the ground so the weeks would not be so bad.  That was very hard to do because we had to carry all of the limbs and stuff from the woods.  We finally got the plant bed burned, then we had to either plow or use a shovel to loosen the ground where we could plant the tobacco seed.  This job kept getting bigger and worse, but we kept on dreaming.  After many days of carrying brush, burning the brush, raking the big clods of dirt and leftover trash off the ground, then came the big problem.  How were we going to get the ground dug loose?  My brother told us little ones if he could have half the tobacco, he would get the earth plowed for us.  We made a bargain and our big brother did borrow a mule from our uncle Arthur and plowed the tobacco bed.  After the ground was plowed, there was still the job to make the dirt smooth enough to plant the tobacco seed.  All of us younger children had to work very hard with very primitive tools to smooth the ground.  We finally had the tobacco bed ready for the seeds.  But we had no seeds.  Where were we going to get the seeds for our tobacco crop?  Well, again our old dear brother came up with a good plan.  We could go to the old Man Morris who owned the country store and have him bring us some seeds from the city when he went in for store stock next time.  We made a bargain with the storekeeper to pay him for the seed when we harvested our tobacco.  It took a very long time to get the tobacco seed home and to get it planted in the big smooth bed oof dirt we ahad worked so hard to make.  When we finally had all the seeds smoothly raked into the beautiful dirt, we had to find something to cover the seeds to keep the birds from eating our seeds.  Mama gave us some of the older quilts to spread over our seeds.   We had to remove them most of the day so that they could get sun and dampness to make the seeds grow.  One day or ten days later, it's hard to remember how long because we were so overcome with anticipation, we finally saw some very small green plants come up all over the big old tobacco bed.  We had tobacco plants!  We had tobacco plants!  That was a very happy bunch of children that day!  I can almost remember it truly.  From that day on until our beautiful tobacco plants were almost big enough to set out into the earth, us children lived in a world of happy anticipation.  We were going to be rich when we harvested and sold our tobacco.  Later I will tell you about our tobacco crop.