Bean picking times way back then
Dear folks,
Well, I’m been seeing trailer loads of fat orange pumpkins all over the roads lately and expect to be seeing the Christmas trees and wreathing materials heading out any day now, both of them headed to the big cities, better them than me. The roadsides out near Rural Retreat look like it’s been raining coleslaw as the cabbage harvest has been underway, all of which reminds me that our area farmers still raise lots of things except cattle, hay and chopped up corn sileage. The fact that this corn sileage, and those hay rolls wrapped in white plastic, actually ferments and have a tiny bit of alcohol in them may explain why local cows seem to be slightly and happily snookered. It also brings back memories of simpler (when viewed through rose-tinted rear-view mirrors) times when all our farmers raised a variety of crops. Who remembers fields of oats, rye and even a bit of wheat? Tobacco, of course, and all over the county one can still spot long-retired cinderblock milking sheds where folks milked eight or ten cows by hand or with one of those little one-cow-at-a-time milking machines and set the milk out in those large metal cans to be picked up.
The crop I remember most, however, is green beans, which were more than just fields of beans. In fact, they often became social events and in their way were far more than just acres and acres of Blue Lakes and White Half-runners. They were planted in long rows and when ripe were descended upon by dozens of local folks, including a lot of housewives and carloads of what we called “bean pickers” from as far away as North Carolina. We would all gather at the field early in the morning, pick “our” row, always the best one! and then impatiently wait for the owner to declare the dew dried off enough to begin picking. Then, with each of us carrying along one of those tall wooden bushel baskets we’d begin shucking off those beans as fast as we could with the admonishment to “pick ‘em clean.” When we’d filled our basket, we’d yell “Weigher!” and one of the young men so-designated would come with his scale and hoist our filled basket to make sure we’d picked either forty or fifty pounds — I forget which. If our basket met the mark the weigher would hand us a paper ticket that we could turn in at day’s close for fifty cents, haul our full basket away and give us an empty. If an older person or a pretty girl tallied up a pound or two short the weigher would pitch in and help pick until the basket weighed enough. The weighers, mostly strong young fellows, of course paid especial attention to the girls and young women and there was always plenty of flirting going on. People yelled back and forth, shouted at their friends, challenged one another to see who could pick the most and not infrequently someone would burst into song. I don’t know of any weddings originating in the bean field but I’d be willing to bet there were a few.
Bean picking was desperately hard work, of course, especially for often sedentary housewives and older people. A really good picker could fill six or seven baskets in a long and grueling day but those half-dollars added up and gave a lot of us country folks a little much-needed cash which none of us ever had much of.
I particularly remember lunch times. Over in Rye Valley, the ladies of the little Elizabeth Methodist Church in Teas, which was once a thriving community but no longer has even a road sign, always showed up with boxes of hot dogs — pre-made the way God intended with those bright red Valleydale weenies, Little Miss Sunbeam buns, French’s yellow mustard, chopped onions and chili and wrapped in little squares of wax paper—and coolers full of Pepsi’s, Co-Colas and R.C.’s. A hot dog and a bottle of pop cost a quarter and they accepted bean tickets same as cash. Maybe it’s just hind-sight but those were the best hot dogs the planet ever tasted, the like of which we will never see again.
By day’s end, we cashed in our tickets and headed tiredly and plumb worn out for home. The housewives would add the half-dollars to their butter and egg money, possibly dreaming of a new blouse or a silky unmentionable out of the Montgomery Ward catalog or new shoes for one or the other of their children that needed them for school that’d be starting in a month or two. The old men and old women would momentarily forget their aching backs as they anticipated a fresh plug of Bull of the Woods chewing tobacco or a new can of Tube Rose snuff.
Nobody’s planting fields of green beans around here any more and even if they did, they’d probably pick them with some kind of a machine or bring in vanloads of migrant workers, not that they aint good people too. Few folks today remember picking beans and even memories of the fun and community of the bean fields are fading rapidly. Yet, when driving up Slab Town Road past that long field that used to belong to “Little Bob” Griffey some old timers swear they still see spectral crowds of sweating, laughing and happy people in the morning mists or tired workers trudging homeward in the gloaming where, somewhere, the light’s still on for them. And so is mine for you.
Sincerely,
Aunt Billy
