Slim

I'm not sure what Slim's last name was. Johnson, I think. I sometimes want to say Whitman, but that can't be right. Slim's broken down shack was a mile down the rural Maryland road from my friend Chuck's house. Chuck's family moved from the DC area to LaPlata to get away from from all the bad influences in Hyattsville, only to find that Chuck and his brother still found plenty of trouble in that small town. So they retreated further, building a big house in the middle of nowhere halsfway betwenn the Zekiah Swamp and Slim's farm.

I guess technically, it wasn't slim's farm. He was a sharecropper. I had no idea that sharecroppers still existed, but then, I was only 15. And slim needed help harvetsting his tobacco crop. Slim had been around Chuck's house a few times, dropping over to drop off some corn on the cob or offering to lend his tractor to pull stumps. He always referred to Chuck's dad as Mr. Charlie. I could never tell if he was in earnest or just making a joke about his name, which was indeed Charles. Slim was kind and polite and almost obsequious, but with a mischevious twinkle in his eye, just to let you know he knew what he was doing.

Slim was as weather-beaten and broken down as his house. Black leathery skin was stretched tighly of his ribs , forearms and cheeckones. His eyes ans forehead were deaply creased and his hands were gnarled tree roots, bumby and crooked. His limp must have been painful, judging by the way he pulled his elbows up as he moved, like someone trying to walk over broken glass.
THough he usually smiled, his eyes were large and pained, jaundiced from years of hard drinking and dotted with brown spots from burst blood vessels.

Chuck and I walked the mile to his house on the first day of the harvest. THe left side of his porch had collapsed and the roof slumped like the back of an old worn out horse. The roof was tin and the walls unpainted. In a pen next to the house was a large hog. A cow was tethered in the grass to one side and chickens ran about the place nesting in odd spots.

A couple of young children played around the yard, thogh Slim seemed too old to have young ones. Inside, his wife cooked ham and eggs for breakfast for all of us. I felt uncomfortable taking thier food, but slim insisted, "You cain't work a decent day without you don't eat nothin."

His wife said nothing.

After breakfast, Slim hooked up a flat bed trailer to his 1950's era John Deere and hauled us out to the field. Already waiting there were half a dozen black men and women, all related to Slim in some way. We were not introduced. They seemed to know who we were.

Slim showed us how to harvet tobacco. We worked in teams of two. One person would use an implement similar to an axe, but with a much thinner, sharper blade. It required a very accurate, 45-degree chop to cut through the stalk of the tobacco plant. Swing your axe in too shallow an angle and it bound righ off the tough, stringy base of the plant. Too steep and the plant would split. But if you hit it just right, it would slice through like butter. In fact you had to be carefull not to swing too hard, because if you hit it just right, the blade tended to slice right through the stalk and keep sailing straight at your shin. Despite the 95 degree, 90% hunidity weather, jeans were required if you wanted to keep your legs.

The second member of the team picked up the freshly chopped tobacco plants and impaled them over a six foot stick. One end of the stick was placed on the gound. Over the top end was placed device that looked like a small funnel, except it was hardened steel with a very sharp point instead of a hole. The stalk of the plant was rammed over the point, which split it so it could be slided down onto the stick. Five plants were place on each stick, which would later be hung in a drying barn.

We soon found that it was easy to ram that spike into your hand, leaving a nice puncture wound. Son after that, we found that green tobacco juice really stings when it gets into your cuts.

We had to be carefull not to cut too much tobacco at a time, as it quickly wilted in the sun and the qulity would be reduced. The only time Slim ever seemede to get mad was when ended up with wilted tobacco.

After the stick of toacco were made, they were loaded onto the trailer and hauled to the barn to be hung. The barn was arranged with four levels of parallel rungs from whuich the sticks were hung. We worked from the top down, with a vertical human chain made from the tractor up the four level, where the forty pound stick were handed up and up and up. The top man stood, one foot on each of the often rickety rails, spaced four feet apart, reached down between his legs to pull yo the tobaaco stick and hung on the rail before him. While filling the top layer, it was hard nopt to raise up and burn your bare back on the tin roof.

At first, it was nice to get out of the sun and work ing the shade of the barn, but as the day wore on and the barn fuilled up, it became incredibly humid in there as the tobacco began to dry.

Lunches were provided by Slim and his wife, and usually consisted of beans and ham with cornbread, eaten in silence woith Slim's family and realives. Sometimes, if we grew tired of that, we'd head to Chuck's house for peanut butter and jelly.

Back to work in the afternoon, Slim would get started on his daily bottle of Richards Wild Irish Rose, which is a nast second=pressing fortified wine alone the line of MD 20/20 or Night Train. He kept the bottle in the tool box of his tractor, which was located beneath the engine. Between the heat o the tractor motor and the Maryland summer, Slim's wine was usually just under the boiling point.

Every time he took a drink, he'd offer the bottle to whoever was nearset and and say. "Wanna tap?" I took him up on it once. Hot, nasty fortified wine served at 135 degrees just wasn't my thing, and I thought I might pass out.