I grew up in the 1950s in the heart of the bright leaf tobacco belt in the Carolinas. As a boy (8 to 12 years old) I spent my summers working on my grandmother's small tobacco farm near Mullins SC. Tobacco was a labor intensive business in those days, so we relied extensively on migrant "colored" help during the peak tobacco cropping season. Hard work but the pay was good.
The men worked in the field, cropping tobacco leaves and putting them into the mule-drawn "drag" -- which was a crude high-sided sled, narrow enough to fit between the rows and large enough to carry 1,000 pounds of wet tobacco. The women and children worked at the barn stringing the wet leaves onto tobacco sticks using cotton twine.
I was the "drag boy" (yes, that's what we were called) who drove the empty drag to the field, exchanged it for the waiting full drag, which I drove back to the barn and unloaded the wet tobacco for the ladies at the barn.
Did I say the pay was good? Croppers were paid $4.00/day, barn help (including me) got $3.00. Everyone got paid the same: family, sharecropper, neighbors, and migrant workers. More after the knotted tobacco leaves...
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