Were We Born Too Soon?

Across the Fence #520

My brother, Arden, wondered if we had been born too soon. The headline of a story in the La Crosse Tribune on October 22, 2014, said “Renewed efforts to ban child labor on tobacco farms.” The story says the Human Rights Watch is pushing tobacco companies to adopt stronger child labor policies, by introducing legislation and urging the Department of Labor to take action. They are looking for legislation to ban kids under 18 from working on farms that raise tobacco. 

I guess we were born too soon. We worked in the tobacco fields from the time we were old enough to carry a hoe and chop out weeds. I must have been pretty young, because we were hoeing tobacco when my cousin Sandy, informed me that Santa Claus wasn’t real, it was just my folks. My world came crashing down around me. I threw down my hoe and went running to the house, hoping my mother would tell me it wasn’t so. You always remember those traumatic experiences, especially when hoeing tobacco. 

By the time I was ten years old I was planting tobacco. We raised 10-12 acres every year. Arden reminded me how Dad would pour a chemical poison into the water barrel on the tobacco planter. I think it was to kill cutworms that destroyed the plants. We got a lot of that poisoned water on our hands as we “dropped” plants. At coffee time we sat down and ate our food with our dirty, chemically-treated fingers. We never thought twice about poison being on our hands and getting into our system. We never got sick, and I’m happy to report I never had cutworms, so it must have worked. Worms from eating dirt is another story.

Piling tobacco: L-R: Cousin Sandy, Aunt Juna, Howard and David.

The tobacco was bigger than we were. Photo-1951 or 52.

Helping with tobacco and other farm chores was our way of life. If there were any child labor laws at that time, we certainly didn’t know about them. I don’t think government laws tried to dictate our every move in those days. If someone had come around and told my Dad his kids couldn’t do any kind of work with tobacco until they were 18, I think he’d have shown them where the carpenter made the door, and “Don’t let it hit you in the butt on the way out.”

By the time we were 18, we’d been doing every job associated with tobacco for many years. We watered tobacco beds, picked tobacco plants, planted tobacco, replanted tobacco by hand, hoed weeds, cultivated tobacco, topped tobacco, suckered tobacco, sprayed sucker-control chemicals on tobacco, cut tobacco, piled tobacco, speared tobacco, hauled tobacco, hung tobacco in the shed, took down tobacco during case weather, stripped tobacco, and spread tobacco stalks on the field using the manure spreader. Did I leave anything out? 

Tobacco was a lot of hand labor and back-breaking work. It included kids doing child labor if that’s what you want to call it. That was life on the farm, and everyone who grew up on a farm helped with the work from the time they were old enough to do a job. We complained about having to work all the time, but I don’t think it hurt us. We learned early in life how to work. 

I’ll admit we ate a lot of food using tobacco-stained hands. It was hard to wash off. We used Lava soap that also took your skin off if you rubbed too hard. Gary, who also grew up with tobacco, said they used green tomatoes to get the tobacco juice off. We never tried that. We also drank water from a clear Mason jar when we were in the field. Sometimes the water had tobacco juice swirling around in it if a tobacco chewer had been drinking from it. Personal water bottles, bought in a store, were unheard of in those days.

We chopped down tobacco with a light weight axe that was so sharp it could slice through a leather shoe and sever a toe if you got careless. Spearing plants onto a tobacco lath held it’s dangers too, as you grabbed a plant, held it against the spearpoint and pulled. A misplaced hand on the stalk could put the spearpoint into your hand.

We hauled tobacco, lifting heavy laths onto the wagon, then crawled up in the shed and balanced on thin, round poles. Poles would sometimes roll or break. If you were lucky, you managed to grab other poles to help break your fall. Sometimes people got seriously hurt or killed falling out of a shed.

Farming is not sitting at a desk, like I did for many years, and maybe suffering a paper cut! Farming is a dangerous job, and sometimes people get hurt, even if they follow all the safety rules. On our farm, no one ever got seriously hurt. Somehow, we survived all the dirt, poisons, and chemicals. We even drank raw milk every day and I don’t remember anyone getting sick. I think we try to protect people too much these days. I read that our upbringing heavily influences who we are and what we do. 

Maybe all of us farm kids were born too soon, but we learned how to work at an early age, and I think that served us well no matter what type of work we went into later.

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