SURVIVING OFF THE LAND

I was born in 1927. That was right before the Depression, and times were real good. I was so young when we had a plenty that I don’t remember too much about it. Papa had a very successful grocery store business in Raleigh. My older sister and brother had cars and nice clothes and all that.

Then the Depression hit, and it was a tough go, I want to tell you right now! My sister Hester had known all the upper middle class in Raleigh, and for years and years she was embarrassed to talk about the way we were raised under the Depression. And for a while, I was. But that was my heritage. We did the best we could, and that was just circumstances. And many folks were in the same boat.

Papa had started off with one store in Raleigh. Everything they sold was bought somewhere else. Then they thought of the idea of buying a farm and raising the products to sell in those stores, and that’s the way they expanded. Later on, after the Depression hit, we raised everything we ate on that farm. The only thing we had to buy from the store was flour, because we didn’t raise wheat.

On down into the farm there was a big swamp. Back then we thought you had to have a swamp to raise hogs. Thought you had to have that muddy water, but that’s been proved wrong. Anyway, that’s what Papa bought it for, for us to raise hogs.

They built all the hog pens around the perimeter of that swamp, on the side of the farmland the house was on. Across the swamp on the other side of the farm, we had strawberry beds and raspberry vines and blueberries and all those kind of things - about anything you could think of that a farmer could raise and prepare for himself. We raised a little bit of peanuts over there. Early spring, we’d plant garden peas, spring onions, and that kind of thing. And then what was left of it, we’d plant in corn to feed the hogs.

One of the biggest things we raised was cane. We made our own vinegar and our own molasses from cane. We had our own mill. Our horse Maude walked in a circle and turned the cane mill. The shaft was a tree. It squeezed the juice out of the cane. We had a cooking vat right beside it. We put molasses up in 55-gallon wooden barrels. I don’t remember what process we used to make vinegar.

We made our own soap from the rendered lard from the hogs we killed and Red Devil lye. When the farming operation wound down, and there was nobody there but Bernice and me, Mamma started buying Octagon soap.

But I was young, and I didn’t realize how tough it was on everybody because what you ain’t never had you don’t never miss. Looking back on it, it was a whole lot of fun. And certainly educational! You learned how to improvise and how to do things children don’t learn how to do today. In other words, I could go anywhere and live today. If I had anything to start with at all, I could raise enough off the land to survive. Children that are raised this day and time don’t know anything about surviving off the land.