James H. Cagle
We worked in tobacco throughout the summer months to have some money for school clothes, and maybe a little extra for something special we wanted but wouldn’t have the money again to get. We were usually completely through with working in tobacco by the time school started back up in the fall. There may have been some unstringing to do but that was about all. We were glad to be done with tobacco when we cropped the last field and strung the last stick. It was a relief to be done with that hard and nasty work for at least another year.
Pecans began to fall off the trees in the fall. If we wanted any money to buy gifts for Christmas, picking up pecans was the only way.
Granny had a lot of pecan trees on her farm. They were not planted in an orchard, but were scattered all over the farm. She had a lot of Seedling pecan trees, and some Stewart pecan trees, and then a few of another variety. She had some up close to her house, some out by the corral, down the cattle lane, in the field behind her house, down in the bottom, and some out by the tobacco barn.
Picking up pecans was hard work. If you were actually going to pick up enough pecans to make any money by the end of the day, you had to stay at it all day. It was hard work because it meant you had to stay bent over all day except when you took a break. Granny would supply the buckets and burlap bags we needed, but we had to be ready to crawl around all day on our hands and knees to make any money. As far as I know there were none of those gadgets they have today for rolling across the ground. It pushes the pecan through a spring wired ball so that when it is full, you can empty the load into your bucket.
After you got your buckets and bags you would go under a tree and start sifting through the leaves, first filling your bucket, then your bag with pecans. If there were a few pecans on the ground and what looked like more ready to fall from the trees, we would get a fallen limb or tobacco stick (tobacco sticks were good for just about anything) and throw it up against the tree limbs to knock the pecans down. Or if it was climbable, which most of them were, we would climb the tree and shake the pecans out. This was something you would do when you needed a break.
The best pecans to pick up were the Stewarts. They were big and plentiful. They grew down in the bottom next to the woods. That meant that whatever you picked up had to be carried all the way through the pasture to the yard. There were plenty of Seedlings, too, but they were so small that it took a lot more time to pick up enough to amount to anything.
The Seedling is the original pecan. All the other pecans were developed by man through the science of horticulture. No matter what developed pecan you plant in the soil it will come up a Seedling, because the seed will not breed true to its kind. To get the other developed pecans, grafting must be done with the scions or limbs of already developed trees to the established stock.
The pecans we picked up could not be mixed. If you picked up several varieties that day you had to keep them in their separate bags. This was because Granny didn’t want them mixed because the man who bought them from her didn’t want them mixed.
A man would come in his truck about once every two weeks to buy Granny’s pecans. He would go through the whole community buying up pecans. He had a scale on his truck for weighing the pecans, or he used the one Granny had. He would, from outside the bag, grab a pecan with the bag and with this knot hang the bag of pecans on a hook at the bottom of the scale. He would then get one of his weights and gradually work it out on the arm of the scale until it balanced out, giving him the weight of the pecans. Whatever money Granny made for her pecans she gave half of it to the one who picked them up.
And so we made a little money to buy a few Christmas presents for loved ones.
