I woke to the sound of the coffee grinder. It was January 1, 1936, and I was fifteen years old. It was below freezing outside, and Dad had banked the fire the night before by covering the burning backlog with ashes. The only warmth during the night had been the heat remaining in the fireplace bricks and that generated by the bodies of two adults and seven children living in the house. I knew dad had already started fires in the fireplace and in the kitchen stove, because he always did that before he ground the coffee beans.
I slept in a room behind the kitchen in an unpainted farmhouse in Tennessee. We had no gas, no electricity, no running water, and no plumbing. The toilet was either out the front door, across the road, and into the woods; or out the kitchen door, behind the house, and into the privy in the edge of the field. The Works Projects Administration (WPA) had built the privy for us in 1933. Before that we went either into the woods or behind the barn.
I wore long underwear and a long-sleeved work shirt in bed. Mama had sewed the shirt, the pillowcase, and the sheets from cloth salvaged from empty fertilizer sacks. It was coarse, but I didn’t mind because I had worn such clothing for years. The material was oyster white and had a tighter weave than brown burlap. Sometimes we bought flour in cloth sacks with red or blue patterns, but Mama used that cloth to make dresses and underwear for herself and for my sister.
The iron bedstead was spotted with rust. The homemade mattress was four inches thick and stuffed with cotton. It lay on a section of woven wire mesh, attached to the bed frame by pull springs spaced six inches apart along each side of the metal bed frame and across each end. The patchwork quilts were stuffed with cotton.
I knew that either Mama or Eunice, my sister, would be up soon and making biscuits and thick, white gravy- -the standard morning meal for the family. Soon I would have to get up and wash my face and hands for breakfast. My bladder was full, but I didn’t want to use the slop jar (chamber pot) under the bed because I would have to empty and wash it later. So I lay in my warm spot and thought about the year ahead.
We expected to plant twenty acres of corn, ten acres of cotton, five acres of hay, and five acres of miscellaneous crops such as watermelons, potatoes, sorghum cane, and peanuts. We had a half-acre plot reserved for a garden and ten acres under fence for pasture. We did all the planting, cultivating, and harvesting with manual labor, using two mules and a few basic farm tools. Dad used to say he farmed the way an Irishman played the fiddle, by main strength and awkwardness. He was Scots-Irish, so he was poking fun only at himself. He was in ill health from the first World War.
I knew I would be busy in January and February going to high school, cutting firewood and cook wood, repairing fences, cleaning stables, and spreading manure for fertilizer. In March I would follow the two-mule turning plow after school and on Saturdays, preparing the land for planting. High school ran from early September to May.
In April we would plant corn and Irish potatoes, and in May we would plant cotton and several other crops. During most of the year, some crop would need planting, some would need cultivating, or some would need harvesting. There might be a week or two of slack time in August, after the last cultivation ended and before the harvest of the sorghum cane began.
We were quietly proud of our independence, and our parents taught us the satisfaction of earning a living by hard, honest labor. Dad said we could look anyone in the eye because we kept our word and paid our debts. We had been through some hard years, but we were thankful for what we had.
Finally, I got out of bed, retrieved my overalls and my denim jumper from a nearby chair, and dressed quickly. It would have been too dark to see inside the privy, so I hurried out the front door, crossed the road, and relieved my bladder beside a little path in the woods. That was closer and more convenient. When somebody said he had to go out, nobody thought he was looking for fresh air or sunshine.
Someone I knew told me a story about a farmer who went to visit his cousin in the city. They showed him how their indoor plumbing worked, and that afternoon they cooked and ate barbecue in the back yard. “I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes,” he said later. “They eat in the yard and pee in the house.”