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Growing Up Apart With Jimmy Carter
by Hugh Frank Smith
[Editor's Note: Longtime newspaperman Hugh Frank Smith revisits his past with this fascinating essay comparing his and former U. S. president Jimmy Carter's childhood memories. USADEEPSOUTH appreciates Smith's and The Memphis Commercial Appeal's granting permission to reprint this wonderful piece.][This column originally appeared in
The Memphis Commercial Appeal
on July 5, 2001, and is reprinted with
the permission of Mr. Smith and the
Commercial Appeal editors.]
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Former president Jimmy Carter and I have a lot in common--in childhood memories, at least.
Carter’s book, An Hour Before Daylight, is an eloquent memoir of his rural boyhood. It was on The New York Times best-seller list for 15 weeks this year. Reading it gave me a been-there, done-that feeling.
Carter and I both grew up on farms in the Depression-era South. My birth year was 1915; his was 1924. His farm was near Plains, Ga. Mine was near Munford, Ala.
But while our farm life was similar in many ways, there also were many differences. Carter’s father was a prosperous and diversified farmer. Papa depended solely on cotton for income. Some years, the boll weevil's ravages or a cruel twist of nature left us with little cash at harvest time.
We did have one luxury that Carter didn't have: a telephone. Papa somehow got a six-mile line that served eight farm families.
With that many people wanting to use it, we sometimes had to wait for hours to crank up the phone on the hallway wall. Through vigilant eavesdropping, each family knew every other family's business.
The African-American sharecroppers who lived on the Carter and Smith farms had abominable living conditions. Ours lived in poorly constructed houses. They lacked adequate clothing and food.
They drew drinking water from an unsanitary cistern that contained rainwater that came off the roof. The children rarely attended school, which was far inferior to local schools for white children.
Carter often spent the night in the homes of "colored" families. Papa never allowed this, although I would sneak over to Aunt Emmaline's--we always called elderly black women and men "aunt" and "uncle" --for a dish of her blackberry cobbler.
All of my playmates were black. Papa didn’t object, since there were no white children nearby.
We drew drinking water from a well, as Carter’s family did. But we also had a cistern that provided water for washing clothes and kitchen utensils.
I recall, as Carter did, a “slop jar” (or chamber pot) in every bedroom. It was my job to empty the jars every morning. Ugh.
As Carter wrote, kerosene lamps provided light, although they were very poor for reading. We went to bed early, for we had no radio or television. I remember riding in our Model T Ford to Talladega on the night of the 1928 presidential election to hear the Herbert Hoover-Al Smith returns on my sister Mae’s old Atwater Kent radio.
Our house was similar to Carter’s. There was a hallway through the middle (we called it a “dogtrot”), a screened-in back porch and a big front porch scattered with rocking chairs and swings. The front porch was a family gathering place, especially on Sunday afternoons. We caught a little breeze there after supper on hot summer nights.
Carter said his father’s reading was limited to newspapers. Although Papa had only a seventh grade education, he was a voracious reader.I checked out two or three books a week for him from the Anniston public library. He read about people in world history who made a difference: U.S. presidents, Napoleon, Julius Caesar, Bismarck, Disraeli, the kings and queens of England and France.
Carter’s mother, Miz Lillian, was a nurse who was not especially interested in being a homemaker. My mother was an industrious farm wife. Her duties included cooking, canning, washing, ironing, tending a big garden Papa cultivated (her cellar was always filled with hundreds of jars of vegetables, fruit, jellies and jams), milking two Jersey cows, raising flocks of Plymouth Rock chickens, making clothes for seven children, and selling butter, eggs and vegetables to supplement our income from cotton.
The Carter yard was covered with white sand. Mamma planted flowers and shrubs all around our house. She dug up dogwood trees, sweet shrubs and violets in the woods and replanted them in the yard. I have some of them now in my own yard in Germantown [Tennessee].
Hog-killing time at the Carter farm was similar to the procedure at our farm. On the first cold winter day, Papa butchered a 200-pound Poland China hog.
Mamma and her helpers boiled the fat into lard and cracklings in a black iron pot. She canned jars of sausage, as we had no refrigeration. We feasted on pork chops, tenderloin, ribs, souse, chitlins and fresh brains with scrambled eggs.
We gave away a lot of the meat before it spoiled. Papa slow-cured the hams under a fire of hickory chips in the smokehouse.
Carter was paid 25 cents for a full day’s work on the farm. I didn’t receive a penny for farm chores. I felt lucky to get three meals a day and to sleep on a nice feather mattress at night.I earned money by raising squabs and guinea pigs for sale, and by writing school and community news and features for The Talladega Daily Home, Our Mountain Home (a weekly) and The Anniston Star.
Carter’s father raised watermelons for market. Papa raised them for family and friends. Every Sunday afternoon in mid-summer, he invited neighbors to a watermelon cutting under a big chinaberry tree in the backyard.
Like Papa, Carter’s father had a shop for sharpening plow points and other tools. I remember turning the hand crank on the forge blower fast enough to keep the charcoal ablaze.
Fireplaces heated our house, like the Carters’. Papa and my older brothers, Sam and Fred, spent many a winter day cutting wood with a crosscut saw. Chain saws were unheard of.
Carter’s father, like mine, opposed the New Deal and President Franklin Roosevelt. Papa thought it was “the craziest fool thing” he ever heard of to plant cotton and then have FDR order it plowed under.
But I especially appreciated Roosevelt for bringing electricity to our farm in 1937--and I have been an inflexible Democrat ever since.
President Carter’s book should be valuable for future historians. I wonder whether anyone has written a more authentic memoir about life on a Southern farm in the Great Depression. I also appreciate the book because it gave me an opportunity to revisit my past.
Veteran journalist, Hugh Frank Smith, a former columnist and copy editor for the old Memphis Press-Scimitar, lives on a farm in Germantown, Tennessee.
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From: Gwen Bass -- I so enjoyed going to this website and reading your article. I remember your telling me about your boyhood at Topside this summer, but it was a lot of fun to read more.
From: Brown Alan Flynn -- What a treat to get to read your Carter column again. (I was also honored that they kept my headline.) Keep 'em coming -- your columns grace our pages and are a delightful change of pace from the usual political spooge we run. (As an artist of the language, I thought you might enjoy that new word I just ran across -- look it up on Google!)
From: JSC -- I loved the article by Hugh Frank Smith comparing his life growing up in the South with former President Carter's book also about growing up in the South at about the same time. Hugh Frank Smith has a unigue writing style that reflects the richness of everyday life in America. As we read about life on the farm either in the present or in the time of his boyhood, usually something humorous, sometimes serious, and always reality is revealed in his observations. Few people can so successfully express the true value and depth of pleasures of ordinary life with family and friends.
From: Lillie Joe Woo -- I sincerely enjoyed reading his memoirs of the past. When I was young I remember the Hugh Frank Smith columns. Too bad there is no more Memphis Press-Scimitar newspaper. Thank you.
From: Rose S. Williams -- Mr. Smith, I very much enjoyed your article about your memories of your childhood in the South. Your memories and those of President Carter's mirror some of the stories told to me by my grandparents who were born in 1912 and 1916. I think what you say is true, these kinds of memoirs are needed for history's sake. I am a child of the South, born and raised in South Georgia in 1957 and dearly love knowing I have such wonderful memories of growing up in a rural area and learning the wonderful ways and customs of the southern tradition. That's one of the reasons I love reading and writing for DeepSouth USA. Thanks for sharing with us.
From: Sterling E. Ainsworth -- Uncle Buge, which is the principal name by which we all know you, I very much appreciated your comparative article. Being raised on a farm in Iowa has a few similarities, without the boll weevils. It was not until we moved from "the big farm" to our own did I know the advantages of indoor plumbing. My birthdate is June 30, 1932 ... the day the banks closed. Dad had to pay Dr. Dorsey (who delivered me in the bedroom of our home) with a live pig. Never did learn how the good doctor was able to convert it into pork chops.
Well, in spite of (or perhaps as a direct result of) the adversities of our sometimes humble youth, we all seem to have evolved into useful and productive citizens. I look back to the first 5 years of my scholastic education in a one-room country school and cherish the skills and friendships acquired. -- Sterling (aka Gene)
From: Randall Ainsworth
Being a brother of Sterling E. Ainsworth (see his earlier comments), I also know you well, Uncle Buge. Not only did I enjoy this article, but in your earlier newspaper days I always looked forward to being mailed your "homey" stories from the Memphis paper about the family farm, Sunny Crest, in Iowa. Like my brother, I was also delivered on Sunny Crest by Dr. Dorsey, but in May 1930. Of greater interest, we were both born in the same house and even in the same bedroom where our father was born in 1904. This would be very hard for most people to be able to say in today's world. I am not certain if Dr. Dorsey received a pig for my delivery, but possibly some chickens, and eggs instead, as money and food were really tight then. The doctor would find preparing a meal with these much easier than obtaining porkchops from a pig.
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