Golden Leaf

I am a product of eastern North Carolina. According to statistics, if North Carolina, from Hwy 95 to the Atlantic Ocean, were a state, it would be the poorest state in the union. I have traveled the world (passport stamped in 157 countries), I have seen the poverty of third world nations, peasants working in the rice fields and in the agriculture areas of Asia and Africa. In all these places, poverty of the cruelest kind, but I have never witnessed as much poverty as I witnessed while growing up in eastern North Carolina.

Most of this poverty was due to the growing of green tobacco. The marketing of that tobacco, the witnessing of seeing those who grew the tobacco, did the back-breaking, unending work, taken advantage of by the landowners, the tobacco auction warehouseman, the cigarette manufacturers who purchased the product. In the winter, the farmer began preparing his plant beds, the areas where he put the seed for the tobacco plants. Because of insect delight in tobacco products (even insects, worms of every type are addicted to tobacco), the tobacco beds were covered with plastic and poison gas used to kill infestation. From the time the tobacco seed germinated and the plant began to grow, ready for transplant in the fields, poison was used in an effort to raise plants for market. Over and over, the stomata, gummed plants were poisoned in the continued fight with nature against insects. After the plant matured, a leaf structure of about six feet in height, the leaves ripened from the bottom towards the top. Each week, young men and women (tobacco croppers), would go down the rows of the tobacco fields taking the ripened leaves to an area where, when I was young, the leaves were attached to sticks which were in-turn hung into curing barns. My tobacco growing cousins tell me that the procedure has changed completely in recent years. Anyways, then or now, the leaves, with their residue of poison, were subject to tremendous heat in curing facilities.

When I was young, the leaves were graded at home before market and carefully prepared for the auction floor where, at the mercy of the buyers, the farmer obtained whatever price he could get for his carefully prepared, months long growing of this cash crop from which he earned his living, supported his family, supported his church and kept the economic welfare of eastern North Carolina going. If lucky, if blessed by good weather (as with any plant, the farmer had to depend on soil, rain, sun and hopefully few storms such as wind and hail) the tenant farmer, and most, especially black, were tenant farmers, gave from one half to one third of his earnings to the landlord. Usually large farms, handed down from generation to generation by families who had gained control of the land early in the country's founding. Most of the landlords lived in the towns and cities where they enjoyed the life of the “good ol' boy”, caring little, if at all, for the poverty existing on the very land that they owned. These “good ol' boys” were not rich Republicans (as the media would have you believe) but rather racist, calculating conservative democrats, part of the one time solid south.

The sons and daughters of these landowners, the warehousemen, the proprietors of the country stores where the peasants were indebted for their livelihood, were the only ones in the eastern part of the state allowed within sight of a tax-supported college or university. I will despise until my last breath the hedonistic commercial owners, the hypocritical preachers, the newspaper editors, the radio commentators, who just turned a blind eye to the disparity, the absolute tyranny, toward the good people who did the best they could with what was provided to them. Once in a while, as was the case with this writer, responsible, respected educators would recognize the aptitude and the work ethic of some students and some families and help them obtain an education and get ahead. But, believe me, those from the hinterlands, the pocosins/swamps of this state, were never accepted by the “blue blood”, “big I little you” toxic-minded, incest-infected hierarchy families who felt they had some entitlement from Heaven to rule their fellow man simply because large parcels of land had been inherited or their family was fortunate enough to have an Oldsmobile franchise.

To this day, and I hate to wish anyone his roasting in Hell, I remember as a young, working university student selling books door-to-door all summer among these beleaguered people who loved me as much as I loved them. Having enough money to pay my tuition, I went to the Chevrolet dealer, where my family had done business for many years and some of my relatives were actually related to them (Blalock Chevrolet, Fremont, NC). At that time a 1952 Chevrolet cost $2,000 (this was about the time of my involvement in the Korean War) and I paid cash for the car. The owner asked my father, who had come to inspect the car, “where did this “boy” get this money?”. My father said, “he worked for it”. You see, the children of poor people were not supposed to gain anything from hard work, they were supposed to be enslaved, as had been their parents and grandparents, to the whims and welts, as white and black slaves of eastern North Carolina.

In spite of these people, the incestuous, moronic placards of the Old South bigotry, many have survived and moved on to demonstrate, to the state and to the world, that the lowly can rise, that our God of justice is still the supreme judicial authority. You are not stuck where you start. Hell would have to be enlarged to accommodate the landlords, the tobacco warehousemen, the cigarette manufacturers, the political representatives who loved these enslaved people just enough to get their votes and to use them for their greed. The public relations protagonists have run overtime in building up the Dukes and the Reynolds...just two of the families who made fortunes beyond belief from the sweat of their fellow man and who can now clamor for attention with their ill-gained gifts to universities, hospitals and, God help us, puny grants supposedly for the good of mankind.

Because China (62% of Chinese smoke) and other countries were growing so much tobacco, producing cigarettes so cheaply, a great mental barrage of concern encircled the halls of government and, supposedly, tobacco farmers were paid off not to grow the weed. A “good ol' boy” group of corrupt politicians (Jim Hunt, Bill Friday, God help us Holding, Barber, Chambers, Davenport, Worley, Penny, etc.), old time corrupt democrats who have run and ruined this state their entire lives, have taken these funds and used them for their own pet projects. One of the most interesting Congressional hearings I ever observed, John McCain was chairman, he mocked governor Jim Hunt, almost crying, as he told the need for educating the people of NC against smoking (500,000 people die in this country each year from smoking). Hunt, Friday, these other hypocrites, could care less about our children smoking. I believe more women smoke today than ever before, they say it is a sign of their liberation.

The money of the Golden LEAF Foundation is used, and everyone in the Legislature knows this, for the benefit of the “good ol' boys”, their political allies and their personal aspirations and comfort. Those who have defended the country, the returning warriors (all of whom live on food stamps), the black and white descendants of the tenant farmers and the cotton mill workers of this state, who lived in poverty, whose only friend, as Senator Herman Talmadge (another corrupt democrat) has said “is and was Jesus Christ”, are still waiting for the largess of government and the justice of God to be visited on those who besmirch the very idea of liberty.