tobacco

I'm about as against tobacco as a human can get.  But this story, from a darling ninety year old, almost made me soft on the stuff.

One of ten children, Anna was the dependable one.  Her daddy taught her to drive when she was eight years old.  He needed someone to bring him the truck in the middle of the day when he had worked his way to the far sides of the Florida citrus fields.  Anna flooded the engine twice and ran off the road into a ditch.  But daddy got a mule and pulled the truck out.  By the end of the day, eight year old Anna could drive.


The summer Anna turned thirteen, Granddaddy from Georgia asked for help.  He needed hands in his tobacco fields.  Anna and her two sisters took a bus to GA and began long days of stringin' tobacco in the hot and humid fields.


Granddaddy also got some help from a neighbor family with eleven children.  They sent two of their boys over.  On their first morning of work, the boys joined in to help the girls catch up for lunch.  One of the boys, Roy, was a fourteen year old with "the sweetest smile you ever saw on a handsome face."  Roy would hand Anna leaves of tobacco and she would hand them to her sister.  Every once in a while Anna would grab for some leaves and all she would get was Roy's empty hand.  He thought this was hilarious. 


And that was the summer.  By fall, Anna was back in Florida.  During the week she stayed with her two sisters in a boarding house and worked every day at a citrus plant.   On weekends she would drive the girls thirty miles to be home with their parents and to help on their strawberry farm.


Roy wrote letters.  He was working in a meat factory.  He hated it.  "If I knew I could get a job near you, I would be there in a second."  He told her.


Thirteen year old Anna tucked the letter in her pocket and went to find her boss.  "I know a man who needs a job.  We lost our driver and we need this man to drive all three of us to the city each week or all three of us girls will quit." Anna fibbed.  The boss didn't want to lose three hard workers.  He pondered the dilemma and then told her that he had a worker leaving on Friday.  "If your friend can be here by Monday, I will train him."


Then thirteen year old Anna talked to the lady who ran their boarding house.  "Do you have any available rooms?" she asked.  There were no rooms available, but Mrs. Waldon's house was recommended three blocks away.


By night fall Anna had secured a job and a room for Roy.  She mailed the news the next morning.


For the next twenty-five years Anna and Roy worked at the citrus plant all week, the strawberry farm on the weekends and the tobacco fields in the summers.   In 1938, after three years of dating, sixteen year old Anna put on her best gray dress and married Roy.  In a tiny chapel, surrounded by the tobacco fields they had met in.  And they lived happily ever after.  At least for the next 70 years.....