Kids Don't Have Backs: A Memoir of My Florida Panhandle Childhood

By Tom Pelham

Kids Don't Have Backs is a collection of stories by lawyer and former Secretary of the Florida Dept. of Community Affairs Tom Pelham, drawn from his memories of growing up in the late 1940's, 1950's, and early 1960's on a family farm in Holmes County, Florida, in the rural Florida Panhandle. It was a time of economic hardship and transformative change — electricity came to the area only in the mid 1950's. These stories bring to life, from a child's point of view, many aspects of this challenging and colorful time.

Beginning farm life in 1947 in a two-room shanty with no electric lights, indoor plumbing, or air conditioning, and no tractors or modern farm equipment or vehicles to assist in working the land, the author's family, through backbreaking physical labor, ingenuity, and sheer will, overcame tremendous adversity to eventually expand the farm to 400 acres and build and move into a proper house with modern conveniences. The hard work created a thirst for pastimes, and the introduction of vehicles and electricity brought greater access to the outside world via picture shows, the sports pages, radio, and TV, propelling the author and his siblings to explore the world beyond the farm.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098395445

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Copyright © 2021 by Tom Pelham. All rights reserved.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

ISBN: 978-1-09839-539-1 eBook 978-1-09839-544-5

Contents

1 Sharecropper Shanties

2 Putting Food On The Table

3 The Vegetable And Fruit Garden

4 Syrup Making Day

5 Poultry And Pork

6 The Smoke House/Hog Butchering Day

7 Dairy Treats

8 The Rolling Store

9 Fishing And Hunting

10 The Master Chef

11 Barnyard Follies

12 Milk Cow Blues

13 The Cotton Pickers

14 The Watermelon Kings

15 The Fall Harvest

16 Saturday Afternoons At The Picture Show

17 When The Well Went Dry

18 When The Lights Came On

19 Washed In The Blood

20 Christmas Time In The Country

21 Atlanta Journal-Constitution

22 Fences

23 The Sand Box

24 Branded

25 Aunt Mary’s Blouse

26 The Dinner Bell

27 Guitar Men

28 My Baseball Sanctuary

29 School Days

30 Senior Class Trip

31 When Dreams Collide

INTRODUCTION

I grew up on a family farm in Holmes County, Florida, in the rural Florida Panhandle. This book of stories is about my childhood on the farm in mid-twentieth century. The farm was owned and operated by my parents and grandparents during a time of transformative change and economic hardship. The stories in this book are my firsthand accounts — memoires — of what it was like to live and work on our Panhandle farm.

The Florida Panhandle, sometimes referred to as Northwest or West Florida, is a strip of land about 200 miles long and 50-100 miles wide and book-ended on the east by the city of Tallahassee and on the west by the city of Pensacola. Holmes County, Florida, is in the heart of the Panhandle, half-way between Tallahassee and Pensacola, approximately 100 miles from Holmes to Tallahassee and about 100 miles from Holmes to Pensacola.

The farm was located on Florida Highway 79 in a rural area known as the Holland Cross Roads farming community, just two miles south of the Alabama-Florida state line. Highway 79 was and still is a north-south highway that intersects east-west State Road 2 to form Holland Cross Roads. Highway 79 connects with Alabama State Road 167 at the Alabama boarder and runs south about 60 miles through the small Florida towns of Bonifay and Esto to State Road 30 in Panama City Beach, Florida. Highway 79 was the second paved road and the first north-south paved road built in Holmes County. The first paved road was U.S 90, an east-west road located just south of the Bonifay business district. It was not completed until 1929.

During the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, many residents of south Alabama and south Georgia migrated to the Florida Panhandle. Some of these early Panhandle pioneers were seeking more productive timber and farmlands. Others sought jobs generated by the construction of railway lines across Holmes County and other Panhandle counties. My grandfather, Thomas M. Blackburn (T.M.) and his wife (Retta), and his brother, Floyd G. Blackburn (Floyd) and his wife (Cine Mae) were among these early settlers. They each migrated with their families from Colquitt County, Georgia to Holmes County in or about 1918. They purchased land and started farms adjacent to each other in the Holland Cross Roads community. The two farms were separate, but their owners assisted each other.

When T.M and Retta and Floyd and Cine Mae moved to Holmes County, the area was very much a part of the Panhandle frontier. The county was sparsely populated and living conditions were primitive. There was no electricity, and therefore, no electric lights, indoor plumbing, running water, sanitary facilities, or air conditioning. Tractors and other modern farm equipment were not generally available or affordable, so farming was mostly conducted with mules and hard manual labor. Few people owned automobiles, and there were no paved roads in the county at that time. Most farm families lived off the land, growing enough food for themselves and their livestock, and raising cash crops to cover other needs.

T.M. and Retta had six children, all daughters, one of whom died at a very early age. Another daughter, Annie Louise, grew up and worked on her family’s farm with her parents and sisters. She attended and graduated from Holmes County High School in Bonifay. After graduation Annie Louise sought and obtained a job in the cotton mills of Columbus, Georgia. Roy Pelham lived and worked on his family’s farm in the Poplar Springs farming community in Holmes County until he dropped out of school in the tenth grade and obtained a job in the Columbus cotton mills.

Annie Louise and Roy met for the first time in Columbus and were married on October 3, 1942, in Phoenix City, Alabama. I was born on November 23, 1943, becoming Mama and Daddy’s first-born child. My brother Bruce was born two years after me, and he was followed two years later by our brother Stanley. Our brother Richard was born three years after Stanley, and our sister Sherri was born eight years after him, in 1958.

1947 was an important year in the lives of TM, Retta, and Annie Louise Pelham. Floyd died at the early age of 49 in 1947, and T.M. was in declining health. Their daughter and son-in-law (Zack and Mildred Outlaw) who had been their sharecroppers, decided to leave farming and move to central Florida to work in the citrus industry. As a result, T.M. and Retta needed help with their farm, and they invited Mama and Daddy to become sharecroppers with them. Mama and Daddy accepted the invitation and returned to Florida in 1947 with me in tow. I was 4 years old at the time. In subsequent years, Daddy and Mama acquired much of the farm through incremental purchases from T.M. and Retta and also expanded it by purchasing lands adjacent to the farm. At its zenith, the farm contained about 400 acres.

The farm was a year-round, labor intensive, physically demanding enterprise that over time involved the efforts of our entire family, including the children who frequently worked like adults. For 16 years, from 1947 to 1963, I lived and worked on the farm with my parents, younger brothers, and grandparents. I participated in all phases of the farm work and learned a lot about farming. Collectively, the chapters of this book present a picture of life on the farm as seen through my eyes. Importantly, this book is based on my personal knowledge, experience, and involvement with the farm during my sixteen years on the farm.

Why did I write this book? First, to pay tribute to my parents for their efforts to carve out a home for us in the Florida Panhandle; Second, to establish a written history for my younger siblings so they will have a better understanding of the roles the played in the farm; and Third, to create a resource for others who have an interest in the history of family farming and mid-century farm life in the Florida Panhandle.

1

Sharecropper Shanties

Mama’s and Daddy’s starter house on the Blackburn farm was a sharecropper shanty. When Daddy and Granddaddy negotiated their sharecropping arrangement in 1947, they agreed we could live in an old two-room wooden shanty built to house sharecroppers. The old ramshackle shanty was the only house on the Blackburn place that was vacant. Mildred and Zack Outlaw (Mama’s oldest sister and brother-in-law) were already living in the four-room tenant house across the road. Mama and Daddy could not afford to buy or rent anything else, so they didn’t have any choice but to move into the old two-room shanty.

I now refer to that shanty good naturedly as shanty number one. It was our home for two years, when I was between the ages of four and six.

Shanty number one sat on a small rise overlooking the intersection of Highway 79 and the dirt road running east and west through the farm. Nestled next to a live oak tree that partially shaded it from the summer sun, the shanty was raised two or three feet off the ground for ventilation. It contained two small rooms and a back porch with no roof. One room accommodated two beds, a wooden chest of drawers, and an old chifforobe with a full-length mirror.

The other room contained sparsely furnished kitchen, dining and sitting areas.I specifically recall a wood-fired, potbellied, four-burner stove that squatted by the fireplace at one end of the room, and a rough-hewn dining table with four ladder-backed chairs and a plain wooden dish cabinet that stood at the other end. Two wooden rocking chairs sat in front of the fireplace in the middle of the room. The only entrance to and exit from the shanty was a doorway from the kitchen area out onto the back porch.

Shanty number one only minimally protected us from the weather. The live oak tree shaded the house in the afternoon and kept the temperature down a few degrees in the summer, and Daddy covered cracks in the walls with cardboard to keep out the wind and cold in winter. But even with a fire burning in the fireplace, the shanty got cold in deep winter. When it rained, we placed pans around the floor to catch water leaking through cracks in the roof. Deep in my subconscious mind, I can still hear the drip, drip of raindrops in the pans. On a clear night, as I lay in bed, I could see stars and sometimes a slice of the moon through one large crack in the roof.

Life in shanty number one was just a notch or two above primitive outdoor camping. Electricity hadn’t yet reached our community. So at night light was provided by kerosene lamps or candles or the fireplace. There was no air conditioning, indoor plumbing, or running water. We brought water to the shanty in buckets or gallon jugs from an open well in the backyard. A slop jar was kept in the bedroom to avoid nocturnal trips to the wooden privy standing in the edge of the woods at the end of a well- beaten path leading from the porch. Every morning, one of us (usually me or my brothers), had the distasteful task of emptying the slop jar in the privy. To avoid the stench, I carried the slop jar with one hand and held my nose with the other.

Although we were on the bottom rung of the housing ladder, I thought shanty number one was a great place to play. I especially liked the back porch which became our playroom. A big live oak tree limb swept down over one corner of the porch, giving it a closed in, room-like feeling, and sometimes I climbed up or swung on the limb. Don’t let me catch you on that limb again, Daddy scolded whenever he caught us in the act. Sometimes my brother Bruce and I crawled or wiggled on our stomachs under the house, trying to catch the old tabby cat that took up at our place or terrorizing the chickens that roamed around and under the shanty. Boys, Daddy’s or Mama’s voice boomed out from time to time, get out from under the house before it caves in on you. The warning was not farfetched. Some areas of the floor sagged because the foundation blocks were deteriorating.

In our playroom, my brothers, cousins, and I played jacks or fiddle sticks or marbles for hours. Mama spread an old sheet over the porch floor to keep our toys from falling through the cracks.

Our favorite porch game was chicken fishing. We tied kernels of corn to the end of a string, dropped it through a crack in the porch floor, and then called the chickens. Here, chick, chick, chick, here. The chickens came running to take the bait, but at the last minute we snatched the corn away, leaving the befuddled fowl to wonder what had happened while we howled with laughter. Boys, what’s going on out there? Mama said, from inside the house. You better not be tormenting those hens. They’ll be so confused they won’t lay any more eggs.

One hot summer day, Daddy traded field work with several neighboring farmers, and he promised them dinner as part of the deal. So, Mama hustled and bustled around the kitchen, preparing and cooking the noon meal for the workers while simultaneously caring for our baby brother Stanley. Vegetables from our garden cooked on the stove as she sat at the dining table slicing tomatoes and cucumbers. The baby’s cradle was at her feet, and when he started to cry, Mama rocked the cradle with her foot and sang to keep him quiet.

While Mama worked, I chased Bruce around the kitchen, trying to lasso him with a piece of old rope. Boys, go play on the porch. I can’t cook dinner with you here under foot all morning and you’ll wake the baby with all that noise, Mama said.

Bruce and I moved out onto the porch, but we were soon back inside, tussling with each other, laughing and yelling, oblivious to Mama as she cooked.

Boys, did you hear me? I told you to play outside on the porch. Don’t let me have to tell you again.

But Mama was soon distracted again when the hungry baby started crying, so while she nursed the baby, Bruce and I slipped back into the kitchen. I tied Bruce to the corner dish cabinet that held most of our plates, bowls, and mason fruit jar glasses.