Sharecroppers Daughter

By Sunnie Day

This book is a story about growing up on a farm very poor and sometimes going to bed hungry. It is also about how to work hard and try to make something of yourself without resorting to a life of crime. I believe you will find it entertaining and yet a serious account of what to do and what not to do. You will find incidents throughout that may

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paper Leaf Agency
• Release date: Apr 22, 2024
• ISBN: 9781638129332

Sunnie Day

I am a retired nurse who now enjoys writing and sharing stories. I am the mother of four grown children and the grandmother of four beautiful grandchildren with one on the way. I live in the great state of Texas and come from an all military family. I myself was in the Army years ago. I am so proud of our military and to have served. I have always loved to write but it has been many years since my pen has taken flight.I love to take an ordinary situation and turn it into a humorous piece. Many of the short articles have been taken from my own life. My family hides now when I say, "Oh I must write about that!" Where is their sense of humor? My poor husband falls victim most of the time. I also have found that after all these years I do still have an imagination, creating fictional stories that take the reader to places unknown. You may find me on Sunnies Pen to Page on Wordpress, where I introduce new writers and their work. My site, Graceful Intentions. I hope you will stop by and have look. My work is also found on Amazon, Yahoo Contributor, and Authors Den as well. Thank you for stopping by, Sunnie

Book preview

Chapter 1

The first thing I should do is explain what a sharecropper does. They get an upfront money man to provide funds for seeds, fertilizer, and anything else required and agree to split the money or crop according to whatever percentage and then the farmer plants, takes care of, and harvests the crop and then either sells it and splits the money according to the agreement or gives the money man his percentage of the crop itself. In other words, the farmer does all the manual labor and the other person provides the upfront money. Is it a profitable exchange? Not always, but it helps to get a crop in the ground and helps some at harvest time.

Being a sharecropper’s daughter was not always the easiest thing to be. We were always poor but there was always love enough to go around. We didn’t always have enough to eat, but we managed to survive. We ate squirrel, rabbits, birds, fish, chicken, and deer. Even when it was not hunting season, my dad and brothers would go out hunting and bring home whatever they managed to bag. We couldn’t always eat chicken as we needed them for eggs. Sometimes Daddy would get lucky and trade for a calf we could raise and eventually butcher and sometimes we would be able to get a pig. Man, it really smelled when they butchered the pigs. No part of it was ever wasted. Don’t ask me what they did with all of it; I am not sure I want to remember. The beef was usually taken to a place in town to butcher. The deer was taken there also if it was hunting season, if not Daddy and my brother would do it themselves. During that time, if any strangers came to the house we were careful to make sure they had no idea anyone had been deer hunting.

Momma always grew a big garden and canned a lot of vegetables and also she canned what we didn’t eat or keep frozen at a locker place in town of the meat. We all had to help in the garden with the weeds and plowing and planting and gathering of the vegetables. The potatoes were the dirtiest job digging them out when they were new potatoes.

Now that you have a little background, I will try to take this a step farther. One of the earliest memories I have is when we lived in an old house that is now on the game reserve. We called it the ranch place. I have no idea why. This will sound like some made up story, but I swear it’s the truth. When we lived there all the other kids were grown and were gone from home except Emma, Victoria, Luke, and myself as far as I know. I only remember them coming for Christmas about once a year. Occasionally they would come in the summer, but not very often.

We had not toilet or bathroom, not even an outhouse. We had to go to the bathroom behind a tree or in the bushes and you always had to watch where you walked in case someone had been there before you. There was also not toilet paper so you used whatever was at hand. Sometimes it was newspaper, an old catalog, a leaf, and I swear a corncob (they were rough, but you used what you had). My mother cooked meals on a wood stove and of course there was no refrigerator as we had no electric so they got block ice from the ice house and we had an old model non-electric refrigerator that we kept it in. Sometimes we put our milk in a jar and hung it down in the well to keep it cool. Our meat we either ate immediately or salted it down or momma canned it to keep it from ruining. As I said before we always had a garden for vegetables and we gathered polk salad sometimes also. We gathered berries and momma canned them and we ate them for desert. If times were good, we got to bake a cake or pie.

The ranch place wasn’t as fancy as it sounds. In fact, the roof leaked badly so we had to put buckets around to keep it from getting the floors wet. Of course the walls had cracks in them so we stuffed any kind of paper or rags in them we could find to keep out the cold in the winter. The inside had newspapers or anything else up on them. That is how I learned to read so early, was reading the walls at home. In the winter it was so cold that we would sleep on featherbeds that momma made so we would sink down in them and they would help keep us warm and then we would pile on really heavy quilts that momma and us girls had made. They weren’t anything like the quilts of today. Sometimes the covers were so heavy you couldn’t turn over, but you didn’t care cause it was warmer that way. Occasionally if it snowed, you would sometimes wake up with snow on your bedcovers. There would be a new leak we didn’t know about, so then we would have to move our beds around. It had an old dipping vat that was used on the cattle drives from Texas to Kansas that was used to dip the cattle for any ticks or flies or things like that. Us kids used to go there and play all the time since it was never used while we lived there.

I remember one Thanksgiving when we didn’t have much and so my brother happened to kill an opossum and that’s what we had for Thanksgiving dinner. Boy, are they greasy. For dessert we had canned blackberries. One of my brothers-in-law that we didn’t like went to get a bowl out of the cabinet instead of just using his plate like the rest of us. My mother used to put things in the bowls because we never used them because they were the closest thing to china she ever had. He never looked to see if anything was in there so when he took his first spoonful, up came some leather shoe strings and he had the oddest look on his face and said what’s this? Of course we all started to laugh as we knew what he had hooked on his spoon. Momma said shoe strings and you need to start looking where you’re putting your food.

During that time, I know daddy used to make whiskey because there was always an old aluminum washtub under the kitchen table with mash in it covered with cloth. When someone we didn’t know came up, we were always careful to keep them out of the house so they couldn’t smell the mash. Also, we were on welfare, but it wasn’t enough to feed us all so daddy raised cows and pigs and we hid them in a pasture in the woods so the welfare people wouldn’t be able to find them. We moved them sometimes so in case anyone turned us in, they wouldn’t be there when they went back. There was only a few of us kids at home then, Emma, Luke, Victoria, and myself. Emma helped in the house with momma and Luke helped daddy and Victoria and I played and did what we could. Everyone went to school then except me, and I was too young. My sister Victoria used to bring me a treat home from school every day. Sometimes it was just a half of a jelly sandwich squished in her pocket but she felt sorry for me because I wanted to go with her so bad.

It was a little country school, so the teacher would sometimes let me visit school and play in the back if I was good. When I turned five she finally talked my momma into letting me start in the first grade. She said Sunnie has visited school so much that she already knows more than some of the first graders I have, so we might as well let her start. Mom finally agreed so I started school when I was five in the first grade and not kindergarten at a rural school. The teacher always worried that somehow it would cause me problems to start that early, but she was at my graduation and was so proud because I carried a B average all the way through high school.

While we were living at the ranch place we hardly ever had shoes so we were used to running around barefoot. All except for my sister Emma, so we would take her shoes and then run all the way around the house in the summer time calling her names and taunting her because we knew she wouldn’t come out and chase us without shoes. It would hurt her feet. She was our babysitter and we tortured her endlessly. We made a lot of mud pies and I ate them. Luke and Victoria would convince me they were good, and because I trusted them both with my life, I gave it a shot. I really never did get to like them however.

We had some cousins come visit us once. I was probably about five years old. My boy cousin who wasn’t much older than I said to me Let’s go down to the barn and I will show you something special. He knew it wasn’t a good thing or he never would have said to go to the barn. When we arrived at the barn he unzipped his pants and showed me his penis. About the time I was really getting interested in this new thing, my mother found us. She beat me black and blue and told me never to do that again. For a long time I didn’t know whether she meant not to go to the barn or not to go to the barn with a boy or what. She never explained. I wouldn’t go to the barn for a long time until one of my sisters explained why she said that. I was way too young to understand.

During the winter when it snowed, we would look for the cleanest snow and make snow ice cream. You had to get as much as you could cause it took a lot of snow to make a small amount of ice cream. That was a really good treat. We continued to do that as long as we lived in the country. We didn’t do so as much when we moved to the city because the snow was not as clean.

Chapter 2

We moved from there and went to live where we called it the Fouch place. We didn’t own it of course. Not sure if we rented or it was part of the sharecrop agreement. It was a white two story house nestled at the bottom of a small hill. It had a nice porch where we kids could play. The top floor had two bedrooms. Victoria, Emma, and I shared one room and my brother Luke had the other room. Our room had no heat