The hardest job I’ve ever had was on my grandfather’s tobacco farm when I was 12 years old. My grandparents were sharecroppers in Greenville, North Carolina, the largest tobacco-producing county in the world — or at least that’s what they said at the time. They lived in a typical white, wooden farmhouse with a large front porch.

Although it was a fairly large farm, it was inside the city limits on a busy five-lane road. Down the dirt path that ran beside the house and through the middle of the rows of barns were three shacks where the “colored folks” lived, next to the pigsty. A water pump there spilled into a wooden trough that guided the water into the pigsty for drinking and wallowing.  Every year when we arrived we would run down there immediately and pump the handle until the water ran cold, catching it in our hands before it hit the trough.  It was the best water I’ve ever had, with a strong mineral taste.

The unpainted shacks didn’t have running water or electricity. They tilted to the right; it seemed one strong wind could be the end. The families who lived there worked on the farm some. The young lady was beautiful and her son, Earl, was perhaps the happiest child I’d ever seen. All day long he ran up and down the dirt path pushing the narrow metal rim of a tire with a tobacco stick, smiling.

Both my mother’s and father’s families were tobacco farmers, but I worked for my mother’s family. We had moved from Greenville years earlier and were living in Nashville, Tennessee where my father was a preacher. In the summers we would go see our grandparents, and one summer my parents just left me there. Came back about eight weeks later to pick me up. So I had my first summer job and it was the hardest work you can imagine.

My cousin, Tammy, and I split the job of being a “hander” during the “putting in” season.  We worked from 6 a.m. - 4 p.m., Monday through Friday, for half rate, which means we made $25 per week each. My grandfather paid everyone in cash from a metal box under the tree in the side yard on Fridays. I think there was a little resentment about our rate. I’m not sure that our combined efforts equaled that of one full-time, professional hander. Tammy and I sang at the top of our lungs while we worked. Sometimes the older black ladies would join in, spitting tobacco between verses.

Every morning before the sun came up my grandfather would drive his army green Ford truck into town to pick up the help. Sometimes I would go with him. He’d drive down a couple streets, and black people would amble out of their houses and climb in the back of the truck and sit there with me. There weren’t any rules about that in those days. It was legal to ride in the open back of a Ford truck.

Through the years Grandpa replaced his truck for newer models but it was always a Ford and always the same color. They were used; even the new ones were already old when they became his. During the last years of his life, when he no longer lived on the farm, he would touch up the paint himself with a four-inch paintbrush. He was proud of that.

The first challenge each day was just getting to the barn. We had to walk from the house down the dirt path, but first we had to pass the chicken coop. Henry lived there, lying in wait for us. He was a mean rooster. Henry chased me to the barn every day that summer, pecking at my heels and jumping on my back as I ran screaming. Henry was so mean that years later, when Granny rang his neck and turned him into dinner, she said his meat was too tough to eat.

Our day started at 6:00 a.m., which is early for a 12-year-old. The men would go out into the field earlier each day with “trucks,” which were simply carts with burlap sides pulled by mules. The men, whose job title was “stripper,” would walk, fully clothed, beside the truck stripping tobacco leaves off stalks from the bottom up and laying them, stem side out, in the truck in rows. North Carolina is known for the flue-cured tobacco farming method, where tobacco leaves are stripped from the stalk and tied onto tobacco sticks, then transferred to a curing barn. Those barns have flues attached to fire fed boxes on the outside which heat the barn slowly curing the leaves without exposing them to smoke.  Each field was worked several times during the season as the leaves matured from the bottom up. Once the trucks were full, the mule would pull them under a shed attached to a barn and there we would be, waiting to do our jobs.

Early in the morning the tobacco plants are still wet with dew, so the first thing we did after outrunning Henry was tie a big plastic sheet around ourselves with a length of rope. We’d wear that sheet until the sun had burned the dew off the plants, by which time our hands and forearms, left unprotected, were completely covered with gunk.

In the shed there were two positions: the “handers” and the “loopers.” The loopers were older black women who tied bunches of tobacco leaves to the tobacco stick, a square wooden stick about 48” long set up on saw horses on each side of the truck. The handers lined up, three to a side, between the truck and the tobacco stick and passed handfuls of tobacco to the loopers all day long. We’d sweep tobacco behind us, first right then left, to the impatient hand of the looper who would deftly work her way up and down the stick, looping twine around leaves, until it was full of tobacco bunches tied snugly together. Working at lightening speed, she would snap the string, breaking it with her weathered hands, a move that would slice my tender skin open, then we’d take the full stick to a hanging area.

There was skill to both jobs, but for all the world I wanted to learn to be a looper. The hander was the entry-level position. The looper was in charge. As a hander, you had to learn how much to hand each time and the right pace of handing so that the looper never had to wait on you. There was a rhythm to it. The looper’s hands were constantly flying, managing the twine and three handers. If you fell out of step, the looper would bark at you.  If she wasn’t happy, she let you know it with a quick snatch of your bunch of leaves. In the late afternoons I would gather up the few leaves that had fallen to the ground and try to teach myself to tie. I was all thumbs and slow as molasses as I tried first to secure the string to the stick, then to loop, tighten and flip the bunch of tobacco securely over one side of the stick and then the other. There weren’t many leaves to work with but the few I managed to tie would droop and then drop off the stick within minutes. I practiced, through much pain, trying to learn to break the string with a snap of my wrist and the pressure of the pinky side of my soft hands. I never succeeded.

Our goal was to be finished with each truck just before the next truck was brought in, so that everyone could work with maximum efficiency. It was a transgression to make the strippers wait for you. If a man had to step in and pick up the pace of the handers, it was a black mark on you.

Efficiency was important because everyone’s goal was to get finished as quickly as possible. They wanted to go home, and no wonder. North Carolina summers are hot and humid, and the work was hard. We were on our feet all day long handling dirty, wet tobacco leaves for little pay. Grandpa had big barns and it took all day to put in one barn. There was no tolerance for anybody who slowed down the progress, especially a pair of 12-year-old white girls who sang at the top of their lungs.

The strippers had a way of showing their disapproval. Tammy and I approached every day with fear and dread, first of Henry, then of the acidic taste of dew from a tobacco leaf, which occasionally splashed into our mouths, or the sting of a drop that landed in our eyes. But we were most fearful of the enormous, lime green, red-horned tobacco worms we were sure to find a hair’s width from our small hands. Tobacco worms were not good for the tobacco plant, or for my grandfather’s reputation. They chewed holes in the tobacco leaves, which were unsightly to a tobacco farmer. Grandpa didn’t want ugly tobacco leaves going to the sale. The strippers were supposed to pick them off in the field and destroy them, but sometimes they would just leave them as a present for us and hang around long enough to hear our screams.

The red-horned tobacco worm was the bane of the tobacco farmer’s existence and the bane of mine. It was impossible to kill. I would not touch one but if someone else would throw it on the ground, I’d do anything to try to kill it. Nothing worked. Even if you ran over it with a tractor, its pulpy body just got bigger and longer. There is no end to how long a tobacco worm can stretch. To this day a good, long thought of a tobacco worm can give me nightmares for weeks.

At about 9:30 a.m. my grandmother would bring down soft drinks and snacks for the workers to purchase. Nehi Grape. RC Cola. Moon Pies. We broke for lunch too, which was usually provided for the group by my grandmother, and then quickly again at around 2:00 before finishing up for the day.

The men came in from the field at 4:00 p.m. and we made a human chain handing up sticks of tobacco to the top of the barn, where they would cure for about a week. Men climbed the rafters of these five-story barns, straddling the three-foot width easily, swinging down to the next level as each row filled up. We handed sticks end over end, two at a time, sometimes singing to end the day. A church song. A black spiritual. Swing low, sweet chariot...

And then they would go home in the same truck Grandpa had picked them up in, and Tammy and I would head to the screened porch to get the tobacco gunk off our arms. My grandmother made lye soap, which would take my skin off now but could barely cut through the gum from the day.

I never realized my dream of becoming a looper. In fact, not long after my summer on the job, Grandpa, who had struggled with his health since being dragged by a mule as a young farmer, retired from farming. He died a few years later at the young age of 68. Sixty-eight years as a banker is one thing. Sixty-eight years as a farmer is something else.

Despite the long days, I didn’t get rich that summer either. After we’d cleaned up from the day’s work, Tammy and I walked down the side of the five-lane highway, past the tobacco fields to the bowling alley. We’d pick up soda bottles on the way there and take them to the gas station for the five-cent refund that helped fund our hobby, no matter how dirty they were. The bowling alley sat on a perfectly square half acre lot where a crop used to be. I don’t know why they chose that particular spot, but it was as if it had grown there. We bowled all summer long and we got quite good, progressing from the lightweight 8 lb. balls to a hefty 12-pounder, which we learned would knock down more pins. We got to know the staff but not many other bowlers. Most of the leaguers didn’t show up at 4:30 in the afternoon. We had the place to ourselves. We’d play records on the jukebox, drink Pepsi and eat hot dogs and popcorn. Though our games improved through the season I’ll never know how close to a 300 game I got. We found out at the end of summer that’d we’d been keeping score all wrong.

When our arms were too tired to throw a 12-pound bowling ball, we’d head the other direction to Clarks and buy Barbie dolls and nail polish. Granny, disgusted with our spending sprees, put her hands on her hips one day and said, “You can spend that money like it grows on trees now, but one day you’ll find out it doesn’t!”

But I already knew money didn’t grow on trees. I’d worked hard for every penny. I have ever since.

I’ve worked as the founder and owner of a digital agency for 15 years, but my farmer genes are strong. Farms don’t grow themselves; neither do digital agencies. They are grown by men and women with a strong sense of personal responsibility. When the hail storm rips your tobacco fields to shreds, you still have to harvest what’s left and clean up the mess. You go out there at the first break in the storm and get back to it.

Tobacco farming is the nastiest job on earth, but I did it. It didn’t occur to me until I was grown that most parents don’t leave their 12-year-old on a farm 600 miles away and expect her to work all summer long. But I thought it was normal, because that’s what they told me to do.  

I worked every day. Still do. From sun up ‘til sundown. Just like a farmer.