Cotton Fields & Saturday's Pig

Here in eastern Tennessee, we don't see sights like this one. Eastern North Carolina is a different story. Almost any direction taken out of Ahoskie, cotton fields are a common sight. Despite the balls of white, the cotton plant isn't a pretty one--not to me anyway. And I can never see it without thinking of the horrible history of American slavery to which it's so closely linked. I've worked tobacco in my younger days (as little as I could get away with, which was, actually quite little). As I recall, tobacco requires one stoop for a good worker, one stoop when the plant stalk is cut near the base. The picture here shows how low to the ground the cotton plant grows. Imagine the extended and endless stooping required to pick a day's worth of plants clean of their yield. Imagine that from dawn till dusk during all those days when the fields were ready to harvest. Just imagine.

Not for vegetarians! This is Saturday's pig--one of them, at least--mentioned in an earlier posting. It's on the cooker, and the meat is being pulled or picked--I don't know which term is correct at this point. The meat goes into the silver tray seen here and then is drenched with the "sauce" in the pint jar.

The picker, the pig cooker extraordinaire, is Uncle Adolph--my uncle-in-law, actually--aka Uncle Sweet Pea. He's a great man, and knowing him has kept my family from missing my father-in-law (his brother) as much as we might have these past sixteen years.

One thing (in two parts) I've always been curious about regarding Adolph but never asked him. First, how did his parents, eastern North Carolina farm folk, come to name him "Adolph"? Second, since he was a boy in the late 1930s and early 1940s, I wonder if his name put him through difficult times with peers and community folk during WWII. I'll have to ask him someday.