Ch 6, No More Farming

Freeland remembers working on uncle Tom’s farm six days a week, twelve hours a day for the enormous sum of fifty cents a day!

 Uncle Tom with Papa

Thomas Jefferson Johnson (1877-1957) and William Henry Johnson (1876-1961)

After a hard day in the fields, when the boys returned home, they had to prepare meals and take care of all the other household chores. On a rotational basis, among the three of them, they did all the cooking, laundry, cleaning, and taking care of the animals. Biscuits and gravy was the main fare at the table, usually accompanied by some kind of meat. It might be some of the home canned beef, a freshly slaughtered pig, or one of the chickens they raised for eggs. What vegetables they had came directly from their own garden. The only things they purchased at this time were sugar, flour, dairy, and other staples.

On returning from the fields, one of the boys would go straight to the kitchen and mix up a tray of biscuits (a couple dozen) and a large pan of gravy, using bacon grease or whatever fats were left over from previous meals. Their dad, “Papa” stayed home during the day, and took care of preparing whatever meat was going to accompany the days meal. Of the other two boys, one would tend to the animals and the other to the garden before they would “wash up at the pump” and arrive just in time for dinner. “Papa” and the three boys had a routine, and except for the rotation of the players it was never broken.

Given the difficulties of the early years, and the added burden of the Depression and the “Dust Bowl,” it is not difficult to understand why farming was not his "cup of tea." The country’s financial depression had been going on for almost eight years, and things were not getting much better. Wages were low and opportunities were scarce. Freeland remembers that land was cheap, but nobody had any money. By the time they bought supplies for the week out of their combined income of nine dollars, there was barely enough left over to buy a “soda pop” and a small bottle of “hooch” to mix it with

 

William Freeland, 1936

Freeland only stayed another 18 months or so before he had had enough of farming! On the way, with his brothers Owen and Francis, to chop the "cockle burrs" out of the fence row, Freeland was mesmerized by the "lazy glimmers" emanating from the hot asphalt paving. He was overcome by a sudden urge to dissociate himself from farming and began to swing his hoe around in wider and wider circles until it had achieved the desired momentum whereupon he released it and let if fly. The hoe sailed to the top of a nearby Cottonwood tree where it probably remains to this day. While Owen and Francis stood there transfixed, Freeland informed them that "never again would he pick up a hoe." The next day he got his papers to enlist in the Army; it’s 1938.

 

Papa and William Freeland Johnson, 1938

Note:  We are leaving today to take William Freeland Johnson home to be buried next to his wife Anna Bell, in Atoka, Oklahoma on Monday.  Consequently, I will not be here to post the last few chapters of his story until next week.