Summer of Rats On Tobacco Hill Road

      This summer was great! I was looking forward to Tenth grade and the exposure to older girls.

That summer I went to stay with my Uncle VD and Aunt Trudie in North Carolina. I was going to help them work on the farm. I would be cropping tobacco and working the other crops. I was fourteen years old and weighed in at one hundred and fifty pounds, not one excess pound of fat on my body. My neck and traps were very big from all of the wrestling bridging exercises. My shoulders were well developed, as were my forearms for such a small boned guy. All that extra work I did for my forearms paid off by building up my gripping strength.

      While living on my uncle’s farm we would get up every day at four AM. We would eat a very big breakfast of eggs, fat back, collards, biscuits, corn pone, and grits. I hated to get up that early, but because of the food I somehow managed. With all this food, I felt as if I was in heaven.

After breakfast my uncle and I would empty the curing barns and take the tobacco to the pack house before the regular hired hands came to the farm. They normally showed up at seven AM.

      A few weeks before the cropping of the tobacco, my uncle and I were cleaning out the pack house. The pack house was over run with rats as large as squirrels. My uncle killed the litters and killed any rat that he could catch. We blocked and repaired all of the holes of entry into the pack house. My second cousin Dennis moved in with us, to help with the farm. Dennis was almost sixteen years old. We shared the middle bedroom. If we wanted to piss, we had to go outside in the middle of the night. If you had to pinch a loaf, you had to go across the farmland to hit the outhouse.

      By repairing the holes in the pack house we fixed one problem and created another. The rats had nowhere to go but the house. There was countless nights when Dennis and I would wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of a rat chewing on the inside of a drawer in a dresser. A few times I would wake up from a rat jumping in my bed, and a few times I woke up to the pain of a hungry rat chewing on one of my toes. My uncle kept a lot of watermelons in the middle bedroom because he feared that the farm hands would steal them or put him on the spot by asking him for a few melons.

      There was one night that Dennis and I woke up to chase a rat around the room in our tightee whitees.  Let me say there is nothing more disconcerting than a rat running up a naked leg clawing at your twin. My uncle’s terrier made short work of the rat.

      My uncle had Dennis and I working all of the crops, hoeing and weeding and harvesting. He had peanuts, soybeans, corn, melons, honeydew, potatoes, and his main cash crop, tobacco. He had given up cotton years previous. I would have loved to learn what picking cotton was all about. My relative’s personal garden allowed us to enjoy all of the finer vegetables. They even grew the hated scourge… okra. My motto concerning okra has been “if it makes your hands itch when you pick it, don’t put it in your mouth”.