By JEFFERSON WEAVER

Seeing one of those priceless films by Mabel Prevatte reminded me again how much I miss the tobacco markets.

I worked on a tobacco farm only long enough to realize somebody could make a killing cutting grass while all the other kids were working in tobacco. I don’t have any direct family connection to the “Indian weed,” as it was called when the last of my ancestors farmed it 300 years ago.

Still, I have a strong sentimental attachment to the golden leaf, as I know many of you do. I recall very well the excitement of opening day of the markets in Dunn and later in Clinton.

The streets would often be swept early, around the time the Old Man went to the office, but by midmorning, the town was too crowded to tell the streets were clean.

The newspapers were extra heavy, and it sometimes took two trips to make the rounds to all my customers. Everybody, including our newspaper, counted on the tobacco farmer’s dollar.

The only thing in town that didn’t rest on the shoulders of tobacco season was the train that rolled through every afternoon, but even it had carried bales of the golden leaf in years past.
Opening day was when the auctioneer’s first chant rolled through the sweet-smelling aisles of the cavernous warehouses, and everyone’s future for the next year rested on what the buyers were willing to pay.

I am not sure how many times Papa and I went to opening day at the Bright Leaf and Border Belt warehouses. Our annual odyssey started when I was a child and couldn’t see over the piles, and didn’t end until the year he passed away.

It was always exciting, better even than when the circus came to town (which it did during opening week one year).

There would be politicians from near and far, even when it wasn’t an election year. Every kid there felt all puffed up since legislators and congressmen and senators knew their daddies and would talk while shaking hands and telling jokes.

The tobacco company reps handed out cigarettes and chewing tobacco, and more than one young’un picked up a pack of smokes for “daddy” or an “older brother” and disappeared behind the building.

More than one of those purloined smokes and chews caused a bad case of retching, too.
For the record, I was legal before I started smoking.

I have to wonder how many tractors, trucks, mobile homes, farm implements, cars, farms, shotguns, deer rifles, and church fellowship halls were bought and sold and built with “Carolina Gold”.

I know of one church fellowship hall that was built, a market at a time, over three years. Those Free Will Baptists served the best ham biscuits ever. Even if you weren’t flush with cash, you’d have been willing to pay $20 apiece for them, as I saw Agriculture Commissioner Jim Graham do once.

But the biscuits, the politicking, the fellowship, all faded into the background when the auctioneer called out the starting time.

The auctions would start with a prayer, then the buyers begin moving down the aisles, listening to the auctioneer’s cadence, a language far more confusing than any heard anywhere else in the world.

For a few minutes, everyone would hold their breath.

The only person in the room you could hear talking (and quietly, at that) was the fellow doing the live spot for the local radio station. The broadcaster I knew best grew up on a tobacco farm and understood the importance of the day.

The buzz of conversation would build back up if the prices were average or below. You could feed your family and keep your head above water on average prices.

If they were up, the voices got louder, and were interspersed with laughter and occasionally, sighs of relief.

New vehicles, college educations, being able to look the banker in the eye – these were the modern equivalent of new overalls for all the boys, some fabric for the girls and Mama, and the skinny credit paid off at a clapboard store.

But the market system is essentially gone now; I don’t know if there is a place in North Carolina where people’s fortunes will rise and fall with the chant of the auctioneer.

My old friend Robert Clark, the late mayor of Clarkton, took me for one of his famous rides in the last year of the auction. You see, the warehouses are almost ghostly now. Tobacco is now sold on contract, with no auction. It may be efficient and profitable, but it sure is uncivilized.

“We never thought this would go away,” he said as we drove through a dark, musty warehouse occupied by a dozen piles of carryover, a bored deer hound, and a thousand pigeons. “Part of Clarkton will go away when the market closes. Part of a lot of towns.”

And he was right.

Do I think tobacco use is good for people? Of course not, although I admit I love my cigarettes.

But while tobacco use isn’t good for us, tobacco was good to many of us for a long, long time. There is no way a widget factory can replace the community spirit that came to life at the magic words of the auctioneer’s chant.

— Jefferson Weaver is s staff writer with the New Reporter. He can be reached via e-mail at jeffweaver@newsreporter.biz, or by telephone at 642-4104, ext. 227.