I Loved Working on the Farm, I Really Loved It, Says Ruth Rebecca Dewitt Middleton, 1989

From Elderly Black Farm Women…As Keepers of the Community and the Culture by Iris Carlton-LaNey, assistant professor of Social Work at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte when the book was published in 1989. The booklet has photos of the author and the ten North Carolina women from Warsaw and Magnolia, N.C. You can see the entire booklet online at https://library.digitalnc.org/cdm/pageflip/collection/booklets/id/25901/type/compoundobject/filename/print/page/download/start/9/pftype/pdf

Ruth Rebecca Dewitt Middleton, Interviewed when she was 76. Born April 3, 1912. Mrs. Middleton has four children. Three of the four died before their 50^th birthdays from heart attacks. She continues to care for those in need and currently provides the daily care for a frail, elderly, demented in-law.

I've worked on the farm all my life. That's the best way to say it 'cause when I was four and five, right on up, see we was pickin' strawberries and cotton and stuff like that tryin' to help Mama. When I was seven years old I was pickin' over a hundred pounds of cotton a day. I’ve picked as much as 320 pounds of cotton a day. God just give me that much gift and see we tried to do everything we could to help Mama because it was hard along them . . . My daddy died when I was three years old and the youngest was 1 year old.

I loved workin' on the farm. I really loved it. Now if the conditions hada been some different, I probably woulda went out and got me a job after I got grown and everything. But, like it was, Mama was still here and her health was failing and so I just planned to just stay here with her until she died ... so that's what I done.

Got married August, 1931. It was harder during the Depression ‘cause after the war, way back yonder, people was getting a dollar a day and then whenever Hoover got in there about '38 or something like that, it come back down. You didn't get but 40 and 50 cents a day. Was a-many-a-week worked 50 hours for $2. A-many. That's the way it was until Hoover got in. Hoover got in in '32, I believe it was. When he got in that's when it started pickin' up again. I don't mean Hoover! I mean Roosevelt. He shut down everything and started all over, and that's when times started to getting better. 'Cause they was something before then, I'm telling you. They had been bad before then, like when Mama was raising us up. She won't gettin' but 30 and 35 cents a day. When we come up, everything fell in line and we hope her all we could and she would try to farm. There was a man lived up here and he would do her plying cause she didn't have nobody to ply, and she'd do his chopping. After we got up, after Buddy (brother) got up big enough to ply and do, then he would do it. And around here we got an ole piece of mule and we tended a piece of land across the woods over there. I'd do the most of the plying ‘cause I loved to ply. She'd send me and my baby brother over there to pry and I'd tell him to stay and let me ply. I'd hitch up the mule and ply all day. I'd crop tobacco. I'd hang tobacco. I've done everything just about on the farm. I’ve cut ditch bank. Everything on the farm to be done except work with the tractor. I ain't never worked with the tractor, but I've done all the rest of it. Won't none of it too hard to me then. It won't. I loved to do it. We'd go in the woods and cut barn (tobacco barn) wood. Martha's husband would help stack it. And we'd get out there and cut fireplace wood, heater or whatever we had, stove wood, everything like that. And we was usta doin' that cause you see Mama had to work all the time and try to raise us and so, we had to get in the wood and stuff. And we'd do it. Won't like these old sorry chillun now ‘cause we didn't know nothing else to do and we wanted to help her. 'Cause in the wintertime she'd walk to Magnolia a-plenty-of-times by herself and work all day and walk back home. And so we'd have to have in all the wood and stuff. My oldest sister Mary, you know, she was the oldest, and she'd do the cooking and everything. The rest of us, we'd have to get in the water and wood and feed the hogs and feed the chickens and we'd do it. 'Cause she couldn't do it. It would be night when she got home and she'd have to leave before day.

She was working to the bulb house in the wintertime and then in the summer she worked on the farm. At the bulb house they cleaned cannas and caladiums. You see they growed them in the field and then they house them in the fall just like you do other fall crops. . . and then you set in there in the wintertime and cut the roots off and clean um up and then they box them and sell them. I worked there a-many a-days. I’ve walked from right here a-many-a-days. . . We'd work until around February cause we didn't work in the fields. The ones that worked in the field, why they'd work right on. . . but we'd always stop cause it was getting time for us to start pickin' tobacco beds and stuff like that. We wouldn't work no more 'til the next fall.

I'd like to be remembered for the life I lived and the service I give, 'cause I always helped sick peoples in any way I could. Mama always done that and right on up to now, I think that would be ‘bout the proudest of myself. . .in caring for other people.