You remember, though perhaps you don’t, that once upon a time men harvested tobacco by hand. There was a time when folk were bound together in a community, as one, and helped one person this day and that day another, and another the next, to see that everyone got his tobacco crop in the barn each week, and that it was fired and cured and taken to a packhouse to be graded and eventually sent to market. But this was once upon a time.

Once, in early spring, men planted tobacco beds, strowing seeds over the ground, covering them with burlap (or later, plastic), and waiting about a month for them to germinate and grow into small tobacco plants. Then they would pull the healthiest plants up, put them into tins with water, and walk the fields, poking them in the cultivated earth in straight rows, putting a little water to them, coming to the end of a row and looking back on their work, their backs weary, their legs tired. ls it possible you have heard of these things? They seem so long ago. But it was only yesterday.

Months later, by late June, July, or August at the latest, those same plants would be small trees, taller than a man, with leaves the size of large oars, a dusty bright green. Men would come along those rows each week and crop off the bottom-most leaves, tucking them under their arms until they could carry no more, then dumping the leaves in the bed of what they called a drag, pulled once by a mule—later by a tractor—that rode along with them. These men had been working from early in the dim hours of the morning, for they had risen at four o’clock to take the dried leaves from the barn. They had clambered up tier poles—sheer rafters ten rungs high, all the way up in the barn—on which the tobacco hung for a week on sticks. Fires, once fueled by wood, later by propane gas, burned underneath for weeks, slowly turning the hearty green leaves a mellow brown. Those pungent leaves were later taken to the storehouses you’ve heard about, where old women sat on summer evenings sorting through the tobacco, picking out the large ones, the dark ones, the pretty ones, the ruined ones, the trash. You’re familiar with this, aren’t you? Someone told you, once . . .