When the drag in the fields is full and can hold no more of the emerald leaves, the mule or the tractor heads slowly back to the barn, over bumpy, rocky trails, narrow and gulley-bound, under trees, past stumps. Under the shelter, women mostly will stand around a pile of tobacco the men left earlier, picking up the leaves in bunches, seeing that the stems are aligned and handing them backwards to a woman who ties three or four around a thin wooden stick in a loop-de-loop, up and around, so that fifteen or twenty bunches hang on each side of the stick like huge green hands pointing down. The stick is held on what is called a tie-horse. The sound the twine makes is a whuurr-zzzipp, whuurr- zzzipp, whuurr-zzzipp. Their conversation is legend, these women, their heads beragged, their hands caked with thick tar and dirt, their brows covered with ever-flowing sweat. Here, beneath these tin-roofed shelters around the tobacco barns, all the world’s problems seem to have been solved, or at least pondered; here reputations have been made or destroyed, and old women impart good and practical wisdom to younger girls—those who listen. You’ve heard of these things, I’m sure? Didn’t you see it in a play, or read it in a book or . . .

You’ve heard how the men come back at the end of the day, when the fields have been attended for that week, and how they stand about the women as they finish tying the last drag-full of tobacco leaves and look at the piles of tobacco on sticks and dread the day’s ultimate task? Surely you have. For they form a chain of men and women from the high long pile that teeters slightly, and they pass the sticks off the pile, one by one, from one person to the next, through the door, inside, up, up into the belly of the barn, where they will hang, waiting for the fire that will cure them and make them valuable.