During all this summer of art work at Beulah Land, the other work, the reason for the plantation’s being, maintained its pace. The sawmill was all but shut down as every effort and all hands were put to harvesting the corn and cotton crops. The gin in Highboro was working seventeen hours a day, and the line of wagons waiting with cotton to be ginned was constant night and day. Leon spent most of his time at the gin and warehouses, and often slept in his office in a small hut just by the gin. He was always saying he must have a proper office and never doing anything about it.

The weather stayed hot and clear, and the rhythm of the days was work—work that made men and women weary, but there was so much to be done there was little time to rest and none to complain. The work itself became a kind of necessary fever that fed on itself. Even the animals caught the prevailing mood. Mules left off their quirkiness and pulled and hauled when they were told to. The food animals—cattle, hogs, fowl—ate until they could eat no more, as if they embraced their destiny of growing fat to feed the men and women who fed and tended them. They ate and stood stupidly in the shade, if they could find any, and waited.

There was no time for fishing, but curiously, there were games, mostly by the children to counterpoint the feverish work of parents, but sometimes the adults joined briefly in games too, or someone suddenly appeared with watermelons that had been cooled all day in a well, and someone else picked up a fiddle or a banjo, and some of the furious, self-propagating energy of the time was used in dancing and clapping hands and laughing—by people who a moment before would have sworn they hadn’t enough energy left to remove their clothes and wash their feet and drop into bed until four o’clock the next morning.

The kitchens were busy too, cooking to feed the field hands. Women who usually cooked for their men who worked in the fields now worked in the fields alongside them with only a few added to the regular kitchen staff of the big house to cook for all. No sooner was the breakfast of fried fatback, flour hoecake and syrup eaten than the cooks set to work to provide the midday meal. Huge pots of fresh peas were set to boil with generous hunks of fat-back, to be served later with rice and hoe cakes of corn bread, made of nothing but corn meal, water, and salt and fried thin and crisp, and pot liquor to soak the rice, and as much chopped onion as anybody wanted for seasoning.