Full Text of the Excerpt

CHARLES THOMPSON:

Does bright grow better in North Carolina than anywhere else? Is that why there's so much here?

THOMAS HENDERSON:

Yeah. I think climate had a lot to do with it.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

Okay.

THOMAS HENDERSON:

And, of course, in eastern North Carolina at that time, farming was by mules and horses, mostly mules.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

Right.

THOMAS HENDERSON:

But as time went on tractors took over. And this flat land they could just-they could just plant anything. And the quality of the tobacco was good. Now Doris, my daughter, married a Taft. And his mother was a Winslow. Now Mr. Winslow was a big farmer. I mean a big farmer. He had-I don't know exactly. But I think he had about ten thousand acres of land. And he grew as much as eight hundred acres of tobacco.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

When was this? This was-.

THOMAS HENDERSON:

This was back before the war.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

Okay. World War II.

THOMAS HENDERSON:

Two, yeah. And he had-. And he also sold mules. He'd go to Missouri, and buy a trainload of mules and bring them back here. And he had had lots one across the road where he could put a hundred mules in it. And he sold them to farmers that farmers wanted them. But he was bound to have been a smart man to have had an operation of that kind and do it successfully. And he had-

CHARLES THOMPSON:

Now I was always under the impression that tobacco was grown on such small acreages because one family couldn't tend that much. But this one grower had eight hundred-

THOMAS HENDERSON:

Tenant system.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

And he had how many, a hundred tenants?

THOMAS HENDERSON:

He really had probably had hundreds of tenants. Now on that-there's a farm over across the river that Joe Taft's mother, my son-in-law's mother owns. And it's about four hundred acres in it. Well you could see there's some of them still left-cabins that these blacks lived in.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

Most of the tenants were black.

THOMAS HENDERSON:

Um-hmm. Most of them black. During the war that changed the blacks went up north where there was work.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

And factories.

THOMAS HENDERSON:

And factories. And so-

CHARLES THOMPSON:

And the whites became tenants?

THOMAS HENDERSON:

Huh?

CHARLES THOMPSON:

There became more white tenants during the war?

THOMAS HENDERSON:

No, they-. Well, I reckon so. But it became mechanized. They-. And when the war was over a lot of blacks came back and the jobs were gone. So they didn't-a lot of them came back but it could sustain only so many. So not as many blacks as there was.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

In agriculture at least.

THOMAS HENDERSON:

In agriculture. And of course, blacks became more diversified and they became able to do things that they hadn't done. And so they-it just eased itself out I think probably to the betterment of everybody concerned.

CHARLES THOMPSON:

Do you think that when blacks went off to work in factories in the north that their lives became better than they were as sharecroppers?

THOMAS HENDERSON:

Well they came-could do more than one thing and that's farm. They got to doing other things and then became more diversified.