Tobacco Road - Erskine Caldwell [45]
Jeeter swore that he would never again have anything to do with the rich people in Augusta. They had hounded him nearly every day, trying to tell him how he should cultivate the cotton, and in the end they came out and took it all away from him, leaving him three dollars in debt. He had done all the work, furnished the mule and the land, and yet the loan company had taken all the money the cotton brought, and made him lose three dollars. He told everybody he saw after that, that God was not working in a deal such as that one was. He told the men who represented the finance company the same thing, too.
“You rich folks in Augusta is just bleeding us poor people to death. You don’t work none, but you get all the money us farmers make. Here I is working all the year myself, Dude plowing, and Ada and Ellie May helping to chop the cotton in summer and pick it in the fall, and what do I get out of it? Not a durn thing, except a debt of three dollars. It ain’t right, I tell you. God ain’t working on your side. He won’t stand for such cheating much longer, neither. He ain’t so liking of you rich people as you think He is. God, He likes the poor.”
The men collecting for the loan company listened to Jeeter talk, and when he had finished, they laughed at him and got in their new automobile and drove back to Augusta.
That was one reason why Jeeter was not certain he could raise a crop that year. But he thought now that if he could get the seed and guano on credit from a man in Fuller, he would not be robbed. The people in Fuller were farmers, just as he was, or as he tried to be, and he did not believe they would cheat him. But every time he had said something about raising credit in Fuller, the merchants had waved him away and would not even listen to him.
“Ain’t no use in talking no more, Jeeter,” they had said. “There’s farmers coming into Fuller every day from all over the country wanting the same thing. If there’s one, there’s a hundred been here. But we can’t help you people none. Last year we let some of you farmers have seed-cotton and guano on credit, and when fall came there was durn little cotton made, and what there was didn’t bring more than seven cents, middling grade. Ain’t no sense in farming when things is like that. And we can’t take no more chances. All of us has just got to wait until the rich give up the money they’re holding back.”
“But, praise God, me and my folks is starving out there on that tobacco road. We ain’t got nothing to eat, and we ain’t got nothing to sell that will bring money to get meal and meat. You storekeepers won’t let us have no more credit since Captain John left, and what is we going to do? I don’t know what’s going to happen to me and my folks if the rich don’t stop bleeding us. They’ve got all the money, holding it in the banks, and they won’t lend it out unless a man will cut off his arms and leave them there for security.”
“The best thing you can do, Jeeter,” they had said, “is to move your family up to Augusta, or across the river in South Carolina to Horsecreek Valley, where all the mills is, and go to work in one of them. That’s the only thing left for you to do now. Ain’t no other way.”
“No! By God and by Jesus, no!” Jeeter had said. “That’s one thing I ain’t going to do! The Lord made the land, and He put me here to raise crops on it. I been doing that, and my daddy before me, for the past fifty years, and that’s what’s intended. Them durn cotton mills is for the women folks to work in. They ain’t no place for a man to be, fooling away with little wheels and strings all day long. I say, it