Woman of the Corn

(I wrote this little journal while employed in a cornfield in Oliver Springs, Tennessee 'bout 5 weeks ago. In the name of moonshine and all things sacred, I tell my tale.)

I.

There I go again! I've discovered a little patch of land I wanna bring around with me wherever I go. Where in a cat's fiddle have I bin, you ask?

I am currently employed in the most beautiful cornfield this side of the Mississippi. When you go digging around for work, you never know who you'll find.

Unfortunately, I arrived to Tennessee with what seemed to be the biggest darn hole in my pocket. I'd been working right along, scrimping and saving but somehow it all just caught up to me and I'd been nearing the end of my savings. I'm not done with this trip yet, darn it! Being the self- advocating type, I was again able to find a farmer who needed help just about the time I needed cash. Except that if NC was an organic farmer's paradise, well Tennessee is more than a stone's throw from it.

A walk through the Oak Ridge farmer's market at first made real employment seem doubtful. All family farms, good folks, but not enough money to go 'round. They've been hit real hard this year. Except for Mister Julian. "Go see that black farmer towards the end. Ask him if he can use a hand". I navigate the narrow stalls full of produce to the last truck in the lot where a small band of men gather around a heap of corn (they sell corn out of a truck bed here), looking for an African-American man. Finally I get confused and ask for my farmer by name. Seems white folks around here don't know that a whole lot of Julian's dark skin and hair reflect his Cherokee roots. I would later learn that his great grandmother was actually sent on the Trail of Tears. Julian doesn't understand either how he is called, except to say that marriage into race has a lot to do with things around here.

And so I am hired by this farmer, on account of two boys he was seeing 'bout didn't show up, another one of his farmhands has been "pissin' blood", and the like. I like Julian immediately because he's honest and straight forward. Although the other men at the farmer's market raise eyebrows at this curious woman from Maine, Julian almost treats me as any other southerner, offering Tennessee moonshine at the end of the day, and including me in his jokes.

This is another world where I have been lucky enough to sit at the table. I decide my English is far too lengthy and explanatory, and so I shorten it to meet our orders. "Corn, ma'am?" "'Bout four a dozen." I think of my Mainer father, the way the "r" in "corn" gets strangled in his mouth, making it another word altogether.

Another farmer comes up to the stall today to talk about the harvest and offers Julian some 'baccer, and another to talk about how everyone's been sellin' their family's land these days. I feel challenged as an ally when the conversation turns to hiring "the Mexicans", and I am patient with my questions. I learn that this man with whom I am working would be grateful if he could learn to read and write, let alone travel to see the world is changing. We have a lot to teach each other.

Julian has farmed corn on this land for a long time now, only recently tending it alone. He and his father pulled corn together, and even watermelons before that, until he died of a massive heart attack. I can see his Julian Sr. sitting at the stall speaking in the same honeyed drawl as his son, "Corn, ma'am? Got'em ready for you".

Now Julian Jr. often gets up at 4:30am to harvest, and works until 8:00 pm sometimes. He barely eats and takes orders over a cell phone at all hours of the day. He has employed a man who he calls "slow" and who he has known since they were boys. Bobby (they call him "Bobby Monday" after the local slum lord) lives up the road and the two spend the shift cussing each other out in a friendly spirit. There's a great but unfortunate story about Bobby being cheated out of a whole mess of money by some young guys pretending to be Julian. As Julian tells me this story, I can see how protective he is of his friend.

The cornfield is framed by glorious mountains and we pull corn until the sun sets over them. I am at peace as I learn to count 5 dozens to the bushel in the way Julian asks. I pull back the husk to taste the first fruit of my labor; the corn is sweet and its milk drips from between my teeth.

We harvest until the sun goes down and I am invited to eat cornbread and creamed corn and squash fried in cornmeal made by Julian's mother, Miss Nanna, a really small Cherokee woman who talks about how when Julian Sr. was alive he would have had nothing of this heating up cornbread and asks me all about Maine. I drive back to Knoxville with my payment of a jar of moonshine and a bag of corn. It has been an incredible day. It takes all my will power not talk to myself all the way home in my new accent.

II.

I love being in the cornfield because there is no squatting down on the haunches, everything is standing up and pulling those corns hard off the stalk and I feel powerful. I also feel powerful giving Ally, our workmule commands. She pays me no attention but I cuss her out the best I can. If you've never pulled corn like this is works just so: Ally pulls the sled down the rows of stalks while we work yanking those ears off and chuckin' 'em in the cart. I wear long sleeves and pants no matter how hot it gets because the sharp plant leaves give you little infuriating papercuts up and down the body that itch and burn like crazy. I am even wearing my bandana around my neck like a real southern cowgirl. Ally has no qualms about releasing gas every two or three rows, and we just try to stear clear of her backside when she is so inclined.

Today I work with Marshall, whom I'll be helping pull corn every morning from now on. Marshall is a disabled Vietnam Vet who traveled all around the country after the war to find himself. Found himself a whole lot of trouble with the powder, and luckily he now finds himself in the cornfield with us. Julian and Marshall cuss each other out, as is the custom. Ally, puts on her own airs.

I continue to help Julian at the farmer's market. One kind gentleman comes up and compliments Julian, "Corn's so sweet I had to take me another sugar pill." From the back of his covered Chevrolet truck I pick up all sorts of language while I'm stuffing and counting corn. I catch myself saying, "Now, go on, what time it is?" and other such things not usually in my English vocabulary. I learn how to cut words off and refamiliarize myself with "ain't" and other great words. Otherwise, folks just don't trust me.

Julian's been working this way since he was seven years old. Now that the farm is his, he still hears customers talking about how long his Daddy's corn grew to be. Every once and awhile I sneak a peak at this man who is my boss and teacher for the rest of my stay in Tennessee. I bet a lot of women loved this man hard. Strong hands, always a clean white shirt, in his early fifties but with that cinnamon-colored skin, who can tell? Then he cracks a wicked smile at me and says, "Sair-uh, ah'm gonna buy you an ice cream." And I'm not really sure who he's treating, or how old he really is.

Tennessee is like heaven back at home this night, with its summer breeze, whining cicadas and ripe tomatoes on the vine. I pick up my guitar and write a few verses of a sappy love song before I compost the last of the corn husks in the kitchen and head off to bed.

III.

It begins at dawn. Slipping into her jeans and plaid work shirt in the dark, like an embarrassed lover. Arriving at the cornfield she is covered in a wet haze, while mist hugs at slender stalks .

Parting grasses to reach for this fruit, covered in moisture, our arms, neck and the small of our backs.
The cornfield smells of sweat and ripeness, sour and salty on the tongue and inside the nostrils. Her fragrance infects the garments worn as one struggles through her, poking and scraping at tender skin.

And soon, heaviness in breath, grunting and sighing in the heat, the grabbing and thrusting noises of corn being pulled at and forced into the sled. Sweat dribbling down the bridge of his nose and over her chin, falling on the moist earth below. Struggling, pulling on arms and legs and bodies of corn and people alike.
Slender stalks pushing up, pushing at, standing stiff and grabbing at clothes.
And then- softness, a bruised and tortured retreat.
Smelling of ripeness and a penetrating sun.
Leaving a taste of corn in her bathwater.

In a fever she can't sleep, can't stop smelling in hard breaths,
Can't understand why she grabs at the sheets.
Then,
returning again..
to work in heat.



IV.

Every day I drive out to Oliver Springs to work for Julian, feeling like I came to Tennessee to enter this new, passionate time in my life. My whole body aches, especially my thumb, doubled back in pain from the pressure of pulling the corn. Marshall spends the morning cussin' out Ally, the asthmatic mule, and me. "'Git up in der" he hollers at her while throwing me a "Git yer ass up der", "if I haf tah tell you agin' i'll ride yer ass". When I start to cussin' him out I say, "Shit, Marshall, yer just sayin' it cause you're sweet on me."

When Marshall is mad at the world, he doesn't speak to anyone, and often walks off on Julian. "I'll never leave this here field", he says, "and Julian will never let me go". Sounds like job security.

One morning I join Marshall at the field and he isn't speakin' to either Julian or me. Julian told me later that a woman had brought his little girl by with the dirtiest little feet, because her mother hadn't bathed her in a week. Thinkin' on how he had treated me, Marshall had said, "all these women are the same."


When I finally leave Julian's farm to return to Maine, Marshall spends the whole mornin' treating me like the backside of the mule. In the heat we endure hours of his silence and slammin around our equipment. Julian calls him "ignorant" about a dozen times. Then in the shade of the yard after all the corn has been loaded on the truck, and we are sittin' havin' a few sips of some white lightin' moonshine he tells me, "you're not bad to look at, once you git that boy oughtta you." Then immediately he covers himself when I smile by sayin', "now don't go thinkin' anythin', you always have somethin' to say, girl." And then, with a grin, "You know why I bin ridin' your ass, don't ya? It's 'cause I like ya. But you start messin' up and I can't say nothin' 'cause if I start....But you better not be callin' me from halfway to Maine sayin' somethin's gone on an happened to you, you hear?"

Marshall couldn't stand for another woman he actually liked to let him down. He just couldn't trust me. But that didn't mean he didn't care.

V.



Another one for the ole resume- I learned to sell corn in a farmer's market in Eastern Tennessee. The demographics of the typical market consumer circle are the following: older white women over the age of sixty and stay- at- home moms in modernized versions of southern bell flair, belled skirts and cotton blouses, debutantes at tomato stalls. This is a weekly social club. And shrewd, competitive, penny-pinching bargainers. Everyone wanting to know what kind of corn, how big the kernel, when it was picked, etc, etc. Sometimes I would notice Julian gettin' tired of them, and I would put on my sugar-coated southern speech and show them what all I had learned me in Tennessee.



Whenever someone passes by our truck of corn, it is important to say, " how 'bout it?", to entice them under the sale umbrella. Usually they bite. And when they do, it's imperative to send them off with, "I 'preciate you" and "you come back". Direct and to the point. If I don't use conjuntions in my speech they honestly look past me as if they don't trust me, or I don't exist. Then I face the mockery of Julian, which is beyond okay. Every so once in awhile Julian tells his customers, "I'll tell you somethin', this girl here sure can pick corn." Which belies all the gender struggle we inevitably go through daily in the field.



One of my favorite customers is old Miss Eula, a cousin of Julian's mother. Miss Eula is a wizened little peach of an old black woman who hangs on the arm of her son, mostly to chat with Julian. She talks often of her youth of hard laboring on the farm, with her son making faces of negation behind her back. Miss Eula makes all kind of promises of blackberry pies, but all we ever do is get to talkin' and advisin' the customers.



There are all kinds of characters on the farm. One afternoon Mr. Emmett comes up the drive spittin a big wad a 'baccer and a shotgun up over his shoulder. "Shit, Emmett, what you bin shootin' at?" Emmett's wife has the cancer and to pass time between treatments he has been shootin' at a rat around the house. I tell him I think he's on a fool's errand.

Just as Julian is divvying up some fine moonshine one afternoon a chubby young police officer circles back and forth out in front of the drive. Thinkin' we might have been caught in the act, we stuff aside the moonshine, but it's Ally he wants. "That your jack?" he asks. Well, Marshall cracks right up and says, "Shit, man don't know a jack from a mule." She's no ass and neither is he.

VI.

Up the road for okry I was sent one day to Julian's relatives. I had asked for a load of okra for Josh back home to fry up. I had learnt me how to become quite a negotiator and a regular at the farmstands. I knew just 'bout everything about where to get anything but moonshine in these parts.



When I left Julian's farm, I didn't have much more money in my pocket, but I had a jar of moonshine, blackberry jam, bags of corn, and the respect of two hard-ass farmers in Eastern Tennessee.



I ponder over a line in my book, Suttree, by Cormac McCarthy, that reminds me of the farm, and keep coming back to it. Hard weather, says the old man. So may it be. Wrap me in the weathers of the earth, I will be hard and hard. My face will turn rain like the stones.