Success with Small Fruits

by Edward Payson Roe

"He can give out rows more rapidly and systematically than any man I ever had," said Mr. Young; and we soon observed that wherever Jubilee led, with his stentorian voice and emphatic gestures, there was life and movement. Thus we learned that although there might be 1,500 people in the fields, there was no haphazard picking. Each one would be assigned a row, which could not be left until all the ripe berries on it were gathered.

Passing to and fro across the fields are the two chief overseers of the farm, Harrison and Peters, both apparently full-blooded negroes, but in the vernacular of the South, "right smart men." They have been with Mr. Young eight or ten years, and were promoted and maintain their position solely on the ground of ability and faithfulness. They go rapidly from one to another, noting whether they are picking the rows clean. They also take from each tray a basket at random, and empty it into another, thus discovering who are gathering green or imperfect berries. If the fruit falls much below the accepted standard, the baskets are confiscated and no tickets given for them, and if the picker continues careless he is sent out of the field.

Mr. Young says that he has never found any white overseers who could equal these men; and through the long year they drive on the work with tireless energy.

Indeed, Peters often has much ado to keep his energy under control. A powerful engine cannot always be safe, and Peters slipped his bands one day to his cost. A woman would not obey him, and he threatened her with a pistol. Instead of obeying, she started to run. He fired and wounded her twice, and then tried to get off on the lame excuse that he did not know the pistol was loaded. The trouble was that he was overloaded. But his offence resulted more from these characteristics than from innate ugliness of temper. To make the business of the huge farm go has become his controlling passion; and he chafes at an obstacle like an obstructed torrent.

Harrison, his associate overseer, unites more discretion with his force, and he gave us an example of this fact. As we were strolling about, we found, seated at the end of the strawberry rows, a group consisting of two young women and two children, with a colored man standing near. They had been picking in partnership, we were informed by one of the young women, who was smoking a pipe, and who replied to our questions, scarcely taking the trouble to look up. She was about half white, and her face was singularly expressive of sensuousness and indolent recklessness.

"This man is your husband?" I suggested.

"No, he's only my brudder. My ole man is pickin' on anoder farm," she drawled out, between the whiffs of her pipe.

"I should think you and your husband would work together," I ventured.

"We doesn't. He goes about his business and I goes about mine," she remarked, with languid complacency.

Here is a character, I thought, as we passed on—the very embodiment of a certain kind of wilfulness. She would not resist or chafe at authority, but, with an easy, good-natured, don't-care expression, would do as she pleased, "though the heavens fell." A little later there was a heavy rumble of thunder in the west, and we met again the young woman whose marital relations resembled those of many of her fashionable sisters at the North. She was leading her small band from the field. The prospective shower was her excuse for going, but laziness the undoubted cause. Harrison, like a vigilant watch-dog, spied them and blustered up, never for a moment doubting that she would yield to his authority.