BUYING BERRIES AT CASTLEBERRY, ALABAMA.
This photo shows fifteen berry buyers from as many different commission houses. Over sixty houses have been represented at different times this season at Castleberry.
The very smell of them said “home.” The skies said “home,” the dying pine needles, giving out their aroma beneath the foot, the way a little stiff-tailed woodpecker shifted around a rotting pine stump. It meant home and memories—memories that had slept embalmed.
Life—it has always hurt me. Was it given us for pain, that we might not become as the fatted swine, who, having no hurt neither have any hope of immortality?
To me it has been one great hurting and the times I have been joyous are the times I have acted in self defense.
I unslung my little kodak and tried to take a razor-back in the edge of the woods. I wanted a good picture of one—this hog of the Cracker South, whose sinewy, lean, sweet bacon is sought for at fabulous prices by the nobility of Europe. I approached him with confidence, thinking he would recognize me as an old friend—nay, even, from my build, as one of his kine. (A horrid pun, but a slippance.) But the razor-back is born in the land of the darky, and the same great Designer who gave lightness to the fingers of the darky gave speed to the heels of the razor-back.
And thus has he survived and still lives. I think he did not even stop to look at my face. To this day he thinks I was black.
Around Marble there are 350 acres in strawberries and 100 or more in Alberta peaches, and as I stepped into the clearing I met a native with a good, honest face and carrying a bag of silver in his hands. We soon became acquainted and he told me his name was John Barns and that he was going to the field to pay off his pickers. It being Saturday noon. I found him very straightforward and not inclined to exaggerate. He had bought his farm of 240 acres Christmas, 1901, for $500. His daughter married one W. W. Wright, who took a notion to plant strawberries—just one acre. He set out the plants December, 1905, and though this had been the poorest year in the history of the berry around Marble, the late spring and frosts holding them back fully three weeks, and cutting off the first crop entirely, Mr. Wright had cleared, after paying for his plants, labor, fertilizers and picking, one hundred and twenty-five dollars on that acre.
“Now, 1903 was our best year,” said Mr. Barns, and he pulled out a little notebook he had. “Now, that year I planted my first berries, one and one-quarter acres, and they netted me $521.27, to be exact.”