In my lifetime, eating black-eyed peas at each year’s beginning has been an inviolable Southern tradition. Grandmothers and mothers would no more think of not serving them on New Year’s Day than they would of not praying before meals.
Even when I was overseas in the military, Mama sent packages of black-eyed peas, and admonished me not only to eat them, but also to share them with soldiers from the South … and if any were left over, with some of the Northern chaps, too. (Mama was a tolerant person, but even so, she’d often slip and refer to those who started the War Of Northern Aggression as “damn Yankees,” and besides, she was offended by the fact that some Northern farmers use black-eyed peas as cattle fodder.)
Dad survived the Depression’s deprivation, starvation, homelessness, and aching need, but suffered indelible psychological scars
Unlike Mama, Dad was disgusted by them — with good reason. When The Great Depression struck, his father, the proud farmer of fifteen acres who earned extra money as a circuit-riding country preacher, made twenty bales of cotton and expected his year of back-breaking labor to gross $10,000 at the current market price — about one dollar per pound. Overnight, the depression reduced the per-pound price to a nickel.
The family lost everything, and if they had anything to eat — for breakfast, lunch, or supper — it was usually little more than black-eyed peas. Upon reaching adulthood, Dad vowed never to eat them again.
Dad once defined for me The Great Depression: “During that time, a man with ten million dollars, each worth zero, was worth no more than a man with one dollar, also worth zero. Everyone was in the same boat.”
Dad survived the Depression’s deprivation, starvation, homelessness, and aching need, but suffered indelible psychological scars that troubled him the rest of his life. He had a morbid fear of making a disastrous crop and going broke, and watched expenditures like a hawk. Giving one of his six children money was ludicrous; the word EARN was sacred to him.
Modern Americans can learn a lot from my father’s experience
Along with all working Americans during that catastrophic time, Dad despised the government because he knew that egotistical, power-hungry, greedy politicians failed to protect and preserve the capitalistic, free enterprise system that maintained a thriving, stable private economy, thereby causing nationwide joblessness and severe economic chaos. Conversely, he loved free enterprise because it allowed him to take well-planned, calculated risks, and with favorable weather and markets, make profitable crops.
Welfare disgusted him because he knew that, while it might provide temporary help for struggling, honest folks, it was more likely to attract lazy slobs who were crafty enough to convince government bureaucrats to put them on the dole, with the certainty that signing a few forms yearly would keep them there.
Modern Americans can learn a lot from my father’s experience. They must promote winners-take-all, bums-starve-in-the-street, free enterprise. They must realize that life’s greatest elixir is hard work; they must desire free enterprise competition that is not hamstrung by over-regulation. If not, they too might end up hating what my father hated: black-eyed peas.
Jimmy Reed is an Oxford, Mississippi resident, Ole Miss and Delta State University alumnus, Vietnam Era Army Veteran, former Mississippi Delta cotton farmer and ginner, author, and retired college teacher.
This story is a selection from Jimmy Reed’s latest book, entitled The Jaybird Tales.
Copies, including personalized autographs, can be reserved by notifying the author via email (.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)).
In my lifetime, eating black-eyed peas at each year’s beginning has been an inviolable Southern tradition. Grandmothers and mothers would no more think of not serving them on New Year’s Day than they would of not praying before meals.
Even when I was overseas in the military, Mama sent packages of black-eyed peas, and admonished me not only to eat them, but also to share them with soldiers from the South … and if any were left over, with some of the Northern chaps, too. (Mama was a tolerant person, but even so, she’d often slip and refer to those who started the War Of Northern Aggression as “damn Yankees,” and besides, she was offended by the fact that some Northern farmers use black-eyed peas as cattle fodder.)
