What inspired you to write “Talmadge Farm?”
I lived through changing times, particularly the 1950s
when there was
nearly complete segregation in the South, especially in
rural areas.
Sharecropping was common, and women did not divorce in
those times
because it was considered demeaning, a failure. Then in
the 1960s,
everything began to change. Sharecropping disappeared,
birth control
entered the picture, and women could live life with more
freedom and less
dependence on men.
Can you tell us more about your family history and its
connection to
North Carolina and tobacco? How did this environment
influence your
writing? Beyond the direct associations with tobacco
and North
Carolina, are there more subtle aspects of your
upbringing and family
history that influenced your writing?
Tobacco was king in North Carolina. People practically
worshiped it. Where
I grew up, it put food on the table. Cotton was more up
and down, but
tobacco provided financial stability, not just for
farmers but for the whole
community. My family grew tobacco, sold fertilizer and
seed, and managed
a tobacco auction. It was our whole world.
You have had a successful career as a lawyer and an
Air Force
Captain before that. What prompted you to pursue
writing fiction?
I always had the idea for this particular story in my
head. The 1950s and
1960s were two decades that changed the world, and a farm
with
sharecroppers is a bit of a pressure cooker environment.
You have the
farm owner’s family – in many cases people of wealth and
entitlement –
living just down the driveway from the sharecropping
families. The
sharecroppers were poor and had limited options, so they
felt stuck living
on a farm that didn’t belong to them doing backbreaking
work with no way
out. It’s a situation that lends itself to drama:
families with major differences
in class/race/socioeconomic status living in such close
proximity to one
another.
How has the landscape of tobacco farming changed, and
how did you
incorporate those changes into the plot of “Talmadge
Farm?”
Probably the biggest change was the shift from
sharecropping to migrant
workers. Today, tobacco farmers are large corporations
that use migrant
workers as laborers. But in the 1950s, farming relied
almost completely on
sharecropping, which was a hard life. Tobacco farming is
physically
demanding work, and sharecroppers needed the help of all
family members
to complete the various steps – planting, seeding,
suckering, priming,
worming, and cropping – of harvesting the crop.
Sharecroppers at one farm
would help sharecroppers at the neighboring farm because
they did not
have the resources to hire extra people. In the 1950s,
sharecroppers were
unable to get credit anywhere but at the general store
and maybe the feed
store. They truly lived hand to mouth all the time, only
able to pay their
debts after the tobacco auction in the fall. Hence the
phrase “sold my soul
to the company store.” Sharecroppers often turned to
moonshining as a
way to make extra money.
As I describe in the novel, sharecropping began to
disappear in the 1960s
as children of sharecroppers started taking advantage of
new opportunities
that the changing society offered. Migrant workers took
over the labor of
farming. In addition to labor changes, new machinery
improved the
industry. N.C. State was instrumental in developing
advances in the
farming world. Legislation changed and farmers were
allowed to have
acreage allotments outside of the land they owned. I
touch on all of these
changes in the novel.
Are any of the characters in your book based on real
people?
Not really. The closest characters to real people in my
life are the
characters of Jake and Bobby Lee. Jake is a Black
teenager who wants to
escape farm life and ends up running away to Philadelphia
to become a
success. Bobby Lee is a young Black soldier stationed at
Fort Bragg. On
the farm where I grew up, there was a Black sharecropping
family with four
sons, the youngest of whom was my age. We were very good
friends. All of
the boys were bright and athletic, could fix anything,
yet were limited in
their opportunities. They didn’t have a school to go to
or a job to look
forward to. Their only options were to stay on the farm
or join the army. The
character of Gordon, while not based on any one person,
reminds me of a
lot of men I knew who did not treat women well, who were
racist, who
enjoyed the status quo and were resistant to anything
that threatened their
way of life.
In addition to the changing tobacco farming
methodologies, the 1950s
ushered in a period of profound social change, marked
notably by the
introduction of credit cards. How did these outside
factors impact
farming, and in what ways did they inform the
development of the plot
in “Talmadge Farm?”
In the novel, Gordon is the president of the local bank,
yet he resists the
advances in the banking industry, including credit cards
and car loans and
the incursion of national banks into rural communities.
Gordon’s father, who
founded the bank, was a brilliant man adept at navigating
the bank through
changing times, but Gordon simply doesn’t have the smarts
to see what’s
coming, and no one can get through to him. He’d rather
play a round of golf
than look at the balance sheet. So between the changing
farming
landscape and the evolution of new banking practices,
Gordon is getting
squeezed from both sides of the ledger as it were. It
proves to be his
downfall. I think that’s one of the great strengths of
the plot – how
everything is tied to everything else.
How did other social changes – including race
relations – impact the
tobacco industry and your writing?
In the 1960s, the minority labor pool available to farm
tobacco began to dry
up as kids started moving up north or joining the army.
We see this in the
novel through the characters of Jake and Bobby Lee. Ella
is another
example. She’s the Black teenage daughter of a
sharecropping family, and
she hates farm work. She ends up enrolling in a
secretarial program and
getting a job at the county clerk’s office, opportunities
that were unheard of
in the 1950s.
The Surgeon General issued a groundbreaking report 60
years ago on
the harmful effects of smoking. How did this pivotal
moment influence
your approach to writing? What firsthand impacts did
you observe
while coming of age among the tobacco farms of North
Carolina?
Most people where I lived didn’t believe the Surgeon
General was accurate
in that report. Most everyone smoked. People viewed it as
the government
coming in and trying to tell us what to do. A prevailing
theme was that the
government was trying to get rid of tobacco but wasn’t
doing anything
about alcohol. One notable exception I remember is that
good athletes in
the 1950s were discouraged from smoking, so maybe the
coaches were on
to something that the rest of us weren’t ready to hear
yet. In the novel, we
see Gordon’s constant frustration at what he views as
interference from the
government, while other characters, mostly ones involved
in the medical
community, begin to appreciate that smoking was bad for
one’s health.
How did you address the plight of women in the novel?
In the 1950s, women were very limited in their
opportunities. There were
very few professional opportunities for women outside of
teaching, nursing,
and working as a secretary. Divorce was scandalous and
unheard of in
those days. We see lots of examples of this in the novel.
But of all the
characters, it’s two of the women who have the clearest
moral compasses:
Claire, Gordon’s wife, and Ivy, the Talmadges’ maid. Both
of them see
more clearly than anyone else where Gordon is going off
the deep end, but
they are nearly powerless to do anything about it.
The novel touches on themes of privilege, racial
injustice, and the
struggle for autonomy and dignity. How did you
navigate these
sensitive topics while crafting the narrative, and
what challenges did
you encounter along the way?
I lived through this time, and I witnessed first-hand
people who enjoyed
privilege that was unearned as well as racial injustices
that denied Black
people access to the same opportunities as white people.
And yet most
people – white and Black – were simply striving to make a
better life in an
honorable way. I tried to infuse all of the characters in
“Talmadge Farm”
with dignity and humanity, even Gordon, who finally gets
his comeuppance
in the end.
The novel is described as a "love letter to the
American South." Can
you expand on this sentiment?
As I look back on my childhood, in many ways it was a
wonderful time to
grow up. It was safe. We never locked our doors. Our
whole life existed just
in that area; it was a long trip traveling to Raleigh,
which was only 60
minutes away. There was a strong sense of community, of
church, of taking care of each other
Ultimately, what do you hope readers will take away
from “Talmadge
Farm?”
I mainly hope they will be entertained by a great story
about three families
who called Talmadge Farm home during the tumultuous times
of the
1950s-1960s.
What impact do you aspire for the book to have on
discussions about
history, identity, and resilience in the American
South?
We have now moved on from the post-Civil War time and the
Jim Crow
period to a place where we’re beginning to find our
identity as a state and
region. In the 1950s, North Carolina was one of the
poorest states in the
country. Our economy was dependent primarily on tobacco
farming but
also textiles and furniture making, none of which paid a
living wage.
Segregation was rampant, and minorities had few
opportunities to improve
their lot in life. Our university graduates who studied
computer science and
technology ended up leaving the state to find jobs in
those industries. That
all began to change in the 1960s with the enforcement of
desegregation,
the advent of birth control, and changes in farming
regulations and
methods.
Another major turning point in our state’s economy was
when
Governor Hodges convinced IBM to move from New York to
North Carolina
as part of the development of the Research Triangle Park.
A large number
of technology and pharmaceutical companies followed suit,
and there was
a ripple effect that extended across the state, even to
areas like Hobbsfield,
our fictional town in “Talmadge Farm.” My hope is that
reading this novel
will help people understand how we got to where we are
today.
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