Not too many years ago in the county where I was born, summer morning mists would hang over acres and acres of tobacco, a crop we have been raising for almost four centuries. Today, however, because most of our farmers have taken a government buy-out, it is, sadly, a surprise to come across a field topping out along a back road in August. If there is anything I associate more with my country upbringing and Southern heritage than the gummy weed so despised by anti-smoking crusaders, it would have to be that other staple of Southern agriculture, the hog. In years gone by even county people who were not farmers kept three or four of them, and every fall our hogs met their inevitable demise. By the time I was in junior high school, I was far too sophisticated --and deracinated-- to appreciate the rustic rituals of autumn, wishing with all my heart I had been born a city girl and not some hick who had to live on a tobacco farm and eat "hug" meat.
But as a child, I had happily run barefoot up the path behind our house to the pen to watch my father feed the animals we raised each year. I enjoyed watching them eat and liked the mealy aroma of mash and water feed and how it coated their pretty pink snouts as they dipped them in the trough. I liked to scratch their backs and hear them grunt. I even liked the "smell" of the hogs themselves. Somehow it was not unpleasant to me.
Daddy loved his hogs and hated killing them. To spare them suffering, he hired a highly-regarded black neighbor to shoot them before slitting their throats. In pork-pie hat and galluses, a cigar in his mouth, Spencer Barnes aimed his rifle at each beloved head dropping one after the other to the hard ground. The Pennsylvania Dutch, who had come to the county in the thirties, did not kill their hogs before bleeding them, and my brother saw an Amish farmer beat with a board one poor thing that had broken its leg and wasn't moving fast enough to the slaughter to suit him. But my people were gentle.
To them hog killing was a big event. Family came to help; and also Agnes, the woman who had taken care of us children over the years and who was given to the telling of ancient and quite often gruesome tall tales. Until late into the night everyone sat around a large table in the kitchen cutting up the meat. It fell to my mother to prepare the country sausage, and she took great care in seasoning this delicacy, adding just the right amount of red pepper and sage and expertly twisting the plumped up casings into the links that would hang from tobacco sticks in the unctuous chill of a December meathouse. In the spring, we would take down from the rafters a moldy Easter ham and scrub it off, stuffing it with greens and onions and boiling it in a pillowcase for the holiday dinner. I am proud of such experiences and proud of my Southern agrarian roots-- now. Though I returned to the county from the North almost thirty years ago, as a young woman I was anxious to shake off the sandy soil of a Maryland tobacco farm and eventually married a Midwesterner, moving to exotic places such as Minnesota and Iowa. It was in Iowa one gray winter day when the snow lay in dishwater dingy piles, that I saw a semi rig hauling some hogs to market. My heart broke for them. Hogs should not be treated this way. They should live in a small pen and be loved by tender-hearted people who speak softly to them and scratch their backs and who kill them with mercy and respect for the sustenance they provide.
But I have not turned into a militant vegetarian. No one loves country ham more than I do. I baste it in Jack Daniels. And I pride myself on my greens and fatback. As I grow older, however, I feel increasingly guilty about buying corporate meat, about buying that plastic tube of Old South-style sausage at the supermarket. Animal rights types are not necessarily wrong in calling attention to the miseries that most livestock endure before their final terrifying moments in a gigantic slaughter house. And right-wing radio talk show personalities might ridicule anyone who protests the plight of corporate farm animals, but, in truth, a little kindness towards the creatures over which God has given us dominion isn't left-wing or radical. It is simply Christian.
Because most people today might not find it practical to keep hogs out back, buying meat on the hoof or meat products from a farmer we know and trust would seem a good alternative to supporting the big agricultural conglomerates. The totalitarians in DC, however, through increasingly complex regulation, threaten small farming operations, and the Southern National Congress has now called on the federal government to end its sponsorship of big agribusiness and to "restore the common law rights of farmers to sell at farm gate."
In first and foremost defending the Christian agrarian substrate of Southern society, we begin to frustrate the American Empire's plans to control even the most seemingly mundane aspects of our lives.
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Joyce Bennett is the Chairman of the Maryland League of the South and a Maryland Delegate to the Southern National Congress.
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