A sharecroppers Christmas Carol
Most of us have heard the classic Dickens story of Ebenezer Scrooge and that fateful, haunted Christmas Eve. I don’t know much about mean ole bankers in London, but I was recently reminded of the time Grandpa and the family had to deal with their own middle Tennessee version of “penny pinching miser,” as Uncle Alex put it.
It was the Christmas of 1951 and the family moved from a farm called The Beech place to a farm owned by a Mr. Armstrong. He was a suspicious man, making life more difficult than necessary for Grandpa, but in those days you took whatever work you could find and dealt with what you had to to survive.
Grandpa was known as an honest, Christian man that had served plenty of landlords with dignity and integrity, but that didn’t stop old Ebenezer Armstrong from accusing Grandpa of short-changing him on his corn crop, so when a kind, respected banker by the name of Mr. Wade offered grandpa an opportunity to farm his land in 1954, Grandpa jumped at the chance, as much as a 62 year old sharecropper could jump, anyway.
As it turned out, Mr. Wade was a very kind man and upon his death his widow gave Grandpa the opportunity to own his first piece of property since the bottom fell out at the height of the Great Depression.
I think about Mr. Armstrong and wonder if he was ever visited by the Ghost of Sharecropping Yet To Come; did he ever become less suspicious? Or did folks just go to his funeral because lunch was provided? Did Mr. Armstrong send Grandpa a turkey that Christmas of ’54?
“A squeezing, wrenching, grasping old sinner!”, they said of Scrooge, and not much better of Mr. Armstrong.
Whatever came of Mr. Armstrong I’ll never know, but I do know that Grandpa moved on with his life and let his character and patience speak for itself and spent the next 27 Christmases in the nicest house he’d ever had, among the people he loved, in what Uncle Alex wrote were the happiest days of his life.
