By Jerry Barksdale for The News Courier
May 16, 2008 11:52 am
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Some people claim that they owe their life to an answered prayer or a miracle. I owe my existence to molasses.
“Young’un, if it hadn’t been for molasses,” said Daddy, “me and yo’ Mama would’ve starved to death.”
They married in 1935 smack in the middle of the Great Depression.
That probably explains why we had molasses every day when I was a child. It was like a sacrament. When I was 5 years old we lived on Grandpa’s farm where Daddy raised cotton and corn and a small sorghum patch. In the fall, he stripped off the leaves, cut down the sugar cane and we hauled it on a horse-drawn wagon to a sorghum mill at Panther Branch on Copeland Road.
The sugar cane was fed into a press, which was turned by a mule hitched to a long pole. The squeezings dripped into a copper pan and were cooked over a wood burning fire. The syrup had to be cooked at the proper temperature for the right amount of time or the molasses would be either green or scorched and unfit to eat. Afterwards, it was poured into half-gallon tin buckets with the mill owner retaining one-third for his fee. We stored our molasses in the smokehouse and always had plenty remaining until the next fall.
Daddy practiced a ritual when eating molasses. He poured a generous dollop onto his plate, stirred in warm cow butter and whipped it into a whitish goo. With a flat knife, he loaded the goo onto hot cornbread and took a bite.
“Um-umm, good molasses,” he declared.
He sweetened his coffee with molasses and Mama used it to make pies and cakes and popcorn balls.
Molasses was considered the food of poor folks.
When I went off to college I stopped eating molasses. I considered myself too sophisticated, I suppose. Just imagine going into a fine restaurant. “I’ll have a slab of cornbread and a dollop of molasses, please.” However, down inside, we are still who we are. I was a molasses eater trying to escape.
In 1976, we sold our home in Athens and moved to an old rundown farm in Leggtown. We were part of the “back-to-the-land” movement. We raised chickens, geese, ducks and turkeys, recycled, grew an organic garden, ate catfish from our pond and drank water from a spring.
One year we had a small sorghum patch in the creek bottom. That fall, my two boys, Mark, 10, and Matt, 8, began stripping off the leaves. It was a warm Saturday morning and we soon became hot and tired. I decided to cut down the stalks with the leaves on. We hauled our sugar cane to a mill across Shoal Creek, where it was cooked into molasses.
I had no idea how many buckets our little patch would produce. I ended up with 30 half-gallon buckets. The kids wouldn’t eat it – said it was dirty. I gave a bucket of molasses to every visitor who would accept one and we still had molasses remaining when Carol and I divorced. I generously offered her the molasses in exchange for the couch, but she wouldn’t agree. I don’t know what happened to the molasses. It probably ended up in Carol’s yard sale along with my Blue Hole canoe.
Today, when I occasionally feel depressed or wonder why God put me on this Earth, I eat molasses. A big slather of molasses on a slab of cornbread restores my soul and reminds me that I owe my life to that substance.
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