Hog Killings and Racism

Hog Killings and Racism
 
It was a scene from a horror movie—rifle, blood, large vats, huge butcher knives, guts in wash tubs, stuffers, grinders, large kettles of boiling oil, and dead bodies suspended from a tree.  But, no, it was a hog killing. 
 
There were always certain days I hated:  the last day of a vacation, the last day before school started in the fall, the day I had to go to the doctor.  But the day that topped the list each year was hog-killing day. 
 
If you live in eastern North Carolina long enough, you will eventually hear someone say, “It’s cold enough to kill hogs.”  I never asked, but I figured out on my own that cold temperatures were necessary to process the meat outside.  A good hog killing took all day.  Keeping the meat at a low temperature avoided spoilage.  So, of necessity, hogs were slaughtered in the winter.  Dad always chose a Saturday for two reasons:  he worked a regular job during the week, and it was easier to find others to help on a weekend.
 
I have decided one must be a special type of person to enjoy slaughtering hogs.  I always wondered if my dad enjoyed the process or just relished the idea of providing for his family in such a primitive way, or both.   Believe me; I never looked at my dad in the same way after the first hog killing.  Wow, if he could do that to another living creature, what could he do to me?  I guess as a child it is hard to process the difference between the life of an animal and the life of a human.  At that age, I had not connected my love of fried chicken, hamburgers, and bacon to the slaughter of animals.  I knew the meat did not grow on trees, literally or figuratively; but remember; I was still little and could not see into the window behind the meat counter at the grocery store.
 
The day dawned with either frost or ice on the ground.  By the time I awakened, the initial slaughter had already occurred.  The shot aimed for the exact location on the head, the rigging to lift the hog and transport it to the scalding vat, the removal of all the hair, the gutting and burying of the innards (unless you were wanting the “chitlins”), and the tying of the now de-boweled hog to a tree for it to drain had been completed. 
 
Then we began the arduous task of cutting up the meat.  I say we, but more truthfully, my parents, my brother, and the other helpers did the work.  I was relegated to helping Mom feed the sausage grinder and the sausage press while she loaded the casings with the extruded meat. The terms—ham, shoulder, ham hock, ribs, bacon, tenderloin, rendered fat, lard, cracklings, sausage, sausage casings, haslets—all became words of the day. 
 
As the meat was cut, it was wrapped in the traditional white freezer paper, secured with a piece of masking tape, and labeled as to its contents and the date.  It was then put in one of the many freezers my parents owned.  Before they had large freezers, they would rent a space at a local freezer locker.  I don’t remember its name, but it was located on Fifth Street in Washington, not too far from the hospital. 
 
As the day wore on, a large black kettle filled with the discarded fat was bubbling gently above a fire.  One of the helpers stirred it occasionally with a large wooden stick.  After a sufficient amount of oil was rendered, the mixture was poured into large tins.  Upon cooling, it transformed into the off-white substance we called lard.  For those of you unfamiliar with the term lard, it looked like Crisco in the can.  The crisp pieces of the fat that were not completely rendered were called cracklings.  They would fish those out of the kettle with a spatula and let them cool.  Some people loved to eat them plain or use them in cornbread.  To this day, I love crackling cornbread even though I know it is not healthy.  Neither is cooking food in lard, but my mom used it to fry just about everything.  She even used it to make biscuits.
 
I suppose the gruesomeness of the scene, the constant work of the day, the smells, and having to be on call as errand girl contributed to my disdain of the process.  I remember thinking, “Why do we have to do all this?  Why can’t we be like other people and just buy our meat at the grocery store?”  I still do not have the answers.
 
Okay, I have described the hog killing, but how does racism figure in with the scene? 
 
I don’t remember hearing the term racism in the early ‘60s in eastern North Carolina.  I knew other words, some considered heretical today, such as negro and the other “n” word, but racism was not one of them.  If you had told my dad he was a racist (and defined it for him), he would have flatly denied it.  I am sure in his mind he was not treating individuals wrongly because of the color of their skin.  He would admit, though, to treating them differently than white folks.  The culture of the ‘50s and early ‘60’s in the South allowed for such differences, wrong though they were.  I have come to the conclusion that every generation allows mistreatment, in some form, of a select people group. 
 
The highlight of the day (and trust me, I needed a highlight) was the big meal Mom would cook around noontime for all of us, workers included:  fried tenderloin, haslet stew, collards, fried okra, squash, boiled potatoes, and warm homemade biscuits. 
 
Get ready; racism is about to meet hog killing. 
 
When Mom called out for all to come to the kitchen to eat, I noticed some stayed behind.  It made sense in a way, because someone had to keep stirring the lard kettle and make sure a stray dog or other animal didn’t steal the meat sitting on the make-shift saw-horse tables.   But why did the white folks go eat and the colored folks stay behind?
 
At the time, Dad was a bridge foreman for the NC State Bridge Department.  For many years he worked a crew of about ten men, mostly black men.  Dad was used to hearing, “Yessir, boss man,” “Whatever you say, boss man,” and other words of compliance from these men.  We used to joke that Dad bossed the bridge crew Monday through Friday and us kids on Saturday and Sunday. 
 
One black man named Neezer (probably short for Ebenezer) worked in that crew, and he always helped Dad on hog killing day.  He was a large, strong man with full cheeks.  His speech was more akin to blubbering than to pointed elocution.  You could sense he was used to hard work and hard times.  Neezer had an interesting past I learned about as I grew older.  Apparently, he and his wife once had a houseful of children.  Tragically, all the kids died in a house fire.  Like Job of the Bible, they were blessed with a second crop of children, probably about the ages of my brother and me.  My nephew Herman III, when he was just a toddler, mistakenly called him “Sneezer.”  Like Saul becoming Paul, the name stuck—in our family at least.
 
Sneezer knew everything about how to kill hogs.  In his later years, he confided in my husband that he had taught my Dad everything he knew about the process; but, of course, Dad used to tell him what to do as if Sneezer knew nothing. 
 
Sneezer and the other black men waiting to eat their lunch was not my first observance of racism.  Occasionally at night, Dad would need to call one of the men in his bridge crew and give them instructions for the next day, especially if he had to be at a different work site the next morning.  I will try to replicate the conversation as I heard it on my end:
 
Dad (talking in a way that imitated the black person’s speech):  “Who dis?  Is yo dad there?  Tell him it’s the sheriff callin’.”
 
The young child would get Sneezer on the phone, and Dad would continue speaking in that dialect. 
 
I was young at the time, but even then it was unsettling to me.  Inherently, I sensed the wrong and the degradation of it all.  I guess Dad thought he was being funny, but I don’t remember anyone laughing.
 
Mom was conscious of not offending or demeaning the black workers to their face.  During one hog killing, I was in the kitchen helping her with lunch preparation.  She had made a large pan of biscuits.  She had additional dough left over to make a large pone biscuit in a separate pan.  I always loved that biscuit because it was larger, flatter, and crispier than a regular biscuit.  For as long as I could remember, she had called it “n _ _ _ _ _  bread.”  I had never thought of that term in a negative way until that day.  As she put the pan into the oven, she cautioned me, “Martha, now remember—do not call this ‘n _ _ _ _ _  bread’ when the workers come in.” 
 
Looking back, I am amazed at how we lived our lives.  Today I read true-to-life fiction like The Help, I remember the marches of Martin Luther King, the protests, the riots, and the stand-off with George Wallace, and I am amazed at the change in society.  I lived through school integration in the ‘60s.  I saw first-hand the upheaval and the struggles inherent in social change.  I hope to think that I came out on the other side with an understanding of our equality before God.  Biblically, we are all of one race—different in skin color, heritage, and culture, but the same before God.
 
I had never been up close to a black child until the early ‘60s.  I remember the day Rufus Barrow walked into our elementary classroom.  You could have heard a pin drop as he walked confidently across the room and found his seat in the row by the window, next-to-last desk.  He was the first black child in our school district to attend an all-white school.  The rest is history.
 
A few years ago, I found a link to my past while rummaging through some old music in my sister’s piano bench.  It was a piece of piano music that I had played as a child.   On the back was a whole column of words written in childish scribble.  For a moment, I could not decipher them; but then, I understood.  Evidently, as a child, taking a break from piano practice, I had tried to figure out the correct spelling for “negro” because written on that music was every conceivable phonetic rendering of that word.  While the rest of the world was trying to ensure racial equality, I was just trying to figure out how to spell it. 
 
Our own personal family history reflected the changes around us.  It was not too many hog killings later that everybody that could fit around the table ate the hog killing lunch together—black, white—it didn’t matter.  Mom quit baking the pone biscuit.  While those deep-seated biases probably still remained in my parents, they were altered to reflect an increasing sensibility to the changes about them. 
 
Sneezer, like my parents, is dead now.  Those hog killing days are over.  PTL!  (That means “Praise the Lord” for you non-shouting Baptists.) I like to picture Mom, Dad, and Sneezer in heaven sitting down at the futuristic Marriage Supper of the Lamb as referenced in the Bible.  I don’t know what they will be eating, but I would hope to think pork is not on the menu and that they are eating with people of every tribe and of every tongue.  I guarantee you no one is a racist in heaven.