Grandma’s house
I showed this photo to two friends of mine who are from the south. One from Alabama and one from Georgia. They loved this old farmhouse as do I. Both of them knew, immediately, that the small house to the left in the photo is the smoke house. I didn’t, as my grandparents did not have a smoke house. They preserved their pork by salting it or making sausage which my grandmother canned.
My grandparents slaughtered their hogs in the fall, after the first frost. The cold, frosty weather prevented the meat from spoiling before all the work of the slaughter could be accomplished. The men slit the hog’s throat, and hoisted it over a tree branch. They caught the blood for blood sausage or black pudding as it is sometimes called. They scraped all the hair from the skin until it fairly gleamed pinky-white like a baby’s skin. Their work finished, the men carried the hog into the farmhouse kitchen where they laid it on the kitchen table. It seemed to me that the hog took up the whole kitchen and the smell of blood was everywhere.
My grandmother who was known as a hard worker, or as we said in those days, she was “smart”, bustled between the hog, her wood stove, the dishpan, the well, and the bubbling iron cauldrons of fat melting into lard in the yard. When the fat had melted into lard, she would scoop out the skin which had crisped into small porky bites. These she baked into a special cornbread we called cracklin’ bread. She ground and spiced meat for sausage then she fried it and canned it. We had no refrigerator. She salted the huge hams…I think Granddad helped here. They didn’t hang the hams, they put them in a special box and covered the meat with salt. She washed the intestines for chitlins which were given to the sharecroppers along with their share of the meat. How she did it all amazed me even at my young age.
So, here’s to you Grandma, and all the other grandmas who worked hard and uttered nary a complaint.
I miss those old words that people used to say…words like ‘nary’ and ‘smart’ and ‘commence’ and ‘hope’ for help and ‘liked to have’ for almost. When I was a girl, I thought those words were ‘country’ and they were, but I was too ignorant to know that country was something to be proud of.