The fight to save our school had not made us complacent but more aware than ever of how lucky we and our children are. On a Saturday morning, in ninety-five-degree heat, about fifty parents and teachers showed up to build an outdoor classroom, complete with a split-rail fence. None of us had ever built a fence the traditional way before, but together, with a lot of joking and redoing, we figured it out.
My mother attended rural Altamaha School.
Syrup-Boiling
Strangely, I felt as if I descended into the syrup-boiling, although I parked in the pasture like everybody else and walked up. It was the day after Thanksgiving, and I was there at the invitation of my cousin Sue. This was the scene if you could have looked down on it: steam leaked out of a long building that was open on one end, the light from inside it casting an isosceles triangle onto the ground. Outside the building, in a circle inscribed by a yard light, a fire blazed in a metal drum and a couple of sawhorse tables sagged with food. People milled in and out of the light. At the periphery children chased in the dark, harvested field.
Near the drum fire a knot of people, maybe nine or ten, had drawn together, their hair and shoulders silvery as moth-glitter in the night light. They faced inward, intent.
They were singing! I could barely keep from running.
Once among the singers, I found my brother, and Sue, singing harmony with a strong, clear voice. Other faces were familiar, and some turned toward me, smiling, holding notes and singing hard, When morning breaks eternal, bright and fair. They edged together to make space in the circle. The saved of earth shall gather, over on the other shore.
When the song ended, Sue grinned, said, “We’re glad you made it,” and introduced Uncle Mike, her daddy, and Uncle Tump and Walter and Linda. Minnilee, to my right, wouldn’t stop hugging me, and I didn’t mind. She knew me less than whom I came from—my grandmother—and it was a long, trusting history.
More arms got thrown around me and I didn’t know whose they were—people who were kin or not kin or neighbor to kin or neighbor. Their names puddled up in my mind, and I didn’t even try to figure out the big tangle this community appeared to be, having landed so abruptly in the middle of it.
Then we were singing again, a traditional hymn, singing seriously, for the joy: When the trumpet of the Lord shall sound and time shall be no more. A lot of people have been away from a place and gone home to rediscover what’s there and have been welcomed by the ones who never left, or who have already returned.
I have been told it is the sweetness of mother’s milk that causes our sugar craving, and that we humans evolved as fruit eaters in the trees. It is a sorry place that cannot produce a sweetness for its animals—maple, molasses, sorghum, honey. In south Georgia our sweetener is cane syrup, boiled from the pressed juice of sugarcane. The syrup has a curious taste that a lot of people can’t stomach. But those of us raised on it, who never had Aunt Jemima, who didn’t know anything else, we sop it up with hot biscuits and pour it over griddle cakes and wet our cornbread with it. We boil it up and pour it over popcorn.
The making of syrup is laborious. The cane has to be grown and cut, its juice squeezed out through what’s called a grinder, although nothing is ground up. The machine is really a roller. The juice is boiled down meticulously, the syrup bottled. It’s easier to store-buy. With the loss of small farms, we were lucky to see a syrup-boiling at all. The farm’s syrup boiler hadn’t been fired in thirty years, and the grinder was gone.
Tommy Davis, whose farm this was, knew how to make syrup. He was a sweet-faced man of sixty, wearing overalls. He had worked hard for syrup making—planting the cane and harrowing it and fertilizing it. He chopped it (best done the day it’s to be pressed), hauled it to the shelter, and fed the stalks through a grinder. Years ago, a mule harnessed to a lever would have walked around and around, spinning the gear that pressed the cane. Tommy had hooked an electric motor to his.
For a long time, he didn’t make syrup, but a few years ago he decided to take it back up. He was standing by the boiling syrup when I tore away from the singing and went inside.
“Glad you came,” he said, sticking out his hand. “Sue said you might.”
“I haven’t been to a cane grinding since I was a girl,” I said. “There aren’t many of them anymore.” He told me it takes three hours to boil off a making, and this one had been going two and a half. The juice was cooked in an iron kettle about four feet in diameter, mortared into a chimney. In the old days, you had to build a good fire under the kettle, build it of fat lighterd, the resinous heartwood of old-growth longleaf pine, and keep it roaring, but Tommy had welded a propane stove under his. He used twelve gallons of propane in a cooking.
“Have you had any juice yet?” he asked.
“No.”
He lifted a flap of blue tarp at the back of the longhouse and led me outside. There was the big grinder, and in the shadows outside the reach of light, a trailer loaded with sugarcane. Tommy flipped a switch and fed two or three six-foot stalks through the metal rollers, holding a paper cup under the outlet. Cane juice ran down, cloudy as fresh lemonade, and thin.
He handed it to me and I drank deeply.
“Years,” I said. “It’s been years.” To tell the truth, I always thought sugarcane juice too sweet. It’s like drinking sugar water. But it’s one of those tastes that’s becoming endangered, like the taste of blackberry cobbler, and when you get a chance to drink it, you drink it. Some of us talk about past times and rattle on about what holds a community together. The Tommy Davises of the world don’t say a word but set to work. They make a cane grinding happen, year after year. They harrow and plow and plant and fertilize and weed and water and harvest and grind and cook. Tommy returned to syrup making because it was dying out, the way our small towns are dying out and our farming communities and our longleaf pine forests. The way family time is dying out. Events like this keep us connected. Tommy’s not standing by, watching what’s important vanish.
Back inside, a couple of people leaned over the hot vat with wet cloths, skimming dregs—black specks of cane—off the foamy top. Rhythmically they rinsed the cloths in a metal bucket and skimmed again, carefully dabbing at the foam, filtering impurities. There was no hurry; they were slow and steady. Parents kept small children back.
I observed awhile, then tried my hand at skimming dregs, swabbing and rinsing, careful not to scald myself. The bucket filled with skimmings. “That’s the part that’ll make you drunk,” they said, laughing. “It’ll make dogs drunk.”
Now Tommy was eyeing the kettle, not leaving it. It was about time to dish up and there’s one moment when the syrup’s ready, when the yell comes to shut off the gas. He couldn’t miss that moment, he couldn’t be too early or too late, and he couldn’t be unprepared for it. He clothes-pinned a clean piece of white cotton over the top of a steel vat with a valve at the bottom—the cloth would catch the dregs that the skimming didn’t.
The syrup was bubbling madly and reddening now. Tommy lifted a dipperful and let it run back into the vat. It wasn’t quite ready. Too thin. But much more heat and it would burn and ruin the entire cooking. Nobody was talking. Everybody was watching, waiting for the perfect moment. Tommy’s wife, Jeanette, grabbed a long-handled dipper made from a bucket and a slat and set to dipping and pouring the syrup back into itself to dissipate heat. Young neighbor Kenyon seized another dipper. Tommy concentrated.
Finally he unhooked from the wall a hand-sized instrument that tests viscosity. The syrup was thin yet. In a few minutes, he tested again and it was ready. In a flash the syrup was ladled into the cloth-lined vat, Tommy working on one side and Kenyon on the other. I had learned that this batch was Kenyon’s syrup. He grew the cane and Tommy boiled it down for him.
When