"The bottom line is, if my grandparents hadn't survived the hand that was dealt them, then I wouldn't be here. If they didn't have hope.... They had their children, and it was brave of them. They could have said, `No, no, no, no, no, I'm not bringing no children in this world!' . . . But they didn't. They said, we can do it. We'll be alright. We'll make it. And they fed them, and they bought them two pairs of shoes a year when they sold that tobacco, and they sent them to school...."
Month: October 2025
Tobacco Harvest, Braswell Plantation, Battleboro, N.C., 1944
In this-- my 17th photo-essay in this series-- we meet scores of tenant farmers harvesting tobacco on the Braswell Plantation in Battleboro, N.C., in August 1944. The 15 photographs speak to North Carolina's agricultural history, but also to the enduring legacy of Gov. Charles B. Aycock's brand of white supremacy.
Hauling Cabbage: Beaufort, 1944.
A number of my cousins in Harlowe also "hauled cabbage" back in the 1930s and '40s. One of them was my mother's first cousin Edsel, who often told me tales of his adventures driving all night to deliver truckloads of cabbage to New York City's Washington Square Market by dawn.
In the Strawberry Fields: Wallace, 1944
In this photograph, we see a group of African American women and children harvesting strawberries in Wallace, N.C., in May 1944. They were among the tens of thousands who labored in the fields of North Carolina's "Strawberry Basket"-- a stretch of towns including Chadbourn, Tabor City, Rose Hill, Burgaw, and Wallace that supplied much of the U.S. with strawberries in the years around World War II. (Part 15 of my "Working Lives" series.)
The Woman in the Lettuce Fields of Castle Hayne, 1943
They came there from a hundred places, as close as the Georgia piney woods, as far as Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Bahamas. Then, early in the spring, when there was no more work in South Florida's fields, some of them came to the lettuce fields of Castle Hayne. (Part 14 of my "Working Lives" series.)
David Cecelski 