In one of the small communities in North Carolina where my husband pastored, we lived in a parsonage surrounded by tobacco fields. My husband never preached on the evils of smoking because if he had they would have fired him immediately. Everyone in the church made a living by growing tobacco.
One of my favorite characters in the church was a widow by the name of Annie Belle. Her husband had passed away years before and when we knew her, she was in her 60s. Instead of selling her home and farmland, she continued on as before by cultivating the land herself and using her old tractor. She even fixed it when it broke down. She was a farmer in every sense of the word.
Her home was a rather frightening place for this city girl. She had all sorts of critters running around her house. She had numerous cats, birds, a raccoon, and a squirrel she had raised from birth. These creatures freely roamed her house and if you weren’t careful, they would climb right up your pants leg.
But I admired Annie Belle more than anyone else in that community. She was a true pioneer woman and could do just about anything. She was fearless. In the spring she would put on her straw hat that covered her red hair streaked with grey, put on her husband’s overalls with a long sleeve flannel checked shirt underneath, put on ankle boots caked with mud and manure and get on her tractor to prepare the soil.
Her skin always seemed sunburned because she was so fair, but she always had a smile on her freckled face with her blue eyes crinkling in the corners behind silver framed spectacles. She was plain spoken and generous to everyone. But she was especially kind to my husband and me who had no family close by and a baby on the way.
One day we went to her home to visit and caught her on the tractor. When she saw us pull into the yard she stopped and waved us over.
As we greeted each other I noticed she was talking rather strangely and when she spit over the side of the tractor, I finally figured out why… she was chewing her produce. Yes, she was also a tobacco planter.
Now what is so funny about this is that a year before, the state came to all the tobacco farmers in the area and offered to buy their land for twice what it was worth so they could build a lake. The majority of the people in the community became millionaires overnight. But looking at Annie Belle you never would have known it.
While we were conversing, she hopped off the tractor and we followed her to the chicken coop. She wanted to give us some fresh eggs. But as she went through the coop, I noticed that she would pick up an egg, look at it closely and then return it. But after looking closely at the other eggs, she would put them in a basket for us.
You know me, I’m nosy and couldn’t resist asking what was going on.
“Well, I have had a turrable time with my aiggs (eggs). So I pozened ‘em,” she said.
With some difficulty, I translated this interesting explanation.
Evidently, Annie Belle had been having trouble with snakes coming in her chicken coop and eating the eggs. So to fix the situation, she injected several eggs with poison and left them in the chicken coop for the snakes to get. She had carefully marked each poisoned egg. She left those eggs in there all the time and never had any more snake issues.
Interesting.
So we all chatted a little longer and finally we left for home with a basket full of eggs and a bag of fresh corn. Upon returning home I laid the eggs out on the counter and thought about this. God bless Annie Belle for wanting to share with us, but what were the odds that she had forgotten to mark one of the eggs?
We couldn’t be sure, but we could be careful since I was pregnant. We decided not to use the eggs, but I pulled out the corn and got ready to shuck.
That’s when a thought struck me. I turned to my husband. “Honey, you don’t suppose Annie Belle poisoned some of the corn, too, you?
We just stared at each other. He grabbed the phone and called her.
“No!” she said. “Thet would be just plumb crazy! I just put Sulphur all around ‘em.”
