Mark Millican: Stalky plant fires up memories

Published 3:00 pm Tuesday, November 14, 2023

The chest-high plants were so thick while navigating the familiar path I’d carved out before that the leaves at the bottom of the stalks were unseen. Eventually, after breaking into an opening high up on a bank in an area that soil erosion inspectors say has experienced “land-disturbing activity,” there stood a singular stalk higher than my head holding sway like a sentinel atop a red dirt promontory.

The crown looked like milkweed, and in fact some of the pods had burst open to reveal white feathery seeds aspiring for a breath of wind. The bottom leaves, dried out by a couple of cold spells, however, were unmistakable — it was rabbit tobacco.

My mind swirled back six decades to the time I spent many a growing-up day in Sugar Valley, a backwoods outpost in northern Gordon County. My cousin Bruce taught me to put my hand around the bottom of the stalk, strip upward and harvest a handful of parched rabbit tobacco. We took it and tore the side out of a small brown paper “poke” (sack) and rolled the black crinkled leaflets inside it. We then found a book of matches — they were plentiful in those days before Bic lighters — and fired up that homemade cigarette. Cautiously we puffed, but wariness mattered not as we alternately coughed our lungs out.

Did the rabbits actually inhale?

Another pastime was harvesting maypop pods in the summertime (for some reason, we called them “paw paws”) for battles between male combatants. They made a “pop” sound upon hitting their target and exploding, and if they weren’t quite ripe they left a nice welt on the wounded party.

Those were halcyon days in the Valley. One time I got a “rising” (colloquially, a risin’) on my leg, which was a sore with a plug of white stuff in the middle. My Aunt Margaret took one look at it and went to the fridge to cut a slice of ham. Sure enough, the piece of pig laid across the sore pulled it right out of there and I was good to go.

My Aunt Marguerite back in Whitfield County taught me how to make a “poultice” (you don’t hear of those much anymore) out of meat tenderizer and a few drops of water. You put this on a bee sting and the enzymes in the tenderizer broke down the insect venom. Of course, many folks in the country just tore open a store-bought cigarette, spit some saliva into a pinch of tobacco and rolled it around in their fingers to put on a sting. It worked, but don’t ask me how.

In the Uplands region of South Carolina — as opposed to the coastal Low Country — my mother’s kinfolk lived in an area of sand and pines and gnarled black oaks. Myrtle Beach was 100 miles away, but it was as if the ocean had dumped sand inland that far and then receded in the long ago. Who knows, maybe Noah floated over that spot.

My PaPa R.B. and MaMa Nellie Mae had a henhouse, and one time a snake got inside and swallowed around three eggs. It crawled up a tree, and about the time we espied it the serpent leapt off a limb around eight feet up to break the eggs for digesting. My grandparents lived in a sparsely-populated rural area and there weren’t many other children to play with, so when kinfolk or neighbors dropped by with their kids you were always looking for something to do (in other words, mischief).

Well, we assaulted that egg-eatin’ snake with a hoe, and chopped its body into pieces around four inches long. The blood and yellow egg yolk ran together as we picked up the segments in a shovel and then buried them in the sandy soil hither and yon. (I have no idea what purpose lay behind these excavations; perhaps in our juvenile thinking we were warning other serpents to stay away from our breakfast.) For some reason, I had nightmares about that snake coming back to life at the foot of my bed.

I’ve written in past columns about my colorful relatives in The Palmetto State; my Uncle Buddy, who while walking through the woods as a boy would stick his hand up under a rock to see if he could catch a snake, according to my mother. He was in Mercy Hospital in Charlotte with a brain tumor when I was a boy, and upstairs a couple of floors was NASCAR legend Fireball Roberts, who would eventually die from his injuries sustained in a race.

Some of my great uncles had a fondness for the “fruit of the grain,” or corn liquor. One time they had me take a fruit jar and get some pond water to cut it with, lest they be seen staggering in front of the women — and especially my grandmother, who would have shown her brothers a thing or two about teaching her grandson to do the devil’s work!

There comes a time and place with remembrance columns such as this one when you have to land it. Suffice to say, I do go back from time to time and think about the wonderful years when I grew up without color TV, much less video games, laptops and cellphones. Just country music on the radio kept our spirits light with “King of the Road” by Roger Miller (“trailer for sale or rent, rooms to let, 50 cents”) or “Flowers on the Wall” by the Statler Brothers (“playin’ solitaire ‘til dawn with a deck of 51”).

Every now and then one of these songs from the past will also work its way into a senior deejay’s memory and be broadcast through the airwaves. and wonder of wonders, if not on the radio I can pull one up on my mobile phone and play it. Who ever knew?

As for rabbit tobacco, I wasn’t tempted for even a heartbeat to strip the leaves and search the truck for a poke and a match the other day. Trust me on that.

Mark Millican is a former staff writer for the Dalton Daily Citizen.