Root Jumper by Justine Felix Rutherford Read Free Book Online

The whole family picked blackberries.
    When we got to where they were growing, some patches of berries were thicker and nicer than others. We looked for those patches. There the berries hung heavy and inviting and sparkled like black diamonds. I remember placing my fingers around the first berries of the summer and hearing the dull thud as the berries hit the bottom of my four-pound lard bucket. I always picked with a small bucket tied to my overall galluses. I left a large bucket at a place I could find later to dump my small bucket into. I was as lazy as any kid. I filled my small bucket quickly, and then I would lie in the grass and look up at the sky and daydream until I thought the other kids had filled their small buckets. I wasn’t much afraid of snakes since I always made so much noise that a snake wouldn’t dare linger.
    Just about everyone picked blackberries. In my young days, if you didn’t pick berries, you were looked down on as the dregs of our community. A family that didn’t pick blackberries when they were available for fresh blackberry pies, jams, jellies, and for canning to use later need not ask for help come the winter months.
    I really can’t say I liked to pick blackberries, but I loved those home-made pies and jelly. I also liked being close to my mother. She was the only one who could fill a bucket faster than I could when I wanted to. She usually filled her pail and then helped everyone else fill theirs.
    We picked gallons and gallons of blackberries. My mother wanted them picked clean. She didn’t want any leaves, bugs, or twigs left in them. The first nice berries were sold on the market in Huntington, West Virginia. They were sorted and placed in crates to go to the market. My cousin, Harold Spurlock, would put them in his truck along with eggs from our farm and sell them for my mother. Harold would stop about every week and pick up Mom’s things for market. As I write this, I have to dodge splotches of tears on my paper, tears that I shed as I recall how good Harold was to our family, especially after my father died. I honor him.
    The blackberries hang on the vines today, but only the birds and rains take them. I still eat the blackberries and spit the whole world in the eye.
     
    Cinnamon Rolls and Coffee Cake
    One of the bread companies in Huntington was the Mootz Bakery. My cousin by marriage, Gomer White, had this old re-done Mootz Bakery truck. The truck wasn’t remodeled. It was revamped. The enclosed back portion of the truck had been cut away making it into a flatbed. Gomer used this truck for everything. Every Friday evening he would make a run to the bakery to work and get surplus bread. I believe he cleaned for the company, and his brother Carl was a mechanic for the company.
    All of us waited for the roar of the old truck coming up the road on Friday evenings. Gomer would stop, and all the kids would climb on the truck with the metal barrels that he took for the bread. While the grown-ups worked, we kids rode around on the bread carts. When the adults had finished, the kids who had fifteen cents went to see a Western movie. When Gomer was financially blessed, he paid our way into the movie. Unfortunately this didn’t happen very often.
    We got a sack full of surplus bread for one dollar. Oh, what we might find in that sack! This bread was supposed to be hog feed. There were a lot of two-legged hogs in those days. As we looked through that sack, we would hold up our first prize. “Wow! A package of cinnamon rolls.” We’d give it to the other kids so we could dig deeper. Someone would say, “Jeepers, here’s a coffee cake,” or “There’s hardly any mold on this package of buns.”
    Who could ever forget “Miss Sunbeam” on the outside of the bread package? She smiled on all of us Depression kids.
     
    Samp and Rags
    My story of the Depression would not be complete without including the man who kept so many people afloat during the Depression year after year. His