It’s my favorite fruit, the peach. That’s probably because I grew up surrounded by a lot of peach orchards. They were everywhere when I was a kid. There weren’t many directions you could leave my childhood home and not run into a sea of peach trees, all laid out in a grid orchestrated by one of the area's local farmers. If it was warm enough there was that unmistakable fragrance. By late spring you started to notice the blossoms with their hint of almonds and butter, but sweeter and more earthy. As the days got longer and the nights became balmier you’d begin to detect a sweet, peppery fragrance wafting through the air. It had a strong, aromatic scent that was very pleasant. That’s how you knew the peaches were in season, and if the peaches were ripe there’s no aroma quite like it. When I was a boy there was a peach orchard close enough to our place that I could get a good whiff if the wind was blowing just right. The memory that bouquet leaves you with is one of South Carolina’s best kept secrets, especially when it’s enjoyed while an army of exuberant tree frogs serenade you with their insouciant lullaby.
When perfectly ripe, they’re succulent and taste as sapid as they smell. Don’t forget about those wonderfully delicious recipes made with my favorite fruit, like peaches & cream, homemade peach ice cream, peach cobbler, peach marmalade or warm peach pound cake. We’ve even figured out how to make a delicious peach salsa - complete with lime and honey - to eat with a basket of warm tortilla chips.
I’m well aware that people unfamiliar with South Carolina’s peach production will automatically presume Georgia, being the “peach state,” produces the most in the Southeastern United States. But I don’t hold that against those who erroneously presume such blasphemy just like I forgive those South Carolinians who still think our state flag has a palmetto tree and a crescent moon. Wrong. They got the palmetto tree right but that's not a crescent moon. It’s actually an image of a gorget and is symbolic of a piece of armor that protects one’s throat and dates back to the middle ages. There are some historians who have suggested the crescent-shaped symbol was lifted from a relevant coat-of-arms. What isn’t debated amongst those same historians is the falsehood of it being an image of the moon waxing crescent in the evening sky.
While California actually produces the most peaches nationally, South Carolina is second in the nation, harvesting over twice as much as Georgia per year. Titan Farms, about 90 miles due south of Spartanburg, happens to produce over half of South Carolina's peach crop annually and is currently the largest peach farm on the entire east coast.
Back in the day though, from 1957 to 1966, the area where I grew up was so well-known for its peach production that it hosted the South Carolina Peach Festival, complete with a parade down Poinsett Street. Fast forward two generations and the peach orchards aren’t as prolific as they once were, but there are still plenty of them around. To this day I can’t resist rolling down my windows on those summer evenings whenever I happen to find myself driving through one of the upstate's many peach orchards. The evocative smell of those peaches is something unmistakable and always lets me know I’m close to home.
While my hometown of Greer sits on the county line, technically I grew up in Spartanburg County, which borders North Carolina and is nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Today they make more BMWs there than any other place in the world, but during the late 19th and into the 20th century that area of the South Carolina Piedmont region was defined by a plethora of those redolent peach orchards along with an abundance of textile mill villages, replete with their hard-scrabble denizens, that dotted the mostly rural landscape. When I was a kid, Spartanburg County alone had over four dozen textile mills and Greenville County had about half that many. As I’ve mentioned, many of my family members worked in those textile mills back in the day. The previous summer I’d worked as a day laborer at a peach farm walking behind a tractor picking rocks out of the soil and tossing them into a big bin affixed to the tractor’s plow. A year later, the summer of ‘79, after finishing my junior year of high school, I scored my first real job. By “real” I mean it was my first time getting paid and finding out the government would get its share of my paycheck. From the Monday after Memorial Day until just before Labor Day weekend I worked forty-hour shifts at the now defunct Startex Mill, which sat alongside the Middle Tyger River on Tucapau Road in Startex. That mill was built in 1896 and had its own hotel and restaurant by the turn of the century. It became the site of hotly contested union clashes in the ‘30s, and in 1980 President Jimmy Carter made a campaign stop there.
Before the mill shut down in ‘98, my maternal grandmother was a first-shift supervisor. In my family’s way of viewing the world, if you had a mill job you had it made. If you ever got promoted to supervisor then you would be living on ‘easy street’ for the rest of your life. So at my mom’s behest, her mother, the one I called Tama, pulled some strings and got me a summer job there. At least I thought of it as a summer job. It was a second-shift gig in the card room where my primary responsibility was doffing the big buckets of soft, billowy cotton rope the machinery produced from hoppers full of raw cotton. Once every twenty minutes or so I’d walk along the dust-laden aisle that separated twenty-four card machines and I would check to make sure the blades were clean and the buckets weren’t yet full. When the buckets filled to the top I’d doff them and put an empty bucket in its place. Easy money.
The card room gig was something that almost didn’t happen for reasons that had nothing to do with my family. As I was wrapping up my junior year, the only class I felt like I had to pass was the one I struggled with the most, English. I possessed enough credits in other subjects that I wasn’t too concerned about any other course except for Mrs. Hermie Gaston’s seventh period class. This was the fifty-five minutes of every school day when she endeavored to teach me and a handful of my fellow juniors the nuances of advanced grammar. She also attempted to ingrain in us some literary classics, such as Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. To this day, I can still recite the opening lines because Mrs. Gaston made us learn it. “Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote. The droghte of March hath perced to the roote, and bathed every veyne in switch liquor, of which vertu engendred is the flour,” or something like that.
Mrs. Gaston had some choice names for those students who met her scorn. She referred to some of us as “Moth-eaten zombies” on more than a few occasions, but usually smiled when she said it. I knew there were other kids in our class that didn’t like her and she probably felt the same about them. Hermie was hard, but I always thought she was fair. She, more than any other teacher I ever had, held me accountable. That didn’t mean I always did as I should. Since I was spending more time getting high with my friends, I was much less interested in my studies. By the end of the school year, I was even showing up stoned for my seventh period English class.
Everyone in Mrs. Gaston’s class knew we had an essay paper due at the end of the school year. She assigned us approved topics and we were expected to take everything we’d been taught and apply it to that writing project. That paper would represent a significant chunk of our final grade. For some of us, myself included, doing well on that composition meant the difference between the ability to be unencumbered for the following few months, or attending summer school. I’d always enjoyed writing short essays and poems, but I was now living in a different world where I was much more interested in girls, music and partying. Those facts, combined with being a notorious procrastinator, meant trying to write my essay paper under duress the day before it was due.
When I turned in my paper the next afternoon I was full of dread. I knew I hadn’t submitted my best work, not by a long shot. I also knew with my grade point average I needed to do really well on that writing assignment. Failing to do so meant three months of summer school when I’d hoped to be working to save money for my first car.
When we got our papers back the following Friday, I nervously held it in my hands for a while before I summoned the courage to take a look. Right there on the top, circled in red ink was a big ol’ D. I already knew I needed a C or better grade to pass English. My heart sank and I felt a lump in my throat. I’d never failed a class before and I was unprepared for how it made me feel. For the first time in a long time I wanted to cry.
I’m not sure what we did the rest of class. I was stunned and my mind was whirring in my vain attempt to conjure up an explanation as to how I’d allowed this to happen. I knew I had nobody to blame but myself and I felt a knot in the pit of my stomach.
When the bell rang to dismiss us for the weekend, we all filed our way out of the classroom at the end of the third floor hallway. As I passed by Mrs. Gaston’s desk she called my name and I looked her way. With a solitary index finger pointing in the air she motioned for me to hang back. She had a dour expression on her face which made me think I was about to have more problems than summer school.
I stood there, waiting. As my classmates exited to make their way home, I made eye contact with a few of them. They each had a look that suggested I should be concerned for my well-being and the knot in my stomach grew.
As the last of my classmates filed out, Mrs. Gaston finally spoke. She told me how disappointed she was in my essay paper. She let me know that she’d grown to have high expectations of my written work. She scolded me, she reprimanded me and she chastised me. I was ashamed because I honestly felt like I’d let her down. I stifled tears and struggled with the lump in my throat.
When she finished rebuking me, I looked down at my feet and responded with a heartfelt “Yes mam, I understand.” It was obvious that my voice was breaking as I spoke, and I tried hard not to tremble. I don’t think I’d ever felt so humbled.
There was a long pause while I stood there, too contrite to look her in the eye. Mrs. Gaston didn’t speak. She waited for me to finally look up and meet her gaze. As soon as I did she told me I had the weekend to rework my paper and get it to her room before the first bell rang on Monday morning. She almost reluctantly explained how she was taking off a letter grade on my final result on that writing project since, technically, it would be turned in a day late. I already knew that if I made a C or better on my paper I’d pass her class for the year. She continued to frown as she eyeballed me conspicuously. She finally told me I could go, reminding me with the hint of a grin that I was still a moth-eaten zombie. Before I turned to race out the door I held her gaze and emphatically told her “Thank you.” I could tell by her expression that she knew I meant it.
As soon as I got home I phoned my friends and explained to them that I couldn’t hang out until I finished my term paper. Then I immediately began pouring myself into that writing project. I didn’t dread it, either. I was so overwhelmed that Mrs. Gaston believed in me enough to give me a second chance that I relished the opportunity. I didn’t stop until Sunday afternoon when I eventually got to the point where I felt it was worth turning in. I only took breaks to go outside and skate my ramp so I could clear my head and ponder my subject matter. I’d skate as if on automatic pilot while I contemplated how to frame the essay paper in a way that would be worthy of a sufficient grade. When I came up with another idea I’d run back to my room, put my skateboard away and write it all down. Finally, by mid-afternoon on Sunday, I was done.
I got to school about half-an-hour early the following morning. When I made my way up the stairwell to the third floor and turned down the hallway towards Mrs. Gaston’s classroom, I was both confident and jubilant. The moment I peered into her open doorway I could see she was busy grading papers. She noticed me, pointed to her desk to let me know where to place my submission and didn’t give me a second look. Then I had to wait. By the time I made it to her class that afternoon the fate of my summer had been answered and Mrs. Gaston didn’t let me down. She rewarded that seminal essay paper with a B.
When I dropped off that updated composition in my eleventh grade English teacher’s classroom that fateful morning, I naïvely believed I was placing the fate of the next three months, the summer before my senior year, in her hands. But it was much more than that. She was perceptive enough to notice something in me that was profound. I’ve never forgotten that feeling, or Mrs. Gaston. Not only did she have my back, she was the first person that ever believed I was capable of writing something worth reading.
Since I passed English and was going to be working instead of taking a make-up class all summer, I also got my first car. My dad’s cousin Lester, who lived near Lyman Mill, was in his late twenties and was always very kind to me. He also had an old ‘66 Mercury Comet Caliente sedan that was sitting in his backyard with the windows halfway down. Its paint had long since oxidized into the color of rust and there were no hub caps to be found. The Mercury had mildewy black vinyl interior and similarly conditioned carpet from all the rain water it had seen. The body was okay and there wasn’t any rust or major damage. Lester and I cleaned the plugs and set their gaps. Then we poured some gas in the carburetor to coax the motor to life and it sounded alright. I gave Lester fifty bucks I’d saved up and drove that Mercury home. About the worst thing wrong with it, other than the fact it looked rough as a cob, was the shocks were busted. Since I was only driving it back and forth to Startex Mill for the summer until I made enough money to buy something nicer, I really didn’t care. I spent the weekend changing the oil and water, installing some new wiper blades, stuff like that. With the help of friends and family we wiped down the interior and cleaned it up. It still had a funky odor, but I didn’t mind. It smelled like freedom to me.
The following week, my first day on the job at Startex Mill, it was finally time to point my Mercury towards the cotton factory on the Middle Tyger River. It was the first week of June of ‘79 and it was already sweltering. The Mercury didn’t have air conditioning so I cranked down the windows and headed towards the mill. The drive took about twenty minutes, including the requisite hot dog stop at Dewey’s Duck-Inn. It didn’t take me many commutes to realize that traffic was very light that time of day as I rolled through the last traffic light in Greer. So I could never resist the urge to see how fast the Mercury would go. There was a pin that stopped the analog needle at a hundred and twenty miles per hour. I usually hit that pin once or twice during the drive to the mill. Those busted shocks made the experience feel like what I imagine a flying carpet might be like to ride. But I could drive pretty well for someone sixteen years old. My mom had taught me how to drive in her ‘71 Chevy Vega four summers earlier so I could buy her cigarettes whenever she was too lazy to do it herself. I always kept it between the ditches and never got busted. Two summers later I’d taken my drivers test in that same Vega, like a boss. My instructor realized I was so nimble at manning the wheel of that little wagon he soon abandoned the test and we spent the remainder of our time together riding around town looking for girls lying out in the sun, although we weren’t very successful. I did get my license that day though and I’ve had it ever since.
I think the summer of ‘79 was the first time I felt like what I thought being an adult must feel like. I had a car, I had money from my summer job, I was buying my own clothes by then and I didn’t ask my parents for anything other than the implied roof over my head and bed in which to sleep. I thought I had it made.
If I wasn’t driving out to Spartanburg’s newest skatepark before leaving for the mill mid-afternoon every weekday, I’d hang out with Alison and her friends. We probably went to the Colvin’s pool at least once per week that summer, otherwise we’d cruise out to Lyman Lake Lodge and float in truck tire inner tubes and talk about life. Those are some truly glorious memories because I knew I finally had companions for whom I cared deeply enough to bare my soul.
Working at the mill was both interesting and eye-opening. My coworker who tended to the other twenty-four card machines was a single-income father of four who lived nearby. He was about my parents' age and never finished ninth grade. I sometimes felt guilty when he realized I’d splurged on luxuries like vinyl records, stereo equipment and fancy sneakers on the same paycheck he was barely providing for his family. The rub was that my coworkers at the mill had heard that my grandmother got me my job there. Some probably thought I was some snot-nosed, spoiled rich kid. Compared to their lives I probably was. None of that was my fault though.
I mentioned that I thought the Startex Mill gig was a summer job. What I didn’t realize was my parents, who had asked my grandparents to pull some strings to get me the spot in the card room, expected me to work there after the school year started. That was why they’d specifically gotten me a second shift job that ran from midafternoon until 11PM. The entire summer I was thinking I would bank most of my money, buy a nicer car and once August was coming to a close I’d quit and spend my time chasing girls. I knew that with my own car I could get another job closer to home with hours more conducive to my social life.
A couple of weeks before Labor Day - and the start of my senior year of high school - I mentioned to my mom that I was going to quit. She immediately gave me a look that made me realize that was a bad idea. Judy-O explained how hard it had been to get me that job, stuff like that. But I did quit, which also pissed off my grandmother who had gone out on a limb to get me the spot in the card room. Keep in mind that minimum wage back then was $2.65 per hour, so the $4.75 I was making was good money. That summer I brought home about $1800 and managed to save well over a grand after I bought lots of new clothes, including a few pairs of Levi 501 jeans and several pairs of stylish leather sneakers. I also bought my senior class ring, about a dozen albums and a new stereo to replace my 8-track tape player. With the remaining money I purchased a janky old ‘63 Chevy Custom Cab pickup truck, which I immediately painted, right in my front yard, the brightest yellow I could find. The most eye-opening thing for me was the realization that my parents and grandparents expected me to keep working at the mill, apparently for the rest of my life. It was as if they thought that was the best I could do, the best that I could be. One other thing to keep in mind is that up until that point my mom had been the only person in my family to graduate twelve years of high school. When my dad found out during his senior year that he would fail English and not graduate, he left to join the army and got shipped off to Korea. While I secretly had aspirations of attending college, my parents didn’t really want that for me. They fully expected me to get a job, preferably in a textile mill, and work until I retired or died. That sudden realization - that my parents and their parents had such a myopic view of my abilities - obscured my view of the world around me. As I thought more about that and it began to sink in, it became a significant driving force in my life although I didn’t fully realize that when it went down the way it did. I just knew it stung to realize my family had thought so little of me, that they’d sized me up and thought I didn’t have the wherewithal to do more, that I didn’t possess the intellect to better myself and improve my circumstances.
What I learned from that experience was I had to figure out a way to get an education beyond high school. I needed some way to outpace the inertia of all those cultural notions my family had mythologized about life in our hometown. Nothing against my parents and grandparents but I had more ambitious goals for myself and intended to aim higher. I really couldn’t explain it but I knew, deep down, that I was capable of more than they expected of me. I only had to find a way to prove it even though the odds weren’t exactly in my favor. The real problem was I had no clue how to do it and nobody seemed to want to show me the way.
The epiphany for me, my aha moment, occurred the instant I understood I would need to shed myself of those things that held me down if I were ever going to overcome them and move forward. I was finally beginning to grasp that life was too short to invest in people who didn’t value me, those who prevented me from positive change. That meant I’d need to find a way to move on from the only family I’d ever known and would have to leave some of them behind. I also knew it was all up to me and me alone.
© 2023 Joseph Phillip Lister Sr.
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