Requiem for a Redneck
THE Redneck Book
What Is A Redneck?
As a chronicler of the lifestyle, I am often asked, "What is a redneck?"
This excerpt from the Requiem provides a conceptual definition by means of a conversation held by three of the book's characters. Read on as Harce, Bud, and George discuss their experiences.
John Schulz
This excerpt from the Requiem provides a conceptual definition by means of a conversation held by three of the book's characters. Read on as Harce, Bud, and George discuss their experiences.
John Schulz
I enjoyed working with my redneck friends because they knew how to get things done. I knew there was something different about them and their experiences that set them apart from me and the experiences of my younger days. I had pondered long and hard on the differences, asking myself, “Just what is a redneck?” One day I found the answer.
When I was in grammar school during the early 1950s in the piedmont of North Carolina, every year there would be a fall break. For me, this wa
s a two-week period in which to play. I was told that this break was for all of the kids who lived on the farm and needed to pick tobacco. “They may as well take a break,” my father told me. “Those kids are going to be in the fields one way or another.” He took me to see a tobacco barn one time, too. I didn’t know what was going on, but I did know I didn’t want any part of it. I never really thought
about the lives of my school mates. I merely figured that their lives mirrored my sheltered existence in some way. I never understood the term “redneck” until I listened to a conversation with Bud, Harce, and George.
Bud and Harce were helping me finish up the installation of a sprinkler system in George Adam’s new yard. I had known George for years. He was an old country boy, maybe 65 or so at the time, who had grown up in Alabama and made it pretty good in the heating and air business in Georgia. George had a heart condition and expected to die any day, but he was always happy and he was always busy building or growing something. George had stories to tell.
My job was to put the fine tuning on the sprinkler heads, which involved adjusting the trajectory and distance while each one was running. My job on this cold spring morning involved getting wet.
I adjusted the final sprinkler head to perfection and jumped back. “Whoo, that water is cold!” Bud and Harce laughed about it.
George Adams got a funny look on his face and walked over to feel the water coming out of the sprinkler. He straightened up and looked at me. “Hell, John, that water ain’t cold. I’ll tell you about cold water. When I was a kid, daddy always had something growing for the grocery market. In the early spring, we harvested the spring onions. When we filled the back of the pickup truck, Daddy would back it up to this spring fed creek and then he’d sit in the truck and drink his ‘shine while I washed the onions in the water right where it came out of the ground. Now, that was cold water! When I got finished washing them, I had to tie the onions up into bundles of twenty and stack them
neatly in the back of the truck.” He paused, shaking his head slowly. “Now, that was cold water.” George stood there staring off into the sky, obviously lost in the memory.
“After Daddy sobered up the next day, we took the onions over into Georgia and sold them to old Mr. Smith at the Piggly Wiggly down on Broad Street. Mr. Smith was something else. I do believe
he counted every onion in each bunch. He wasn’t very nice to us. We were ‘rednecks’ and even though he couldn’t stock his store without rednecks, he didn’t have to be nice to them. I remember, after he finished counting the onions, Mr. Smith would pull out his wallet and slowly count out a few bills and hand them to Daddy. Daddy held his head up and counted the bills again, even more slowly. He valued his pride. He could take whatever came his way and serve it back to the giver in turn.” George gazed out over the upscale neighborhood like none of us were there. “That was some cold water.”
After about a minute, George kind of came back to reality and looked around to see the three of us staring at him with our mouths open, waiting for him to continue. He definitely had everyone’s
attention. “Then there was the corn,” he continued. “The common practice on growing corn, or what we called “roasting ears,” was to plant acres and acres of the same thing at the same time. This gave a good yield and was easy to manage, but when the corn came in, you had to work your ass off harvesting it, shucking, canning, selling to the Pig, you name it. The problem was it all came in together and after you like to killed yourself with it, there wasn’t any more. When there wasn’t any more was when the price went up. Well, Daddy didn’t like that system, so he did some research. It was a bit more trouble, but he would plant ten rows of one kind of white, ten more rows of one kind
of yellow, and so on, using varieties that took different times from planting to maturity. This way, when the corn came in, we had six weeks to deal with it. And that wasn’t the best part. The best part was that about three weeks into the harvest, a lot of everybody else’s corn was gone and the price went up. We would take a pickup load to Mr. Smith and some more to the people at the farmer’s market who played like they grew it. The farmer’s market people liked Daddy’s formula,
too, because sometimes they would be the only ones there with roastin’ ears. I remember one time . . .” He stared off in the distance.
We lost him again. Finally, Bud cleared his throat and George started up again.
“One time, we took a bunch of yellow corn to the Piggly Wiggly. Mr. Smith looked at it and said, ‘Buster (that was my Daddy’s name) come over here and look at this.’ He pointed at a couple of 3-peck baskets of old corn on the side of a shelf and said, ‘Buster, this here yellow corn weren’t any good. You are going to have to take it back.’ And my daddy asked him, ‘How long has it been in the store, Mr. Smith?’ And Mr. Smith said, ‘It came in last week. It just weren’t no good from the start.’
And my daddy knew he had him there. He said, ‘Well, I guess I got you there, Mr. Smith. You see, we deliver white corn one week and yellow corn the next week. That there from last week is yellow corn and last week was a white corn week for us and so you must of got it from someone else.’ Mr. Smith owned up that he could of made a mistake and didn’t push it any further.”
George paused. “After we got in the truck, my daddy said, ‘I wish I didn’t have to deal with that cheatin’ son of a bitch, but I guess I do. It’s easy and he pays pretty good. We gotta make a livin’ somehow.’” George grinned. “One time we made a really good sale at the farmer’s market. This doctor saw us driving up and bought the whole load of corn at retail and paid us extra to deliver it to his house. This made Daddy happy and he said he would buy me some new shoes. So we went to Kessler’s and I told him that I would really like to have some basketball shoes so I could play basketball that winter. I knew I could make the school team, but I had to practice barefoot ‘cause the coach wouldn’t let me wear my brogans on the gym floor. Well, Daddy told me that I could only get one pair of shoes and if I wanted basketball shoes, that would be ok. So, I got some Converse All Stars. Black, with a white sole. High tops. Man, I was proud of those shoes. You know how your daddy or granddaddy had to ‘walk ten miles through the snow to go to school?’ Well, daddy only had to walk five miles to school – when he went – which wasn’t often. Now me, I had it easy, I just had to walk two miles to the bus stop. But I did walk it barefoot. I always took my basketball shoes off and tied the laces together and hung them over my shoulder. I didn’t want to wear them out on the
gravel road.”
George looked at Bud and asked, “What about you, Bud? I can tell by the way you do things that you’re an old redneck.” Bud had been in a halfway trance, listening, obviously going back to his own
childhood. He looked up, stuck his hands in his pockets, and rocked back and forth on his heels and toes.
“Wa’al,” he said, “there was eight of us children and Daddy made sure that we was in school every day the door was open. We only had a mule and buggy until we got a pickup when I was about twelve. I was third next to the youngest. We didn’t go to church much ‘cause it was right hard to get everybody ready and there with the wagon. But, I still remember my maw. She’d sit in her rocker every night that went by and make us all gather around her and she’d read us verse from the Bible. My youngest sister’s still got that Bible. And that Bible has still got everybody’s name in it.
“There sure is a lot of stuff kids today don’t understand. Two of them things is working and Christmas. Me and my brothers and sisters would start picking cotton after school about three weeks before fall break. That way we had a head start on it when fall break came along. That two weeks of fall break, we were all in the cotton from dawn to dark. It’d break your back, but we kept at it because we knew that it had to be done for us to eat that winter. We’d get the wagon loaded. It
took two mules and it was long with tandem wheels in the back. It had sides on it built what looked like up to the sky when I was a kid. Then, Friday night, we’d all climb up on the wagon and Daddy would drive it to town. We rode and spent the night on top of the cotton. You never seen a better bed. Man, it was soft, except some of the burrs and seeds got down in your coveralls sometimes. We’d get to the gin sometime late at night and sleep until about five in the morning when Daddy would get us up for breakfast. We had a bucket of fatback and biscuits that Maw had made for us. A lot of the kids from the other farms ate breakfast at the diner, but we had better things to do with
our money.
“Daddy would make a deal with the foreman at the gin and he would stay with the wagon to make sure that everything got done right. He’d get a small advance on his money, though and he would
give each of us fifteen cents to go to the movie and a dime to buy ice cream with. That movie was something else. It had news, something called coming attractions, cartoons, all kinds of other stuff and then cowboy movies with folks like Lash Larue, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. Every once in a while we got a Hopalong Cassidy movie. I liked him.
“While we was at the movie, Momma and Daddy went shopping. They got bunches of stuff for the farm and lots of things like flour and sugar. We grew most all of the stuff we needed to eat. The last thing they would do was to get new coveralls and a new pair of brogans for each one of us kids. Momma would get a little cloth to make dresses for the sisters. I think she got a little red ribbon, too. That was put away and it was what we all got for Christmas. And Christmas was fun back then. We had lots of food and played with all the cousins, and it weren’t all uptight like it is now. But, you know, them people in town, they did call us rednecks.”
Harce added his part. “Yeah, they call us rednecks because they figured people from the country didn’t know how to behave in town. I bet we behaved better than anybody else. When we used to take stuff to town, that’s when I learned how to fight. I got to where I would fight some city kid who even looked at me wrong. The football coach wanted me to play football. I tried it out, but he told me I was too mean and all I was supposed to do was tackle the other guy, not get him down and hit on him. Hell, they didn’t even think about running that football past me.
“But you know, we might of been rednecks, but we knew how to do stuff. We knew how to fix a truck that wouldn’t run, and build houses and barns and ramjet pumps for water. My Grandma knew how to churn butter and sew clothes with a needle and thread. We knew how to butcher meat and how to hunt and how to grow our own food. Hell, Ol’ Hank Jr. was right on the money when he sang that song A Country Boy Can Survive. We weren’t afraid of work and we knew how to do stuff. Let them say what they want. All we ever needed from the store was sugar, flour, and ribbons for the girls. ” I paid attention and might have nudged the conversation toward the difference between rednecks and “white trash.” Bud jumped all over that one and George Adams agreed.
Bud said, “A redneck might not have no money, but he does everything he can to get some. White trash don’t never have no money and they don’t seem to care.”
George added, “White trash does better in town ‘cause they can get on welfare and not think it is shameful.”
Bud carried it on. “White trash is the people with the tumbling down house and dogs under the porch and pregnant daughters. Rednecks work, and they care about things and they know how to
do things. That’s the difference. White trash is really the ones they make the jokes about.”
George told us, “I want you to look at what is important to rednecks. They love their trucks, they enjoy country music and that came down the line from church music. And then there’s NASCAR,
horse racing and chicken fights. That comes from who can come up with the best of everything and make it work for them. I think rednecks are the backbone of the United States. Tell me I’m wrong
and you can kiss my ass.”
I owned up that I would never complain about cold water again.
When I was in grammar school during the early 1950s in the piedmont of North Carolina, every year there would be a fall break. For me, this wa
s a two-week period in which to play. I was told that this break was for all of the kids who lived on the farm and needed to pick tobacco. “They may as well take a break,” my father told me. “Those kids are going to be in the fields one way or another.” He took me to see a tobacco barn one time, too. I didn’t know what was going on, but I did know I didn’t want any part of it. I never really thoughtabout the lives of my school mates. I merely figured that their lives mirrored my sheltered existence in some way. I never understood the term “redneck” until I listened to a conversation with Bud, Harce, and George.
Bud and Harce were helping me finish up the installation of a sprinkler system in George Adam’s new yard. I had known George for years. He was an old country boy, maybe 65 or so at the time, who had grown up in Alabama and made it pretty good in the heating and air business in Georgia. George had a heart condition and expected to die any day, but he was always happy and he was always busy building or growing something. George had stories to tell.
My job was to put the fine tuning on the sprinkler heads, which involved adjusting the trajectory and distance while each one was running. My job on this cold spring morning involved getting wet.
I adjusted the final sprinkler head to perfection and jumped back. “Whoo, that water is cold!” Bud and Harce laughed about it.
George Adams got a funny look on his face and walked over to feel the water coming out of the sprinkler. He straightened up and looked at me. “Hell, John, that water ain’t cold. I’ll tell you about cold water. When I was a kid, daddy always had something growing for the grocery market. In the early spring, we harvested the spring onions. When we filled the back of the pickup truck, Daddy would back it up to this spring fed creek and then he’d sit in the truck and drink his ‘shine while I washed the onions in the water right where it came out of the ground. Now, that was cold water! When I got finished washing them, I had to tie the onions up into bundles of twenty and stack them
neatly in the back of the truck.” He paused, shaking his head slowly. “Now, that was cold water.” George stood there staring off into the sky, obviously lost in the memory.
“After Daddy sobered up the next day, we took the onions over into Georgia and sold them to old Mr. Smith at the Piggly Wiggly down on Broad Street. Mr. Smith was something else. I do believe
he counted every onion in each bunch. He wasn’t very nice to us. We were ‘rednecks’ and even though he couldn’t stock his store without rednecks, he didn’t have to be nice to them. I remember, after he finished counting the onions, Mr. Smith would pull out his wallet and slowly count out a few bills and hand them to Daddy. Daddy held his head up and counted the bills again, even more slowly. He valued his pride. He could take whatever came his way and serve it back to the giver in turn.” George gazed out over the upscale neighborhood like none of us were there. “That was some cold water.”
After about a minute, George kind of came back to reality and looked around to see the three of us staring at him with our mouths open, waiting for him to continue. He definitely had everyone’s
attention. “Then there was the corn,” he continued. “The common practice on growing corn, or what we called “roasting ears,” was to plant acres and acres of the same thing at the same time. This gave a good yield and was easy to manage, but when the corn came in, you had to work your ass off harvesting it, shucking, canning, selling to the Pig, you name it. The problem was it all came in together and after you like to killed yourself with it, there wasn’t any more. When there wasn’t any more was when the price went up. Well, Daddy didn’t like that system, so he did some research. It was a bit more trouble, but he would plant ten rows of one kind of white, ten more rows of one kind
of yellow, and so on, using varieties that took different times from planting to maturity. This way, when the corn came in, we had six weeks to deal with it. And that wasn’t the best part. The best part was that about three weeks into the harvest, a lot of everybody else’s corn was gone and the price went up. We would take a pickup load to Mr. Smith and some more to the people at the farmer’s market who played like they grew it. The farmer’s market people liked Daddy’s formula,
too, because sometimes they would be the only ones there with roastin’ ears. I remember one time . . .” He stared off in the distance.
We lost him again. Finally, Bud cleared his throat and George started up again.
“One time, we took a bunch of yellow corn to the Piggly Wiggly. Mr. Smith looked at it and said, ‘Buster (that was my Daddy’s name) come over here and look at this.’ He pointed at a couple of 3-peck baskets of old corn on the side of a shelf and said, ‘Buster, this here yellow corn weren’t any good. You are going to have to take it back.’ And my daddy asked him, ‘How long has it been in the store, Mr. Smith?’ And Mr. Smith said, ‘It came in last week. It just weren’t no good from the start.’
And my daddy knew he had him there. He said, ‘Well, I guess I got you there, Mr. Smith. You see, we deliver white corn one week and yellow corn the next week. That there from last week is yellow corn and last week was a white corn week for us and so you must of got it from someone else.’ Mr. Smith owned up that he could of made a mistake and didn’t push it any further.”
George paused. “After we got in the truck, my daddy said, ‘I wish I didn’t have to deal with that cheatin’ son of a bitch, but I guess I do. It’s easy and he pays pretty good. We gotta make a livin’ somehow.’” George grinned. “One time we made a really good sale at the farmer’s market. This doctor saw us driving up and bought the whole load of corn at retail and paid us extra to deliver it to his house. This made Daddy happy and he said he would buy me some new shoes. So we went to Kessler’s and I told him that I would really like to have some basketball shoes so I could play basketball that winter. I knew I could make the school team, but I had to practice barefoot ‘cause the coach wouldn’t let me wear my brogans on the gym floor. Well, Daddy told me that I could only get one pair of shoes and if I wanted basketball shoes, that would be ok. So, I got some Converse All Stars. Black, with a white sole. High tops. Man, I was proud of those shoes. You know how your daddy or granddaddy had to ‘walk ten miles through the snow to go to school?’ Well, daddy only had to walk five miles to school – when he went – which wasn’t often. Now me, I had it easy, I just had to walk two miles to the bus stop. But I did walk it barefoot. I always took my basketball shoes off and tied the laces together and hung them over my shoulder. I didn’t want to wear them out on the
gravel road.”
George looked at Bud and asked, “What about you, Bud? I can tell by the way you do things that you’re an old redneck.” Bud had been in a halfway trance, listening, obviously going back to his own
childhood. He looked up, stuck his hands in his pockets, and rocked back and forth on his heels and toes.
“Wa’al,” he said, “there was eight of us children and Daddy made sure that we was in school every day the door was open. We only had a mule and buggy until we got a pickup when I was about twelve. I was third next to the youngest. We didn’t go to church much ‘cause it was right hard to get everybody ready and there with the wagon. But, I still remember my maw. She’d sit in her rocker every night that went by and make us all gather around her and she’d read us verse from the Bible. My youngest sister’s still got that Bible. And that Bible has still got everybody’s name in it.
“There sure is a lot of stuff kids today don’t understand. Two of them things is working and Christmas. Me and my brothers and sisters would start picking cotton after school about three weeks before fall break. That way we had a head start on it when fall break came along. That two weeks of fall break, we were all in the cotton from dawn to dark. It’d break your back, but we kept at it because we knew that it had to be done for us to eat that winter. We’d get the wagon loaded. It
took two mules and it was long with tandem wheels in the back. It had sides on it built what looked like up to the sky when I was a kid. Then, Friday night, we’d all climb up on the wagon and Daddy would drive it to town. We rode and spent the night on top of the cotton. You never seen a better bed. Man, it was soft, except some of the burrs and seeds got down in your coveralls sometimes. We’d get to the gin sometime late at night and sleep until about five in the morning when Daddy would get us up for breakfast. We had a bucket of fatback and biscuits that Maw had made for us. A lot of the kids from the other farms ate breakfast at the diner, but we had better things to do with
our money.
“Daddy would make a deal with the foreman at the gin and he would stay with the wagon to make sure that everything got done right. He’d get a small advance on his money, though and he would
give each of us fifteen cents to go to the movie and a dime to buy ice cream with. That movie was something else. It had news, something called coming attractions, cartoons, all kinds of other stuff and then cowboy movies with folks like Lash Larue, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers. Every once in a while we got a Hopalong Cassidy movie. I liked him.
“While we was at the movie, Momma and Daddy went shopping. They got bunches of stuff for the farm and lots of things like flour and sugar. We grew most all of the stuff we needed to eat. The last thing they would do was to get new coveralls and a new pair of brogans for each one of us kids. Momma would get a little cloth to make dresses for the sisters. I think she got a little red ribbon, too. That was put away and it was what we all got for Christmas. And Christmas was fun back then. We had lots of food and played with all the cousins, and it weren’t all uptight like it is now. But, you know, them people in town, they did call us rednecks.”
Harce added his part. “Yeah, they call us rednecks because they figured people from the country didn’t know how to behave in town. I bet we behaved better than anybody else. When we used to take stuff to town, that’s when I learned how to fight. I got to where I would fight some city kid who even looked at me wrong. The football coach wanted me to play football. I tried it out, but he told me I was too mean and all I was supposed to do was tackle the other guy, not get him down and hit on him. Hell, they didn’t even think about running that football past me.
“But you know, we might of been rednecks, but we knew how to do stuff. We knew how to fix a truck that wouldn’t run, and build houses and barns and ramjet pumps for water. My Grandma knew how to churn butter and sew clothes with a needle and thread. We knew how to butcher meat and how to hunt and how to grow our own food. Hell, Ol’ Hank Jr. was right on the money when he sang that song A Country Boy Can Survive. We weren’t afraid of work and we knew how to do stuff. Let them say what they want. All we ever needed from the store was sugar, flour, and ribbons for the girls. ” I paid attention and might have nudged the conversation toward the difference between rednecks and “white trash.” Bud jumped all over that one and George Adams agreed.
Bud said, “A redneck might not have no money, but he does everything he can to get some. White trash don’t never have no money and they don’t seem to care.”
George added, “White trash does better in town ‘cause they can get on welfare and not think it is shameful.”
Bud carried it on. “White trash is the people with the tumbling down house and dogs under the porch and pregnant daughters. Rednecks work, and they care about things and they know how to
do things. That’s the difference. White trash is really the ones they make the jokes about.”
George told us, “I want you to look at what is important to rednecks. They love their trucks, they enjoy country music and that came down the line from church music. And then there’s NASCAR,
horse racing and chicken fights. That comes from who can come up with the best of everything and make it work for them. I think rednecks are the backbone of the United States. Tell me I’m wrong
and you can kiss my ass.”
I owned up that I would never complain about cold water again.
Copyright . dekie hicks. All rights reserved.