by Elisa New
Weekdays: coffee. Cake plates stacked, percolator at the ready. Dried fruits and nuts heaped or fanned artfully in the Limoges, chocolates in gold paper in a crystal dish.
Weekends: brunch. Vinegar cruet. Pickle forks. Platter of tuna, salmon, tomatoes, lettuce frills. Bagels, defrosted, sliced, toasted, and presented on a crisp napkin. Pie server raised on silver tiptoes on the cloth, ready for its Pyrex insert (piping hot).
Ice bucket (sterling) furred with condensation and thus assigned a little table of its own. A child desiring a refill stood up quietly, filled the glass from the frosty bucket (tongs not fingers, please!), and ducked into the little kitchen where Leona poured. Coke, ginger ale, and such in cans were kept strictly out of sight. The procedure was a delicate one, so children learned to slide their hips around the folding kitchen door and to slip back to their chairs with all dispatch.
Aunt Jean’s glance was sharp. She did not countenance childish interruptions to her flow of talk. It took all her patience, all her intelligent resolve, to straighten out, to set right the acts, to get in the proper order and perspective the family story that others could be relied on to miscarry. For what she offered was not just anecdote or gossip, though they were included, but History.
I can still see Aunt Jean, light from the terrace slanting onto her speckled hands. Sitting under the portrait of herself bedecked in pale blue satin, she would chronicle the life and times of the Levy family. Jean knew well, for instance, as Fanny somehow didn’t, that Riga was in Latvia, not Austria, and that despite his German-sounding name, Uncle Baron was of “Russian or Polish extraction.” The thick file Jean kept was full of documents to that effect. Inconvenient facts were twisted or altered as occasion required. But she understood history ’s continuities and causations, its force and sweep. Beyond dispensing discrete factoids, Aunt Jean was the one oral historian in the family, the only one who knew how to knit the decades into a proper saga, to launch our heroes—Jacob and Bernhard—with the proper pomp.
If she steered clear of the actual content of her father’s politics, she was a strict disciple of its forms. Jean’s narrative of Jacob Levy’s progress had a kind of brilliant teleological dynamism—leaping toward the future, retouching the past—that would have made her father, that old Marxist, proud.
It helped Jean’s momentum somewhat that both her father, Jacob, and her uncle, Bernhard Baron, had made their breakthroughs courtesy of the roller, the oblong turning cylinder of polished steel that speeded up and smoothed the progress of anything fed into it. This cylinder, turning at so many revolutions per minute and then so many more—symbolized progress. Thus Jean gave her visitors to understand how, from 1900 and into the halcyon 1950s, when she had been at the helm of Levy’s International Shrinking Company, what had been slow became quick. The cloth for rainwear, suiting, sails, and canvas awnings which, in 1900, Jacob had lifted from dunking tubs and hung on wooden rods, turned into another stuff entirely, courtesy of the new roller machinery. Now it was a textile that leaped and rippled in waves of sheen and fiberglass.
This same roller, Jean implied, revolutionized tobacco too. Whether fabric and tobacco were related in fact, they certainly were in Aunt Jean’s mind and came, in turn, to be related in mine, so that when I imagined Levy’s Shrinking and Carreras Tobacco, I saw them rolling together on one great bolt, blurring into one product.
Jean’s narrative also held together what others thought betrayal drove asunder. The affinity between Jacob Levy and Bernhard Baron, the continuity of Jacob’s Baltimore cloth-shrinking enterprise and Uncle Baron’s cigarette-rolling juggernaut encompassed the whole chain of inevitabilities that had taken Jean’s brothers and then her sons to London and made them principals in Carreras cigarettes and then Baron’s. Those who saw it otherwise, Jean implied, lacked vision.
As Jean had it, the fact that our own Uncle-Baron-had-invented-a-cigarette-machine-in-Baltimore-sold-it-in-England-went-on-to- manufacture-there-summoning-nephews-grand-nephews-making-them-great-men was the happiest of inevitabilities, decreed by history, destiny, and the intrinsic excellence of the persons concerned—with, she allowed, a little help from tobacco.
One could see, listening to Aunt Jean expound on the great epoch when the family had owned Carreras, that just thinking about tobacco made her very happy.
Taking pleasure in tobacco was hardly unique to Aunt Jean. By the 1960s, when we used to visit her, tobacco’s reputation had began its steep decline, but for nearly four hundred years prior (from tobacco’s discovery by Sir Walter Raleigh in the 1590s to the U.S. surgeon general’s report on smoking and health in 1964) tobacco had been producing a global glow in the lungs only augmented by happiness in the international pocketbook.
It was the tobacco of Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas, shipped from Baltimore, that launched Bernhard Baron in the 1880s. The role he played in busting the tobacco trust and renewing the Anglo-American tobacco trade established him in London as a Jew to reckon with. And it was tobacco that made the fortunes of my great-uncles Eddie, Paul, and Theo who, after joining Uncle Baron in London, gained wealth, influence, and for one of them, even a title.
Generations before my great-grandfather Jacob or my uncle Baron arrived in Baltimore from Bremen or Hamburg, the sea lanes between Europe ’s major ports and the oozy inlets of the Chesapeake were crowded with ambitious hopefuls, crisscrossing the oceans, perfecting vessels of transport.
The young men began coming in the seventeenth century, as news of endless fertile lands was brought back across the ocean. Anchoring at some moist inlet of the Chesapeake, a landless second son from Sussex could set himself up for life, the proceeds reaped from the first year’s crop paying ship’s passage for the laborers required to farm a larger swath of acreage. For each passage paid, London investors topped off his holdings with fifty more acres. In short order, he would be in possession of a country seat.
And what, really, was sweeter than sitting pretty in a seller’s market? A young planter set up along one of the Chesapeake ’s many inlets might cross his boots and await the Sovereign’s coming to fetch his own fields’ produce. From the Bay’s deep basin, the King’s ships let down little tribes of boats. So desirous was the King to pick up and transport the besotting weed, or sotweed, he would call at one ’s very back gate.
No one sums up the first century of tobacco commerce better than the first William Byrd of Virginia, who looks out on his world, likes what he sees and pronounces it good. Marveling at the wonderful popularity of the crop he calls “that bewitching vegetable,” Byrd in 1730 describes a life “abound[ing] in all kinds of provisions without expense.” Established amid his thousands of acres of cultivated tobacco (the original Byrd estate now contains the entire city of Richmond), Byrd epitomizes planter insouciance: “I have a large family of my own, and my doors are open to everybody, yet I have no bills to pay, and half a crown will rest undisturbed in my pocket for many moons altogether.”
Nor does Byrd suffer undue rustication. Each year he sails to London for the “season.” Tobacco’s European devotees are city people—patrons of coffee houses and counting houses; readers of papers, members of clubs—and so are its producers. Tobacco’s travels make it, and everyone who touches it, more urbane. Sliding his ship into Liverpool with his crop battened down beneath, Byrd strikes the template for a transatlantic type: the tobacco cosmopolitan.
Fifty years later, Britain’s heavy hand, including a chokehold on credit to tobacco planters, compromised the lifestyle Byrd loved. But tobacco itself was no less bewitching or profitable a commodity. The market for Virginia and Maryland tobacco easily survived George Washington’s curtailing of tobacco exports to Britain, and the trade sprang back. The growing worldwide market—and slaves—kept profits up.
America’s first profitable region, the Chesapeake, had been born in tobacco, but its industrial and commercial development was promoted by tobacco too. Hard to grow, tricky to preserve and package, tobacco nevertheless provided technical ch
allenges and scope for innovation that an ambitious young man could turn to good account.
Cured tobacco spurred advances in greenhouses and smokehouses, in coopering and caulking, in sailcloth and tar and thus, in contemporary terms, in heating, cooling, packaging, preservation, containerization, and waterproofing of all kinds. Inelegant in its less processed forms—stuffed into a pipe or, worse, into a cheek as a chaw or under the nose as snuff—tobacco’s social climb from saloon to salon, from exclusive use by men to common use by women, forced developments in fine papermaking, in filtering and advertising, as well as advances in belts, rollers, and precision knives. By the first decades of the nineteenth century, tobacco had made Baltimore not only America’s largest shipbuilder but also its biggest agricultural exporter and the country’s second largest port of entry for immigrants. Ships emptied of tobacco took on cargoes of immigrants; ships emptied of immigrants filled up with cargoes of tobacco, and the ports organized for its shipping—Port Tobacco, Annapolis, Danville, Roanoke, and Baltimore—grew in complexity and opportunity. Baltimore shipped its tobacco to the world.
“The relation,” writes H. R. Billings in Tobacco: Its History, Varieties, Culture, Manufacture, and Commerce (gold tooled, handsomely illustrated) in 1875, “existing between the balmy plant and the commerce of the world is of the strongest kind. . . . The great herb . . . has gone on its way . . . ever assuming more sway over the commercial and social world, until it now takes high rank among the leading elements of mercantile and agricultural greatness.”
Tobacco’s ascent up the ranks of products had, of course, been accelerated measurably by war. Billings, who published his book not long after the U.S. Civil War and only twenty years after the Crimean War, would have seen the commerce take a sizable expansion. “Tabac bon,” says a “soldier in the red shirt” in Tolstoy’s work on the Crimean War, Sebastopol. “Yes, good tobacco—Turkish tobacco,” answers the Frenchman, “and with you Russian tobacco good?” “Rouss Bonn!” repeats the soldier in the red shirt.
Mid-nineteenth-century battlefields were great cigarette clearing-houses, with new blends and new smoking fads being taken back home after the war. The cigarette, which in Tolstoy’s works symbolized nationalist antagonisms, attained international standing and became a universal token of world commerce. Inevitable accessory to any worldly scene, part of business and of leisured life, the cigarette traveled across the Atlantic, up the Black Sea and the Dnieper, and down the Elbe and Bug, out from Bremen, out from Hamburg. Billings quotes a Russian correspondent:Everybody smokes, men, women, and children. They smoke Turkish tobacco, rolled in silk paper—seldom cigars or pipes. These rolls are called parparos. The ladies almost all smoke, but they smoke the small delicate sizes of parparos, while the men smoke larger ones. Always at morning noon and night come out the inevitable box of parparos, and everyone at the table smokes and drinks their coffee at the same time. On the cars are fixed little cups for cigar ashes at every seat. Ladies frequently take out their parparos, and hand them to the gentleman with a pretty invitation to smoke. Instead of having a smoking car, as we do, they have a car for those so poky as not to smoke.
Now, of course, we are all poky. Except for the two cigarettes I smoked for “research” purposes (working my courage up with half a bottle of wine on a porch in North Carolina), I have never smoked. I have done my part in coaxing one father, one daughter, one husband, several cousins, and assorted friends to quit the habit, and I do not wish that anyone I love should start again.
And yet it is a lie to say tobacco does not make me—like Aunt Jean—happy in a mysterious way, and I would probably mourn the disappearance of certain peculiar, irreplaceable forms of well-being associated with centuries of tobacco use.
Erotic? Aesthetic? Sublime? One writer has called cigarettes these names. I would not disagree. Cigarettes are, whatever else they may be, artifacts of the subtlest instincts of humanity, the urge to confect, concentrate, and distill; to risk, to deny death; cigarettes are civilized.
Which is why one of my most cherished possessions is a box top full of bright tobacco, now dried and nearly odorless, from a curing barn in Wilson County, North Carolina, one of the places my great-great-uncle Baron went every year between 1875 and 1895 and where, in his stead, my Aunt Jean’s youngest son Jerry went too.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” asked Joey Scott, tanned, modest, as I stood with him in August 2001 in a Wilson County tobacco field. After I had spent the previous day at the Tobacco Life Museum, the Wilson County curators sent me to Joey, whose father, grandfather, and on back beyond the Civil War had raised the choice bright leaf tobacco my Uncle Baron had bid top price for at the local auctions.
Joey was right. Tobacco ready for cutting is pretty to look at. Especially on an August morning, with the dew on. The tiers of tobacco’s spiraling leaves make a pleasing picture against corn’s silkier verticals. And where cotton also grows, as it does on Joey’s farm, where the pink and white blooms of the unopened boll toss for three days before the cup of cotton froth appears, tobacco makes a handsome backdrop, complementing with its straight green the riot of pink nearby.
And out of the curing barn, bright-leaf tobacco is even prettier. A hand of cured tobacco set against the sky is a dazzling matte gold, like a child ’s thick-crayoned round of sun; cured hands being loose piled are the color of luxury. From out of the velvety looking shadows of the barn waft besotting, bewitching odors natives call “sweet scented.” As if the earth itself came up in a fire of honey: That is the look, the smell of bright-leaf tobacco.
No wonder, as one of Uncle Baron’s biographers put it, he made a “lifetime study of tobacco culture in all its branches, from the planting of the seed to the manufactured article.” Every spring brought him from London back to the tobacco belt. “From 1871-96,” this source continues, “there was not a single year that Bernhard Baron did not see for himself the growing and cutting of the finest crops of Virginia and other tobaccos.” Uncle Baron took these trips not just for the pleasure of it; those who would make a success of tobacco had better know it and all its idiosyncrasies. Tobacco defeats casual cultivation and rewards only those who tend it devotedly. From February through June, tobacco is like a child in need of patient nursing; there is no end to the care the plant exacts.
Around December in some climes and by early February everywhere else, the seed is started in a protected place—a barn warmed by the heat of livestock, a sunny woodland clearing sheltered from wind, or under a cabin floor. The seedlings sprout and send up stalks and leaves. In late March or early April, when a spring thaw warms ground a spade can break, a young boy takes a crate of bright sprigs outside, pokes down and digs out and opens new holes to replant the seedlings, keeping the hills equidistant, giving each seedling space to broaden.
The six- or seven-year-old boy is brought back in May or June to pick the grubs off the lower leaves while his father suckers the plants, pulling off the top leaves to encourage bushy second growth. The nine-or ten-year-old boy walks the fields in June, sack around his waist, tossing in both grubs and narrow leaves that are forcing out the best growth. Then come weeks of waiting. After the last suckering, the leaves are left to fatten undisturbed in the moist heat of midsummer.
At least for a while in the cooler days of September, tobacco is not the worst crop in the world to pick. Unlike rice, which grows in malarial swamps; unlike sugar, which requires a machete to cut it; unlike cotton, which tears the fingers with its woody burrs, tobacco is a crisp and supple plant. Tall, its prime leaves growing at a man’s hips or a child ’s shoulders, its leaves, though sticky, break off the stalk with a sharp snap.
Nor is the curing always miserable. Arranged in tiers in a curing shed, each hand on its own dowel, the crop is barn cured—leaves placed where air through the slats can lift their edges and brush their central ribs.
On a day with a breeze, a boy can slip away, find himself a nicotine bower, and doze in the coolest spot around. And in the early morning dew
, who would not enjoy lifting down a fragrant, cured hand and inhaling its breath: sweet scented.
Problem is—most places—the weather.
In most places, August is brutal.
In August a boy working tobacco awakens with a headache. He will have spent the night curled near the opening of a shed, its rough door unhooked to admit what breeze might come. As the day’s picking begins, the temperatures in the Chesapeake or the Crimea are already high. By one o’clock the sun burns through sweat soaking the boy’s neck; pools of standing water from last night ’s rains grow fetid. It is hard to imagine lifting a finger in weather that loves tobacco but hates mortal comfort.
Picking and flue curing both happen in August and September. A boy picking by day may also be assigned the task of tending the flue at night. Sent to sleep on a pallet next to the hot walls, the boy’s job is to wake the men in the event of a stray spark. The smoke tugs at his lungs all night, not altogether unpleasantly, but he wakes blinking in an acrid, intoxicating haze. Early mornings, on the hottest days of the year, the job may fall to him to restoke the fire, pushing lengths of dry wood into the flue to keep the heat constant.
The person tending this fire, setting these plants, pulling these worms, his face a smudge, his hands a cracked and blistered mess—who was he? A fixture of the trade. Unmentioned in Byrd or Billings, he was indispensable to tobacco culture through the end of the nineteenth century.
From William Tatham’s classic Tobacco Culture, 1800, London.
