Of Love and Dust: Daily Life in Cherie Quarters

Of Love and Dust:Daily Life in Cherie Quarters

An Excerpt from Ruth Laney's debut book on the place and people who inspired Ernest Gaines

By Ruth Laney

This month, LSU Press will release Ruth Laney’s debut book, Cherie Quarters: The Place and the People That Inspired Ernest J. Gaines, a project Laney—a longtime contributor of Country Roads—has been working on for years. The book tells the story of the plantation community where renowned writer Ernest Gaines (1933-2019) grew up, a place that is also the frequent setting for his fiction. In anticipation of Cherie Quarters’ October 19 publication, Laney has kindly shared an excerpt just for Country Roads readers— detailing what daily life was like in the place that inspired one of our nation’s greatest literary voices.

In the 1930s and 1940s, most of the people of Cherie Quarters worked as sharecroppers or tenant farmers. Ben Biben, who was born there in 1934, recalled that River Lake Plantation functioned somewhat differently from other nearby plantations. Workers “were more like managers. You didn’t have to buy your supplies from the plantation store. You could go anywhere you wanted for them.”

Early rising was common, but “You could get up at different times. Most farmers had their own mules. They got up early but were not obligated to.” After working in the fields, men and women went home for the noon meal, called “dinner,” and a rest. Around 2:30 or 3:00 they returned to the fields and worked until dark. “The lady would leave out the field about four o’clock and come home and cook supper.” Men, when they knocked off work, would “get home and feed the mules.”

Biben recalled a schedule ruled by the seasons. In January, the workers planted Irish potatoes and onions. In midto-late February, they dug sugar cane stubble. In March, they planted corn and prepared the land to plant cotton. In April, they were cultivating, hoeing, and thinning out corn and cotton plants; in May, they fertilized corn and cotton. “We called June ‘lay by,’ pulling the dirt up around the cotton, cutting the grass and weeds, hoeing it out.” July and early August was “sit-back time; I guess nothing special was going on. It was so hot.” By the middle to the end of August, they would “pull corn, cut weeds, clean the ditch bank.”

In September, workers got ready for cotton picking by making their own sacks. “We were poor, so you couldn’t buy the sacks,” Biben said. “You’d take a feed sack or a croker sack and make a cotton sack from it. You’d make a strap from another sack cut into pieces and tie it to the sack. You’d make a loop to put your hand in. Everybody made their own sack, and you had to tailor it to fit you. Some people bought those long white sacks, but we’d make ’em from [brown] feed sacks.” In October, the workers picked cotton, dragging the long sacks on their shoulders. October 1 was also the traditional date for planting sugar cane for the following season.

In October, November, and December—a season known as “grinding”— they harvested cane—cut it with cane knives, loaded it into mule-drawn wagons, and took it to the mill. After River Lake’s sugarhouse was torn down in the 1950s, the cane was sent to a mill at nearby Alma Plantation. “Oh, boy, that sugar cane,” said Biben, nearly fifty years after leaving Cherie Quarters. “Cutting it, loading it by hand, packing it on that wagon.”

Biben teamed up with his uncle George Williams. “George and me used to load together. I’d load the front of the wagon and he’d load the back.” George’s two mules, Red and Bird, pulled the wooden wagon. It was twelve feet long by five feet wide, with shallow sides eighteen inches high. They used stakes to hold the cane in and chains to tie it down. Williams had probably bought the wagon in nearby New Roads, and he customized it for various purposes. “The wagon was made somewhere else, but the bed was homemade. The wheels, the frame, the tongue all come in one piece. The bed, the thing you sit in, you had to make yourself. It was made of cypress. George made that, or Mr. Revel Domino or Mr. Isaiah [Izel Gaines, Ernest Gaines’s grandfather], people who were carpenters.” When it was time to pull corn, “You’d build a higher side on it. You would add to the side, make it higher so you could carry much more.”

The work was undeniably hard, but Biben said, “You didn’t know it was bad. You had fun. We’d sing, laugh, joke, talk about each other. Sometimes they would sneak into the sugar cane patch for some hanky-panky. A lot of people would sing church songs: ‘Satan, Your Wall Must Come Down’ or ‘Working on the Building.’” He sang a few lines from the hymn: “I’m working on the building/It’s a true foundation/I’m holding up the bloodstained/ Banner for my lord/Well, I never get tired, tired, tired of working on the building/I’m going up to heaven to get my reward.”

One song included the words “Oh, Lord have mercy, late in the evening sun going down.” It was “the same thing like slaves used to sing. I found out later it was about getting away from the slave owner.”

Children also worked at Cherie Quarters. Ernest Gaines became a wage earner at eight, earning fifty cents a day picking cotton, pulling corn, digging potatoes, chopping or hauling sugar cane, and cutting trees for firewood. Ben Biben picked cotton as a child. Bill Robillard recalled “loading cane when I was nine years old, and I was on the puny side. We had to survive. I started working for forty cents a day. Forty cents a day.”

Forrest Zeno went to work at twelve. “A child got forty cents a day for twelve hours’ work. Ladies got sixty cents a day for hoeing sugar cane. Mens got eighty cents a day for hoeing cane. Men who plowed with the mules got a dollar a day—that was twelve hours a day. We started at six am, when day break.” Freddie Kemp started at fourteen. “Farm work, hoeing, plowing. We kept hogs, chickens, mules, horses, cows. That was my job, milking cows. Cow done kicked me many times.”

In addition to sharecropping or tenant farming, most Cherie Quarters residents found ways to make extra income. George Williams gave haircuts on the porch of the house he shared with his wife, Mamie, and their two children. Using a truck borrowed from his brother-in-law Freddie Kemp, he hauled cotton to gins for other farmers. He also broke and bred horses, renting out his stallion Tony as a stud. “George was the only one who had a breeding stallion back then,” said Ben Biben. “They’d go back in the graveyard to keep people from seeing it [the horses mating]. The graveyard was surrounded by trees then. Nobody could hardly see it unless you were looking for it. Sometimes Lionel Gaines and Alcide Cage would sneak back there and get behind the bushes and watch.”

In January 1957, this group gathered in front of the Cherie Quarters cabin, where Ernest Gaines had lived as a child. From left, front row: Charles Kemp, Louise Kemp, and Lionel Rowan. From left, standing: Sam Bibbens, Gabriel Brooks, Lionel Green, Rose Bibbens, Jerry Brooks, Lubertha Brooks, Mathilda Harrison, and Mamie Kemp. Photo by David Biben. Courtesy of Deidra Biben-Glynn.

Ernest Gaines’s maternal grandmother Julia McVay, who cooked for the white owners during the week, put her pots and pans to use on weekends, too. “She would give suppers every Saturday night,” said Biben, who often ate at McVay’s house with his grandparents. “She’d charge ’em fifty cents a plate for chicken and gravy, snap beans, peas, potato salad, rice, stewed chicken, fried fish.” McVay also made Mardi Gras costumes and took on other sewing projects.

Many residents of Cherie Quarters worked at the Triple Arch restaurant on False River, where Black people were allowed only as cooks and waiters. The restaurant was popular on weekends, especially when LSU was playing football in Baton Rouge. “Triple Arch, you almost had to have a membership to go there,” said Joe Williams. “Wealthy white folks went there.” “A whole bunch of us worked there,” said Ernest Brooks, who was in his first year of high school when he started at the restaurant about 1950. He worked from nine in the morning until two the following morning for three dollars a day. He chopped onions, celery, and bell peppers; made hush puppies; and washed dishes. His seventeen-hour shift had few breaks. “We’d have a chance to eat, but our break wouldn’t be that long.” Brooks objected to the behavior of the white owner, Claude Melancon. “He always talked down to people, and I didn’t like that. But I couldn’t do nothing about it, being a kid.

“There were no Blacks going in there. Anybody Black . . . had to be working.” Black people were not allowed inside even to buy food to take out. “They had a little delivery side. You had to go to the side door if you wanted to buy something. You just had to knock on the door and order what you wanted and they’d bring it out.”

Biben remembered an endless cycle of labor, both paid and unpaid. “I used to watch people work so hard. People like Ovide Simon—we called him Tee Moon. He’d go into the field at day light. His stepson would bring him breakfast and dinner in the field. He’d work until dark, feed his mules, then go home for supper. He’d sit and talk with us on the porch for a while, then he’d get his gun and go kill a possum. That’s the next day’s meal. They’d lay it out until the next morning, get up and skin him out, gut him and dress him, and eat him the next day. We’d sit there talking and laughing, and he’d say, “Well, let me go see can I find something.” He’d get a single-barrel shotgun and go out and hunt until he killed something. Get up in the morning and you’d see him out there with his wagon and his mule.”

Ruth Laney will appear at the Louisiana Book Festival at the State Capitol on October 29. To order a copy of Cherie Quarters: The People and the Place that Inspired Ernest J. Gaines, visit lsupress.org.