By BETH MACY
THE ROANOKE TIMES
Nov. 27, 2002
CLAYTOR LAKE -- In her 20s and 30s, Linda Hamlett Childress tried to hide the fact that she'd grown up poor.
If she had enough things, she figured -- a fancy car and a giant house, with diamond jewelry to match -- then no one would know she was from a Charlotte County tobacco farm, the one with the outhouse and no running water. No one would know she had stood in the "reduced lunch" line at school.
At her previous house, in Salem, she and her state-trooper husband had four bathrooms, two living rooms and two fireplaces. "We made enough to pay for it, but just barely; we were right on the line," recalls Linda, now 46 and a dental hygienist.
After a while, the veneer began to fade. Keeping up with the Joneses wasn't just tough. She was Jonesed out.
The older she got, the less she cared about covering up her past. She started sharing some of her tobacco farm stories with friends and patients, and she noticed they got a kick out of them.
They laughed when she said a balled-up page of the Sears & Roebuck catalog was almost as soft as Charmin. They laughed when she talked about the time her daddy made her plant tobacco seedlings all day while the rest of her girlfriends were home getting dolled up for the prom.
When Linda and her sister finally made it back to the house, all grimy and stinky, there were their tuxedoed dates sitting on the front porch, flowers in hand.
People liked the stories so much that Linda decided to write her memories down -- so she wouldn't forget. She also wrote them for her daughter, Ashley, who's a junior at the University of Massachusetts and, as Linda puts it, "has done gone Yankee on me."
Ashley, who is studying psychology, once accused her mom of having a "passive personality." She'd have a field day with the way Linda went about self-publishing her book, "A Tobacco Farmer's Daughter."
Linda printed her stories out and gave them to her boss, Roanoke dentist Fred Coots III -- a certified college boy with the plaques on the wall to prove it. She had already decided: If Dr. Coots gave her the thumbs-down, she'd trash the book.
Linda wanted him to read it ... and she didn't want him to read it. Coots was so book-smart and citified that she just knew he wouldn't get it.
A few days later, he came back, threw her manuscript down on a table and stood there, grim-faced.
"Well?" she asked.
"I love it," he said.
With that nod of approval -- along with some copy editing from Coots and a longtime patient -- Linda published her book.
Still, she worried: What would people think? What if nobody bought the book?
Linda and her husband no longer live in the sprawling Salem subdivision. They're on Claytor Lake now, near the cliffs, in a homey cottage with a panoramic view. The house had been in Steve Childress' family for decades.
Steve grew up middle class in the Pulaski County town of Fairlawn. His family had intercoms in their house and a heated driveway to melt the ice.
Steve never had to put baby powder in his hair to cut the grease, or bathe in a No. 3 galvanized tub in the kitchen. Steve's dad hadn't dropped out of school in the second grade.
Harry Lee Hamlett never did learn to read well, his daughter says. "But he can walk a tract of timber off and tell you the amount of footage for each kind of tree. ... My daddy is a legend in Brookneal."
He's 66 and still farming the same spot of land. He's got 400 acres and runs a fairly successful tobacco operation, given the uncertainty of the industry.
When Linda was a kid, the farm was a matriarchal affair. Harry Lee ran a sawmill on his land while her mom, Jane, ran the tobacco farm and managed the books. The four girls -- Linda is the second oldest -- worked daily in the fields. They planted, pulled weeds, suckered the seedlings and pulled the tobacco leaves off at harvest time.
Linda learned to chop wood at the age of 8, to drive a tractor when she was 10.
It's not that her family couldn't afford indoor plumbing; there were definitely kids who had it worse than her. But her daddy didn't see a need for toilets or vacations or store-bought clothes - even in the 1970s.
When his daughters hit puberty, he changed his mind on the bathroom issue. It would no longer do to have teenage girls bathing next to the wood stove.
It was a proud moment for Linda and her sisters. She recalls beaming when the school bus dropped them off, and their friends could see the bathroom construction project from the bus windows.
Still, she wanted to get out in the worst way.
Within days of her high school graduation, Linda did what most of her friends did: got herself hired on at the Bassett-Walker Knitting Co., where she sewed fleece sportswear and saved up for a place of her own. She had wanted a professional job, but her parents didn't see a use for college.
"Not everybody can be a doctor or a lawyer," her daddy told her.
Within six months, she'd saved enough to leave the farm. She moved to Farmville, where she took a job as a hospital EKG technician. But before long, her bank account was empty -- and the rent was due.
She called her daddy and asked to come home. He was there within the hour. He was stubborn as kudzu and not a little bit gruff, she says. "But he always rescued you when you needed it."
Then came trooper Steve, to whom she quickly became engaged and married. When he was transferred to Richmond, Linda did her best to shed her accent and become a city girl. "My mother hated the person I was," she recalls. "She thought I was being 'biggity.'"
As her husband moved up through the state-trooper ranks, Linda worked as a dental assistant. Linda decided she wanted to move up, too. Not only did the dental hygienists get paid better than the assistants, she noticed, they dressed better, too.
At 33, she enrolled in the dental-hygiene program at Virginia Western Community College. She drove her daughter to school and piano lessons and softball games, and then drove herself to class. By the time they moved to Salem, in 1996, she had earned her associate's degree and advanced to hygienist.
She now had all the trappings of the middle-class life -- complete with her own diploma on the wall. "But guess what I found out?" she recalls. "I was still the same old me."
Linda still wants to get her bachelor's degree. She's working on a fictionalized version of her story now, called "Tobacco Row Girl," that will be darker than the tales in her story collection. A part of her is a tiny bit jealous of her Yankee-sounding daughter with the intellectual/hippie lifestyle and the luxury of studying Proust.
So far, in three months, she's sold nearly 1,000 copies of her book of stories, and she's displayed it everywhere from the Virginia Tech Farming Family Showcase to the Brookneal Drug Store. She even got to ride on the town float in Brookneal's bicentennial parade.
People who like the old, rural ways are gobbling up her stories like so many fried apple pies. "[Congressman] Virgil Goode bought my book!" she exclaims.
Even Daddy, who was skeptical at first, now carts around copies to sell from the cab of his truck. The project has made her family closer, she says.
Despite her hatred for cigarettes -- Linda and Steve are fitness fiends -- she's come to appreciate the dying art of tobacco farming.
Not long ago, at a book-signing in Chatham, she read from the final essay in her book, a chapter called "Summer's End," describing bittersweet memories of plowing the fields under:
