Tobacco Patch

"Well, like I said we were sharecroppers and so we didn't have any money and--but my mom kept us together, and she had a little tobacco patch. And she had the money that she got from that tobacco, and so she made all of our clothes. She made them out of feed sacks, and she made our underclothes out of flour sacks. And, our little gowns and things, she made out of flour sacks and so she was very handy with a machine and so we got along fine. Now we didn't go hungry. But now we didn't have a hotdog or a hamburger, but we didn't go hungry. I think we knew that we were poor because mama gave us a quarter every Monday morning for five lunches. It was five cents a day, and, we had some girls that had a lot of money. And they--they would buy icecream and I said one day to mama, I said, “would you just please give me a nickel for icecream?” She said, “Alma I can't afford it.” And that made me know that she was...hard."