55 pages • 1 hour read
Jimmy CarterAn Hour Before Daylight: Memories of a Rural Boyhood
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2000A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 7-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Breaking Ground, to Be a Man”
Carter reflects that the children in the family were always aware of economic concerns and the way prices, crops, and other factors were interrelated. The only boy in the family for 13 years, he was proud when Earl discussed farm decisions with him.
He loved to travel from field to field with his father. On one such ride, Earl told him how he got started in business. His friend Edgar Shipp set him up with the store in Plains, but Earl was more interested in farming and especially in buying cheap land in order to sell the timber. In 1928, he became a full-time farmer. He held onto all his land even when prices were low.
Carter’s farm jobs went from hoeing and chopping wood to plowing the home garden to breaking land. Finally, he was entrusted with plowing for crops: Corn, then cotton and peanuts. He loved plowing in his bare feet with the mule Emma, as the plowed land was soft and damp. At the end of the day, his progress was visible. Plowing involved many serious decisions, such as how to preserve moisture in the soil. Earl’s workers were often illiterate and yet made such decisions daily.
Carter also had to learn to care for Earl’s 25 or 30 mules and horses. This included watching them for signs of exhaustion or overheating in the field. Like the other workers, he had to avoid sunstroke, which could be fatal. They called it “the bear.” Heat exhaustion was also a serious concern but gave more warning signals. Any illness was devastating to the sharecroppers, who were “chronically malnourished” and “barely scraping by financially” (168).
Pork processing began with the difficult process of slaughtering hogs, boiling the carcasses, scraping off the hair, then removing the intestines and cutting up the hog. No part of the animal was wasted. Eating the parts that couldn’t be preserved, like the brains, was a treat. The cuts were then rubbed with Earl’s secret formula for curing the meat and smoked. Earl also belonged to a beef club, whose members took turns slaughtering a steer with the help of the group.
Watermelons were Carter’s favorite crop, because he had the easy job of removing the damaged melons. Melons had to be sold at exactly the right time for maximum value. The crop was also farmed on newly cleared ground, so Carter could look for Indigenous artifacts there.
Sugarcane, used to make syrup, was also planted on newly cleared land. The cane was milled and processed on the farm. Earl let the skimmings ferment for the cane-mill workers to imbibe—“but not until after noon on Saturdays” (174). He developed a label with the words “Plains Maid” and a picture of a beautiful woman for bottles of the syrup and other products from the farm. Sometimes he sold syrup through distributors, but he hated to lose profit to a middleman.
Corn was grown to feed both animals and humans and was the staple of a Southern diet. Like pork, no part went to waste. Even the leaves were fodder for livestock. Sweet potatoes were shared with everyone on the farm and were a common school lunch food. The farm also produced okra, peas, and greens. The Carters harvested wheat, rye, and oats, threshed it, and brought it to a local mill.
The single most important economic factor on the farm was the price of cotton, which was set internationally. Unless a farmer had the means to warehouse cotton, he was forced to sell his supply at harvest time regardless of the price. Insect invasions were a serious threat to the crop. Carter had to apply a special formula poisonous to insects to each plant by hand, a process called “mopping” the cotton. His clothes were covered by the sticky solution, which attracted flies and bees.
Picking cotton was backbreaking, but Carter enjoyed the competitive aspect of seeing who could pick the most in a day. He was eventually able to pick 150 pounds a day, but Rachel Clark could pick 350 pounds.
The Carters owned another farm in Webster County, which was cultivated by day laborers and Black tenant families. The eight families of tenant farmers were “unforgettable” to Carter. They were extremely competent and owned their own equipment. Earl was fair to them, and they rarely moved away. Felton Shelton stands out in Carter’s memory, as he was well-dressed and had an added business weaving baskets.
Willis Wright had the biggest operation, and along with Rachel Clark, he was instrumental in teaching Carter and helping to shape his “values and opinions” (184). When Willis needed kidney surgery, Lillian served as operating room nurse.
Carter reflects on how many Black families became successful owners of their own farms during Reconstruction—about 25% of farm owners in the South in 1910. Over time, however, racial prejudice limited lending to Black farmers. Earl surprised the family by selling the Webster farm to Willis.
By age 16, Carter was a proficient farmer, qualified to one day take over the farm. However, because of the influence of his mother’s brother, Tom, he wanted to go to college. Uncle Tom had joined the navy and wrote to Carter frequently. Carter’s only option for free tuition was to attend either the Military Academy at West Point, New York, or the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. Carter planned to attend Annapolis, and his father supported his dream.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Learning More About Life”
Carter emphasizes the importance of proper medical care for his farm community and the impact of his mother’s nursing career on his early years. Illnesses were a topic of local gossip. Symptoms of illnesses such as tetanus, mumps, measles, typhoid, typhus, and polio were widely recognized and commonly treated at home, not in the hospital.
Prayer sessions in the various churches were held to pray for “recovery or (in hopeless cases) for fortitude” (192). Friends and relatives took over the household of the sick person, and bereavement was a cause for more help. If the deceased was prominent, all stores would be closed. Vehicles yielded to the funeral procession. The Lebanon Cemetery was segregated “like everything else” (192), but all the funerals were impressive.
The height of social and financial distinction was to be a doctor, especially one at Wise Sanitarium. Since diseases were often fatal, lives depended on the doctors, who often paid house calls. The better-off locals in Plains held stock in the hospital and believed it was better than the ones in Atlanta. A popular story held that a local man traveled to Baltimore to be treated at Johns Hopkins, only to be told to go to Wise for his treatment. Less popular doctors were not affiliated with Wise, and locals believed that they were the ones prescribing opiates to the few people with drug dependencies in town.
Both doctors and nurses trained at Wise, including Lillian Carter. Before choosing private duty after the arrival of her daughter Ruth, Lillian was the nurse in charge of the operating room. She acted almost as a doctor in diagnosing and treating patients, including the Carters’ Black neighbors. She never charged them for her help, instead accepting payments in eggs and other goods. Doctors and nurses frequently married or had affairs. Carter’s own godmother, who was married, lived with a doctor who was a widower.
Earl was among the first of the local farmers to become more dependent on peanuts as a crop. Continuous cotton farming had depleted the soil, but Earl knew the importance of crop rotation to rebuild soil fertility. He was, however, subject to the same variations in weather and pricing patterns as other farmers. Excessive rainfall caused invasive weeds.
Earl also made some errors in judgment. He planted too many tomatoes at a time when they were bountiful, then converted the crop into catsup (ketchup). The first batch was ruined when he accidentally kept the juice and fed the pulp to the hogs. The subsequent batch fermented and exploded in the bottle.
Another error in judgment was Earl’s habit of smoking. Tobacco companies had given out free cigarettes to soldiers in WWI, and Earl was addicted to the strongest brands. He also rolled his own cigarettes. Nobody knew that smoking tobacco was linked to cancer, which caused Earl Carter’s premature death. He did, however, convince his son not to smoke until he was 21, although Carter’s mother and three siblings all took up smoking and died of cancer.
The family kept turkeys on the farm for their own use. Carter went with Earl once to pick out a new breed of white turkey that had more breast meat. Carter wondered why his father knew exactly where to go and spent more time than necessary with the farm’s owner, an attractive widow.
Chapters 7-8 Analysis
Modernization was creeping into rural Georgia in these chapters, which are set in the late 1920s to 1930, the year in which Carter was 16. Farm life followed the same seasonal cycles as always, with their ritualized systems for processing meat and harvesting crops. At the same time, Earl Carter was shrewd enough to practice crop rotation and to plant more peanuts as the cotton crops depleted the soil.
The local hospital, Wise Sanitarium, was also thoroughly modern for its time, and held in high esteem by the local citizens. Carter treats the fact that it served as a hotbed for affairs with tolerance, titling Chapter 8 “Learning More About Life”—perhaps because his own godmother was one of the guilty parties.
During this era, nothing had changed to lessen The Devastating Impact of Racial Segregation. As Carter fondly recalls the Black families who worked on the Webster farm, he also notes how few Black families owned their own farmland since the Reconstruction era. He shows his father’s humanity when he describes Earl’s sale of the Webster farm to its best worker, Willis Wright. Given Earl’s shrewd business practices, this was undoubtedly a financial decision. However, the fact that Carter previously emphasized that his father never sold his land shows that Earl was, uncharacteristically, cognizant of Willis’s work ethic.
These chapters also invoke The Role of Family in Shaping Personal Identity as Carter matures and chooses his career path. Carter measures his maturation by the way in which he was entrusted with increasingly challenging jobs on the farm, including plowing and caring for the valuable large animals. Fully qualified to take over the farm, he instead decided to attend the Naval Academy at Annapolis. He has alluded to his Naval career earlier, so the decision is not a surprise. Nor is Earl Carter’s support for his son’s ambition surprising: By giving him enormous responsibilities on the farm, Earl clearly recognized a rare combination of hard work, drive, and ethics in “Hot.”
However, his uncle Tom’s influence over Carter’s decision to seek a naval career is a surprise. Carter doesn’t mention until Chapter 7 the fact that his uncle, his mother’s brother Tom Watson Gordy, had a naval career and was Carter’s “distant hero,” writing letters to him throughout his boyhood. He then says that he had been planning to go to Annapolis from the time he was five. The author’s sudden introduction of an influence over a decade in the making shows the somewhat recursive quality of the memoir. As indicated by their evocative titles, the chapters are organized around topics, creating some necessary repetition or omission of information. Annapolis and Uncle Tom, to Carter, clearly were a part of the “to Be a Man” theme of Chapter 7, not the chapters dealing with his boyhood.
