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The People Who Lived on the Land that is Now Redstone Arsenal, page 27
Dave always puts his syrup in buckets; however, some people go to the Coca Cola plant in Huntsville, get wooden barrels, wash them up, and bring them to take their sorghum home. Of course, the residue from this syrup making doesn't go to waste. Molasses strap is used for making home brew and moonshine. Home brew is alcoholic. It has hops in it. You have to let it “breathe” before you bottle it. Most of the people make home brew now days. We need to move on now, another mile up the road to the west. It's getting late, and there is one more family I'd like to introduce, the Harris family. There is the cemetery up on the north side of the road. The road is curving a bit, and as it starts to straighten out, we see a small house on the south side of the road. That's where Billy White lives. He goes to Farley School. His daddy is Juanita Lassiter's brother. Juanita and her husband Millburn used to live in one of the sharecropper houses over on this side of the road. It was a small place, so after they had their first child, they moved across the road to live in the big house with Millburn's grandparents, Martha and J.B. Harris. Billy's father is a sharecropper, and his family has a three-room house. It's front door faces north to the Farley-Triana Road. Beds are in both of the front rooms, but one of the rooms is also used as a living room. The kitchen is the back room. They don't have a barn, but they do have a one-hole outhouse with a pit dug beneath it. Three more small houses are on the south side of the road. One is west and a bit south of the White's house. The second is west of the White's and up closer to the road??"the Toodleman's live there. Bill calls Mrs. Toodleman “Aunt Millie.” She is black. A white person doesn't call a black woman “Mrs.” Billy White and his friends like Aunt Millie because she lets them smoke rabbit tobacco. Billy says all the kids smoke it. It grows in the fields among a lot of sage and has grayish-green leaves that are almost 3 inches long and have white fuzz. The third house is directly across the field to the southwest of where the Whites live. The Broiles house is an antebellum style house with two stories. Those folks have a two-seater outhouse. [Mr. Broiles sold his house to a fellow from Indiana in 1939; before he arrived, everybody had heard he was a Republican, and they couldn't wait to see him because they had never seen one of those.] Well, there's the J.B. Harris house. It's up the hill on the north side of the road. Some people call it the Lee House. It's a two-story white house, with four big rooms, two on each side of the large foyer where the stairway curves to the second floor. From the downstairs room on the right there is an entryway into the kitchen and eating area, and behind that is the original section of the house, built 20 years earlier than the two-story section added by Houston Lee when he married Charity Cooper. The way it's all put together, it makes a z-shape. After J.B.'s son, Sam, started his family, he built a house across from his father's. 27 - (4060)