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Sorghum
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When I was four we moved to Ham- ilton, Alabama, which to my Mother was a step down. At least Albertville had a paved road and a stop light. Hamilton had neither. It was lo- cated just north of the center of Alabama, with one border on the Mississippi state line.
Dad said it was too poor for blacks because the thin soil on its rolling hills wouldn’t sustain much cotton growth. You had to go north to the Tennessee River or south to the fabled Alabama “Black Belt” to find areas where the soil was rich enough to support the cost of antebellum slaves, and thus then have free blacks. An all-white county just above us was known as the Free State of Winston be- cause it seceded from the Southern secession- ists.
The 1928 election according to Dad: (Al Smith was a Catholic candidate).
An Alabama farmer was asked how he voted in the latest Presidential election: “Well, they told me that the Pope would come over if Al Smith was elected, so I decided to vote for Hoover. But then I heard that if the Pope wanted the White House he could have bought it from the Republicans, so I voted for Al.”