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There is nothing like the Piedmont land, no sir. A life of rising in the morning, planting peppers, and praying to God for the cycle is an honorable one, worthy of Caroline. There is luck in that mud, you know; It is expected to be cultivated with cash crops, and it will grow by waiting for the future. Build a house, build a barn, and get it for work; wipe the sweat from your forehead during the day, and put your head on the pillow at night.
There aren’t too many distractions when it comes to rural life. It’s not just too much. Before the frost the seeds in the ground, grow, keep, germinate. The life of a thin thing is easily lost in the sun being too hot, the rains are few, the culture is not done. You have to focus more than that. you have purpose. And you simply don’t have time to lose getting distracted by those…childish cries in the distance.
Hmmm This is “the ball” again. A group of boys play it loud enough to disturb your plants. You shake your head. Nobody wants to plow anymore. It is 1887, and certainly, the onset of spring comes with joy and a natural horn wave in the local pubescent, but at some point it is time to grow and start farming peppers.
One night, you find yourself staring at the ceiling as crickets chirp, watching the sheer inscrutability of the watch. You’re quickly at the pantry, clocking in the hours, eating in your precious sleep before another day’s work begins.
“The introduction of a fool’s staff at this time, when all the boys are at work, is ridiculous,” says your letter, printed in type. Gastonia Obtuse days later “Let us leave sports and other idleness to work with the will, and in our time exercise our talent in doing something that will benefit us and our old age, one thing. [the] thirteen days of revolution…”[1]
That should show. Hopefully, soon the summer air will be filled with clouds of dirt from the new plow, and fewer happy children will cry.
But it is too late. North Carolina boys are ready to play ball, they don’t grow peppers. One of them is sent by his father to collect a package of painted cotton seeds. The snafu collapsed into the stowage, burying the kid under ten feet of suffocating seeds. In each moment he flashed his short life before him, afterwards he did not think about all the crops he could not grow, his hands would form calluses, the sweat would leave engraved on his forehead. The first and only thoughts of the boy broadcast in the air were more tragically predictable than those;
“… I’ll never play baseball again.”[2]
He’s back on his feet quickly enough, thrashing through the diamonds with the simple idea that somehow, the infield dirt will grow something as a reward like the shadow of a pepper crop.
Children kept playing and not farming and by the time Gen Z entered the workforce, farms were a place where people could often find themselves voting against their property. However, they grew up and became teenagers to do other things. One of them from Gastonia, North Carolina made a hot sauce out of habaneros and Naga Jolokia peppers, and fixed it on Shark Tank, garlic, tomatoes, dolorosa, lime, and passion fruit, the bounty of the land itself, in which there were more key footprints than hoof footprints in 2015.[3]
Clearly, North Carolina’s Ghost Peppers weren’t going anywhere—but neither was baseball.
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