My sister and I were perhaps exposed to more of these expressions than most children of the thirties, due to our being half orphans. Along with two brothers we were constantly farmed out to relatives - although, strangely - never together, in order to have a roof over our heads. Being moved from relative to relative did not bother me. There were lots of relatives in those days, for large families were the general rule. Much later when my sister and I talked of our bad old early days, we usually associated an aunt, or uncle, or cousin, with their most used expression. For instance, it was a grandfather that always, always, bragged that he "had drunk enough whiskey in his life to swim a mule."
Often we agreed that those expressions were more than just expressions. They actually represented the heart and soul of rural Texas during that terrible period, and should not be lost. However, we did nothing about it until a talk session occurred during a family reunion about the bad old days.
A favorite cousin, whose family I had lived with twenty or thirty different times over the years, referred to his father’s days on the farm as a tenant farmer. I hastily reminded him that his father was a sharecropper, as were we all. After three different corrections by me, he stopped using the term tenant farmer but not once did he use the word sharecropper.
Unwilling to have such an important time in American history cleaned up and brushed over, as easily as changing a word here, and a phrase here and there, we would record it as it was and leave the rewriting of history to the historians.
I was descended from share-croppers and I was glad that I seemed to be the last person in America to know what gee and haw meant to the mules when it was yelled to them while plowing and what farming on the thirds and fourths meant, and why there was such a wide social difference between thirds and fourths farming and farming on the halves. Of course, farm day laborers were even lower on the scale, they hardly reached keeping your head above water was all.
These expressions were a large part of the times when talk was all. If you have heard the expression "You come back now, when we send for you" actually uttered, you know it brings chills over anyone who speaks it, and all who hear it, that match those tremors brought by a Greek tragedy. Indeed, the results of these words, usually spoken quietly and deliberately, often brought about tragedies of Greek proportions.
"I wouldn’t take a million dollars for any kid I’ve got. And I wouldn’t give you a dime for another one."
"If I loved a liar I’d hug you to death."
"I wish I could buy him for what he’s worth, and sell him for what he thinks he’s worth."
"She must have been vaccinated with a Victrola needle."
"Yes, and there is another little verse right after that one."
"I soon told him how the cow ate the cabbage."
"There was so much noise you couldn’t hear yourself think."
"Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth."
"The way her stomach is swelling up she must have swallowed a watermelon seed."
