The Tobacco Wives

Content Warning: The source material contains discussion of miscarriage and racism.

The chapter begins as 15-year-old Maddie Sykes’s mother shines a flashlight in her eyes and tells her to get up. It is early June 1946 in the Holler, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, and school has just been let out. Maddie recalls a previous night when her mother, Grace, whom she calls Momma, woke her up on the middle of the night and insisted that she help her burn a collection of Maddie’s father’s belongings. Maddie’s father, Jack, whom she calls Daddy, died in the war the previous fall, and Momma has been behaving erratically since. As Maddie expresses: “Momma loved me, I knew that, and I loved her too, but something in her died with Daddy” (4). Maddie knows that Momma has started looking for a new husband. Maddie hides a few precious possessions of her father’s in her sewing kit, which she keeps tucked in her mattress. As she packs her belongings, she reflects on the difficult financial times that she and Momma have faced since Daddy’s death, but sketching and sewing allow Maddie to escape her trying circumstances. She has started making money for her work and is looking forward to her break spent sewing and enjoying the activities of a teenage summer.