Memories of picking sweet potatoes
I picked sweet potatoes when I was a child, and it was two years after graduating from junior high school when I worked in the village.
At that time, in my hometown of Xiangling Town, due to the large number of people and the small number of land, coupled with the policy of large pots of rice in the countryside at that time, each family did not have enough food to eat. Therefore, carrying sweet potatoes in late autumn and early winter every year has become a way out for the people of Xiangling Town to fill their stomachs. From after the autumnal equinox to around the frost, sweet potatoes can be picked for more than twenty days to a month. This is a big event, and there are a wide range of participants, men and women, old and young, as long as they can run and carry back. This event is not launched, there is no need to call for it, and every year it is not known who starts first or who sweeps the end last. At the end of the season, households with few laborers pick up five or six hundred catties, medium households pick up seven or eight hundred catties, and households with more laborers and strong bodies can pick up two or three thousand catties, and some even more. In addition to eating the sweet potatoes retrieved, some people also have to sell part of them to the flour mill. Sweet potatoes provide at least two or three months of food rations for the people of Xiangling. This was an excellent way to get rich at that time, which was generally short of grain and could not earn any money. That's why my father used to encourage me to pick more sweet potatoes with the phrase "now picking sweet potatoes is better than anything else."
The place to pick up sweet potatoes is in the area of Zhang Li and Zhao Qu on the east bank of the Fenhe River, three or five miles away, crossing the river; The distance is more than 10 or 20 li. At that time, there were few bicycles in the village, and all the sweet potato pickers walked. People with shovels on their shoulders, pockets on their shoulders, sweet potatoes pickers: all dressed up like this. No matter how many sweet potatoes are picked up (naturally everyone estimates the weight they can carry, for fear that they will end work early when they can't carry it), they all rely on people to carry on their shoulders, carry dozens of pounds, and walk more than ten miles, each sweet potato picker is sweating profusely and his clothes are soaked. However, no one wants to pick up less.
During the sweet potato picking season, the brighter and later, the darker the sooner, and the people in the village turn around in October." Due to the short weather, the sweet potato pickers get up early and return late. Before dawn, I had to finish eating and go on the road, and I could only return home after lighting the lights at home.
Sweet potato pickers do not eat lunch, first, there is no place to eat; Second, there is also a fear of delay. When you are hungry, you have your own dry food to suppress your hunger. Most of the dry food is the same, and all the yellow nest head slices are roasted on the fire to turn golden, so that they are not cold when they are cold in the wild. There are also some people who may have a shortage of food at home, so they have to bring some sweet potato chips baked with a spoon.
Sweet potatoes are generally easier to pick, as long as you have the strength to dig, there are always some. On the one hand, because dryland people (our collective name for Hedong people there) grow sweet potatoes more; On the other hand, mainly because they are all collective work, it is common for sweet potatoes to come out unclean, and sometimes whole nests of sweet potatoes are often dug out. In order not to make each sweet potato miss the pickup, the people who pick up the sweet potatoes turn the same as turning the ground, one by one. Maybe the people of Xiangling do not grow sweet potatoes, maybe the people who pick sweet potatoes are hungry, maybe some people are not afraid to waste every effort of their shovels, or maybe the people of Xiangling are naturally careful. All sweet potatoes, no matter how small they are, and what they look like (digging up sweet potatoes and calling Joe), must be picked. Some sweet potatoes are small and cute, small and smooth, and tender like a little mouse, so everyone can't bear to throw them even more. Of course, some sweet potatoes are small and thin can no longer be called sweet potatoes, to be precise, they can only be a thick root. Just this, in the eyes of some older people, is also unwilling to throw it. They often say, "Eating this is much better than eating starch nests."
In fact, picking sweet potatoes is not only a matter of suffering and suffering, but also sometimes anger. I encountered it once in the first year of picking sweet potatoes: it was in Yan Village, it was when the village had breakfast, and the sweet potato pickers in the sweet potato fields on the eastern slope of the village were in groups, estimated to be one or two hundred people, and some of the sweet potato fields there had already been out (officially harvested out), and the sweet potato pickers were allowed to enter the field; Some plots are coming out, and the people who come out of the sweet potatoes go home for breakfast, and the most taboo of this kind of plot is that people who pick sweet potatoes go into the field. However, there are a few daring ones who go to the unfinished sweet potato field to "pick". It was discovered by the people watching sweet potatoes from afar in the village, and this time it was a disaster! They immediately reported to the task force stationed in the village, and two or three cadres of the task force led the cadres of the large and small teams in the village, and the momentum divided into two roads and began to surround the sweet potato pickers. At this time, I don't know which eye-catching shout: "Someone is coming, run." All the sweet potato pickers were first shocked when they saw this, and they all raised their heads to look around, and after figuring out what was going on, the crowd dispersed like a hornet's nest that had been stabbed, and the sweet potatoes picked up did not have time to put them in their pockets, so they ran to the east, south and north directions. Only the older and younger, and those who were actually picking sweet potatoes, were still standing in place to see how the task force fell, and I was one of them. I thought to myself: "You stole sweet potatoes, I didn't steal them, what are you running!"
However, "honest people always suffer losses" really caught me up. The leader of the task force spoke: "Give me all to obediently return to the village, no one wants to run... You Xiangling people are really bad, look what it looks like to steal our sweet potatoes! Several elderly elders argued, "We didn't steal again, why did you chase us?" The task force leader's voice became louder: "Who knows if you steal or not?" You can't pick it up! Let me go! "The village cadres led the way in front, a few cadres next to them, and a few cadres behind them "broke off", and we were like prisoners who had been "escorted" and released, and we walked in a long line towards the village. From the sweet potato field on the eastern slope to the village, there is a ditch in the middle, and the downhill road is winding, between people
The distance is very large, and from time to time someone slips away, some hide in the yard of the roadside, and some hide in the thatched house on the side of the road... Watching the number of people in the team go less and less, I wanted to slip away several times, but I never had the courage to slip away. When the people were concentrated in the warehouse of a production team, only twenty or thirty people remained of the original fifty or sixty people. The head of the task force asked people to stand well, and he began to lecture that picking sweet potatoes is a gain for nothing, socialism is not allowed ... Some people still steal, it's really bad! See what has turned our land into? You Xiangling people love to turn the ground anyway, today I will let you give me a good turn..." The leader of the task force looked to be in his thirties, with a small comb, wearing a student blue uniform that was very fashionable at that time, and his demeanor had a "poor atmosphere" that the people hated the most.
The land to be turned over was in the river beach in the village, and when I got to the end of the field, there were about ten fewer twenty or thirty people. Several elderly people privately said, "Let's turn him on the ground and don't let each person carry a bag of sweet potatoes when he goes back?" Hearing the adults talking, I was secretly happy that I could actually carry a bag of sweet potatoes back. With this illusion, a dozen people worked very hard to turn over the ground until the sun went down and their stomachs were hungry and thirsty. At this time, the team leader said: "Forget it! I won't punish you today, you Xiangling people love sweet potatoes, the brigade has steamed a big pot for you, go back after eating! As soon as I heard this, the joy of thinking that I could carry sweet potatoes suddenly turned into full of anger, and my chest was breathless for a while... I couldn't stand this great insult, I wanted to shout, I wanted to cry, I wanted to scold, but I didn't, I couldn't reason with them. But I know, how can a hairy child talk about the task force? Without saying a word, he carried the iron mill and carried the empty pocket, and ran straight for the way home angrily. Several elders pleaded with the team, saying that they always wanted to recite sweet potatoes, which reached my ears from time to time
When I got home, it was already dark, and my mother asked me how much I had collected, and I cried before I could say "wow". While crying, talking, gasping, stammering, intermittently telling about today's encounter... When my mother saw that I was very angry, she couldn't stop giving me relief. "How can you always do things? As long as my baby is good, it is better than anything... Don't cry, the pot still gives you hot sweet potatoes..." In the two sweet potato picking seasons, I did not count how many roads were run, nor how many sweet potatoes were picked, nor did I summarize how much I harvested from picking sweet potatoes, I only knew that my father said: "Fushengzi picked up sweet potatoes for the family to top a big bar." Later, when I grew up, I learned that my current spirit of hardship and thrift was inseparable from picking sweet potatoes back then.
In the fall of 1964, I went to school again and never joined the sweet potato picker again. Later, when I was at the most powerful in Xuedazhai, I heard from the people in the village that picking sweet potatoes was also cut off as the tail of capitalism, and some people secretly picked them up and were criticized after they were discovered.
The Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee was like a spring thunder, breaking the shackles that imprisoned the heads of Chinese peasants, and hundreds of millions of peasants radiated infinite wisdom and strength, and encouraged by the household joint production contract responsibility system, they turned China's rural areas upside down. The hometown father, who had been running all day to fill his stomach, finally had his stomach full. Grain that everyone in our village had not seen for many years filled the yards, filled the tanks, and filled the stockpiles. Then to the season of picking sweet potatoes, people are busy in their own responsibility fields, they are harvesting autumn, and they are planting wheat, and the family labor is not enough, how can they ask people to pick sweet potatoes? Besides, the sweet potatoes dug up in the dry land's responsible fields are cleaner than in any year, and the sweet potatoes collectors can only turn over the land for nothing, who is willing to do this loss-making transaction.
Since then, picking sweet potatoes, a good job that once helped feed the people of Xiangling, has been completely interrupted in Xiangling Town.
More than thirty years have passed, and whenever I recall the days when I picked sweet potatoes, I always evoke many, many reveries... Thousands of thoughts, thousands of words, gathered into one sentence, may our motherland be richer and stronger from now on, may our people no longer suffer from hunger, and let the era of picking sweet potatoes never return!