I have taken calls in Johnston County for twenty six years, and I have never heard a captain read a notebook over the radio. Captain Rayford Barnes was standing in the doorway of the curing barn on the Pittman farm, with the door pried off its hasp and the smell of old tobacco rolling out around him, and he read slowly, one line at a time, because he knew I was writing it down. Eighty eight year old Amos Pittman had been locked in that barn for two days. I had kept him talking on the telephone through a crack in the door until the captain arrived.
The notebook had been in the shirt pocket of Amos the whole time. On its last page was a list of seven farms, written in pencil in his shaky hand, with the name of each farmer and the sum of each harvest. Four of the seven were crossed out. Beside the list were two sentences in a different hand, in blue ink, that Amos said he had copied from a note he found in the truck of his grandson. The captain read it aloud. “The broker pays half. The preacher gets ten percent.” Then he stopped. “Gail,” he said, “which preacher?”
I did not know. But Amos did. He sat on an upturned bucket outside the barn, wrapped in a blanket, shaking, and he said a name to the captain that I heard through the radio on my console. Reverend Clyde Hargett of Grace Harvest Church in Selma. Hargett ran a harvest assistance ministry that helped old farmers sell their crops, and he had steered all seven men to a broker named Lonnie Gaskins, who bought their tobacco at half price and kept the rest. Four of the farmers had lost everything. Amos was the fifth, the one who had survived.
A notebook found in a curing barn gave one farmer the day to bring his grandson back to the land in Johnston County.
Amos gave his terms from the bucket, wrapped in the blanket, and the captain held the radio close so I could hear every word. “Captain, I will tell you the names of every farmer on that list, and I will go to the courthouse in Smithfield and swear to it. My grandson Tyler sold my harvest to Gaskins for one million, nine hundred thousand dollars less than it was worth, and I do not want him locked up. I want him in the program in Raleigh. The farm stays. My Ruby is laid to rest in the yard behind the house, and nobody is going to take this land from us.”
A battered pickup came bumping down the farm road, and out of it stumbled Tyler, a thin young man of twenty seven in a stained jacket, who dropped to the dirt in front of his grandfather. “Granddad,” he said, “I locked you in the barn because Gaskins told me you would go to the sheriff. I was afraid. I was so afraid. I sat in the truck for two hours with my hands over my ears, and I could hear you calling.” He shook his head over and over. “I needed the money for the heroin. That is all. I sold you for a needle, and I will hate myself till I am dust.”
Over the radio I heard a sudden shout, and then footsteps on gravel, and I knew something had gone wrong. Reverend Hargett, who had been listening to everything from the front seat of his white Cadillac at the end of the farm lane, where he had come to do his Christian duty, started the engine, spun the wheels, and then jumped out and ran for the tobacco field with a briefcase. Deputy Marcus Webb stepped out from behind the barn and put himself between the reverend and the rows. I heard him say, very softly, “Sir, that is far enough.”
Hargett stopped in the middle of the field, in the dry stalks, with the briefcase hanging from his hand. He opened it, and the contracts of seven farms blew out across the furrows like leaves. Deputy Webb collected them one at a time, walking slowly among the stalks. Captain Barnes cuffed the reverend at the edge of the field. I heard all of it over the radio, and in the middle of the quiet, the old farmer said something that I will keep forever. “Thank you, Gail, for staying on the line.”
The money consequences were exact. Lonnie Gaskins was arrested that evening at his office in Benson, and Reverend Hargett was charged with fraud, extortion and exploitation of the elderly. The seven farmers were repaid from the seized accounts, and the four who had lost their land were given the right to buy it back. Tyler entered the program in Raleigh the next morning, charged but promised leniency by the district attorney, and the farm of Amos Pittman, worth one million, nine hundred thousand dollars in crop alone, was his again.
Amos started the Ruby Pittman Fund, in the name of his wife who passed in 2018, and I sit on its board. It pays for legal help, seed, equipment and treatment for farm families fighting fraud and addiction, in Johnston, Wilson and Harnett counties. In the first year we helped forty three farms. One belonged to a man of eighty one in Four Oaks who had been told he had to sell his land by Friday. A lawyer from our list was at his kitchen table by Wednesday.
Tyler came home from Raleigh in the fall, in time for the harvest, and I drove out to the farm on a Saturday on my day off. Amos stood in the yard beside a stack of cured leaf, in his Sunday overalls. Tyler was on the tractor, with his sleeves rolled, bringing in the load. He cut the engine and climbed down, and the old man took off his cap and put it on the head of his grandson. I did not hear what they said. I only watched the two of them stand in the gold light.
