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Memories of Golde Dicks Markham (1996) Golde Markham Dicks 62/125

One of the most memorable events of my childhood occurred every day about sun­
down. A young black man, Rufus “Sill” Strawder, had a habit of yodeling after a hard day’s
work in the cotton fields, cornfield's, or cane patch. Everyone could hear him for miles. I

always felt that I could1 listen to him forever, and I never heard anyone else who could equal
Sill’s yodeling.
The whole countryside enjoyed! his yodeling. I could tell when he reached his house

because his voice gradually faded away and we knew it was the end of the workday.
I daydream about those late afternoons, trying to recapture Sill yodeling in my mind.
Sill lived in Grandpa Tyre’s cropper’s house. If Sill could have come along in these times, he
could have been in the twelve zeros.

The cane was cut and placed into piles to load onto a wagon. We then hauled it to the
cane mill to be ground and cooked into syrup. For several years Grandpa Dicks had a little

orange grove between his house and the horse lot. Pa picked several bushels of oranges and
Ma cut them into halves and removed the seeds. Pa dropped them into sixty gallons of syrup
that we were cooking. The syrup was cooked until it got so thick we could just pour it out
of the bottle. It was SO' delicious with that strong orange flavor. My youngest sister Fay now

has the cane mill and the sixty-gallon syrup kettle.
When I got home from school, my job was to feed the cane into the cane mill to mash
the juice out. The stalk of cane was pushed between two big rollers and the juice drained into

a big barrel. Sometimes it was so cold we just about froze.

No funeral homes existed when I was growing up, but I remember seeing caskets
stuck way back in the commissary store. Eventually a man in Lake City opened a casket

store. He sold nothing but caskets, but they were nothing like the caskets of today.
Neighbors dug the graves and filled them in after the corpse was lowered into the

grave, using leather straps from a horse’s harness. Two lines were used if the corpse was

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