Ring the Bell, It’s Time to Pray

A lot of times we’ll be sitting around the kitchen table and we might be talking about people or about a situation that we all have an opinion about and about the time the conversation starts to get ridiculous or heated or bizarre, Jimmy will say “ring the bell, it’s time to pray”.
As we were driving around this weekend Jimmy and I were having a conversation and I said “ring the bell, it’s time to pray”. We started laughing and then I asked him where in the world he had come up with that phrase. I knew it was from his childhood or young adulthood but I didn’t know where it had come from. I was pretty sure it came from the stripping room.
He told me that when he was old enough to remember this kind of thing, there was a guy named Randel Willett who had been raised in Fancy Farm but lived off from here. When he came to town he spent a lot of time with Bernard Elder and he would come and help strip tobacco. Jimmy and Joey used to help strip tobacco for their uncles so they would go from farm to farm to help get the crop finished up. So Randel Willett would come and, according to Jimmy, tell some off-colored stories or jokes. He would get everybody laughing crazy and then he would say “ring the bell, it’s time to pray”. Of course they would keep on laughing.  
The stripping room was notorious for things like that. For those of you who don’t know, the stripping room is a room off of a barn or garage or somewhere like that where tobacco was stripped off of the stalks. Stripping tobacco can be long and tedious, it’s not really hard work because you’re sitting down most of the time. Farmers would always have young boys around because they could do jobs that the older ones couldn’t or wouldn’t do. First, they could climb up in the barn to take the tobacco down. When I say climb, that’s what I mean. They would climb up on something and then pull themselves up into the barn from one tier to another. One of the boys would be on the top tier and he would hand the tobacco down to the next tier to the next boy. The next boy would hand down to the next tier and the boy on the bottom tier would then hand the tobacco down to the man on the ground. He would hand the tobacco off to someone else who would put the tobacco on scaffold wagons. So two or three boys were always required around the stripping room. They had jobs inside the room too. They would haul out tobacco stalks after they were piled up next to someone stripping tobacco. In later years they would stand on the boxes of stripped tobacco to press it into the box so that you could get as much tobacco as possible into the box.
But anyway, the stripping room was notorious for long conversations, a whole lot of gossiping and I’m sure one or two off-colored jokes. I can remember always wanting to help in the stripping room. I didn’t want to help in the barn because even loading the tobacco on scaffold wagons was hard work. But I wasn’t really invited. I think they would have appreciated an extra set of hands but I’m also sure that I would have been in their way. And I came to find out that they would have had to tone down some of their conversations.
Now, they weren’t vulgar, but if someone said something they didn’t want to have to worry if a lady was present. That always surprised me because I know some of the sisters and girl-cousins helped in the stripping room. But all of those guys knew them. They didn’t really know this new woman who had ingratiated herself into the family. So I stayed out. But every once in awhile I would hear some of the things that they talked about.
They talked about soap operas quite a bit. That one shocked me. But they all watched “Days of Our Lives” and they kept up with the story lines. Of course, if they missed a month or two they wouldn’t have missed much.  Most of them watched daily, if they could. They talked about politics a lot. And they all had their own political opinions. Things haven’t changed much. This year out in the stripping room we were talking about the presidential elections and the Mexicans who come to help us every year were scared to death of Trump winning. I told them they would not be able to cross the border and go home if he won. They believed me. The men in the stripping room talked about the talk in the town. They talked about who was getting married, who was getting divorced. They talked about this kid having a car wreck or that boy getting arrested. For people living on a farm they could find out information in a heart beat. They were not malicious with their gossip but I’m sure it gave them many hours of entertainment. They talked about how much the tobacco was going to weigh. They talked about all the other farmers and what their corn or beans yield had been. And I know that they told some off-colored jokes. Those were never shared with me.  
When the older guys had a chance, they would sometimes go up to Land Between the Lakes, to Bacon Creek, and camp. Jimmy tells how he would get up real early to milk on a Saturday morning and drive up to the lake to join them for breakfast. Knowing him I’m sure that he could stay up there most of the day just sitting around talking and visiting. Jimmy loved hanging around his older uncles and their friends and other family members.
But what it all boiled down to was if they got onto a subject where the discussion got heated or too many opinions or too much gossip, Randel Willett would always say “Ring the bell, it’s time to pray”. All these years later we still are doing that. What more would you expect?