The Pinch Hitters

The flight of young adults in their call to wartime duty after Pearl Harbor placed many farms in the Southland under heavy and protracted strain. Their departure left the farms wanting for their strength, their energies, their skills, their example. The void, when filled, usually fell to the older community left behind. In some instances, the void would be filled by the early maturation of adolescents and less commonly by the entrance of an unsuspected character.

The Pinch Hitters chronicles one South Carolina family facing such an exigency in 1944. The enlistment of the four military-age adults left the farm in the hands of the widowed owner, a teenage grandson, Will, and his black agemate, Sugarbread, the farm’s sharecropper family, an elderly neighbor, and a prisoner of war farm laborer. The challenges and joys that arise from planting season through harvest form the backdrop for teenage Will’s receptive observations of the skills, experience, discipline, values, and behavior of those who “came to bat” for the young men who left the farm to fight in World War II.

Will cultivated significantly different relationships with the major pinch hitters. With Granny Jack, the farm owner, a widow of eighteen years and second-generation descendant of Choctaw Squire Buck Collins, Will was dutifully obedient. With Champ, head of the sharecropper family, he admired the quiet demeanor, strength, and skills of hand. He battled any closeness with Mr. Sif, the knowledge-filled neighbor who kept a caring eye on Granny Jack and her farm. With Henny, the prisoner of war, he swiftly came to worship.

The construction and populating of a Prisoners of War camp within reach of Granny Jack’s farm brought uneasiness to the surrounding community that was never felt by Granny Jack. She saw that the shortage of farm labor could be lessened by engaging the POWs. Mr. Sif and others of like mind saw the POWs as the enemy, a force to be kept behind the camp’s barbwire, certainly not released into the community to create havoc and bring the war onto home soil. Will and his agemate Sugarbread saw the POWs as replacements for their uncles lost to the war, as baseball players, as horse whisperers, and they hoped, as accomplished fishermen and woodsmen.

The realities and fallacies in each of these images of the POWs would play out during the farm’s productive season. One of the farm’s grey mules would come under Henny’s command, baseball would be added to football in the POWs’ athletic prowess, Champ’s son would return home from the war in a casket, Champ would be implicated in the poisoning of the POW farm laborers, and Mr. Sif’s 1936 Chevrolet would be connected to the Klan-like demonstration in front of Granny Jack’s home. These realities and others would interrupt the exploits of Will and Sugarbread, but none would disrupt their friendship.