Ashes to Ashes (3 page)

Adoring the Devil’s Breath

TOBACCO
is a hard plant to love. Man-sized or taller, demanding at every stage of its growth, sticky to the touch during hot weather, highly inviting to unsightly and voracious pests, tobacco prompted one of its more eminent growers, Thomas Jefferson, to call it “a culture productive of infinite wretchedness” in view of the hundreds of hours of backbreaking labor per acre that it required—and still does, despite advances in mechanization and agronomy.

The tobacco plant is something of an anomaly of nature in that its unprotected leaves rather than its blossoms, fruit, or shielded seed are what man values. Native to the Western Hemisphere but now grown worldwide,
Nicotiana tabacum
is rarely found in the wild. It has a limited life expectancy without cultivation but sprouts spectacularly when tended. If unchecked, the plant grows as high as nine feet, with wide-spreading leaves in the shape of a rounded arrowhead, sixteen to eighteen inches in length and attached to the wrist-thick stalk in an ascending spiral so that the ninth leaf overlaps the first. The leaves and stalk are covered with soft, downy hair that emits gums and aromas; these oils, resins, and waxes increase as the leaf matures and accumulate on the surface in a viscous sheen. The whole point, when raising it commercially, is to force the growth into no more than fifteen or twenty leaves per plant, which, if properly selected, harvested, and cured, will bulk nicely and prove rich in nicotine, a potent compound that, unless absorbed in small doses, can be lethally toxic and is generally acknowledged as the source of the habit-forming property of inhaled tobacco smoke. Just how it addicts, nobody knows for certain.

So labor-intensive is tobacco that its growth and processing may be said to resemble horticulture more nearly than agriculture; it is practically handcrafted from the first. Until about midway into the twentieth century, American farms raising tobacco typically grew no more than four or five acres of it, given all the time and effort it commanded. For a crop that size, a seedbed of about a hundred square yards is carefully disked, plowed, harrowed, and sterilized with ashes or gas to rid the soil of insect or plant contaminants. Late in winter the bed is spread with tobacco seed so tiny that only an ounce, containing some 300,000 seeds, is needed. Covered with hay or cloth to protect them from the cold, the seedlings incubate for several months until they reach five to eight inches in height and are transplanted to the field one at a time, 6,000 to 10,000 per acre, three to four feet apart atop little ridges to allow for optimal drainage. The soil surrounding each must be kept loose and weed-free, especially in the early growing stage, and then the more intensive cultivation, with its painstaking stoop labor, begins.

The hot, moist climate of the American South, with its especially hospitable porous clay soil, is ideal for tobacco, but the farmer can only pray that the heavens will provide proper rainfall. Too much, and the tobacco leaves will end up thin and washed-out; too little rain yields a heavy, coarse, poorly flavored leaf. The success of the rest of the process is in human hands. First the plant must be “topped” at the right height, for if cut off too low, it will produce too few leaves, and if too high, there will be too many small and immature ones. Then the plant must be constantly suckered for five to six weeks to remove the small new growths between the leaves and the stalk and thus force the growth into the surviving leaves, which begin to take on a waxy sheen as they mature. Most unpleasant of all is the vigil against insatiable, leaf-loving pests, of which the hornworm, naturally camouflaged a vivid green, thick as a farmer’s little finger, and several inches long, is the worst menace; they must be plucked and stomped ruthlessly. And considering that an acre of tobacco holds between 100,000 and 150,000 leaves, each oozing sap as the hot, drier midsummer weather comes on, it is one messy, endless chore.

Each leaf on the plant, moreover, may differ from every other in size, shape, color, thickness, and the amounts and distribution of its chemical constituents—
e.g.
, the farther up the stalk, the lower the potassium content and the greater the proportion of nicotine. The commonest variety of American tobacco is harvested in stages, three or four leaves at a time from the bottom up, over a five- or six-week period beginning about mid-July in a process called “priming”. The redolent, sticky, chemically active contents of the gargantuan leaves combined with the baking sun have been known not infrequently to induce nausea and dizziness in the pickers. And the most perilous part of the process remains.

Lugged by mule-drawn sleighs in the pre-tractor days, the leaves were
brought to special steep-roofed, airtight curing barns, roughly sixteen to twenty feet per side and twenty-five or so feet high, where the farm women traditionally tied three of the large leaves together into “hands” and looped them over sticks that were hung on tiered wires or poles. There the leaves remained for from five to seven days while their water content, making up between 80 and 90 percent of their weight, was bled out of them at temperatures reaching as high as 140 degrees, depending upon the source of the heat. In the process, the chlorophylls were decomposed and the underlying xanthophyll and carotene emerged, and the leaves turned to shades of brown and yellow. Then the barn was thrown open to allow the leaves to reabsorb sufficient moisture—about 10 percent of their weight—to make them pliable enough to be handled, graded, and carted off to the auction warehouse without cracking or crumbling. Poor oversight of the whole operation, requiring round-the-clock supervision of the curing fires, could easily ruin a whole barnful of leaf. Overcooking impaired its taste, aroma, and color, while undercuring left it prone to ruin by mold and other agents of spoilage. The occasional wayward leaf that fell from its place and landed on the flue could burst into flame and send the whole barn up if those tending it grew lax. The entire process of growth, harvesting, and curing would consume well over 400 hours per acre before the modern era
(i.e.
, post-1950), when mechanization began to speed the transplanting, fertilizing, and hauling procedures, sprays facilitated the suckering and worming, and metal barns and containers of stacked trays to hold the leaves improved the curing. Even so, with the best of equipment and economies of scale, it takes more than 200 hours of tending to bring an acre of typical North Carolina tobacco to market.

For roughly two centuries, from the time English settlers began to grow the plant in the rich, loamy soil of tidewater Virginia in the early years of the seventeenth century in competition with the Caribbean plantations cultivated by Spain at its imperial height, the growing process was essentially unaltered. But then an important change occurred that brought with it immense consequences in the nature of tobacco use and its potential impact on the health of its users.

During the first few decades of the nineteenth century, open, smoky, and dangerous fires were increasingly abandoned as the heat source for the curing process and were replaced by a low brick flue with metal stripping on the top that ran the length of the barn floor and had an exterior opening of about a foot or eighteen inches at either end for the fuel, usually firewood. These flues had the advantage of providing a more intense, easier-to-control, and smokeless heat. The change did not greatly alter the appearance of the strong, pungent, dark leaf that flourished in the coastal regions of Virginia and had long been the preferred variety in America and England for pipe smoking, chewing tobacco, and snuff. It was a different story, however, in the inland Piedmont region of Virginia and North Carolina, where a 150-mile-wide swath was given
over to tobacco-raising after the richer coastal lands had become exhausted and farmers moved west. A less heavy, more sallow leaf grew in the thin, sandy, grayish soil of the Piedmont, which was good for growing little else. In contrast to the heavy, dark leaf with high nicotine from the lowland soil, the new leaf, lighter in both weight and color, had a less harsh taste and more pleasing flavor, thanks in part to the soil’s lower nitrogen content. The difference was accentuated when, in 1839, on a farm in Caswell County, North Carolina, just south of Virginia’s prime inland tobacco market in Danville, charcoal was by chance introduced as the fuel for flue-curing. Not only did the method consume one-eighth as much fuel as the wood fires, but the intense heat it produced turned the thinner Piedmont leaf a brilliant golden color that delighted the eye as much as smokers’ taste. The “Bright” leaf would soon become the bellwether American variety. Besides its appealing flavor and appearance, Bright tobacco had one other feature that gladdened the user: its smoke was far easier to swallow. Indeed, its very mildness, when compared to the smoke from the darker leaf, very nearly obliged the smoker to inhale it for a satisfying experience.

In determining the affinity of substances for one another at the molecular level—whether they bind or absorb or are soluble with one another, that is, or whether they repel or irritate one another—chemists gauge them on a spectrum measuring their degree of acidity or alkalinity. Acid substances may generally be thought of as more watery and astringent, like vinegar; alkaline substances as more oily or fatty in nature. A common instance of the uncongeniality of the two extremes is the eroding effect of an excess of certain gastric acids on the alkaline-rich membranes of the stomach, resulting in an ulcer. Smoke is a mixture of gases and infinitesimal droplets of several thousand compounds—4,000 or so have been identified to date—ranging in diameter from ten to forty millionths of an inch. Among these compounds is the nicotine molecule, an alkaline substance, that arrives within the body amid the smoke aerosol suspended in a solid particle of partially burned tobacco that has been given the imprecise, catchall name of “tar”. For a foreign material like nicotine to gain passage through the cell membrane walls and thus be absorbed by the human system, fatty or oily substances like the alkaline lipids of the mucous membranes lining the mouth are a highly receptive medium. The darker leaf tobacco that was commonly used for pipe, cigar, and chewing tobacco as well as snuff was alkaline in nature, while in the flue-cured processing of Bright leaf, chemical changes yielded a smoke that was more acidic in nature and not so readily absorbed by the mouth. Thus, in one of nature’s myriad little ironies, the nicotine in each mouthful of the stronger dark-tobacco smoke would be absorbed slowly and in modest quantity through the oral membranes and the saliva, eventually being metabolized without any remarkable effect on the internal tissues, whereas the other harsh compounds in the dark-leaf smoke, upon reaching
the back of the throat, triggered a reflexive rejection in the form of coughing and irritation and, if swallowed, nausea or worse. By contrast, the lighter, gentler, more acidic smoke of Bright tobacco, unabsorbed by the alkaline mouth membranes, traveled readily down the throat and deep into the bronchial tree of the respiratory system, until it eventually reached the tiny air sacs, or alveoli. Here the nicotine droplets and other compounds in the smoke passed easily through the thin membrane walls and directly into the blood system.

The impact of this distinction can be better appreciated if one understands that the absorptive surface of the lungs’ intricate pathways is several hundredfold greater than the absorptive area of the mouth. Thus, the lighter smoke of Bright tobacco, because it is far more easily admitted to the internal human system, ironically causes a far profounder reaction than the smoke from the heavier, dark leaf used in cigars, pipes, and chewing tobacco, which generally is not taken in beyond the mouth. As a result, 50 percent of the Bright leaf smoke, its acidity diluted, is retained by the lungs, 80 percent of the tars are deposited in the respiratory tract, and 90 percent of the nicotine is passed into the blood. It is a transient but powerful hit, momentarily suffusing an entire cross section of the bloodstream.

Within seconds of each puff, the chain reaction sets in, affecting both the nervous and cardiovascular systems in ways not yet totally understood. It may be safely said that nicotine-sensitive receptors in the brain activate neurotransmitters that cause the release of enzymes that in turn increase the heart rate by between ten and twenty-five beats per minute, raise the blood pressure, and constrict the blood vessels. The combined effect of these and related reactions is that, for each inhaled puff and particularly the first, the smoker experiences a systemic bite or sting; the reward of these tiny “highs” is swift, complex, and mildly narcotic, as the soldiers who began rolling cigarettes from Bright tobacco during the Civil War were pleased to discover. A craving for these intermittent little highs would become the basis for a cumulatively heightening addiction unless the smoker could avoid inhaling; latter-day surveys disclosed that only 5 to 10 percent of cigarette smokers believed they did not inhale.

But none of this was well understood in the mid-nineteenth century, as flue-cured Bright leaf began slowly to gain popularity. It would not be until the early twentieth century that the American blended cigarette, more than half consisting of Bright tobacco, came into its own. Meanwhile, other varieties enjoyed their heyday. Prominent among these was Burley, an adaptive hybrid of the old dark, heavy Virginia leaf, now being grown less and less in the depleted lowland soils. Burley did especially well in rich, if hilly, Kentucky soil and offered growers several important advantages. A somewhat smaller but bulkier leaf than the Virginia and Bright varieties, it took perhaps one-third less time to tend; instead of being harvested a few leaves at a time, each stalk
was taken down whole, and instead of being fire- or flue-cured, it was left to dry in the open air for thirty or forty days. During that time, the enzymes that would have been killed by heat-curing survived in the Burley and slowly, steadily consumed the sugars in the plant and left it, when smoked, with a strong, bitter taste. Fortunately, the Burley leaf had a loose, porous cellular structure that allowed it to absorb a considerable quantity of flavorings—rum, licorice, molasses, and chocolate the most popular—that made it a favorite component of pipe and chewing tobacco. Burley also eagerly accepted humectants that kept the tobacco moist—no small advantage in the pre-motorized age, when store inventories were infrequently replenished. A second mainstay of the pre-twentieth-century tobacco market was “Oriental” or “Turkish” leaf, grown mostly in countries bordering the eastern Mediterranean. While sun-cured like Burley, it had a lower nicotine content than American tobacco but a more distinct and pungent aroma that made it attractive for blending with domestic leaf; by itself, especially in the form of “Turkish” cigarettes toward the end of the nineteenth century, it was regarded as a luxury import. Minor but continued use was made, too, of Maryland tobacco, a light-textured leaf valued for improving the evenness of the burning quality of blended products.