An Hour Before Daylight
Memories of a Rural Boyhood

Jimmy Carter

3/27/2004

When Jimmy Carter ran for president in 1976, I remember the jokes about the "peanut farmer" who dared enter national politics. Although he had been the governor of Georgia, there were pictures of the country bumpkin planted in many American's heads. In An Hour Before Daylight, Carter talks about his boyhood on that peanut farm. Although the farmer picture was used to discredit him, Carter is proud of his heritage. In this book Carter remembers his early years in the late 1920's through the 1930's growing up outside of Plains, Georgia.

This narrative has the feel of sitting a kitchen around listening to Jimmy Carter reminisce about his childhood. He talks about his best friends (mostly black) and their escapades in his earlier years. Carter talks about the different aspects of farming - the difficulty of picking cotton, harvesting peanuts when he was no more than five or six and then selling the boiled nuts in Plains, the corn, the stock, watermelons, and the disaster the year his father planted tomatoes.

An Hour Before Daylight doesn't gloss over the racial differences in the 1930's South. Carter relates the tale from an adult's viewpoint looking back. In his area of the South during his childhood, the separate but equal laws for the "coloreds" were so ingrained no one even thought about them. Everyone was too busy trying to make a living from land that didn't yield its harvest easily. Out on the farms like Earl Carter's (Jimmy's father) all the day laborers, tenants, and share croppers were treated equally despite their color, except in pay. Again, no one questioned the inequities of pay - that's just the way it was. Instead, Earl and Lillian Carter made sure the people working on their farm were cared for and treated fairly. At the end of the book, Carter lists the five most influential people in his early life outside of his immediate family. Three were black, one was his uncle, and one was his schoolteacher.

Carter also gives a rich picture of his farm during the Depression. He remembers when cotton dropped down to 3 cents a pound. When Roosevelt started the New Deal, there were high hopes in southwest Georgia. But when the government advocated plowing under fields to cut the production of cotton because of the surplus, the hard working farmers never understood or accepted the rationale. Nothing was wasted on the farm. If they produced more food than they and the tenants could eat, Earl Carter would take his produce to town for sale. Cotton could sit in the barn for a couple years if there was a surplus to sell in the future when the crop was poorer. Slaughtered farm animals were cut up and all parts useable. If some foodstuff was inedible by humans, it was given to the hogs.

This book is a window into a world I never knew and barely understood. Most of the Depression stories I had heard were of the Dust Bowl areas that were deserted or in cities. Most of the farming stories I knew came from the more fertile land in the Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania regions. An Hour Before Daylight shows the reader the a Georgian farmer struggling to care for his family and employees during an economic tragedy and succeeding in that struggle.

Carter's memories are not in chronological order, which can be disconcerting at times. He repeats his stories on occasion when they apply to more than one topic is he discussing in different parts of the book. His years from high school on are touched upon, but not the focus of the story. If you want a better understanding of Jimmy Carter, you'll find some of that here. If you want a feel and picture of regular people coping and surviving through the Depression, you'll find a wealth of good reading here.

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