Harry Crews on Big Families, Low Income

Families were important then, and they were important not because the children were useful in the fields to break corn and hoe cotton and drop potato vines in the wet weather or the help with hog butchering and all the rest of it. No, they were important because a large family was the only thing a man could be sure of having. Nothing else was certain. If a man had no education or even if he did, the hope of putting money in the bank and keeping it there or owning a big piece of land free and clear, such hope was so remote that few men ever let themselves think about it. The timber in the county was of no consequence, and there was very little rich bottom land. Most of the soil was poor and leached out, and commercial fertilizer was dear as blood. But a man didn’t need good land or strands of hardwood trees to have babies. All he needed was balls and the inclination.

from A Childhood: The Biography of a Place by Harry Crews (as compiled in Classic Crews: a Harry Crews Reader, 1995), pgs 30-31