Barbara Sprinkle Moser beamed as she held up a framed woodcut
print.
“Look at this,” she enthused. “It’s called ‘Tobacco Warehouse.’”
Her sights had been set on a framed Ansel Adams photography poster,
but hadn’t moved fast enough. She watched a man from Clemmons admire
it, and later confirmed he had taken it. But this! Here was something
tangibly connected with her family’s past. She admired the dim forms of
growers in billed caps hovering over heaps of tobacco leaves on the auction
floor. She turned it over and mined the tags for information, gleaning
that the artist was Patricia Walach Keough, the print fifth in a series of
23, the piece framed by Village Smith Galleries and purchased by RJ
Reynolds Tobacco Co. in 1980.
Moser was one of hundreds of area residents who streamed through
the doors to the Milton Rhodes Center for the Arts in Winston-Salem on
Feb. 10 to peruse art pieces from the RJ Reynolds Tobacco Co. collection,
lining up around the block waiting for the center to open at 10 a.m.
They could spend anywhere from $15 on an ashtray to $15,000 for an
original of Toko Shinoda’s 1977 painting “Cherishing,” a gift from the
chairman of Mitsubishi Corp. to the chairman of Reynolds at the time.
A kind of frenzy had set in by mid-afternoon, with visitors weighing
the risk of setting aside a coveted piece against making their decision too
hastily and forfeiting something better. But mostly they admired each
other’s finds and cheered each other’s good fortune.
Here was “Laundorama w/ San Francisco Night Sky” a stunning portrayal
of a white woman and a black woman carrying baskets of laundry,
awash in vivid color. “That’s beautiful. Are you buying it?” a woman
asked a reporter who laid it against the bin to better appraise it. Another
man lamented, “I wish I’d pulled that out.”
Perhaps no one was more thrilled than Moser with her “Tobacco Warehouse”
woodcut print.
“Both of my parents worked in the factory for Reynolds,” she said.
“I never worked in the factory, but I worked on a tobacco farm that my friends’ family owned.” Stella Surratt drew near, gravitating to Moser’s story.
“My father grew tobacco in eastern North Carolina,” Surratt volunteered.
The two women were soon discussing the finer points of handling the
harvested leaves.
“I knew how to tie it and sling it over,” Surratt said.
“That old gum, it used to get on your fingers,” Moser recalled.
“At the end of the day the one who had the most gum we said was the hardest worker.” “You could make a ball out of it,” Surratt agreed. Surratt’s father owned land in the Tarboro area. As a young woman, she earned money by working the tobacco crop raised by her father’s tenants.
Her husband, John Surratt, served as mayor of Winston-Salem from 1961 to 1963 and continues to practice law. There were totems of an economy and culture gradually fading from prominence: the Shinoda piece passed between two multinational corporate leaders, a photo of a fearsome looking drag harrow upturned at the edge of a field of lush green tobacco foregrounding Pilot Mountain, a painting of a buyer dressed in a green jacket and tie fingering dried leaves from a bin on the auction floor.
His smooth skin set him apart from any grower or laborer. “One thing I learned from working in tobacco is that I didn’t want to work in tobacco,” Moser said. “I worked for Wachovia for 30 years.”
