When I was a boy my grandmother — Ma, as I called her — always kept a quart jar of homemade black strap molasses on the kitchen table. To me, weren’t nothing better after a meal than one of Ma’s hot cat-head biscuits, a slice of homemade churned butter, a saucer of molasses and a glass of fresh cow’s milk.
Why, it used to be when you lived on a farm, you ate what you grew and you grew what you ate. That included all types of livestock, vegetables and maybe a patch of sugar cane.
Like most things that grew on a farm, sugar cane had to be planted, cultivated and cut down before a killing frost came in the fall. Before the stalks were cut down, the blades, leaves, fodder and the head (seeds) of the cane were stripped off. This was used to feed cows, mules and chickens. You’d better have on a pair of gloves or some mighty tough hands, ‘cause that stuff would cut the dickens out of you.
In every neighborhood, someone would have a cane mill to which folks would haul their sugarcane stalks. There, the juice of the stalks would be pressed out and cooked to make the molasses.
My Granddaddy Ussery had such a mill, which was powered by one of his mules. One end of a long pole was connected to the mill while the other end was fastened to the mule’s harness. The mule would walk round and round, thus turning the mill. Sometimes the mule had to be blindfolded to keep it from getting dizzy.
Granddaddy wouldn’t get no cash pay for making others’ molasses, but he would take a percentage of what was made. He always said that cane grown in the sand made lighter-colored syrup than that grown in the clay and he could sell it better.
Making a batch of molasses is an all-day affair taking several people doing different jobs to produce the finished product. First, the sugar cane stalks are fed into the mill press, which in turn squeezes the juice from the stalks into a bucket. Then the lime-green juice is poured into a large metal pan that is divided into three compartments.
A small fire is placed under the pan, cooking the juice until it begins to thicken. All during the cooking process, trash and foam are skimmed off the top with a long-handled spoon. The first of the skimmings are thrown away, but as the juices cook and thicken, the skimmings can be used to make molasses candy.
There is great skill involved in knowing when to stop the cooking process. If all the water from the juice hasn’t been removed, the syrup will sour and be no good. If the syrup is overcooked, it will taste burnt and turn to sugar.
After the cooking process, the juice has been turned into a thick, dark syrup which is called molasses and poured into gallon containers for all to enjoy.
Molasses contains a large amount of minerals and potassium. It can be used for cooking, making beer and rum, and also used to make livestock feed, ethanol, tobacco products, munitions and a lots of other things.
We tend to think of most molasses being placed in small bottles or gallon jugs, but it is also made in large quantities of up to thousands of gallons.
Most of us don’t remember, but on Jan. 15, 1919, there was a disaster called the Great Boston Molasses Flood. So happened in a North End neighborhood of Boston, Mass., a large molasses storage tank burst when the temperature outside went from sub-freezing to 50 degrees over in a few days time.
A wave of molasses rushed through the streets at an estimated 35 mph. The tank held a whopping 2,300,000 gallons of molasses.
The tank fell at about 12:30 in the afternoon. Witnesses say they felt the ground shake and heard a huge roar, a tremendous crashing and thunderclap-like bang and, as the rivets shot out of the tank, a machine-gun-like rat-tat-tat sound.
The collapse unleashed a wave of molasses 25 feet high at its peak. The molasses wave was so strong it took out a railroad bridge and several railroad cars were swept off the track.
Molasses, waist-deep, covered the streets and swirled and bubbled about the wreckage. Here and there a form struggled — whether it was an animal or human was impossible to tell. Horses died like flies on sticky fly paper. The more they struggled, the deeper they became in the mess.
Twenty-one people were killed and 150 were injured, along with a lot of dogs and cats.
One survivor says he was swept off his feet and carried, tumbling on its crest, almost as though he was surfing. When he finally hit the ground, the molasses rolled him like a pebble up into an alleyway.
It took four days before the rescuers stopped looking for victims. Many of the dead were so glazed over with molasses, they were hard to recognize.
Crews used saltwater from a fireboat to wash the molasses away, and used sand to absorb it. Boston Harbor was brown with molasses until the following summer.
It took months to get things cleaned up because rescue workers, cleanup crews and sightseers had tracked molasses through the streets; on the subways, trains and streetcars and into their homes all over Boston. It was a sticky, sticky situation to say the least!
To end this here story up, I’ll just say a little Black Strap molasses can go a long ways on your plate or on your feet.
J.A. Bolton is a member of the N.C. Storytelling Guild, the Anson County Writers Club, Richmond County Historical Society and the Story Spinners in Laurinburg.