Christine Walker grew up sharecropping.
On October 1, Christine Walker celebrated her 100th birthday, and her older sister, Annie Lou Harrell, joined in. Sixty friends and family blocked off Spruce Street for the party. Walker has five children, 11 grandchildren, and 68 great grandchildren. Annie Lou lives two blocks from her.
Walker was born in 1925 in Midville, GA. She grew up on a sharecropping farm where they raised corn, peanuts, and cotton. Her stepfather expected her older brother and the sisters to work as family farmhands, milking cows, plowing behind a mule, picking crops, and cutting peanuts and corn. “We would shell the corn, carry a bushel of corn to the gristmill, then sit, and wait while they ground it,” Walker recalled. “We would have our own grits. We had to draw water from a well. We fished in little old ponds. They caught redbelly, pike, and fish eels. They went hunting and killed a lot of rabbits and possums,” all to eat, of course…