"
"Hookworm, Uncle Eli? What is that?" asked the boy.
"It's a queer kind o' disease," the old man answered, "that comes from
goin' barefoot. There's a kind o' grub in the soil, and it works its way
in. It's only jes' recently that it's be'n found out that the po' whites
are peaked and backward because they're sick, and now they know a cure
fo' it, why hookworm is being driven right out o' the South."
"Was there so much of it?"
"Puttin' an end to it will make useful American citizens out o'
thousands o' poor critters that never knew what ailed them."
"But where did the 'poor whites' come from, Uncle Eli? What made them
that way?"
"Whar they come from I jes' don' rightly know. I reckon I saw more o'
them when I was down in Georgia, but the Florida 'crackers' are still
worse off. Thar's not so many in the mount'ns an' those that are here
live 'way up in the gullies. The sure 'nough po' whites, or 'Crackers'
as they call them, belong to the pine belt, between the mount'ns an' the
swamps o' the coast."
"Why are they called 'Crackers'?"
"I don' know, unless because they live on cracked corn and razor-back
hog. It an't so easy to say how they begun.
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