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From a distance they look like broomsticks, stacked on a table in a parking lot on Pecan Avenue. But if you come from the South, and you grew up in the country, you know what they are without looking at the sign.
Sugar cane.
The table was set up in front of a two-seat barbershop called Central Pecan Barber Styling. Charles Davis stepped out of the shop to say hello. It's his shop, and that's his sugar cane - $2.50 for a 5-foot stalk.
"I've seen it in a couple of stores," he says. "But this is fresh-cut. Just take the bark off and cut off a hunk and chew it."
He's got a couple hundred stalks at his house off The Plaza. It was a good year for the garden: corn, tomatoes, white potatoes, sweet potatoes, string beans, butter beans, mustard greens, collards.
"The cotton didn't make this year," he says.
Wait, what?
Cotton?
And here we get into why Charles Davis grows sugar cane in the city. And cotton. And even a couple hills of tobacco.
Davis, who's 62, grew up on a farm in Marion County, S.C., almost all the way to Myrtle Beach.
They raised cows, pigs, turkeys, chickens, even guineas - a chicken-sized bird with a featherless head. They always had a big garden.
Davis grew up, got off the farm, did a lot of odd jobs, ran a moving company, settled in at the barbershop 16 years ago. As a grown man he has spent most of his life in the city. He has seen Charlotte grow like a pole bean.
But all along a part of him has missed the country life.
Come on in the barbershop. There's a cotton boll he grew. There's a bundle of his broom straw. There's a mullein plant - "that keeps you from getting a cold," he says. "You make a tea out of it."
His garden is organic. His mulch is leaves. In the fall he gets up early on garbage day and fills up his truck bed with bagged leaves people set out at the curb. It's not quite time yet, though. Too many twigs the first time people rake. Better to wait for the second go-round.
Davis doesn't do anything with the cotton and tobacco, other than watch it grow. Sometimes a woman from the city will walk by and compliment him on the nice flowers. Tobacco makes a pretty flower.
"I always keep a few cotton bolls around the shop," he says. "I had an old man used to come in here. Grew up out in the country. One day he came in and said, 'Every time I come in here and see that cotton, my back starts hurting.'"
That's the way a lot of us in the city think about farming. Back-breaking work. Always worrying about the weather. A lot easier to just go to the store.
For Davis it's the opposite.
The garden is where he goes to relax. It's the place that takes him back home. Marion County, as close as a bite of sugar cane.
It took him a few years to get the cane growing. He thought about making syrup but it cost too much for the little bit of cane he has.
So for now he's putting it out at the little table, for people who grew up with memories like his.
"A few people have come by and asked if it was bamboo," he says. "I know right then that they're from Charlotte. That's a city question."
