by Jeannie Travis
I picked cotton when I was a little share croppers daughter, and let me tell you…..It’s a mercy the machines do it all now. It’s picked and baled right there, and hauled away in big trucks. Cotton farming has come back in a big way in the area of Weakley County,TN where I grew up, and it makes my fingers twitch just driving by the fields! Farmers have bee hives setting out to pollinate the flowers, they look like okra or Althea/Rose of Sharon blooms. I buy honey processed over that way from cotton and soybean fields and it is delicious.
When you watch Sally Fields and those other movie stars picking cotton they hold the boll with one hand and tug the cotton out with the other, one lock at a time. WHO taught them how to pick cotton ? What you do is take 2 rows through the field, and you don’t straighten up except every once in awhile to see if your back still works….or go to the wagon to weigh up….toting that big sack is not easy. All day long you pull a heavy canvas cotton sack through the middles …. ‘Course the part that drags on the ground has a layer of tar on it so the cloth don’t wear out so fast. Both hands are going at once alright, but each hand picks a boll, fingers splayed out just right to go between the hard, pointed cotton boll sections. Imagine the hangnails! After your hand is full of cotton you cram it down into the slanted opening of the sack and reach for another boll. Running into a patch of cockle burrs is special torture…as it is so hard on the hands, clothes, etc….Cotton bolls pick up the burrs and you have to take time to pull them off…
We had plenty of experience before we had to pull those long canvas sacks… because Daddy fixed us up tow sacks with a piece of rag for a strap. Wonder what the Childrens Services folks would have said if they had seen us picking cotton, at 5 , 6, 7 or 8 years of age ? By the time we got old enough to really do any work my handsome blue eyed daddy was dead of Leukemia at age 34. Our farming days were over. .
After the cotton was weighed, it was dumped out into the wagon that had high sideboards added. When it was full or the fields were clean, the mules were hitched to it and it was driven to the cotton gin and sold. If it was a big field, by the time you finished picking it, the other side of the patch was ready to be picked again . Mama said the first year she and Daddy were married they planted cotton. By the time she had hoed the patch over it was ready to start again. Imagine waking up every morning knowing that after you cooked breakfast, washed the dishes, milked the cow, and put the soup beans on the back of the stove to finish cooking real slow, that you had to go hoe in that hot sun EVERY day! Arrgghh !