“Oh, when those cotton bolls get rotten you can’t pick very much cotton in them old cotton fields back home.” – Lyrics by Huddie Ledbetter known as Lead Belly-American folk and blues singer (1888-1949)
“Jump down; turn around Pick a bale o’cotton. Jump down; turn around, Pick a bale a day.” – unknown
Last week Wilhelmina and I sat on the porch watching the crop duster sweeping over the cotton field. Wilhelmina is a scaredy cat; she thinks a big swooping yellow bird is going to get her. But there’s no chance with me next to her and her hidey holes nearby. Where I grew up behind our house was a cotton field. I could stand on a chair, raise the window, look beyond the backyard and watch mechanical Cotton Harvesters work late into the night. They were all lit up like a carnival. It was fun watching Cotton Harvesters from the window.
Years later I had the good fortune to meet “Mamaw and Pawpaw.” They took me in and told stories about picking cotton in the Delta. I started writing it all down. This is what Pawpaw said.
“I always knew I’s gonna be rich. I could work harder and faster than any other man and I was willin’ to do anything. I could pick five hundren’ pounds of cotton in a day, more than anybody. I’s just looking for my chance. I didn’t know where, when or how…but I’s looking.
“We were like family. Everybody just trying to make a little livin’ doing the best they could at the time. We was just like everybody, we might be poor and we might have to work from can to can’t but we never went hungry. We had chickens and pigs and sometimes wild meat. Momma cooked a good rabbit with some gravy. We had a garden that fed us all year long. Daddy took the old truck to the hills and got a load of firewood and some syrup. Come winter we’d have all the firewood we needed. What we didn’t use of anything we got, Daddy sold for cash. Between my daddy coming up with ways to earn a buck and cotton picking we had money.
“There was a national cotton picking contest up in Blytheville, Arkansas; thousands of people came. It was a fair with games and singing, some of the best country music you ever heard. The first time we went it was with me and Bessie and two brothers. The Ford we were driving kept quitting; we would get out and push the thing to get her running again. I had to do that about every 45 miles.
Years later we went back again and out of thousands of pickers I came in second. I’d have won that contest if I drank some water. It was as hot as I had ever seen. I knew I was best, 147 pounds in an hour and a half.”
Husband Sam invited me to the church harvest festival for our first date. I declined as I promised to go with Mamaw and Pawpaw. So, we did a double date. Mamaw and Pawpaw were the nicest, kindest, smartest people I have ever known. God bless their cotton picking souls.
Shannon Bardwell is a writer living quietly in the Prairie. Email reaches her at [email protected].
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