I come from cotton pickers, those folks who not only walked down rows, but also sometimes crawled down them for expediency. Mama told me that she wore two cotton sacks across her back. “You could carry two rows this way,” she explained. She spoke of the brutality of picking cotton and how the bolls scratched her fingers to the point of bleeding. She picked so much cotton that her hands became calloused.
Mama and her siblings’ childhoods in South Carolina were truncated because they had to labor in the field. Mama practically boasts of how she had picked 250 pounds of cotton a day and how her mother and grandmother picked as much as any grown man: 350 to 400 pounds. I had no idea how much those measurements meant; I only knew that these women grew to mythical proportions in my mind. When Mama speaks of the land, she has a push/pull, love/hate tone in her voice. I can hear the pride in her family’s resourcefulness, but I can also feel the burden she still carries from that hard, thankless, and tedious labor they all had to perform. She tells me there was more to cotton than picking it. She speaks of prepping, tilling, and plowing the land and also planting seeds. She has a faraway look in her eyes when she talks of this work.
Mama always seems split about the land. Loved it. Hated it. She had a green thumb, which she inherited from her mama. As a child, I witnessed how she loved growing things. She would often embarrass me by stopping on the side of the road or a public place to get a cutting to transplant to our yard. However, she would only grow ornamental plants and flowers, never vegetables or anything resembling a crop. I believe it was a carryover from when she had to work in the field. I cannot imagine the
