Daddy and Uncle Earl farmed cotton and corn. They also raised gardens for food. The corn was mainly for food for the mules and cows. Cotton was the main cash crop. There were lots of tenant farmers in Macon County, but not in our part of the county. A finger of blackbelt soil extends into Macon County, and there was a lot of tenant farming there. Over the years I have learned that a “one horse tenant farm” was generally considered to by 7 acres of cotton and 14 acres of corn. A tenant farmer and his family could manage that much.
Daddy and Uncle Earl were not tenant farmers, but they both managed about what a tenant farmer would have managed. They worked together, so the total amount may have been the equivalent of two tenant farms, during my early years. Later on, in the fifties, they farmed separately, although they shared the Super A Farmall tractor for a while.
My earliest recollections of picking Cotton go back to the mid-forties. I remember picking cotton on Uncle Earl’s place, on the field called “the level.” Everyone was involved. At four or five years of age, I probably spent as much time laying in the mule drawn wagon, looking at the cumulus clouds in the September skies as I did picking cotton! Those were non-stressed, comfortable days for me. I was still sorting out the things that I saw, or imagined. In the sky, I could make out all kinds of shapes and forms in the late summer clouds. But there is something else that I remember. Crooked, silvery objects, that moved through the sky. Uncle Earl said they were “crooked ladies.” I think they were actually some kind of sediment on the surface of my eyes, but they were fascinating, and I remember those days with nostalgia.
I had a “cotton sack” to pick cotton in, just like the grownups. Mama made my sack out a the cloth sack that 25 pounds of flour came in. Near the top one side of the sack, they put two small rocks, and folded the cloth over them, and then tied the cloth around the rocks with strings. The other ends of the two strings were tied to a cloth band. The band went over my left shoulder, and the sack on my right side. I don’t remember if I ever got a sack full!
My other job was packing the cotton in the sacks of the grownups. They put me in the top of the sack, and I packed the cotton with my feet! When the cotton sacks got full, they would be emptied onto a “sheet.” The sheets were composed of four fertilizer sacks, that had been “ripped” (seams removed on three sides) so that they were approximately square pieces of cloth, about 3 or four feet square. Four of them were sewn together to make a sheet, about six or eight feet square. After a big pile of cotton had been dumped on the sheets, the opposite corners of the sheets were tied together, and then the sheet could be hung on the steelyard scales to be weighed. A sack held 40 or 50 pounds; a sheet a couple of hundred, as best I remember.
Here’s a picture of what was identified on the internet as “antique” steelyards:
The long shaft was called the steelyard, or balance. The top hook went over a tree limb or some kind of scaffold. The sheet hung on the bottom hook, which is actually to the left of the top hook in this picture. There were two balance weights that were called “pees”; a “big pee” and a “little pee.” Both were used for weighing the cotton at the same time. The long end of the steelyards was calibrated with numbers to give the balance weight.
Daddy’s last cotton crop was in 1954, after we had left the Little House. I was twelve years old. Uncle Buddy, Daddy’s brother, who was in his mid-fifties, challenged me to a cotton-picking contest. I picked 210 pounds that day, and that was a lot. Many grownups could not pick that much. But Uncle Buddy picked 211! Black women who sometimes worked with us were very good at picking cotton. Lola Story and Eugenia “Pie” Menefee sometimes picked four hundred pounds or more in a day. I remember at one point in time, the going wages for picking cotton for hire was 2 cents per pound, so they could earn a whopping $8 per day! As best I recall, it took about 1500 pounds of “seed” cotton to make a five-hundred-pound bale at the gin. The seeds were two thirds the weight. They were valuable, and often paid the cost of ginning.
Recent Comments