Picking Cotton

It was a given that when you were old enough to pull a sack you were to pick cotton. We picked ours by hand when the fields next to us were using machine pickers. It was really fun when I think of it now. It was even more fun when grandmother hired people to help us. It was like they were our employees, even though I was just a small little girl. When the hired hands had their sack full we would weigh them. When there was someone other than just the family picking, the family did the other chores associated with the gathering of the cotton. Most of the time my daddy did the weighing and loading onto the cotton wagon. The job was bigger when there were more pickers. Someone had to be at the scales at all times, because everyone did not fill their sacks at the same time. On these days we did not have to pick as much. I rarely ever just stayed at the wagon, however. It was another one of those things that the boys did instead of the girls.

My sack most of the time may have weighed twenty pounds at the most. There were ladies that we hired that every time they came to weigh up; the weight was more than ninety pounds. These were women that my grandmother had always said, "she can pick over four-hundred pounds a day.
This was possibly the craziest cotton crop we ever made. The planting was a mess with it raining so much that year. It took several attempts to just get the seed in the ground. Finally one Sunday afternoon the odd crew of two little kids, a grandmother and Mama waited on the planter. Daddy pulled a planter he had borrowed from Preston Dean behind the old Ford Tractor Granddaddy and Grandmother owned. After the cotton was up with a good stand, surprisingly, we were still faced with lots of rain. It was so muddy in that field that one day we were pulling the bigs weeds. My feet marred up in the mud loosing my shoes.

Daddy making this cotton crop on his own meaning that he rented the land from Preacher Corum. Daddy didn't plant this cotton on Grandmothers land. It was an extra way for him to make money himself. Grandmother was proud of him. Proud until the not so unusal Daddy persona  came out. Preacher Corum really wasn't a preacher that was just a nickname he was given. It always puzzled me how he could be a preacher that was saying ugly curse words. A question my curious-nosey-little-self finally asked my grandmother. "How can he be a preacher if he says the words he says." Grandmother then told me that was just a name they gave to him, because when he came home from the army he bought lots of new clothes and dressed up everyday. He was not a very industrious man so it was a neighborhood joke that he dressed up like a preacher when he came back from the army. He had a little cash and was trying to make the people think he was a big shot. He did later get a job at Reynolds Metals. That was the best job in this area at the time. I thought they were rich because they had an air conditioner in their house.

The cotton really did well considering it was worked by a tractor that broke down often and two women and children. Now came the time to pick it. This was the worst part of the whole crop. Daddy must have gotten tired of the whole cotton patch thing by the time it had to be picked. The tractor would not start. He was the only one that could have started it. Had it been just a few years later my brother could have started the tractor. The picking of the cotton was nothing unusual for Grandmother, Mama, my brother and me. That part was left to us without saying.

The tractor thing was important to put the cotton in when we picked it. When it was ready to be picked, it had to be picked.  The cotton patch was across the road from the house. The four of us picked a whole bale of cotton without a wagon to put it on. A bale had to weigh two-thousand pounds before there was enough to take to the gin. Every evening after school we would pick as long as we could. When our sacks were full we pulled them across the road to the carport and poured it on the floor. After we got enough for it to be taken to the gin, Grandmother finally got Daddy to get up off the couch to crank the tractor to go to the gin. This meant the cotton had to be put back in the sacks to go in the cotton wagon. Makes me wonder how all that work was worth the six-hundred dollars Daddy made. He used the money buy the green Catalina Pontiac that he smashed the front of before spring.