When them cotton ball get rotten, you can't pick very much cotton...

My cousin-in-law posted on Facebook about living in modern day cotton country.  It brought back a flood of memories I thought I'd share.  First, the view from our front step was not much different than the current photo at the top of my blog.

It was 1959-1960.  I rode to school with my dad in his 1953 Chevy pick-up.  Hank Williams was still getting radio air play.  "I'm so lonesome I could cry..." struck a nerve in that flat lonely isolated landscape.  I played my dad's Jimmy Rodgers, Hank Williams and Johnny Horton LP's.  There was a Nixon-Kennedy billboard on the road into town.  Our party line ring was two shorts and a long.  Drinking water came from a cistern.  Canned goods were stored in a dug out cellar, with its musty smell and refuge from tornadoes.  There was one tv channel when the weather was right.  It was there on that black little box I fell in love with Annie Oakley.  Played by Gail Davis.  My first unrequited love.

We lived in a rural community of Hester.  It was on an old KATY spur and down the road was an abandoned cotton gin.  Dad was pastor of Hester Baptist Church.  The building was a converted WPA school house.  There was no running water in the church.  A his and her's 4 seat outhouse sat next to the fence.  The farmer behind us ran some cattle there and he used an electric fence.  On a dare, I once peed on that fence.  You will only do that once.  We lived in the parsonage next door.  Surrounded by cotton fields,  my anal retentive compulsive cleaning mom fought the dust there for 5 years.

This was still the day of migrant farm workers.  Families from Mexico would travel north following the various harvests.  Cotton was still picked by hand in those days.  It was back breaking work.  Stooped over, you'd drag this long duct cotton sack picking the cotton balls from the spiky, thorny hull.  When your sack was full, you'd take it to the truck, it would be weighed.  You were paid by how much cotton you picked.  Many of the farmers still had migrant camps.  They were old ramshackled huts that provided shelter for the couple of weeks it took to pick cotton.

Dad taught Spanish at Martha High School.  This meant when ever there was problem, usually a birth, the migrants were sent to our house at all hours of the night so my dad could translate.

On a clear sunny day, I'd watch the crop duster daredevils spray the cotton fields.  They would come in low, under the power lines sometimes.  I would imagine them as P38 fighters coming in for a strafe on my bunker in the bar ditch.

We were poor in those days so steak was a real treat.  Dad had a little tripod charcoal grill on the back porch and was grilling us some steaks.  I imagine one of the church members butchered a calf and gave us the steaks.  I look up and I see dad running down the cotton row, spatula in hand chasing the Ferrel cat that just snatched the steak off the grill.  I once was playing in the irrigation ditch and caught a mess of small fish in the drain.  I gathered them up in a box and took them home.  I filled a wash tub with water and ran in to get mom to show her.  When we emerged from the house, the tub was empty.  Damn Ferrel cats again.

Thanks to Senator Robert S Kerr and the irrigation projects of the 50's, cotton farming in western Oklahoma was tolerable.  Boll weevils were dealt with by harsh chemicals.  The mechanized cotton harvester made migrant workers obsolete.  Western Oklahoma and Texas are littered with small abandoned cotton gins.  A cotton farmer can now farm thousands of acres instead of a few hundred.

I'd still like to once more travel those old country roads in an old 50's Chevy pickup with Hank on the radio.


COTTON FIELDS
by Huddie Ledbetter aka Leadbelly

When I was a little bitty baby
My mama would rock me in my cradle
In those old cotton fields back home
When I was a little bitty baby
My mama would rock me in my cradle
In those old cotton fields back home

Oh, when those cotton ball get rotten
You can't pick very much cotton
In them old cotton fields back home
It was back in Louisiana
Just about a mile from Texarkana
In them old cotton fields back home

When I was a little bitty baby
My mama would rock me in my cradle
In them old cotton fields back home
When I was a little bitty baby
My mama would rock me in my cradle
In those old cotton fields back home

Oh, when those cotton ball get rotten
You can't pick very much cotton
In them old cotton fields back home
It was back in Louisiana
Just about a mile from Texarkana
In those old cotton fields back home
In those old cotton fields back home...