Cotton Tenants: Three Families

by James Agee

  Then comes the second sweeping, with the twenty to twenty-two-inch stock you will use from then on: then comes hoeing, another job for the whole family; then you run the middles, that is, put down soda by hand or horn or machine. (Soda makes the weed; guano puts on the fruit.) Then comes the third sweeping: and then another hoeing. The first and second sweepings you have gone pretty deep. The stuff is small and you want to give loose ground to your feed roots. The third is shallow: the feed roots have extended within danger of injury.

  The fourth sweeping is so light a scraping that it is scarcely more than a ritual, like a barber’s last delicate moments with his own soul before he holds the mirror up to the dark side of your skull. The cotton has to be treated very carefully. By this last sweeping it is making. Break roots, or lack rain, and it is stopped dead as a hammer. (The language of tenants, among other nonliterary and scarcely literate people, is full of surrealism of that quality.)

  This fourth sweeping is the operation more properly known as laying by. From now on to picking time, everything is up to the sky, the dirt, and the cotton itself. It is from now, in mid July, for five or six weeks on, that you have nothing to do and no rations money. You look for work and by great luck get some, or you look until you are sickened with looking, and sit down to take your leisure. Mile on mile on mile on mile, driving in midsummer, on the porch of nineteen shacks in twenty you see the same sight, formal as a dream: the whole family, blank in the eyes as fish, sitting in stiff rows, speechless in their chairs, like the wives in Bluebeard’s basement, slack as meats on butchers’ hooks, more dead than death: the adolescent daughters in their cleanest happiest prints. What this is like extended, like a lack of breath in too-deep water, through four months of the wetness and cold and knee-deep mud of the winter: what it does to the heart and brain of its victims: would be a pleasure to make unbearably clear. It is happening now. But only being there could make it clear: a tenant who is otherwise articulate shuts up as if he were shy of it. The trouble is, the public schools have not trained him in the ability to talk about abstractions, and food, and the uses of a useless day, and existence itself, are all very close to being abstractions in the winter.

  But it is midsummer. Here is what the cotton is doing with its time. Each square points up: that is to say, on twig-ends, certain of its fringed leaves point themselves into the form of an infant prepuce: each square points up; and opens a white flat flower which turns pink the next day, purple the next, shrivels, and falls, the next: its fall forced upon it by the growth, at the base of the bloom, of the boll. Developments from square to bloom consume three weeks in the early summer, ten days in the later, longer heat. The blooming keeps on all summer. The development of the boll from the size of a pea to that point when, at the size of a big walnut, it darkens and dries and its white contents explode it, takes five to eight weeks.

  Meantime there are enemies. Bitterweed, ragweed, Johnsongrass; the weevil, the army worm; the slippery chances of the sky. Bitterweed is easily extinguished and won’t come back up again. Ragweed will, with another prong every time. That weed can suck your crop to death. Johnsongrass, it takes hell and scissors to control. You can’t control it in the drill (the row) with your plowing. If you just cut it off with the hoe, it is high as your thumb by the next morning. The best you can do is dig up the root with the corner of your hoe, and that doesn’t hold it back any too well.

  The weevil is much less dangerous an enemy than he used to be. Army worms are devils. The biggest of them are the size of your little finger. They eat leaves and squares and young bolls. You get a light crop of them at first. They web up in the leaves and become flies; the flies lay eggs; the eggs become army worms by the million and you can hear the rustling of their eating like a brushfire. They are a menace but they are easier to control than the weevil. You mix arsenic poison with a sorry grade of flour and dust the plants late of an evening (afternoon) or soon of a morning (premorning): the dew makes a paste of it that won’t blow off.

  It’s a very unusual year when you do well with both your most important crops, because they need rain and sun in such disparate amounts. Cotton needs much less rain than corn: it is really a sun flower. If it is going to get a superflux of rain, that will best come before the cotton is blooming. And if it must rain during that part of the summer when a fairsized field is blooming a bale a day, it had best rain late in the evening when the blooms are shutting, not in the morning and midday. For then the bloom is blared out flat; rain easily gets in it and hangs on it; it shuts wet, sours, and sticks to the boll; next morning it turns red and falls. Often the boll comes off with it. But the boll that stays on is sour and rotted and good for nothing. It isn’t therefore at all surprising that the religious faith of tenants is clearest and deepest in their prayers for a good season (a good rain) or for sunlight: weather is the least controllable essential in their uncontrollable lives. Nor is it in the least surprising that not one of those miraculous demonstrations of the sky which compose an Alabama year arouses in them the lightest reflex toward what is known as beauty. The weather is as organic to them as their own livers, and just as important and just as customary.*

  *They have in fact the stormfear that many primitive peoples share: and wind is terrifying to them as cloud and lightning and thunder. You can never tell what’s in a cloud, Burroughs says. Arn, and dogs, draws lightning, he adds. Families, when the man is away, hurry to join each other beneath the blackening of the air. They draw together in shuttered and latched rooms; the children are silent; Mrs. Burroughs sits with her hand on her knees and her palms to her ears. The men are responsibly brave for the sake of their families, but are not in the least ashamed of the fact of their own fear.

  CHAPTER 6

  Picking Season

  Late in August the fields begin to whiten more rarely with late blooms and more frequently with cotton and then still thicker with cotton, like a sparkling ground starlight; and the wide tremendous light holds the earth beneath a glass vacuum and a burning glass. The bolls are rusty green, are bronze, are split and burst and splayed open in a loose vomit of cotton. The split bolls are now burrs, hard and edged as chiseled wood, pointed as thorns, three-, four-, and five-celled. There is a great deal of beauty about a single burr and the cotton slobbering from it and about a whole field opening. The children and once in a while a very young or a very old man, are excited and eager to start picking. It is a joy that scarcely touches most men and any women, though, and it wears off in half a morning and is gone for a year.

  Picking is simple and terrible work. Skill will help you; endurance will come in handy; but neither makes it a bit easier. Over your right shoulder you have slung a long sack that trails to the ground. You work with both hands as fast and steadily as you can. The trick is to get the cotton between your fingertips at its very roots on the burr in all three or four or five gores at once so that it brings out clean at one pluck: an easy job with one burr in ten, where the cotton is ready to fall; with the rest, the fibers are tight and tricky. The other trick is against this thoroughness and obligation of maximum speed, not to hurt your fingers on the burrs any worse than you can help. You would have to try hard, to break your flesh on any burr: a single raindrop is only scarcely instrumental in ironing a mountain flat. An hour’s picking, your hands are just limbered up. A week, and you are favoring your fingers. The later of the three to five times over the field, the last long weeks of the season, you might be happy to swap them for boils.

  Meantime, too, you are working in sunlight that stands on you with the serene weight of deep seawater, and in heat that makes your jointed and muscled and finestructured body flow like one indiscriminate oil, and the brilliant weight of heat is piled upon you heavier and heavier all the time and the eyes are masked in stinging sweat and the head perhaps is gently roaring like a private blowtorch, and less gently pulsing with ache. Also the bag, that can hold a hundred pounds, is filling as you drag it from plant to plant, four to nine burrs to a plant to be rifle
d swiftly, then the load shrugged along another foot or two and the white row stretched ahead to a blur and innumerably multiplied by other white rows, and bolls in the cleaned row behind you already like slow popcorn in the heat and the sack still heavier and heavier, so that it pulls you back as a beast might rather than a mere dead weight.

  Also, cotton plants are low, so that in this heat and immanent weight of light and the heavying sack you are dragging, you are continuously stooped over even if you are a child, and bent very deep if you are a man or a woman. A strong back is a big help but not even the strongest back was built for that treatment, and there combine not just at the kidneys, and rill down the thighs and up the spine and athwart the shoulders, the ticklish weakness of gruel or water, and an aching that increases in geometric progression, and at length, in the small of the spine, a literal sensation of yielding, buckling, splintering, and breakage: and all of this, even though the mercy of nature has strengthened and hardened your flesh and anaesthetized your nerves and your powers of reflection and imagination, reaches in time the brain and the more mirrorlike nerves, and thereby makes itself much worse than before.

  Later in the season you are relieved of the worst of the heat. In time, you exchange it for a coolness which many pickers like even less because it slows and chills the lubricant garment of sweat they work in, and seriously slows and stiffens the by then painfully sore fingers.

  The idiom has been overused but it is accurate: picking goes on each day from can’t to can’t: sometimes, if there’s a rush, the Tingles continue by moonlight. In the blasting heat of the first of the season unless there is a rush—to beat a rain, to make up a wagonload—it is customary to quit work an hour and a half and even two hours in the worst part of the day and sit or lie in the shade and possible draft of the hallway asleep or half-asleep after dinner. This time off narrows as the weeks go by and a sense of rush and the wish to be done with it grow on the pickers and come through from the landlord. There are tenants who have no midday meal. Those we are speaking of have it. It is of course no parallel in heartiness and variety to the proud enormous dinners cooked up for harvest hands in the wheat country and accounted and painted with Zest, Gusto, and even Zowie by certain lovers of what they call the American Scene. It is the same everyday food, with perhaps a little less variety than in midsummer, hastily cooked by a woman who has hurried in exhausted from the fields a couple of jumps ahead of her family, and served in the dishes she rushily rinsed before she hurried out a couple of jumps behind them.

  There has been a certain exaggeration about child labor in the cotton fields: essentially none, but stupid a little, and worth a word or two. The exaggerations have chalked up child labor as a crime a hundred per cent against the landlord or his overseers. They—particularly the overseer—have some direct and a strong indirect part in it. But two facts the correspondents have overlooked. One is that it is customary as breathing on all farms, even the Jersiest and most Kulak you can imagine, for the children of the family to help with the work. That is part of the whole structure of any family that lives directly off the land. The other fact is that Southern farmers more strongly than others retain still the delineaments of the primitive family anywhere: a patri- or matriarchy (in the South it is patriarchal; in the American middle class it is matriarchal and on an uglier plane)—a patriarchy into which children are born unquestioning slaves until by their own physical or mental strength they free themselves.* Still another fact that has nothing to do with the tenant system is that cotton requires more labor than most other crops and that the labor of your children is free. The economic skeleton of these three facts is plain as the skull on your throat and so solidly sustains the arguments of those who ignore it that it is odd indeed that they do ignore it.

  However, there is certainly a line. Cross it, and the work children do most certainly becomes child labor. Every tenant family crosses it and the fact that few are aware of crossing it is irrelevant. In that country you speak of a family not as a family but as a force: and with good reason. Nothing brilliant is expected of a four-year-old but he will do a fair amount of picking along with the others; you cannot learn him too young. By the time he is seven he is no longer able to think of it, ever, as play. By the time he is twelve he has long outgrown any sense of privilege, pride, or novelty in plowing, too: and by that time if not before it is likely to seem logical as well as necessary that he quit school. All of the same goes for a girl. The baby meanwhile is lying in the field or rolling around in the white load of the woven-oak basket. A little older, say two, and he is picking his hat or his skirt full. There are sometimes shifts into gayety in the picking, or excitement—a race between the two children, a snake killed—but mostly it is silent, serious, and lonely work.

  Floyd Burroughs is a very poor picker. When he was a child he fell in the fireplace and burnt the flesh off the flat of both hands, so his fingers are stiff and slow and the best he has ever done in a day is 150 pounds. Average for a man is nearer 250. His back hurts him badly, too, so he usually picks on his knees, the way other pickers rest; and a man walking on his knees down a white shudder of heat is something for painters of peasants to look into. Allie Mae picks about the average for a woman—150 to 200 pounds a day. She is fast with her fingers until the work exhausts her. Lucile picks 150 pounds a day. Junior hasn’t yet got into his stride. Fields has been slowed down by poor health for several years now. His wife is strong and competent and her mother is still a good picker (and a vindictive hand with an axe) so in spite of having only one child old enough to be any use they can get in the crop without hiring a hand. The Tingle boys are all right when their papa is on hand to make them work: otherwise they are likely just to clown, and tease their sisters. Sadie is very quick. Summer before last, when she was just eight, she picked 110 pounds in the day in a race with Laura Minnie Lee. Last summer she was slowed up by runarounds that were losing her two nails (caused by the diet plus dirt and not much fun among the burrs) but she was picking steadily. Mrs. Tingle used to pick 300 and 350 pounds a day but sickness has slowed her to less than 200 now. It is possible that Mrs. Tingle is something of a fantast, though, and indeed in all the above we must bear in mind the possibilities of Homeric brag: according to general publicity surrounding the Rust machine, 100 pounds a day is good picking.

  Commonly, cotton is stored in a small structure in the field, the cotton house. None of these three families has one. The Burroughses store in one of their outbuildings; the Fieldses on their front porch, raising planks around it; the Tingles in their spare room. Children enjoy playing in it, tumbling, jumping, diving, burying each other; sometimes they sleep in it, as a sort of treat. Rats like it, too, to make nests in, and that draws ratsnakes. When the home scales have weighed out fourteen hundred pounds of cotton it is loaded on the high-boarded wagon and taken to gin. A man is “free” to take his cotton to whatever gin he pleases but that means generally the gin his landlord owns or has an interest in. The same goes for what store you trade at. Over and over again you hear tenants say, innocently enough, too, that there’s never no use gitting a man agin ya.

  The children take turns riding in, bale by bale and year by year: they are likely to be cleaned up as for Saturday afternoon, and they are happy and excited. And there is for that matter a happiness and excitement, and a raw, festal quality about it, this one of the tremendous slow parade of muledrawn, crawling wagons, creaking under the year’s blood-sweated and prayed-over work, on all roads drawn in, from the slender red roads of all the South and onto the Southern highways, a wagon every few hundred yards, crested now with a white and now with a black family, all towards these little trembling lodes that are the gins, and all and in each private heart towards that climax of one more year’s work which yields so little at best, and nothing so often, and worse to so many hundreds of thousands.

  The gin, too, the wagons in line, the people waiting on the wagons, the suspendered whiteshirted men on the platform, the emblematic sweep of the great-sho
uldered iron beam scales cradling gently in the dark doorway, the insignia of justice, the landlords in their shirtsleeves at the gin or relaxed in swivels beside the painted safes in their little offices, the heavy-muscled young men in baseball caps who tumble the bales with sharp short hooks, the leafers drawn there to have their batteries recharged with the vicarious violence that is in process in the bare and weedy outskirts of the bare and brutal town—all that also in its hard, slack, sullen way, is dancelike and triumphal. The big blank surfaces of ribbed tin, bright and sick as gas in the sunlight, square their darkness round a shuddering racket that is mystery to these we speak of. All it means to a tenant it this: he gets his ticket and his bale number; waits his turn in line; drives under as they hise the ginhead; they let him down the suction pipe; he cradles its voracity down through the crest of and round and round his stack of cotton till the last lint has leapt up from the wagonbed. Wandering loose out back, his son may happen upon the tin and ghostly interior of the seed shed, against whose roof and rafters a pipe extends a steady sleet of seed and upon all whose interior surfaces and all the air, a dry nightmare fleece trembles like the fake snows of Christmas movies. Out in front he can see the last of the cotton snowlike relaxing in pulses down a space of dark into the compress. The bale is lifted like a Roxy organ, the presses unlatched, numbered brass tag attached, the ties fastened: it hangs in the light breathing of the scales. A little is slivered from it; the staple length is taken. (Of the type raised in this vicinity it is ⅞ ths-inch to an inch.) The ginning charge per scale varies a little; hangs around $4. On anything exceeding 550 pounds there is an extra charge of a cent a pound; for this overweight strains the press. There are plenty of buyers on hand, ranging between Vergil Davis who clerks in the town’s biggest general store (the Moundville Mercantile, popularly known as Davis’s) through legmen for Southern mills. A half-cropper has little to say about the sales; a renter a fair amount. The cotton may be sold right off the platform; and may wait on, for better prices, late into December. If it waits it may be stored in the Government warehouse; it may be left outdoors. Alone among Moundville landlords the Tidmore brothers have a warehouse of their own, and they charge their tenants no storage. The tenant gets nothing on his cotton until settling-up time, at the end of the season; the landlord’s first cotton-money by invariable custom pays off his fertilizer bill. What the tenant does get bale by bale is the money on his share of the cottonseed, on which his living depends. A landlord sometimes makes a joking feint of withholding that money against outstanding debts and, somewhat less often, carries out the joke. But generally the tenant’s business of that day ends as he leaves his landlord with six dollars or so in his pocket. The exodus from town is even more formal than the parade in was. It has taken almost exactly eighteen minutes to gin each bale (once the waiting was over), and each tenant has done almost exactly the same amount of business afterward; and the tenants’ empty, light-grinding wagons are distributed along the roads in a likewise exact conjunction of time and space apart: the time consumed by ginning plus business; the space apart which, in that time, any mule traverses at his classic somnambulist pace. It is as if the people drawn in full and sucked dry were restored, sown at large upon the breadth of their country, precisely as by some impersonal mechanic hand.