I could hear only her end of the conversation but one word stood out as the woman repeated it: Cotton. From the conversation, I could tell that she wasn’t talking about a cotton garment but the plant itself.
Once she finished her phone conversation, I curiously asked what it was about. A friend was telling her about the cotton crop he had grown, she said.
Black folks growing cotton for fun? Now that seemed awkward to me given the long nightmarish history of black folks being forced to pick cotton in the South. Why, I wondered, would any black person want to plant cotton for no good reason?
Her friend, she said, had planted only a few plants near his Florida home, but she knew of someone else who had planted a couple rows of cotton. Naturally, I wanted to see the plants but was told that at this time of year (May) they were still green. I was imagining dark-stemmed plants with white cotton bolls.
I’ve never picked any cotton, but I’ve seen enough vintage photos of African American men, women and children trudging through cotton fields with heavy sacks on their arms and a blazing sun over their heads. I know that there were and probably still are black cotton farmers who do it for a living. But someone growing for pleasure was new to me.
She said people grew the cotton to share, just as this friend was doing with her. And how would she use it, I asked. As decoration.
I couldn’t imagine decorating with cotton because of what it represented. Its past was inherent in a group of early 20th century stereoscope cards I bought at auction some months ago. About eight of the cards showed African Americans engaged in some form of cotton production – from planting to picking to removing bales from a train. I bought them for their historical value.
These black and white cards offered no romanticized view of cotton. They showed a hard life for people with few resources or choices. Most of the cards were made by the Keystone View Company, one of the major manufacturers of stereoscope cards from the late 1800s into the 20th century. The cards were viewed through a stereoscope viewer.
On the front were photos glued to a hard board and on the back were a history and description of what was on the front. Some were dated, some were not.
The scenes were from New Orleans, Texas, North Carolina and South Carolina – indicating the breadth of cotton-growing in the South. Picking cotton was back-breaking and heartless work that black folks did as slaves and as sharecroppers well into the 20th century.
Cotton had long been a fixture in the rest of the world before it became as much a cash crop for the South as slavery. The earliest records showed that the people of the Upper Nile in Africa were cultivating one type of cotton about 12,000 years ago; in coastal Peru, they were producing another variety 10,000 years ago and in Pakistan, another variety 5,000 years ago.
Touring an exhibit at a local science museum recently, I came across a display of cotton that had been grown in Guinea in West Africa. The display showed cotton bolls in gourds, and the description noted that women picked, ginned and spun it into thread for cloth, and in some instances used indigo to color it. There was no year on the display, but this wasn’t new cotton; it was old cotton. Cotton is still grown on small farms in such countries as Zambia, Burkina Faso and Mozambique, and harvested mostly by hand.
It is also still cultivated in about 90 countries worldwide, with most produced in the United States, China, India and Pakistan and West Africa, according to the WWF (formerly the World Wildlife Fund). There are said to be 17 cotton-growing states in this country, stretching along the southern half from California to Florida.
Cotton became a southern economic mainstay after Eli Whitney invented his cotton gin in 1793 to separate the seeds from the fiber. According to one website, by 1850, nearly half of the enslaved Africans in the South were being used in the cotton fields. This boon in cotton led to an increased demand for slaves that, according to one account, went from 700,000 in 1790 to 4 million in 1860, just before the Civil War.
During Reconstruction and beyond, blacks – and some poor whites – with skills and no land or money took up sharecropping, another form of slavery because they remained beholden to and exploited by white landowners on whose lands they tended cotton.
During my conversation about cotton crops, another woman in her 90s recalled her sharecopper father taking his crops to market. I can’t remember if the crops were cotton or tobacco, but she as a child watched as the white owner told her father to go on home and he’d take over. To this day, she recalled the pained look on her father’s face: He had grown the crops and couldn’t even stay around to see how much they sold for. It was devastating both for him and the child who saw it happen.
Raw cotton is stained with much pain and sweat, but some folks apparently can see past it to the decorative. I found several cotton arrangements on the web: How about this bridal bouquet starting at $75. Or this centerpiece starting at $15. Or these mini cotton bales. Or these bolls sold as a Christmas decoration.
