PICKING COTTON

When I was four years old, someone grew cotton in a field across the road from our house. I never paid any attention until it came cotton picking time and a group of black people showed up working the rows as they stuffed the picked cotton into big homemade bags they dragged on their shoulders

My father would take me over for a closer look. We would watch the black people dump their bags into a wagon, then they would move back out into a new row to pick more.

One day the man who owned the farm asked me, "You want to pick some cotton, Boy?" I surely did, but I had no bag. That afternoon my mother cut some material and made me a little bag that fit over my shoulder. She and my father took me back across the field and I went to work pulling strands of soft cotton out of the bolls.

"Pick 'em clean," the farmer would yell to me.

Picking cotton soon became a drudgery, long before I had my little bag filled. I wandered back up to the end of the row where my parents and the farmer stood watching.

"I'm tired," I complained.

"Well, give me the cotton," the famer said, "and I will pay you." He took some change out of his pocket as he reached for my bag.

But I protested. I started to cry. I wanted the cotton. I didn't want his money.

They all laughed but decided to let me keep the cotton. When we got home, my mother picked the seeds out of it and used the cotton to make me a pillow. I had that pillow until I went into the Army. She offered to send it to me over in Germany, but I was afraid the other soldiers would laugh, so I let her keep it for me.

One other time I picked cotton. When I was in the sixth grade at Ranlo School in North Carolina. If you volunteered to pick cotton in late September, they would let you out of school in the afternoons. My cousin Howard and I volunteered. We went to the cotton fields, and they gave us bags and assigned us to certain rows. This was serious cotton picking. They paid by the pound, and I can testify that it took a lot of cotton picking to get a pound. It weighed about as much as heavy air. But Howard told me to put little pebbles in the bag every once in a while to add to the weight. We must have put too many in because they caught us. We were fired the first day. We didn't tell the teacher. We just said they had more pickers than they needed.

My grandfather grew cotton on his farm in South Carolina. He had black people come over from another farm to pick. They would load it into a big wooden wagon drawn by two mules, one short and one tall. My grandfatrher called the mules, Mutt and Jeff. He always let me go with him when he took the wagonload of cotton to the gin where it was ginned and made into bales. He would usually buy me a bottled Coca-Cola, but he didn't drink them. He would take a high wagonload of cotton into the gin but bring back just two bales. I knew right then for certain that I did not want to be a cotton farmer.

HOW DO YOU SPELL PRESBYTERIAN?

In a small Southern town before television, there wasn't a lot to do. The one movie in town changed films every two weeks. If it was a good movie, we would sometimes see it twice. But mainly we went to church.

Although we were Presbyterians on my father's side, my mother complained because they couldn't sing and she didn't want to be anything she couldn't spell. So we attended all kinds of other churches. As visitors. We would always sit in the back. We watched. We listened. We sang.

We liked the Church of God, the Pentecoastal Holiness and The Four Square Gospel churches. My mother called them "Holy Rollers" because they shouted and talked in tongues. It used to scare me at first to see them rolling their eyes, flinging their arms and babbling. But I got so I liked it because their music was so good.

The only part I didn't like was their ritual of playing slow, sad music and calling sinners to come home. There was even a song: "Come home, come home. Ye who are weary come home. Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling. Calling all sinners, come home."

As I understood it, they wanted all sinners to redeem themselves and to accept Jesus as their Savior. Usually two or three people went up. If it was a good night, even more. And they all usually came from the back where we sat. The Sinner Section.

I felt secure in the knowledge that I myself would never go up. For one thing, I was only eleven years old and they didn't expect children to jump up, shouting and talking in tongues. And if a child ever did, he got smacked and put back in his place.

It was my mother I worried about. Especially since she dressed in bright, ruffled dresses and wore make-up and earrings. Whenever the preacher called for sinners, they would often mention in disgusting tones, "You out there with rouge on your face. You with painted lips. You out there with dangly earbobs and diamond-studded combs in your hair."

I would think, "My Lord, he's talking about Momma." Except they were rhinestones in the combs and not real diamonds.

Every time the ministers would call for sinners and describe them, I would sneak a glance at Momma and could easily confirm that they, indeed, had her number. I soon took to praying in earnest that the Lord NOT let her jump up and make a fool of herself and humiliate me. I would remind the Lord that we were, you know, really
Presbyterians who did not take to public spectacle in religion or in other matters.

"Please, please, God" I would beg. "Don't let her be saved."

It was syears later before I realized that I had worried needlessly about her ever being saved. My mother wasn't about to be saved if it meant giving up pretty clothes and ear bobs. Looking good was more important to her than living right. At her request, we buried her in a bright pink dress. She was wearing her favorite earrings, a little lip-gloss and a touch of blue eye shadow. But she did ask us to have the organist play, "Come home, come home. Ye who are weary, come home."

My father called me "Darling" when I was a boy, and he continued using this Southern term of endearment long after I was too tall and too lanky to easily fit on his lap.

Being called Darling was just one of the casual everyday ways I was assured of my father's affection. Modern day psychologists would call it unconditional love, but my father did not take to psychologists nor to unconnditional arrangements. He had many expectations, in fact. And he verbalized them as often as his terms of endearment.

He also called me "Son" as if were a proper name. Sometimes he would say it sternly and with a prefix, as in "Now, Son." It was a sure sign that I should listen up and not stray into what he considered a wayward life.

Soimetimes he would repeat the words, "Son. Son. Son." Usually this was said slowly and deliverately with a heavy tone of dispair, which was quickly and accurately interpreted by me to mean, "What am I going to do with you?"

Other times he would say, "Let me sing you a song, Son." And before I could say all right, he would go right into singing, "You Are My Sunshine", and I could tell he really meant it.

Or he might sing "Beautiful, Beautiful Brown Eyes" and when he finished, he never failed to tell me, "Son, you were the first boy child in our family to have brown eyes and I truly don't think I can ever love blue eyes again."

Ir wasn't until years later when I heard him singing, "Beautiful, Beautiful BLUE eyes" to my own daughter that I realized he freely adapted this song to the color of the child's eyes presently on his lap. Nevertheless, I never doubted his sincerity, then or now.

I do miss having my father around to call me Son, yet I will always be eternally grateful for being his Darlin, his Brown Eyes, and his Sunshine.