COTTON COUNTRY

My Daddy said the Civil War was fought more or less over cotton. There seemed to be a great need to keep the slaves in order to get the cotton picked. At that time, no great machines came into the fields. Only human hands could take it out of the prickly boll. The whole southern economy depended on the plantations growing, gathering, and marketing cotton. People often talk of slavery in the Old South, but rarely do they mention the connection it had to cotton.

The South lay destroyed after the years of the great Civil War. Cotton crops weren’t planted during the last two years of this terrible time in our history. If they were planted, they weren’t gathered. The great plantations had no means for continuing the way of life that had existed for two hundred plus years. Cotton production had ceased. Life as it was known before the war no longer existed. The great need the world had for cotton, linked to the South’s necessity and will to live, spawn the idea of crop sharing. The blacks, now free, had no immediate means to sustain themselves. Thus, the system that became known as “sharecropping” came into existence and continues down even to the present time. The freed slaves had no implements, seeds, or money to buy food. Therefore, they entered into a work agreement. This placed them in immediate debt and once again under the control of their former masters.

The poor white people were equally disadvantaged. A group called “tenant farmers” had already been in existence. The difference between a sharecropper and the tenant farmer, was very little. The tenant farmer leased the land from the owner for a percentage of the crop and sought his own financing for seed, food, and supplied his own tools. It was one way, at least, to feel somewhat elevated above the former slaves. The poor whites that resorted to sharecropping were considered to be lower on the social scale than even the poor, recently freed slaves.

Cotton has been a part of our family’s way of life as far back as we have a history. On both the General’s side, and the Messer’s side, of the family. No one seems to know what part we played in cotton production before the Civil War, or if we were ever slave owners. My Daddy told me our ancestors came here indentured to the large plantation owners. Probably, we stayed on afterwards to work for wages in and around cotton. No one seems to really know. All written and oral records have disappeared. My Granddaddy had taken a little time off to try his hand at the family recipe to improve his lot in life, but it was short-lived and a failure. The Messers were cotton farmers. Sometimes they owned small pieces of land, but more often than not, they were tenant farmers. Always, they worked the great cotton fields.

Being born in 1937, I had no idea of the power of cotton, and how it would influence my life as I grew up. I was just suddenly there one day. I gave no real thought to its importance until years later. In the years of my growing up, the planting and gathering of cotton controlled our every function. The value of the land, length of the school year, social standing in the community and, most of all, the ability to borrow money, was dominated by the production of cotton. My family, our friends, and neighbors were tied to the seemingly eternal cycle of growing white gold.

The farms were small in those days and there were very few tractors. Our power came from the noble horse. A farmer with two could handle twenty acres. Some of that would be in woods with a small pasture for a milk cow and a couple of hogs. The houses were normally built on a high spot to protect against the floods that often came in the late fall and early spring. Every family had a garden place near their house to grow vegetables. Two teams of horses could handle forty acres with this same arrangement of pasture, woods, and garden. There always seemed to be a low place where the water never drained. It was difficult to cultivate and remained overgrown a good part of the year.

My Daddy loved the feel of fresh dirt in his hands. I can remember watching him walk across the land he had freshly plowed with his horse-drawn braking plow. He’d pick up the rich black earth, run it through his fingers, and slowly let it fall to the ground. His team of horses would be standing idly by, switching away the flies with their tails. The blackbirds would be a few feet behind looking for worms in the freshly turned dirt. His love for the rich Arkansas loam was great. I think I must have inherited that from him. As far back as I can remember, I always had a kinship with the earth. I felt like one day the Lord just mixed a little water with it, and there we Messers were.

On the many different tenant farms where we lived, I could always look in any direction and see a patch of woods. I could see our neighbor’s houses and the farm animals at pasture, or working, depending on the season. Most of the houses were unpainted and of a natural color. Some were covered with green or reddish brown bricksiding. Occasionally one, such as my Granddaddy Poe owned, would be painted white. That indicated an owner of land and one well up in the world of Cotton Country.

We started the crop in the spring. The cottonseed would be put in the ground as soon as we thought the young plants would be out of danger of a late frost. Later, it would be chopped by hand, to clear it from grass and weeds. How many times this would be done, depended on the rainfall. When reaching a certain height, it would be plowed a final time, and then left to allow the cotton boll to develop. They would then mature, open, and the cotton would be ready to pick. In the cold winter, we tried to keep warm and in the hot summer, we tried to stay cool. So went the cycle of life all the years of my growing up.

I still have a great affection for cotton. If my clothes are made of a hundred percent, I feel very good about it. I’m not that fond of it, if it only contains forty. I’ve had some very interesting experiences sleeping on sheets that have not contained sufficient amounts. Probably, if you looked in your closet, and read on the collars of your shirts, you will see cotton is still alive and well, and very much a part of our present world. Other materials come and go, but that sweet smell of soft breathing cotton lives on. My sister, “Armentia” I intend for you to meet her soon, recently sent me a white sweatshirt with a picture of a green cotton boll on it. It was proudly marked, just beneath the boll, in big bold letters: COTTON COUNTRY. I like that shirt a lot, as the symbol shows, we Messers still have a very high regard for such a grand heritage and our eternal connection to cotton.

My Daddy told me one time that Cotton was King, and right down there by the Mississippi River, where you cross over from Memphis into Arkansas, there’s a sign that declares that very thing. I think it may still be there. I hope you’ll be here later when I help My Daddy take a big 1500 lb. load to the gin. I now want to take you with me over to another county to meet my Uncle Floyd. He remembers all the way back to the great Civil War that altered the way of life in the South forever.