Cotton.
Nothing but cotton.
Cotton. Endless acres of puffy bone-white cotton as far as the eye could see.
Visions of cotton mixed with Charley Floyd’s fantasies of Jesse James, Belle Starr, Ned Christie, Al Spencer, and other old outlaws who had found comfort in the Oklahoma backwoods. The images of eternal cotton fields did not yield sweet dreams for the boy. They were more like nightmares. These recurrent dreams of chopping and picking cotton kept Charley grounded in reality, a place he wanted to avoid at least while he slumbered.
Besides dominating Charley’s thoughts, cotton also acted economically as the primary cash crop for Walter Floyd and many other farmers of Oklahoma. Cotton’s seasonal cycles created a way of life for many of them. In spring, money was tight when the crop was planted. After the cotton harvest in the fall, the Floyd children got new shoes and overalls, and Mamie bought cloth, kerosene, and other necessities that the family could not grow or make themselves. The level of the yearly cotton crop was important to the Floyds.
A subtropical plant, cotton was grown both for its soft white fiber and also for the seeds contained in the pods, or bolls. Since earliest recorded history, cotton has provided mankind with one of the basic fibers for clothing. Cotton was grown in the Indus valley in India as early as 3000 B.C. Ancient Egyptians cultivated cotton, and the plant grew in the Sudan and other areas of North Africa. Medieval Arabs gave cotton the name qutn, meaning “a plant found in conquered lands.” That was appropriate. Marching armies from ancient Rome to antebellum Virginia had fought battles in fields covered with broken cotton plants.
Cotton reigned as king of the cash crops in Oklahoma for more than a century. The cotton culture arrived along with the Five Civilized Tribes when these Indians migrated from the southeastern United States. By the 1830s, Choctaw farmers in Indian Territory shipped five hundred bales of cotton to market each year. The Cherokees presented silver loving cups to their top growers as early as 1845, and a few years later, some large cotton farms appeared along the Red River. Because individual farmers and sharecroppers raised most of the cotton in the territories, there was never a true plantation system with a large slave population as there was in the southern states. Without this leisure class, cotton farming was never romanticized in Oklahoma.
To the west in Oklahoma Territory, cotton farming took off right after the big land run of 1889, when floods of white settlers streamed across the border. By the turn of the century, more than 240,000 acres of Oklahoma Territory were annually planted in cotton. Oklahoma cotton growers gained worldwide attention. At the Paris International Exposition of 1900, Alfred Smith, a black cotton farmer from Oklahoma County, took home both the first-and second-place honors for his superior cotton samples.
Every rural community had at least one, if not several, cotton gins. In the early 1900s, Oklahoma farmers were shipping bales not only to New England but to France, Germany, and Japan. In 1913, cotton went for 11.77 cents per pound, and by all appearances, the price seemed likely to climb even higher. Still, no matter how much money it earned, it required a great deal of hard labor to get the crop planted, grown, and harvested.
Knowing that cotton was familiar to the great prophets of the Bible gave a modicum of comfort to those who worked the fields. Black sharecroppers and poor white tenant farmers from the Carolinas to Texas, and throughout America’s Cotton Belt, found solace in the fact that the cotton they picked traced its origins to ancient varieties grown in the Nile valley, where Moses once walked.
When they labored in the cotton fields, the black workers, even in Oklahoma, leaned on spirituals and gospel music to help them get through the long day. In the early 1900s, Huddie (Leadbelly) Ledbetter, a black folk and blues singer and a furious twelve-string guitarist, who ended up serving two terms for murder, popularized an old plantation song that was originally sung by field hands trying to pass the time.
You got to jump down, turn around, pick a bale uh cotton
Got to jump down, turn around, pick a bale uh day
O Lawdy, pick a bale uh cotton,
O Lawdy, pick a bale uh day.
Music broke up the monotony of picking and helped the workers forget the constant pain in their fingers. It also made them remember that cotton was not just king but a tyrant.
Charley never forgot that. He cursed the fields of cotton all the time he was growing up. The annual crop was the largest source of the Floyd family’s income, but it was not any less of a burden to those who toiled in the fields. Year in and year out, there was cotton to tend and pick. Charley and the other Floyd children could have set their watches, if they had had them, by the cotton cycle.
Every spring, Walter and his mule plowed and harrowed the soil. Between April and May, or just after the last frost, the cotton seeds were sown eight to eighteen inches apart in rows separated by about four feet. Once the plants broke through the top of the earth, the Floyds thinned or “chopped out” with hoes, kept the weeds under control, and cultivated the soil. All the while the crop grew, the farmers worried about weather and fought boll weevils, stinkbugs, leaf worms, and root rot. Within several weeks, the first buds appeared on the young plants and they soon blossomed into flowers with creamy white or yellow petals. After the flowers opened, they turned various colors and shades and eventually withered and dropped off, leaving an egg-shaped cotton boll. Inside the segmented boll, white fibers grew from the newly formed seeds. Gradually, the boll expanded and then burst open. Fluffy white fibers swelled from the split segments like powder puffs ready to be picked. In late summer and early autumn, the real work commenced. The first of as many as three cotton pickings got under way.
Harvesting was unquestionably the most arduous of all the steps in the cotton-farming process. Picking seed cotton from the open bolls kept most of rural Oklahoma busy until early December. Big landowners hired local and migrant harvest hands for wages that were based on the price of cotton at that time. Sharecroppers and the smaller farm operators, such as the Floyds and their neighbors in Sequoyah County, could not afford to hire extra help. Large families were there to do the chores. Grandparents, pregnant women, and even small children turned out and were given harvest assignments. During “cotton time,” everyone helped with the picking. There was no alternative. Country schools were dismissed for six weeks in October and November and the children picked up gunnysacks and took to the harvest fields.
Often the workers got to the field so early they had to wait for daybreak to have enough light to pick. A typical day in the cotton patch lasted twelve hours. It was strenuous work, pulling the open bolls of cotton off the stalks and putting them inside the long cotton duck sacks that the adult pickers then dragged behind them. Most of the time, workers were so thirsty, it felt as if they had cotton stuffed in their mouths. Rest stops for a dipper of water or a moment to wring out a sweat-soaked bandanna were few and far between. The continuous act of picking the delicate fibers from the thorny pod was tedious. It also hurt like the dickens. By the day’s end, the cotton burrs had chewed through the work gloves of those lucky enough to have a pair and slit open their fingers and palms. Knees were raw and bloody, and shoulders and backs were racked with pain that came from bending or from hauling fifty-pound sacks up and down the rows. The first few mornings after harvest began, hardly anyone could move. After a week or so of stooping in the rows and grabbing the cotton tufts, muscles became toned and hands suitably callused, however.
Pickers competed with the other workers and even with themselves. They all tried to pull just a little more cotton every day. Some of the larger boys and young men liked to brag that they could pick more cotton than anyone else. A few wildly claimed they could “pick a bale uh day.” That kind of talk brought guffaws, since everyone knew that to pick a full bale a day required a half-dozen seasoned hands working as hard as an oil field whore on payday. But laughter, like the songs echoing across the fields and the pails of cool well water, brought relief during long hours spent in the cotton patch.
In the autumn evenings, Charley climbed on top of the loaded cotton wagon and stretched out long as a cat. The night air was crisp and smelled of clean cotton, dying leaves, and the earth itself. While the wagon rolled on home, Charley lay there under the cold stars and mused about things other than cotton picking. Sometimes a big slice of moon lighted the way.
This was the best time for a boy’s imagination to run wild. Visions of the James brothers on the scout, masked men burying their loot, and Billy the Kid making a break for it raced through his mind. After the family ate super and the evening chores were completed, the lanterns were turned low and the weary household settled down to rest. Charley, snug in bed with his brothers, closed his eyes with the wild West still on his mind. In a heartbeat, he was asleep.
By dawn, the gunfights were finished and the dust had settled. With dawn, all the bandits had disappeared. He was once more dreaming of cotton—bales of that damned old cotton everywhere.