THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 7, 1994 TAG: 9408050006
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: PERRY MORGAN
LENGTH: Medium: 62 lines
It being August in the old cotton South, there was respite from the hardest of farm labor. Plows were put away, and mules rolled lazily in the dust of their pens. The cotton had no more need of cultivation. In the last month of its making, before its bolls would burst in a fleecy frothing across endless fields, cotton shifted for itself.
If it did not rain too much on open blooms, if arsenic had checked the weevil and the worm, and if there was harmony in the heavens, there would be a harvest stretching through dry September and past the leaf falls of October. And at last, after ginning, there might be some cash in hand. But now, in early August, nothing was certain, the crop was still in progress - many bolls swelling, others still forming at the base of purple flowers - and so there was a turning to other things.
It being August, a farm pond might be drained and a fish fry planned; there could be no bigger news. Barefoot boys danced on the dam as lowering water set off a frenzied flopping upon the black bottom. Into this mud they would wade knee-deep to gather the bass and bream and lug them out to barrels and then, returning, extend arms into the gelatinous ooze to grabble for catfish which were hard to see and harder to hold and which looked, the boys imagined, like tiny whales. Hours later - cleaned, mealed and fried crisply in bubbling washpots - the fish would be heaped on plates and handed 'round under oaks along with glasses of lemonade - a tart sweetness rarely tasted and part of a feast never forgotten.
It being August, gardens and melon patches would be at their peak, bearing more than could be eaten or preserved. To junior farmers fell the task of toting and emptying into the hog pen croker sacks bulging with the overripe and the excess from rows of tomatoes, beans, cucumbers, corn, okra, watermelons, cantaloupes and peaches. My brother fancied that we would ``stuff the hogs,'' but we never succeeded. Lolling bellies deep in mud, they would rise squealing as we approached, devour what-ever was heaped before them and press their snouts against the fence, waiting for more than we could deliver under the hot and glaring skies.
On August nights, farm families sometimes set straight chairs into wagons and rattled off to revival services. The air in the little white churches was old and the light poor, and the songs were lifted from memory. Visiting preachers brought the word in thundering tones, mopped their brows with big handkerchiefs and took the long way 'round to the end of their sermons. These were punctuated by the squall of babies, fits of giggling among older children and, through the windows, the sound of mule tails swishing. Sometimes whippoorwills sang the wagons homeward, and always about were owls. When labor was light, their cries could ruin sleep, all too elusive in the damp and smothering heat. It was cooler to sprawl on a floor than toss on a bed, and cooler still to lie on a porch open to any blessed breeze.
It being August, both the summer and the cotton were maturing. We would go again down the hard rows, but beyond them lay the school, the county fair and trips to town. A season that seemed endless was turning slowly on its hinge. MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot and The
Ledger-Star. by CNB