THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 15, 1995 TAG: 9510140002
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J5 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: PERRY MORGAN
LENGTH: Medium: 64 lines
It being October, I remember from another time and place the hard times of a cotton farmer named Horace Haynes. The time was 1937 and the place a Georgia town where Mr. Horace lived and farmed fields that encircled it.
If he took 10 steps from his back door, he was standing waist-high among cotton plants laden with bronze bolls which in the scorch of August had exploded like popcorn and made the fields so white that they gleamed at night. Everyone could see that Mr. Horace and his mule Euliss and other forces of nature had produced a prize crop, maybe a bale per acre, which, in the time of the weevil, could get your picture (and the mule's) into the county weekly.
But who would pick the cotton? Mr. Horace's sons had gone away from farming, and the price of cotton was so depressed that it would not produce enough cash to hire hands for the harvest. Worse, Mr. Horace's own hands were unsteady; a tremor made them all wrong for picking. That task needed supple and precise movement of fingers to pluck lint from the boll and push it into the cups of the hands which held and compressed and transferred it to the sack.
No matter. Mr. Horace went to it. From dawn to dark in withering heat he picked one-handed, his other arm cradling and steadying the stalks against his chest. Considering that he was a mere wader in an ocean of white, it was a pitiful sight. But he was genial and talkative when townfolk visited and picked along with him until (it wasn't long) the heat made them swimmy-headed or the stinging worms nailed them or sweat messed up their eyes. Mr. Horace dwelled on the bounty of the crop and reckoned somehow he'd get it gathered and hauled to the nearby gin which worked the same hours as he did but with untiring sinews and with an inexhaustible and thundering heart. Within his sight, the gin attracted scores of heaped-up wagons, each holding the makings of a bale and seed swappable for a little quick cash.
October came - harvest-time half passed - and Mr. Horace was nowhere near ready to pack a wagon for the gin. He seemed to have become a statue in the field - a bent figure in faded overalls all but fixed in space and forgotten.
But that is not how it turned out when October came and cooled the air and colored the woods. Mr. Horace is no longer bent. You can see him standing in the middle of a blackened field; his hand is moving a weight along the beam of a steelyard lifting a brimming basket of cotton: He is weighing up the last of the crop.
Around him, sitting or standing amid mounds of cotton piled on burlap spreads, are a dozen women and small children who were ``moved,'' as Miss Lila Bridges put it, to help out. Miss Lila is frail and gentle; she is wearing some of her husband's old clothes and a dab of perfume which finds its way over the rows.
The fledgling pickers have been singing hymns about rugged crosses, higher ground, precious memories and being up yonder when the roll is called. But now the children are hearing Mr. Horace call out their weights, and working out in their heads the equivalents in stick candy and all-day suckers. But about the end of the labor, there's no elation: Some sort of communion they'd entered without knowing it is slipping away. As they fold their picking sacks and wave to Mr. Horace, they feel a little chill.
Miss Lila never forgot. For 40 years she sent Christmas cards remembering ``that October when we were all together and picked cotton for Mr. Horace Haynes.'' The thought still warms. MEMO: Mr. Morgan is a former publisher of The Virginian-Pilot. by CNB