DATE: Tuesday, September 23, 1997           TAG: 9709230001

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B11  EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion 

SOURCE: Perry Morgan 

                                            LENGTH:   67 lines

COTTON MAKES A COMEBACK, IN FIELDS AND IN THE MIND IT'S GOOD TO HAVE COTTON RETURN WITHOUT NEED OF A PEASANT TO ATTEND IT, AND WITH PRICES UP AND COSTS DOWN.

In those old cotton fields back home where I collected a $3 profit on my father's last crop, I decided to think no more about cotton.

But September comes and the bolls crack and cotton fields rise in dreams. Appearing sometimes as keyboards where, in small defiance, pickers skipped over rows - parting and picking toward each, leaving dark rows between the white.

They wanted some communion other than the heat, the pain of bending and the pricking sensation of fingers constantly probing against spiny bolls. One definition of loneliness is an old man picking by himself in a five-acre field on a Saturday afternoon.

But cotton in dreams is mostly dry and fluffy and piled high on wagons rattling over clay roads toward gins and a bit of cash for the seeds. Excited children perched above looked down on the shiny, muscled haunches of mules that stepped along relaxed and laconic. They would get something from the store - a small change of diet and clothes if the weather had been kind and enough weevils had been killed.

Cotton has come back in Virginia. It grows across the Southside - 14,000 acres in Suffolk alone, and the statewide total has jumped from 200 acres in 1976 to more than 100,000 acres.

Cotton has been coming back since the memory of man runneth not to the contrary. You can make rags - or sacraments - from it and, with machines to plant, plow and pick it, money. Linda McNatt reports in The Virginian-Pilot that a $25 bounty has been put upon the heads of boll weevils - plus poisons, traps, inspectors and, occasionally, a plowing-under - a far cry from days of dabbing squares with poisoned syrup dripping from a stick.

(Variance on an old verse: Boll Weevil, Boll Weevil/Eat the Leaf, Chew the Boll/Pull up the Stalk/and Spit in the Hole.)

The half-century fight to curb the weevil and replace the mules changed radically the South's landscapes and folkways, but in and from the memory of the 9 million one-gallused men, and women wearing feed-sack dresses, cotton does not recede.

Most of William Faulkner's work and other literature - from Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (James Agee) to Rick Bragg's just-published All Over But the Shoutin' - was foreshadowed by a crop that once swept upward over the South from sea islands to upland valleys.

It was a plant that could tell a family's fortune at a glance with shriveled leaves or too many weevils - punctured bolls or, conversely, with a tossing luxuriance of green leaves topped by white, rose and purple flowers. (From the flowers and from the bolls, drying and cracking this time of year, there burst, in Agee's phrase, a white vomit of fibre.)

I would like to pick another row before I go. But not in today's tidy and timid fields. The stalks are short, huddled upon the rows, - pre-sized, I reckon, for the picker. Sometimes you have to squint to see the lint. I'd want to pick a row where stalks were bushy and in wet places stood so high a boy could get off his knees and pick for a minute standing up.

The old fields were grassy, had many drowsing crickets, and the dry, sweet odor of fodder; they rolled out white blankets to the terraced feet of scarlet sumac and yellow sassafras.

It's good to have cotton return without need of a peasant class to attend it, and with prices up and costs down. With the old fields, a human pageant of more misery than beauty passed on. But there was fierce meaning in those fields that lay so close to precipice. And, also, some music which sometimes swells in sleep - old songs, like cotton, running back into the mists of memory.

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