Picking Cotton

Picking cotton
You could pack 70 or 80 pound in one of those 9-foot sacks but mine usually had less than that. They also made 12 footers but with my limited skills I had no use for one that big. I saw one in my cousins antique store recently and it had a metal ring sewn into the bottom corner. Most of us poor folks just put a large green cotton bole in the corner and wrapped a few strands of bailing wire around the outside of the sack to form a ring of sorts. When you weighed the cotton you placed the ring over the hook on the scales and doubled the sack up and wrapped the shoulder strap around the hook. We also found polk salad that had mature red berries and used the them to write our name on the sack.

We were usually in the fields just after sun up so we could get some work done before the hot part of the day. If we were picking a large field they would park the wagon in the middle of the field and we would go to the other end of the row and pick back to the wagon. In the early morning the dew was still on the cotton and we would put the sack in front of us so we could keep as dry as possible. The cotton in those days was very different than what you see today. Today's cotton has been genetically altered to produce very small stalks. The old cotton would sometimes be shoulder high and sometime in the good bottom land over your head. Thus the expression ------- in tall cotton. Speaking of that one of the first things you learned was never pick up a pile of cotton lying in the middle of the row.

When you wore the bottom of your sack out you just cut the strap part off and turned it over and patched the hole. I don't remember what a 9 foot sack cost but we were paid about 3 dollars for picking a hundred lb. of cotton and believe me you knew the value of a dollar. Picking cotton was a very serious thing for most families. A large part of the families cash money for the year was produced in just a few weeks.