JIM “PAPPY” MOORE: In Them Old Cotton Fields Back Home

On TV and online, I see many people who think cotton was picked in America exclusively by Black people. This is a major misunderstanding of life in America. My father and his three brothers’ history attests to this fact. They were born in the 1920s and 1930s. They came from a very poor family. The Great Depression hit West Texas earlier than it hit Wall Street in 1929.

Poor rural white families routinely picked cotton. Boys would start picking cotton at about age 6 and pick it every year at harvest time. The Moore boys – Garland, Clyde, Doc and Fred – always picked cotton, and that meant they did not attend school in September. They were picking cotton that month.

It was hard, grueling work. Hot sun overhead. Rows of cotton bolls ready to be picked. You might think “how can picking cotton be hard?”

Cotton bolls are not soft. They are very hard, and they have razor sharp edges. You can slice a finger on one them in a New York minute. I know because I have picked cotton. When I was a young boy my Dad wanted me to understand what he and his brothers did routinely, all day long, in hot weather, every September. I learned at age 6 in 1955. He got one of those long cloth sacks they used to pick cotton. You’d wear that hanging around your neck and drag it behind you as you walked the rows of cotton.

The notion was that you were trying to fill that long cloth sack with cotton, one piece at a time. I never got the sack full, and I cut my fingers many times. It was hard, hard work, and I never forget it was how my Dad and my uncles spent their September for about 12 years of their life.

Later in life I’d hear that song by the famous Black blues singer known as Lead Belly. I came to love that song, and still do. It reminds me of my Dad, my Uncles, and Lead Belly.

When I was a little baby
My mother would rock me in the cradle
In them old, old cotton fields back home

Oh when them cotton balls get rotten
You can’t pick you very much cotton
In them old cotton fields back home

It was down in Louisiana
Just a mile from Texarkana
In them old cotton fields back home

Tip of the hat to Lead Belly.