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Near Nida Oklahoma
October 10, 1959
In the pre-mechanical era of farming in Johnston County, each August, the farmers who cultivated cotton on the stretch of rich, blackland soil between Milburn and Nida Oklahoma along State Highway 78, would drive to our poverty-level community and recruit families to pick their cotton the following month. Most of us did not have telephones so the farmers would return the week before the actual harvest and let us know when to show up with our cotton sacks.
My mother would sew sacks from rough canvass for four pullers: ten-foot long sacks for my older brother, Jerry; sister, Martha, my sack -- and then her longer 12-footer. Hers was always longer than ours because each day she somehow could pull a least a hundred pounds more than we could – on the same number of rows. At a dollar for each hundred pounds of weighed cotton, she was always worth at least 125 percent of each of the rest of us.
We were paid weekly with paper checks from the farmer to each family after we weighed our last sacks on Saturday afternoon. Whatever money my family made would go toward our fall school clothes and maybe a few dollars for Christmas shopping. Maybe on a Saturday on the way back home, we would stop at a small grocery store at Emit and get 15-cent Pepsi Colas to mark the end of our week’s toil.
On the mornings of each outing to pick the prairie’s cotton, my mother fixed our lunches composed of a quart of pinto (red) beans and corn bread. She also wrapped a wide-mouthed gallon jug with Daily Oklahoman newspapers for insulation, packed it to the top with ice cubes from our little refrigerator and then filled it with the milky calcified water, hand-drawn from our well.
Mama then took us to the field in our family ‘s 1947 Buick. We would park along the field with other families and wait for the signal from the farmer to begin to pick. Some mornings the dew was very heavy and if we picked “wet cotton,” it would weigh heavy and the farmer would lose money. The patient families seemed to understand this, as did the farmer -- because they would all reflect on this at the next year’s recruitment: there was an understanding that things should be “fair.” When the farmer decided enough dew had dried, he signaled us to come and pick. Perhaps a dozen families, fifty or so souls, would proceed to the field and begin the days’ labor.
If you picked from one end of the field to the other and then back it was called a “round.” If you only picked to one end, it was a “through.” The families usually picked a round and weighed-in their sacks; then repeated the cycle all day -- with a break for lunch, the length of which was determined by each family’s circumstances, particularly those with babies.
Our family ate lunch and then napped, because Mama, who had experienced this ritual all her life, firmly believed in naps. After eating we each dropped back on our cotton sacks and into a 20-minute slumber. In the early part of the picking season, Moma would cue us to wake up; later, we became trained and almost simultaneously rose and prepared to return to our toil in the rows.
The only break in this ritual was imposed by the weather, perhaps a “cotton shower” that briefly wet the fields and ceased all harvest. Those were rare by Fall but the prospect was celebrated by my adolescent, older neighbor, Wayne Marshall, who would occasionally spot a lonely cloud in an otherwise blue sky and break into a preacher’s prayer for rain: “Oh Lord, just share us a few, merciful drops to end this day’s work and grace our labor!” His plea always failed but the chorus of “Amen” from the rest of the entertained pickers, who were of all races: white, black, red and mixed. What we shared in Wayne’s mirthful prayer was our mutual poverty and the knowledge of our annual struggle.
The harsh inequities of our work was amplified each Fall when the University of Oklahoma and the University of Texas football teams played each other in the Cotton Bowl in Dallas. On the two-lane highway at the end of our rows, we would observe the southward parade of Cadillacs and Lincolns driven by doctors, lawyers and entrepreneurs from Oklahoma City and Tulsa who took a short-cut through our prairie to enjoy their game.
On October 10, 1959, 10 a.m., it was already hot as I was picking out in front of the rest of our makeshift band of pickers by about 30 yards. As we finished our second round, a black Lincoln weaved to a stop on the highway at the end of my row. The driver leaned over and pressed the button to electrically descend his passenger-side window. In a drunken slur he asked: “Does this road take me to Dallas?”
I thought very quickly and told him that after he rounded the curve just ahead, he should keep going straight on SH22 and ignore the right turn -- that turn would take him out of his way. If he would proceed on SH 22, it would take him into Mesquite and he would know how to get to the Cotton Bowl from there.
He did not thank me or even acknowledge that I was there, as he pressed the button to roll up his window. He then spun his tires.
Every picker behind me heard what I said; they stood and watched the Lincoln as it approached the turn.
When the driver continued east as I had suggested – and straight into Arkansas-- a cheer erupted among our four-dozen pickers: No one in our little field was going to the OU/Texas football game at the Cotton Bowl that year – but neither was that asshole.
Bo McCarver
For Radio-Free Oklahoma
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