Cotton – the fiber of lives past and present
Driving north through South Georgia in early November, I am struck by the expanse of cotton fields on either side of the highway. I speed past churches, their steeples pointing directly to heaven, like spiritual antennas connecting to God. They stand alongside the Florida-Georgia Parkway, like sentries guarding the entrance to the palace. This is no palace. Though it used to be home to a king- king cotton, if you please.
The sight of cotton stirs my emotions. I am traveling to Atlanta to celebrate the past. A boyhood friend turned 50 and I was invited to celebrate with him, with family, with long separated friends.
Venturing north means traveling through the South- Tallahassee to Atlanta - one capitol to the next: Florida to Georgia. The link is strong, fibrous- cotton. It stands in the fields stretching for acres as far as the eye could see. Fields of green speckled with white, like snow drops on the leaves. This cotton used to be indeed king. But even though it is no longer king, it still holds much sway.
Georgia is the third largest cotton producing state in the union it once tried to destroy. The state has 1.03 million acres under cotton crops – second most in the U.S.
It’s ironical that South Georgia cotton would move me, an island boy with sea island cotton in the recesses of my genes. There is a long romance between Georgia and sea island cotton. Georgians were importing sea island cotton from the West Indian islands as early as 1785, less than a decade after Independence, according to The New Georgia Encyclopedia. Chances are some of that cotton came from Montserrat. Cotton was being exported from the island in 1782, the year the French captured the British colony, Sir Howard Fergus writes in Montserrat: History of a Caribbean Colony.
In the 1780s, white folks even tried planting sea island cotton in Georgia, but the conditions were only favorable on the coast because of the long growing season. Cotton, white as snow, is forever stained with blood. The westward migration of English settlers to the Georgia interior, the invention of the cotton gin and the growth of cotton production coincided with the aggressive removal of Indian tribes and occupation and possession of the fertile Georgia soil for cotton cultivation. The path from cotton cultivation to the slave plantation is short and direct.
Cotton demands many hands. The demand for cheap labor prompted Georgia land owners to look to the slave trade and Africa for labor. They bought record numbers of slaves. As their ventures prospered, it fed the demand for more slaves, who planted and picked cotton. According to The New Georgia Encyclopedia, cotton production increased 2,000 percent in the 10 years from 1791 to 1801. Fast forward the Civil War, Emancipation, end of chattel slavery, Reconstruction, sharecropping and the age of Jim Crow. South Georgia cotton in now the domain of big agribusiness. Cotton no longer picked by hand. Large machines sweep through the field snatching the fiber from the plants. As you drive by, huge bales of cotton, stacked like large boxes of paper tissues sit astride the road. A year earlier, before the general election, the bales were painted with graffiti: Saxby, the writing shouted; a salute to Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss, who was in a tight run off race. Chambliss is a South Georgia boy. He’s from Moultrie, in the heart of Colquitt County, about 65 miles from the Florida state line. Chambliss and cotton seemed an apt partnership: the ole boy from the old South.
Sea island cotton was loved for its strong, long fiber and the ease with which the fiber separated from the seed. No one ever told me that. But instinctively I should have known after all the summer days I sat on my front porch on a pile of cotton separating the fiber from the seeds by hand. My grandmother assigned me to the task. This wasn’t just make work. My efforts bore economic reward. The seedless, clean cotton sold for more at the cotton gin than the seeded cotton. By separating the seed from the cotton I was adding to the wealth of my grandparents’ household. I never thought about those benefits. I fretted about the time lost away from my friends. But I should have fretted instead about the injustice and the inequity about the whole exercise. Not my loss, but my grandmother’s loss. Although she didn’t know it - she hadn’t read the history books; they weren’t written yet. The landowners cheated the peasants; they fudged the scales; they deducted 10 pounds for shrinkage. They demanded clean cotton. After the death of sugar, cotton was king on Montserrat from 1910 to 1960 - a year before my birth. It paid the bills; it sent children to secondary school. It paid the passage for young men and young women to buy tickets to board those passenger ships to flee to England to seek better lives beyond the hot sun and dusty cotton fields. They sailed away to lives where they would wear cotton but never again have to plant it, to pick it, to separate the cotton from the seeds, to feel it cling to their shirts and plants and hair. Like them I left the cotton fields, but on a Saturday morning driving through South Georgia, I realized that no matter how far I run, the fiber of that cotton will always weave a tapestry of fond memory, an unbreakable bond between the man that I am and the boy I used be.
Nov. 20, 2009
