HEAT OF THE DAY

I wriggle my bare feet trying to find the shade under the cotton plants. I am ten years old picking cotton in a Texas field sweltering under the 100º heat. My fingers are still not callused or scarred and so they bleed as I pull the fluffy cotton from the pointed bolls.

An eight to ten foot long cotton picking sack is dragged behind by a strap slung over my shoulder. I pick cotton boll by boll, transfer a handful from my left hand into my right hand and stuff it into the bag. When the bag is full (or when the bag of the farmer in whose field we are picking is full) we carry the bags to the wagon. There they are weighed. The cotton is poured into the wagon. When the wagon is full, the cotton is taken to the gin. There the seeds and debris are separated from the lint and the cotton is baled for shipment to the spinning mills.

For me weighing time is relief time. For just a few minutes there’s respite from the back torturing that comes from stooping. There are a few minutes of dispensation for the knees on which one crawls down the rows of stalks plucking the low lying bolls. And best of all there are water jugs bringing relief to scorched throats.

Worst of all is the voice of the man weighing the product of my labor. He’ll say something like 40 pounds, a meager effort for my 2 hours of labor. Everybody knows my little brother can pick twice that amount in the same period of time. Still worse: my sister (girl - of all things!) beats my amount picked every time.

I’ll heed my father’s call, “In the field by sun up”. I’ll give it my best shot till sunset with an hour off for lunch. If the crop is good and if I don’t spend too much time day dreaming of becoming the next Mel Ott, or if I don’t get too caught up in picking and throwing unopened hard cotton bolls at fellow pickers, and if it’s a bit damp in the morning so that the lint weighs a little more, and if all those “ifs” come together just right I might pick a total of 180 pounds of cotton that day. At the rate of 25¢ per hundredweight I’ll earn 40 cents for my day’s labor.
Mr. Mertink the farmer philosopher for whom I worked was also a bit of a poet. He wrote into my autograph book the profound words:

“When you get old
And tired of your fate
Remember how hard the work
And the heat of 1938.”

I am now old and I think of others who know about work: hard, boring, physical work. I see children at the rug weaving looms of Egypt with the finger crippling repetition damaging them for life. I see coal miners in the USA and China descending into the depths of blackness and unclean air. I image again the women of India sitting in the sun with their bamboo handled hammers crushing granite into small pieces for use as aggregate in concrete construction. I see the coolies still pulling barges up stream, and half-naked Bangladesh men pulling steel laden carts down a humid street. Hard work, physical work that strains the muscles, numbs the mind and shortens life is still a constant in the lives of millions. So I remember Mr. Mertink’s little ditty and I feel grateful that for me cotton picking is a thing of the past and that my heart can still feel a touch of shared humanity with those who work so hard for long hours under terrible conditions just to eke out a marginal life with little promise of rest and reward.