Cotton on the Cane
This here is a hay cutter.
He would go around with that, he would basically cut the hay and then we had a baler that come
up behind it and baled it and those were like forty pounds.
I started working in the hay fields at eleven years old.
You lift the bale of hay up with your arm and your knee and you would have to throw
it up.
You’ve got two guys on top, stacking the hay and we would put it in barns or old slave
shacks that people moved out of.
That was all day long and you’ve got an eleven-year-old skinny kid, when I was eleven
years old, I must have weighed about 110 pounds.
Most of the football players at school, they had no idea how strong I was.
I didn’t play football, I was a band guy, so you can imagine what happened to the surprise.
I know that’s chopping cotton in the spring.
So what you do is that you have a hoe that’s about that wide and it’s gauged for a purpose
to be that wide.
Because what you are doing then is you chop all that down, you skip the same length of
the how and then you chop the others.
And you don’t even have to look, it becomes a rhythm, that’s the way it was done.
That’s called chopping cotton.
When I was doing it, we got $3.15 per day starting at nine years old.
Now if you are a sharecropper, you teach the kids to do it around seven because that hoe
is very sharp.
Because you have to make a clean cut, but if you were a day laborer you got the same
pay as a grown man, .35 cents an hour, $3.15 a day for five days a week.
So, you can imagine a man’s got three sons and his wife and they’re hiring out as day
laborers, they’re doing pretty good.
And of course, these kids didn’t get that money.
Parents got that money and of course you know at the end of the week, on Saturday evening,
and you’ve done all your chores and took care of all the animals, if you were a teenager
you would get on a wagon and head to Natchitoches and you go to the movies.
Because out of your $15.75 you would take five dollars and you would go to town, you
would buy you some shoes, you would buy you some pants, a shirt, because you would begin
to buy and stock for your school clothes you know.
So that was basically the life you know, be able to make the money and then the parents
would share the revenue and the rest of it would go toward taking care of the family.
This is the typical plantation store.
They would sell sausage called the Three Little Pigs, I’ll never forget it.
It was kind of like a big Vienna sausage and the company was out of Houma, Louisiana.
You couldn’t get Three Little Pigs sausage in a supermarket in Natchitoches because he
only sold a lot of his stuff to plantation stores because a lot of it had to be preserved.
When you opened that can of sausage, it’s preserved in grease, so you didn’t have
to refrigerate it.
And when it was empty, you can use the grease for frying or whatever you wanted to use it
for.
And also, they had steam driven cane syrup from south Louisiana, where they raised sugar
cane and they would make this raw syrup and we would buy that by the gallon, and you would
make flapjacks and you’d eat syrup and we had a lousy diet.
And that was you know because you were eating all this sugar and you would buy sugar by
the twenty-five pound sacks.
You took those sacks and made girls clothes along with flour, and a lot of the companies
realized that and they began to put flowers on them, put other little diagrams on them.
We didn’t buy much meal because we got our own corn and we created our own meal, but
if you wanted flour, you had to get by twenty-five pound minimum sacks.
This is obviously in the sixties, whereas a black man would be a clerk in a store.
There was no way in the fifties, a black man would have that job.
What I see missing here is the cannister of cookies.
We used to have big canisters like that, plastic, and these cookies were like two for one penny.
There’s a story behind that.
We were living in Melrose and my only brother, he’s five years older than me, my sister
gave him a dollar to go to the store to get a pack of cigarettes and one or two other
items, but he was supposed to bring back at least fifty cents worth of change and of course
she gave him a nickel to get him a few cookies.
So, he went to the store and he had all this money in his hand, you know like fifty-five
cents, so he told the guy, “give me the rest in cookies.”
He’s seven, nine years old, he had no idea how big that was going to be.
You ordered fifty cents worth of two for a penny cookies.
So, the guy is giving him bags and he give him two big bags of cookies.
He didn’t realize what was happening to him.
You know, he goes, “Oh, my God.
He didn’t stop, he just took all the cookies and he was biting a cookie and throwing it
over here and you could follow him to New Mexico eating cookies and when he got back
home, he hid cookies under the bed, he had cookies everywhere.
So my sister said, “Where’s my change?”
He says, “he didn’t give me any change.”
So my sister went back to the store and she asked the guy, “Why did you cheat my little
brother?”
And the guy said, “this kid left here with all the cookies I had.”
“Well he says that you didn’t give him any change.”
“Well no, there wasn’t no change coming because you asked for the rest in cookies,”
but he wouldn’t dare tell my sister that he spent all the money on cookies.
So her and that guy got into a big mess.
As she was coming back home she was seeing cookies and she said, “Where are all these
cookies coming from?”
Because she figured, he’s got a hundred cookies, he’s got to do something with them,
so she came back and she found where he hid all the cookies and she had to go back down
there and apologize to the guy.
(Laughs) That was amazing.
We talk about it now.
That was the worst trouble he ever got in.
Of all the trouble he’s been in, one hundred cookies and he couldn’t tell anybody, he
couldn’t share it, he just had to eat them, until she found him.
That looks like cotton behind him there.
Looks like he’s got his sack around and he’s got it rolled up and he’s got his
bucket there, he’s got water, or whatever he’s got with him there but he’s headed
to the field.
Once you go to the field, you go to the field.
Now he’s got boots on, that to me is not normal unless it’s muddy, but you don’t
wear boots to the field, it’s hot enough.
You know every plantation used to have their own gin.
And as I drive down Cane River I hate to see the gins that are still standing, most of
them are just ready to fall down.
And I’m saying, “why?”
Those are historic structures, the few that’s left.
Most of them has got torn down, you know, but the few that’s left we need to preserve
them.
Especially the ones down at Typo, down Bermuda, as you go down, you’ve got Lambre Gin, it’s
still standing but they’re letting them just go away.
But those are typical workers in a gin.
My father worked in one.
That’s a typical guy who’s operating the gin.
That could be my father or any other of the plantation black guys who moved from driving
the tractors to working in the gin.
But it all paid the same, five bucks a day driving a tractor, five bucks a day working
in the gin.
All the owners up and down Cane River plantations had a union.
They all paid the exactly the same.
They paid exactly the same for gathering pecans, picking cotton, chopping cotton, hauling hay,
pulling corn, they paid exactly the same.
So there was no benefit to you to leave one plantation and go to another.
That looks like Typo gin from looking outside and looking around it and my father worked
at Typo, which Typo gin was the Cloutier’s gin, Emanuel Cloutier, he owned the gin, the
Prudhomme’s had a gin, the Lambre’s had a gin, J.H. and Aubrey Williams had a gin,
Jack Pratt had a gin and as you go down Cane River, the Henry’s had a gin, the Herzog’s
had a gin, because they had so much cotton that they all had their own gins because what
happens, it costs money to process that cotton and if you didn’t have a gin, there went
a lot of your profits.
That looks like getting it out of the press and then basically putting the burlap around
it to be shipped.
That was all hand done.
Now you bring it out and you weigh it and then you mark it because what you’ve got
is pressed cotton, the seeds are out, it is 100% cotton and it’s clean and it’s pressed.
Now it’s going to be shipped to wherever you’re shipping it to, usually over to the
Carolina’s because that’s where they had all the textile operations going.
And that operation there, was a big operation.
That’s means that one guy can come up from wherever with a truck and pick up everybody’s
cotton because it’s all marked.
See it’s not like they get it all mixed up and once he gets to the market, the checks
are sent to whoever.
But you wanted to weigh it at your site before the he left.
It’s not that you didn’t trust anybody, but the fact of the matter is they needed
to know.
And these guys here are the guys who worked in the gin handling the cotton.
It was a big operation working in the gin.
Matter of fact, that’s what you would call an “inside good job” on the plantation
if you got to work in the gin, because you weren’t out in the cold and the rain, you
were in the gin, you worked in the gin, and you kept it going, you did maintenance on
the gin.
There were some skilled workers in the gin ‘cause all that stuff had to be maintained,
it’s not like it just ran itself.
And that is a typical operation there and you see that’s 100 % black and of course,
fifty cents an hour.
Everybody paid the same.