1950s SMALL TOWN LIFE/COTTON GIN EXPLORERS PART 1

I screamed in Susan's direction though I couldn't have heard her if she answered. My bent arms stuck out from my shoulders like chicken wings, and my palms were glued to my ears.

"Why is it so loud?" I yelled as hard as I could, the effort straining my throat.

She stood facing me, her arms and hands in the same positions as mine.

"Be quiet," she mouthed at me with irritation.

"Well, you don't have to be mean about it," I muttered to myself, pouting internally.

When the gin came to life, it always seemed shocking and scary, yet exciting . The men, lounging in metal folding chairs, jumped to their feet and raced toward the machinery, moving this lever, checking the lint cleaners, adjusting the gin stands, eyeing the metal conveyors that ran beneath the stands. All the machinery starting at once sounded like a thousand sirens, and caused my heart to feel a comparable amount of alarm.

We knew we had to leave the gin immediately once it started. Our dad was a fanatic about safety, and he was proud of the fact that no one had ever had a serious injury while working for him. One of his friend's sons, a teenager, was killed in a gin accident a few years ago while working for his own father, and it had troubled my dad greatly. Both my brothers worked at the gin, but Daddy didn't allow any horseplay while the gin was running.

We started walking stiffly toward the large closed sliding door. Mr. Ward, busy running up and down the front of the ginstands making adjustments, rushed over smiling and pushed the heavy corrugated tin door open for us, shoving hard against the wooden crosspiece. We stepped carefully into the covered portico area. It looked like a porch, but a really tall one that could accommodate trailers.

A green trailer, its sides made of chickenwire and wood framing, stood under the covered area. Mr. Bennett was standing inside it, hip deep in cotton moving the huge suction around, vacuuming up cotton bolls and sending them up twenty feet or so to the top of the portico where they entered a large metal conduit that took the cotton into the gin. There the seed was separated from the cotton, the cotton was cleaned, pressed into a bale, wrapped in brown looseweave burlap, and bound tightly with three inch wide metal straps that squeezed the compressed cotton like an overeager grandmother, making indentions in the bale every eighteen inches or so.

Mr Bennett goodnaturedly motioned for us to crawl up in the trailer. We vigorously shook our heads no, our arms moving back and forth awkwardly, palms still pressed hard against our ears.

That suction looked larger than my head and nearly as large as my shoulders. I envisioned myself hopping up in the trailer, laughing and happy, then being forcefully vacuumed up into the suction. I didn't allow myself to envision anything beyond that.

A cap flew off Mr. Bennett's head once and got sucked away. Daddy said later they chased that cap through the whole gin and never could get hold of it without risking someone's fingers or arms. It came through at the end of the ginning process in shreds and ended up in a bale of cotton, what was left of it anyway.

We looked both ways once we were outside the cover of the portico. There were quite a few cottonwagons in the yard. Some were full of cotton; others sat empty waiting for owners to return for them. Red ones, blue ones, some without paint, all lined with chicken wire and one small one that was completely made of weathered wooden boards.

It was owned by Annie, a woman who farmed a small amount of land outside Purdon. She always brought in cotton each year. My daddy said he thought she planted it, hoed it, and picked it herself. He doubted she had any help. She was about the only black person who owned her cotton herself in that community. The majority worked for someone else.

"Gi haw," she said to her old mule as she moved her wagon across the scale at the office, just twenty yards in front of the gin. It was always on a first come/first served basis at the gin.

Mother was inside, and I could see Jan's forehead and the top of her blonde hair through the large windows. Mother had obviously let her sit up on one of the tall stools that lined the elevated pressboard desk running the length of the front wall. She liked to spin around, but that could be dangerous due to the height of the seats.

Mother waved to Annie when her wheels were on the scale properly and she pulled up on the mule's reins, causing him to stand still. After Mother weighed the cotton and trailer, she mouthed "thank you" and motioned Annie toward the short line at the gin suction area. She'd have to come around for a second weighing after the cotton was out of the trailer.

We stood still in the area between the gin and office and watched as Annie, her bonnet securely tied around her face, "gi hawed" the mule carefully around us and in line behind Mr. Curtis and his pickup truck with attached blue trailer already waiting their turn.

Glancing back toward the huge tin building with its red and white Murray Gin sign, I saw Daddy motioning the next trailer under the overhang, smiling, yelling goodnaturedly to them. There were only five noteworthy buildings in Purdon: the school, the Bittner and McCraw grocery stores, the big wooden revival tabernacle, and the Purdon gin.

The gin made a lot of noise, and so did some preachers that held revivals in the tabernacle.  Nobody complained though. A lot of people depended on the gin for their livelihood and the preachers for spiritual guidance.

The tabernacle was an arsonist's dream with its all-wood construction and wooden benches, but it was the gins that often burned. The remains of one gin that my grandfather had owned was in our back pasture, and I liked to climb up on the brick footers that stood about four feet high and jump between them to show off when the yellow school bus passed by. I was never sure anyone saw me. No one ever mentioned it to me, but I continued to do it on days I felt like showing off.


I had begged Mother once to let me go out and pick cotton. I'm not sure what made me ask, but I was sincere. She had already let my older siblings try it one time, and I don't think she wanted to waste her time or listen to the complaining. But I could see the people in the cotton fields at harvest time as we passed in the car.

They worked in cotton dresses and bonnets of pink and yellow and white, patterned cloth, with flowers or animals, rarely a solid color. I could sometimes see small people out there between the cotton stalks, maybe children of 8 or 9, near my age.

It was so hot in the fields, I knew I couldn't make it very long, but I wanted to see what it was like and whether I could endure it. I never got the chance to prove it, but I was still mesmerized by the sight of those people in the fields. The largest part of them were black, but not all of them. I didn't know any of the kids since they didn't attend our school. I wasn't really sure where they went to school, and I guess it never occurred to me to ask. It was a whole world about which I knew nothing.

Susan turned the metal doorknob and swung open the door. It nearly hit the wooden chair that rolled away toward the rolltop desk.

"Who left this chair out like this,?" she demanded like she was an employee.

Mother glanced back over her left shoulder. "I think Jan was playing there on the adding machine," she said nonchalantly.

"Can I look at the cotton samples?" I asked suddenly.

"Yes, but don't pull any cotton out of them. Mr. Saber will be here tomorrow to grade them. Don't mess them up," she reminded me.

I never was sure why cotton had to be graded, but I would give it all an "A" because I loved the way it looked and felt, so soft and white.

I opened the door to the tiny room that held the samples on floor to ceiliing shelves. Each sample was about the size of a large roll of paper towels and wrapped in a plain brown paper sleeve, the pure white cotton sticking out on each end like unruly clouds.

I liked to pick them up, feel their weight, and move them to different places on the shelf, talking to myself about which one was the best quality the entire time. Even though there was a lot of dirt, cotton fiber, and dust around the gin, the cotton sample shelves were kept spotless.

The room was so small, there was barely room to stand in front of the shelves. A calendar hanging on the wall always puzzled me. It was kind of funny, but I thought it should embarrass both my parents, but for different reasons.

A very attractive blonde woman appeared to be in a windy place. Her hair was swept up as was her dress, of course not revealing much except her very shapely legs. She was holding a bag of groceries and looking somewhat distraught. The most puzzling part of the picture was that her pink panties were puddled around her pink high heels, and clearly she could do nothing about it.

"We don't like this picture," Susan told Mother, speaking for both of us. "Why do you have it in here?"

Mother glanced in the sample room. "We usually keep that door closed," she said, offering no explanation. Then, "It's from a supplier."

There was a small refrigerator to the right of the shelves, and I always looked in it when I was in there, but it rarely held anything I wanted to eat. Some of the men left their lunches in there, but they had always eaten everything up by the time I got there after school.

Seeing the refrigerator always reminded me that I wanted a coke, so I asked, and Mother dug some change out of a metal box in the drawers of the desk and gave it to us. We carried the coins outside to the small front porch of the office where there was a red Coca Cola machine. A nickel and a penny inserted into the change slot produced an ice cold cola in a glass bottle, a taste that seemed made for afterschool.

"Hey," I suggested a little later, feeling confined in the small office. "Let's go out back behind the gin and look at the burrs."

Burrs were dumped out back and on clear fall days when the air was pure, they were set on fire, and the pungent smell of burrs infiltrated every home in Purdon within a mile. I guess everybody was used to it. It was just one of the normal smells of fall.

"What's that?" someone would say, puttinng their nose toward the sky.

"Oh, they're burning burrs at the gin, that's all."


"See if Jan wants to come," I told Susan. Of course she did.

Jan had a little wooden thing with some tacky writing on it that she had made at school She took it with her outside. We strolled across the lot. Annie was just pulling out from under the gin, and there weren't any more trailers behind her. Mercifully, the gin would shut down soon, that loud whine silenced until tomorrow when we'd be at school.

The burrs covered a third of an acre or so. We picked up sticks and rocks, threw them out, and watched them sink into the burrs. Burrs are very tough, a plant version of porcupines, hard on the skin, so we were not tempted to do anything but toss items for distance.

For some reason, Susan and I started throwing the piece of wood that Jan had brought out, back and forth between us. Jan didn't notice at first because she was still chunking things into the burr swamp. Eventually, she noticed our game of keepaway and asked for, then demanded, her silly piece of wood.

One of us, of course I don't remember who it was, took the wood piece and threw it into the burrs. Without thinking, Jan rushed into the burrs for it and sank immediately up to her knees in the nasty sludge. She started screaming, and we grabbed her hands and drug her from the muck, her legs covered in black slime.

We were grateful for the screaming of the gin at that moment as it covered Jan's screams. Susan and I exchanged uncertain looks and Susan yelled, "I'll get a pole and get your wood thing."

"I don't want it anymore," Jan cried out. "I want Mother!"

We helped her limp up to the office, certain that we'd have to confess.

"I didn't know the burrs had water in them!" Jan sobbed as she burst through the office door.

Mother looked momentarily startled, then started to laugh. "Time to go home," she said, closing the ledger and picking up her purse.

Jan leaned into her and Mother wrapped her arm around her shoulder. "Bring some paper towels from the sample room," Mother said over her shoulder as she headed for the car.

"Think she's gonna tell Mother?" I whispered.

"Well, I can't believe she didn't already." Susan whispered back. "I never dreamed she'd take off running into those burrs like that. No telling what's down there. Ugh!"

"Cotton is a vegetable," Mother was saying to Jan as we opened the car door and crawled quiet as snakes into the backseat. "It's actually the mallow family, easy to remember because it looks like marshmallows."

"But not the burrs," Jan whimpered. "I think they're part of the filthy family."

Mother laughed gently, handed her a wad of paper towels Susan had passed over from the backseat, and edged the car slowly out of the drive onto the narrow gravel road leading home. Susan and I stared out windows on opposite sides of the car, mentally marking our balance sheets. We now deserved more punishment than we had received. We'd have to be extra good this week.



Installed