Chapter 27

Roadside placards and handbills lure desperate migrants to cotton fields. On arrival, cotton pickers must obtain sacks—often on credit—immediately placing them in debt. Payment is by the hundredweight, with a slightly higher rate on later passes through the fields. The work demands deft fingertips and relentless motion as families, including children, move in lines across the rows.

As sacks fill, cotton pickers haul them to the scales and confront a constant tension: accusations of stones in bags versus suspicions of crooked scales. To counter cheating, workers keep their own weight books, which can deter fraud but also invite reprisals if not maintained. The scene normalizes argument as a necessary defense in an imbalanced system.

Between loads, talk turns to the threat of cotton-picking machines and the strategy of renting and exhausting land. Cotton infiltrates everything—clothes, fences, noses—while trailers and trucks ferry the harvest to gins and compresses. Children tire by evening yet still feed their parents’ sacks to stretch family earnings.

As dusk falls, the influx of new workers intensifies competition, foreshortening the job’s duration and cutting into each family’s take. Some balance perceived cheating with their own small deceptions; others accept suspiciously smooth weigh-ins as further loss. Despite a day’s labor, the pay is slight, and warnings about a jobless winter underscore the precariousness.

Night brings the cotton camps and a modest meal—side meat and hoped-for biscuits—paid for from meager earnings. The chapter closes on a wish that the cotton would last, even as the crowding and the season’s end make clear it will not.