“I started pickin' cotton when I was five years old,” said my grandpa, “Paw-Paw” as I call him, as he looked at me with a sly smile as if recalling days of working with his brothers and sisters in the cotton fields. We sat around the kitchen table and talked for hours about his childhood. My grandmother has an old picture of Paw-Paw and his family and had trouble recollecting the date it was taken. Grammy gingerly replied, “Oh, it was way back when.” Like many other families in the ‘30s, his family were sharecroppers and tended mostly to cotton. It seemed that many of my grandfather's memories stemmed from his life as a sharecropper and working with the machinery to harvest the crop.
In the South you were either rich or poor. The wealthy were landowners who stood at the top of the food chain, and the tenant farmers and sharecroppers were the plain “simple-folk” with little income. My grandfather, Billy Ray Voss, moved three different occasions in Arkansas from the time he was born until he was nine years old. Then his family moved to Oklahoma and later built a home in Missouri where they had one hundred acres of cotton to tend to.
“The landowner furnished the seed, and it was up then to our family to do all the chopping, the hoeing, and the plowing, tilling, and picking of the cotton” (Voss). Grandpa also says that “the landowner got a fourth of the crop.” Grandpa recalls a time living in Arkansas with his family working for his Uncle Maurice. They lived in a small house with no electricity. Kerosene lanterns lit the house. Living in the ‘30s may not seem so desirable to our “modern” generation, but this comment from my grandfather shows his true respect for the time and place that he came from: “We weren't as bad off as people looking back would think we were. I don't remember a time that we ever went to bed hungry. We didn't have the finest clothes, but I don't remember us going naked either.” People in this era may have grown up with few material things, but as you can see, it had no effect on their quality of life.
One piece of machinery was very important to the cotton industry, and that was the cotton gin. Eli Whitney invented it in 1793, and it then contributed to the vast increase in cotton production. According to Mary Bellis, this machine separated the cotton seed from the raw cotton fibers at a much faster rate than if it were done by hand. Grandpa can recall the times as a child when he was very fascinated with the loud roar and function of the gin. “There was one good thing about the cotton gin; it had a big ol’ tank of water, and we could swim in that -- what little bit I could swim at that time” (Voss).
After talking with my grandpa, I realize that our generation is spoiled. “People didn't have to have as much then as they think they have to have now” (Voss). Paw-Paw is a very wise ma,n and I am proud to be his granddaughter. I will treasure the stories that he has shared with me and share them with my children and grandchildren just like he did for me. His upbringing was so very different than my own, and I look with only pride at the history of where I come from.
Works Cited
Bellis, Mary. “The Cotton Gin and Eli Whitney.” About.com Inventors. The New York Times Company, 2011. Web. 13 Sep. 2011.
Voss, Billy. Personal interview. 9 Sep. 2011.
Note: Courtney Voss, who is from Carthage, NC, is pursuing an associate in science degree at Sandhills Community College.
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