Cotton-Picking Folks

Children of the Cotton Patch

Cotton-like the families that produced it-is today undervalued for its contribution to Texas's wealth and heritage, but for the region's first century as a colony, a nation and then a state, the fluffy commodity carried the Lone Star economy bale by bale toward prosperity. In Cotton-Picking Folks, award-winning author of fiction and nonfiction Preston Lewis explores one family's experiences on dryland tenant farms during the Great Depression and the waning years of the sharecropping and crop lien system.

As the grandson of a tenant farmer, Lewis in the 1970s collected the written and oral histories of his grandfather's five daughters and two sons. Born into a poverty that demanded their child labor, all seven siblings picked cotton before they could read, and all faced a biscuit-and-gravy existence that typified the farm tenancy system in the cotton South in the first five decades of the twentieth century. The seven children matured as tenant farming reached its Texas zenith in a labor-intensive industry that sucked children into the state's cotton fields to feed the voracious global hunger for the versatile fiber.

Their coming-of-age recollections are enlightening and touching testaments to the enduring spirit and faith of the Greatest Generation, whose work in the cotton fields was little different than it had been the previous century. In the 78,000-word volume with 18 photographs, Lewis provides a 16,000-word essay that puts the Depression-era cotton culture in perspective, then lets those who worked in the fields and farm homes tell their stories through their letters and recollections.

Cotton-Picking Folks: Eulogy for a Texas Depression Era Family is a heartfelt tribute to a farm generation poor in material goods but rich in spirit.