Tall Cotton

Old barns frame cotton crop in Suffolk, Virginia 

The summer of 2010 is the hot, hot, hottest summer of my life.  Around the state the corn is fried to a bacon brown in the fields.  The crops are useless even for livestock fodder. The Governor declares the crispy corn an official disaster. But there is a bright, white, soft spot in this oh, so, sultry summer story.

The calendar pages flip by, and now it is October, and the weather is balmy. I am taking a Sunday afternoon drive, and as I round the corner of a country road in Suffolk, I suddenly blink. The fields are a ridiculous, improbable white. Fluffy new fallen snow white. The cotton is busting out all over white. Exploding out of those pupae- like cases,  blowzy, full- blown,  bloated; like a voluptuous showgirl gone to seed, or at least to a steady diet of cheese grits.

I’m no farmer, but as I gaze around I think these farmers must be in tall cotton. 

A river of cotton in Suffolk

King Cotton.  High Cotton. When those cotton bolls got rotten you couldn't pick very much cotton, cotton. The Cotton Club. The Cotton Blossom.  Cotton- pickin.  She don’t cotton to me too well.  My mouth is dry as cotton. Cotton up to. It beats picking cotton. Cotton candy. We’re in tall cotton. The Cotton Belt. Cotton plantation. Cotton underwear. Girls in cotton dresses. Soft as cotton.  Cotton fields. The Cotton Song. Cotton-eyed. Cotton futures. Cotton ball. Wads of cotton. White as cotton. Cottony.  Cotton time. 

Cotton vernacular is threaded throughout Southern dialect, but it is a foreign crop to the eyes of a girl from the Virginia Piedmont, a rolling land of corn, soybeans, and hay.   King Cotton is the number one crop of the South, but it is actually only a Duke or a Squire  in Virginia because the plant requires a growing calendar of 200 frost free days, a condition only found in the southeast pocket of the Old Dominion.  Despite being only a marginal crop in Virginia, the cotton story is the story of the old South. These sticky seeds contain the embryo of the Antebellum era and it’s subsequent demise. 

Mature cotton plant

I park the car by an abandoned house and walk into the cotton fields.  I lean over and try to imagine the brutality of a life spent working from sun up to sun down, stooped  under an unblinking sun, bending low to the ground plucking multiple cotton bolls off of each twiggy plant. “Jump down, turn around, to pick a bale of cotton,  jump down, turn around, to pick a bale a day...” For a few moments I contemplate the real impact of the cotton story on Virginia, the South, and on so many, many souls.

In my life, cotton has been primarily about clothes and what my mother calls her "linens”.    During my Richmond childhood cotton was the dress code.  Every gentleman had his summer seersucker blue and white white striped suit, made of 100% pure, lightweight, breathable, cool cotton.  Men carried a cotton handkerchief and women carried small lace edged hankies. Girls and women wore white cotton gloves, fastened with a dainty, little pearl on the wrist.  If your slip was showing, someone could whisper “Cotton is low.”

Young girls in white cotton dresses, a Sunday afternoon 1890

White cotton and linen clothes came out after Memorial Day.  Every summer we visited my Great Aunt Charleton in sleepy little Victoria in Southside Virginia. The maids patiently packed up the winter chintz and hung the white cotton summer curtains, put on the white cotton slipcovers, and shook out the colored cotton rag rugs that covered the bare wood floors. The big porch swing and the rocking chairs were piled with flowery cotton pillows. Summertime, and the living was easy, and hot, and the cotton was cool.  And in those pre-air conditioned days we needed cool.

We sang old songs about cotton.  Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton, old times there are not forgotten, look away, look away, look away, Dixieland!” or “When I was a little bitty baby my mama would rock me in my cradle, in those old cotton fields back home.”  The cotton songs were written by the great blues musicians such as Lead Belly, born on a Louisiana plantation, and recorded by an unlikely assortment including Harry Belafonte, the Beach Boys, Elvis Presley, and Elton John. Embedded in those innocently sung lyrics are references to the dark and very disturbing history of cotton cultivation.  


American blues is a musical style that originated with African-Americans working in the cotton fields of the deep South, music born out of a cross-pollination of work songs, spirituals, chants, shouts, ballads, and rhythms.  Rhythm and blues are the foundation and inspiration for much of the great American music of the past one hundred years;  including rock and roll, jazz, and what we know today as simply, the blues.

Before cotton, tobacco was king.  But tobacco destroyed the soil, stripped the nutrients out of those coastal rich, loamy fields. Slavery was on the wane by the late 1700’s, the soil and the economy both exhausted from a hundred years of plundering tobacco farming.  Then the refinement and development of the Cotton Gin (engine) used to strip  the sticky seeds from the boll coincided with the wider Industrial Revolution, the invention of factory spindles and looms, and the establishment of textile mills in Europe. During the American Revolution colonists could no longer import bolts of cloth from England for clothes and it became imperative to cultivate cotton in America. In 1795, Whitney’s new cotton gin did the work of 100 men in a single day, raking the seeds out of the cotton puffs. Suddenly, cotton became a profitable crop for those hungry textile mills and the plantation became a viable business model.

Old Suffolk farmhouse.

Cotton Culture gave birth to a distinctive plantation lifestyle with its accompanying landscape, architecture, hospitality, code of honor, gambling, belles, and reckless young men;  a life of great wealth for a minority class of planters; an eked out survival existence to a large class of subsistence farmers; and the diaspora and suffering of an entire race of people whose labor made it possible.

On the eve of the Civil War in 1860 the South was at the peak of its wealth as the world’s largest cotton producer. The same year saw the biggest harvest of the century: 4,861,292 bales worth over $300,000,000.   Natchez, Mississippi was the richest city in the United States and magnificent homes were built or being constructed across the South.  Sixty percent of the United State’s total export  was cotton.  The South was reaping the financial legacy of almost seventy years of cotton farming using enslaved labor.  Planters in the cotton belt made enormous profits and plowed that cash back into purchasing more acreage and more slaves, in order to make even bigger profits the next year.  The nouveau rich were flourishing, and cotton hubris swelled to the size of a hoop skirt.

Hot headed Southern politicians coined the phrase “King Cotton” to illustrate their argument that cotton ruled the Southern economy, and was essential to the European mills. Implicit in their argument was the necessity of slavery to cultivate the crop, an unholy union sanctified by greed.  

During the war the South employed “cotton diplomacy” with planters voluntarily halting exports hoping to cause a “cotton famine” in the textile mills of England and France, and to compel England to throw its weight behind the Confederacy.  This was a deeply flawed plan because the English were leaders in the abolitionist movement, plus they had stockpiles from the bumper cotton crop of 1860. Ultimately, the Confederates deprived themselves of critical capital.  Later in the Civil War exports were halted because of the Northern blockades. 

 After the war, Cotton Culture resumed, only now the labor was supplied by the sharecropper, working for the remote hope of owning some of the wealth in what remained a cruel, feudal system.  After the war, the cotton textile mills moved to the Piedmont, stretching from central Virginia down through the Carolina’s.  The mills became the job of last refuge for the poor whites in a landscape and economy decimated by the war until the 1930's, when the unions forced the mills to close their doors. The cotton crop fell from grace under the rapacious and relentless Boll Weevil.  

Now cotton has made a comeback in Virginia. Viewed through my car window the cotton fields look both innocent and eerily familiar framing the weathered barns and old farmhouses.  The old Cotton Exchange building in Memphis has become the Cotton Museum.  Cotton has become an important crop in Africa, Asia and the Middle East.  Three quarters of the United States crop is bound for China, where it is used for the manufacture of clothing, most of it ending up back in the United States in Walmarts and other retailers.

On Sunday, October 16, 2010, the front page of the Wall Street Journal reported that “Cotton prices touched their highest level since Reconstruction on Friday, as a string of bad harvests and demand from China spark worries of a global shortfall....It is officially the highest price since the records began in 1870 with the creation of the New York Cotton Exchange.”

Definitely some high cotton.