The Secret Life of Snowstorms

The Snowstorm

Chesapeake, Christmas Evening, 2010

“Silence in the terrible beauty of the snow and of the Sphinx and of the stars...”

(The Snowman by O. Henry)

The snow is falling, wrapping the landscape in a soft white cloak. In the morning we sleep late, snuggling deeper into our beds.  The highway is quiet, the alarm is silenced, and the bustling world of commerce, productivity, and motion is abruptly halted.  We have entered the altered dimension of snow time.

Life is restricted to our interior landscape; cooking in the kitchen, gazing out the windows, sitting by the fire and around the table, reading, and taking long naps under downy comforters.  Occasionally we take a walk through the neighborhood.  The snow takes us back to an older rhythm of life, when families lived in close proximity during the long winters and life had a slower, deeper pace.

“Housed and windowpaned from it, the greatest wonder to little children is the snow.”

(The Snowman by O. Henry)

When I was a child we made snow cream.  We scooped up enough clean snow to fill a big chilled bowl, and mixed it with a cup of whole milk or cream, a dash of vanilla, and sugar to taste, or just sweetened condensed milk and vanilla. Crushed frozen fruit or chocolate syrup could be added for the young snow gourmand.  Winter also brought the tradition of cutting intricate and elegant paper snowflakes out of folded paper that were taped to windows by loving mothers and teachers.  

The magic and joy of snow storms shine brightest when viewed from young eyes.  The Snowy Day, a wonderful Caldecott Classic by Ezra Jack Keats, shows how little Peter’s urban world in transformed by a big snowstorm.  Peter goes out to play and makes snow angels, a snowman, and then he pretends to be a mountain climber.  Peter tries to preserve some of the magical snow by carefully putting a snowball in his pocket.  The snow melts in the house during the night, but the next day brings fresh snow and happiness.  One of the most important picture books of the last century, The Snowy Day was a groundbreaking work when it debuted in 1964, and the book is credited with introducing multicultural images and characters to mainstream American children’s literature.  


Today, the Chesapeake Public Library catalog lists almost four hundred entries for children's books about snow, but snow has always been popular in stories for the young.  In 1812, the Brothers Grimm published a collection of seventy-four fairytales. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were studying and researching linguistics when they recorded and preserved many old folktales including Hansel and Gretel, Beauty and the Beast, Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Pigs, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Cinderella, the Frog Prince, and Snow White.

“Once upon a time in the middle of winter, when the snow flakes were falling like feathers from the sky, a queen sat at a window sewing, and the frame of the window was made of black ebony.  And whilst she was sitting and looking out the window at the snow, she pricked her finger with the needle, and three drops of blood fell upon the snow.  And the red looked pretty upon the white snow and she thought to herself, I wish that I had a child with skin as white as the snow, as red as the blood, and as black as the ebony wood of the window- frame.” 

Hans Christian Anderson brought us the story of the Snow Queen in 1848, often considered one of his finest stories.  The Queen of the snowflakes, or “snow bees” follows the snow fall around the world, but her palace is in the land of the permafrost.  Anderson also wrote The Snow Man in 1861. "It is so delightfully cold," said the Snow Man, "that it makes my whole body crackle. This is just the kind of wind to blow life into one."

In the Little House Books, Laura Ingalls Wilder describes family life during the 1800's on the northern prairies with long weeks sitting by the stove together sewing, doing lessons, and reading aloud while the snow piled up even with the second story window.  Her stories were my first glimpse into life in extreme Northern climates as she described a  Dakota winter where blizzard followed blizzard.

“But even after Laura was warm she lay there listening to the wind’s wild tune and thinking of each little house, in town, alone in the whirling snow with not even the light of the next house shining through. And the little town was alone in the wide prairie.  Town and prairie were lost in the wild storm which was neither earth nor sky, nothing but fierce winds and a white blankness.”  ( The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder)

Another wonderful family film and novel, LIttle Women, includes images of the snowy weather encapsulating the cozy family life of the March family. The author,  Louisa May Alcott, described one scene as, “....a little sketch of the four sisters, who sat knitting away in the twilight, while the December snow fell quietly without, and the fire crackled cheerfully within."  The March family were based on Louisa's own family, growing up without much money, but with a lot of love in the old Orchard House in snowy Massachusetts.

Snow represents a break from normality and routine, an alternate reality.  In the beloved children’s book The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, the door in the back of the wardrobe opens into a winter forest, blanketed in snow, alien and magical.  Even without the fantastical creatures, snow is suggestive of a fantasy world, and the pure, icy evil of the Snow Queen transfixes even the most worldly adult reader.

Without the distractions and stimulation of the modern world, family and winter life in the past centered around conversation, singing, storytelling, reading, and the endless emotional nuances of human relationships.  This rich interior life is captured cinematically in Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s beautiful movie, Fanny and Alexander, set in the early 1900's in a Swedish town.  The extravagantly detailed Victorian rooms, the sleighs filled with fur bundled families, and the intense emotions and colorful characters of family life are celebrated in the beautiful opening scenes of this film from the far North.  I thought of all these storied families over the holidays as my own family stayed home together, building roaring fires, playing Scrabble and making pots of tea while we marveled over the curtain of snow falling outside the windows.

I also thought of outside pleasures in the snow. Some of the loveliest walks of my life have been through snowy landscapes.   Particularly walking through forests of conifers where the boughs are swagged and  laden with snow.  Once wandering through a snowy pine forest I heard strange clattering sounds.  Following the noise I came to the edge of a small clearing where two large bucks, heads down, hooves stomping, battered their antlered heads against each other as fierce as any two warriors locked in mortal combat. I crouched watching through the trees for a long time.  The deer were oblivious to my presence, consumed with battle lust, hormones, and power.

Growing up we spent much of our time in or by the creek that ran through the woods near our home.  The moving water was endlessly fascinating in every season.  In winter the granite boulders were capped with white and ice, the waterfalls frozen into glassy sculptures, the water crusty with frozen ice begging to be broken.   

Although snow promises a chance for domestic bliss and leisurely strolls, it also offers extreme adventure, hardship, and survival stories.  If you decide that traveling the icy roads of Chesapeake are not sufficiently exciting, then reading about those intrepid souls who pit themselves against the most severe elements can be very entertaining.  There are many extraordinary books on polar explorers such as The Coldest March: Scott’s Fatal Antarctica Expedition by Susan Solomon or Admiral Richard Byrd's own account of his five months of dangerous and solitary survival in an observation camp in Antarctica entitled Alone: The Classic Polar Adventure.  

Photo: Frank Hurley

Another true story that has always fascinated me is the failed Ernest Shackleton Imperial Trans-Antartica Expedition between 1914 and 1917.  The ship, aptly named the Endurance, was crushed by ice packs, and the men were marooned for a year while Shackleton staged a heroic rescue by setting out in a lifeboat for help.  The tale is vividly brought to life by the astounding photographic record of Frank Hurley, who recorded the entire epic on fragile glass negatives. The photographs are haunting and awe inspiring, capturing the marooned men with their glittering eyes and frosted beards, the icebound ship reduced to a sculpture, and the  tiny figures juxtapositioned against the vast white wilderness.  Miraculously, they survived in the arctic landscape for a year and didn’t lose a single soul.  Somehow, united in the knife edge fight for survival, they fared better in the freezing wilderness than back in the civilized world, where alcohol and restless energy drove them to worst fates.

Photo: Frank Hurley

New Yorkers who found themselves stranded and angry in this snowstorm could gain perspective from one of the many historical accounts of the Great White Hurricane of March 1888.  Snowfalls of over four feet blanketed New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts.  The weather stations recorded eighty miles per hour gusts and sustained winds of over forty five miles per hour, which resulted in average drifts of thirty feet covering the roofs of many houses, with the highest drifts up to fifty.  Engineers tried to ram trains through the drifts and only succeeded in burying entire cars and trapping passengers  for days.  The temperature averaged nine degrees the day of the storm. The entire Northeast seaboard was totally immobilized from Norfolk to Boston and over two hundred ships were sunk or grounded.


Ironically, it was the city dwellers, newly dependent on modern transportation such as street cars and trains, grocery stores, coal and milk delivery who suffered the most.  Most farming families weathered the storms with their wood piles, root cellars, and stocked provisions the same way humans have weathered blizzards for centuries.

Hundreds died from blizzard related accidents and from exposure.  The monster storm changed America forever, resulting in the construction of the New York subway system, burying underground electrical and telephone lines in New York City,  the establishment of the National Weather Bureau, and even new laws regulating trash collection because of all of the  incidents that resulted from debris blowing around the streets like missiles during the blizzard.  SInce this storm there have been other storms just as huge, but the experience and knowledge gleaned from each new weather event has helped us prepare for the next.

Although we are better prepared in the modern world, a big snow fall still promises a time out, a time to think, a time to remember when life was different.  The phrase “going north” is still a metaphor for solitude, loneliness, and quiet.  For space. For room to breathe. Let it snow.

A Boy's Life: Hunting in Old Back Bay

My husband and I are plummeting down, down, down at a dizzying speed via Google Earth.  We are hurtling downward to the world, to North America, to Virginia, then to a small point of land on the coast, and a dock with a boathouse and a treelined inlet. 

 “Well, I’ll be.” My husband says quietly.  “There it is, there’s the boathouse.”

We are staring at a place on the laptop screen he hasn’t seen in almost forty years. A place now called “Wash Woods” inside the False Cape Virginia State Park.  In 1966, a commission recommended that the State purchase over 4,000 acres of land on a thin barrier strip between the Atlantic Ocean and Back Bay.  The land was condemned over strong protests  by the owners and a failed lawsuit, and just like that, a way of life abruptly ended.

Once, men were men, and men had guns, and men had dogs, and together, they all went hunting. For the past century some of the wildest and most abundant hunting land on the Eastern Seaboard has been found along the edge of Virginia straddling the North Carolina line in a life infused body of water known as Back Bay.  The grass savannas, creeks, and islands are all part of the Eastern Flyway; that great annual southern migration path followed by millions of geese, ducks and other birds in an ancient journey programmed deep into their feathered DNA.  

Etched deeply into the human genetic code is the drive to hunt, gather, and foray. When the autumn skies filled with thousands of birds and the air echoed with the wild calls of waterfowl, the hunting season began in earnest. During the off season, men oiled their guns and practiced shooting, carved decoys, practiced bird calls, told stories, and fantasized about bringing down birds with a single crack shot.  Young boys waited impatiently for their initiation into the the rites of manhood.

For at least a couple of centuries, duck hunting has been one of the most popular sports in the South.  A hundred years ago gentlemen arrived by train religiously each fall for the season  in Virginia, often from as far away as Boston.  The astonishing abundance of water fowl promised happy shooting for everyone. How could you miss when the air and the water were thick with birds? The gentleman hunted for sport and to escape from the tedious restrictions of civilization in their rustic lodges.  Then there were the so called "outlaw gunners", who hunted for survival and profit, and there was nothing sporting in their wholesale slaughter.  These men were killing machines, and singly destroyed thousands of birds that were quickly packed and sent by train to Baltimore or Washington, where they would fetch the highest prices. Finally, there were the local families, born to the outdoors and the watery landscape, and a sense of  sportsmanship and stewardship over the land and water.

These days the only thing my husband takes with him for outside excusions is his digital camera and his iPhone, but that’s not how he was raised.  Late autumns were spent learning about life and death in the waterways of the southern Virginia shoreline.  Growing up in Newport News his large extended family were members of the Newport News Ducking Club, one of several well known hunt clubs dating back to the 1920‘s.  These clubs owned thousands of acres of islands, shoreline and marsh of almost pristine wilderness in what is now known as the Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge and False Cape State Park.

The Newport News Ducking Club alone owned almost three hundred acres of the Great Marsh on Horse Island, Big Ball and Little Ball Islands. The property included two old houses on the inside shore of the mainland which served as a rustic clubhouse and a caretaker’s house.  The houses could only be reached by boat or by driving down the beach for roughly eight and a half miles starting at what is now the end of Sandbridge, just beyond the old Coast Guard Station.                   .

When the hunting season got under way a pronouncement would be made that the men in the family were going to Back Bay, and then a well organized ritual unfolded. Groceries such as steak, eggs, coffee, bread, and other provisions were packed. U. S. Royal Hip Waders, camouflage and wool hunting clothes were hauled out of closets, still stamped with the slightly musty smell of swamp and mildew that had permanently seeped into every fiber. Milk gallon containers were filled with water for drinking and cooking. The dogs were let out of the kennels in panting anticipation of their time to hang with the men, and fulfill a hunting imperative bred into their brains, muscles, and tissue.

The jeeps must have been redolent of stale clothes, dogs, men, and swathes of cigarette smoke.  Indeed, all of the manly arts were practiced in this male clubhouse environment, outside of the civilizing restraints of women and society. I can imagine my husband, a small, rather frail boy in the photos, anxiously bouncing along in the backseat in the night, straining to keep up with the older boys.  There was never a question of not going, it was simply taken for granted that every boy worth his salt was in for the hunt, an unbroken code of life spanning generations.

The packed jeeps set out with their journey timed to synchronize with low tide when the sand would be packed hard enough to drive on.  My husband remembers the miles of dark beach, the line of waves, and every eye searching for the almost invisible turn into the dunes just past the cypress stumps.  When the turn was located, which sometimes took a couple of passes, his father would roar in a deep voice, “Hang on to the dogs, Dougie!”

Then the jeeps started spinning, grinding, pitching and rolling into the deep sand of the dunes. The churning seemed endless, tires clawing and spinning deeper and deeper in search of traction, dogs and boys rolling and falling back and forth over the seats, until with a final clutching groan the jeep mounted the dunes and spun out on to the beach forests beyond.

Then they rolled into the clearing by the old brown shingled house, hunkered down on pilings, with the sloping slate porch roof shrouded by an enormous tree. The jeep doors would open at last, and out would spill the men, cursing with gusto, the dogs panting with excitement, the boys nervous and grinning, and the endless gear to be hauled inside.

For years my husband was too young to be allowed outside by himself at night. Packs of feral pigs roamed wild through the dune forests, and could appear suddenly and kill with stunning efficiency.  The pigs were the descendants of domestic pigs from the old and long abandoned settlement of Wash Woods. The ruins of a few houses and a church were reputed to have been started by shipwrecked victims. The shallow waters around False Cape, named because of it’s deceptive resemblance to Cape Henry, lured many ships to their demise and were known as one of the graveyards of the Atlantic.   The old houses and church were built of salvaged cypress wood from the shipwrecks.  

The only time Dougie was allowed outside after dark was to go to the dock or run down the path to the caretaker’s house next door, where the Waterfield family lived a rustic life in a house ripe with the smells of people and swamp life. There he would breathlessly pass along the bags of food and his father’s instructions to Mrs. Waterfield, to make forty bologna and cheese sandwiches for the early morning excursion.  Then running, panting back to the house, the strange smells of the island people still in his nostrils, the stars glittering overhead, and the anticipation of the predawn hunt. In the background were the sounds of the wind kicking up, and the water splashing against the dock portending bad weather for men, and good weather for ducks.

Later in the chill of the early hours, quilts were reluctantly thrown off and layers of long johns and wool donned.  The boys were sent out to haul the four horse powered engines out of the boat house, fill the gas tanks, and yank the cord until the cold engines reluctantly stuttered and started. The weed grass props were curved like sickles. The decoys would already be stacked in the boat like cord wood. By 4:00 AM men, dogs, boys, thermoses of hot coffee, guns, and decoys were underway in the overloaded metal john boats, poling through the grasses.

Andy, the family’s beloved labrador, assumed his position on the prow of the boat, toes and nails hanging over the edge, nose thrust forward sniffing the air, head swiveling.  His eyes scanned the dark water and gazed watchfully over the rafts of ducks on the water. He was vibrating with anticipation as the boat v’d towards the blinds. Several times Andy jumped overboard when they passed too close to a raft of ducks; the temptation was simply too strong for a dog to endure. When they arrived at the blind he would take off, and inevitably return with the first duck, before they had even unloaded the guns, sandwiches, thermoses and ammunition.  He was known as the “duckinist” dog. 

The decoys were homemade from cork in the backyard, or recycled and repainted from earlier years. New decoys were sometimes purchased from Wilcox Bait and Tackle, still on Jefferson Avenue, or from the mail order catalogs like Hurters Hudson Bay Outfitters. To this day my husband knows his ducks.  Along the water he will point out marsh ducks, which are different from open water ducks like Canvas Backs. Open water ducks stay in the deep water where they dive for food. The legs are set so far back on the body of diving ducks that they can’t walk on land, they just fall over.

Marsh ducks eat mud, nibbling and straining the bugs and other good stuff out of the mud and marsh weed.  To set out the decoys, you had to know what species of ducks weren’t sociable, since you couldn’t have their decoys sitting next to an antagonistic breed of duck decoy.  Everybody had a different opinion on how to set them out. “Put them in front in a pipe formation, no, over there.” “Leave a hole in the middle." "Hurry, get them set out!”

Hurry, because soon it would be sunrise over the marsh. You had to be in the duck blinds, decoys out, when the sun came up. The blinds were fashioned with sheets of plywood nailed haphazardly over a two by four frame. Earlier in the fall the boys would be sent out to bush them, cutting marsh grass in bundles and covering the blinds for camouflage. You had to hide your face against the reeds and peer out so the white of your face didn’t spook the birds.

“Here they come, get down, get down!” 

You would instantly hunch down, hide your face.

Harsh whisper, “Get down, get down.’’

“Where are they?”

“Don’t look, don’t look!”
 

It was very difficult to get close to these ducks since they were completely wild migratory waterfowl, and very wily.  They definitely weren’t hanging out at the museum pond. His father was always at the end of the blind.  Ducks fly into the wind to land, so his father would always be on the right end of the blind for the direction of the wind. This ensured that the ducks would be on his side so that he had the best shot. Dougie would be in the middle as the youngest and most inexperienced hunter. There was a strict sense of safety instilled, because danger existed all around.  It was second nature to the men who had been hunting since their childhoods. 

When the ducks would get close there would be a hiss. 

 “Take’m, take’m now!” 

Everyone would stand suddenly, three in a blind, and you had a split second to pick your duck, calculate the lead, and shoot. Then that concussive, deafening “BOOM” from the combined magnum shells, and the gas operated Belgium-made Browning shotguns.  Like a bomb going off by your head, it would part your hair. 

If you turned around and looked for Andy he would be lunging off the bank, head and eyes riveted on GETTING THE DUCKS!  He had one speed, wide open, and an unstoppable instinct, GET THE DUCKS! You could scream, plead, fire the guns, blow the whistle, he wouldn’t even turn.  GET THE DUCKS!  Once they tried to chain him to the edge of the blinds so he wouldn’t go early and he pulled the boards off the blinds. GET THE DUCKS! Another time they tied him to a pony stake in the ground and he pulled it out with a huge plug of marsh, dragging it all out to the decoys.  GET THE DUCKS!  He was a duck machine.

Then after the limit was bagged, toes frozen, fingers numb, it was time to slog your way through the sucking marsh, fifty feet or so over to where the boat was hidden in a separate boat blind. The ducks were packed in burlap bags to deter any hungry dogs who viewed them as caviar and catnip rolled in feathers.  Then it was time to pick their way in the boat through the marsh back to the clubhouse. The motor bogging down in the duckweed until you tilted it up, spraying duckweed everywhere, and then you were off again. Once back the men would go into the house, leaving the boys to bale the freezing water, and put the motors in the boathouse.  Then everyone would take a nap.

When I asked my husband what stands out in his memory forty years later, he pauses a moment before answering.

“I think it was being with Dad outside in that landscape. There was all sorts of stuff flying around, ducks, geese, swans, cormorants, and nutria in the water. And just the thrill of being grown up enough to go. Just to be around the boats and motors and shotguns, hear the stories of the men and be a part of the family.”

When I asked him if he would like to go down to Carolina and find a way to navigate back to the house site by water, he shakes his head. Perhaps sometimes just memories are best.

  

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.