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Cotton Mary |
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Looking for a summer read you can really dive into? Available at the SCAC Gallery. Price: About the book: "A young Cotton Mary defies her daddy's wishes, deserts his scraggly field of cotton that has fought to break through the stubborn, red, Alabama clay. She turns her back on the sparse field of plump white bolls that have victoriously survived and leaves them unpicked to seek work at a cotton mill in a nearby town. Though the Great Depression has not quite tightened its tortuous talons on the South, the boll weevil, the searing drought, and and poorland management have already ravaged most of the cotton crops in East Alabama leaving many farmers desperate. Mary is familiar with the hard times now descending again like a tornado on her sharecropper family. Scores of men and women, like Mary, are leaving farms, lured to dime-an-hour wages in a mill which devours bales of cotton and sucks the sweat and dreams from its laborers, releasing them from eight-hour shifts only to begin again the next day turning out the finished denim and mattress ticking. With no hint of remorse, town folk call them "lint-heads" behind their backs while accepting their wages in exchange for just enough supplies to get by for the next two weeks. By age twenty-one, Mary is living in a brown creosoted mill house with her husband and three children and holding down eight-hour shifts six days a week in the spooler room of the mill. Despite boiling diapers in the backyard wash pot and baking hot biscuits daily in a wood-fired stove; beyond conjuring up herbal remedies for sick kids, washing the family's clothes on a washboard and ironing her husband's shirts and khakies--she reports to work regularly and on time. A delicate ninety-pound image camouflages the guts of steel within this woman who draws upon every ounce of her coping skills to survive. Yet Mary is able to see beyond all this and doggedly refusing to pass her mill-hand legacy on to her progeny, she relentlessly urges them, 'You will leave this village, go on and get your education and make a better life for yourself.' " |
