I was a regular hand when I was 7. I picked cotton. I drove tractors. Children grew up not thinking that this is what they must do. We thought this was the thing to do to help your family.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
My father was raised in the mountains of New Mexico, and he picked cotton for a dollar a day. He was working for the family from the time he was 7.
I was coming home from kindergarten - well they told me it was kindergarten. I found out later I had been working in a factory for ten years. It's good for a kid to know how to make gloves.
There's a catharsis in cutting down trees. But there's absolutely none of that in picking cotton. It's maddening! It's fiddly, and it pricks your fingers, and it's something that's a very hard skill if you have no alacrity for it.
Oh, I started out young. They handed me a cotton sack when I was about 8 years old. Give me a little small one, tell me to fill it up. I never did like the farm but I was out there with my grandmother, didn't want to get away from around her too far.
Food became for me a way of becoming self-sufficient with my hands, to regain manual literacy, which I think has been lost on our generation and certainly younger generations. Very few people can actually make things with their hands and do things with their hands.
When I was still at school, I'd help Dad at the concrete yard he had prior to the garden centre. I was doing things there, like driving the tractors and forklifts, that most kids my age couldn't.
We are all fed from hundreds and thousands of hands. Often we do not know whose they are nor how they work. Only a few of us ever visualize the hands that grope in the coal mines or push levers in the mills or handle axes in the lumber camp.
When I was growing up, hand washing was a ritual, but now it's a necessity. A child dies every 15 seconds from preventable causes, which has got to stop.
In essence, I'm a sophisticated cotton picker.
I pulled cotton at 6 years old and worked on the peanut farm and paper route.