King Cotton

No crop or product defines our Southland as completely as does cotton.  It was the crop which built and sustained our cities and towns, which fed and literally clothed us, and which permeated our culture so completely that its influence remains even today.

It was and is a product that lasted indefinitely, one which Southerners hooked their fortunes to for generation upon generation.  Unfortunately, such dependence on cotton was a two-edged sword, bringing as much misery and economic ruin as it did culture and prosperity. 

Slavery, that vile, indefensible institution, would not have become as entrenched as it did without cotton; share-cropping would not have trapped several generations in its vicious cycle of poverty and ever-increasing debt; folks would not have sacrificed both lung and limb in the dangerous and oppressive cotton mills of the small-town South; the boll weevil wouldn’t have come calling in 1920, 1921, and every year thereafter; and our farmlands would not have been stripped of nutrients so quickly had crop rotation been better understood, for cotton will ruin good soil in just a season or two – none of this would have happened had we not become so dependent on cotton.

In many ways, cotton delivered some of us, as a people, from abject poverty, but for many others it chained folks down, tied them up, and caught them in an oppressive hand-to-mouth existence.    

But there’s no denying it influenced our culture greatly.  Numerous references to King Cotton still enliven the Southern way of speaking.

“Aren’t you in high cotton?” a good Southern friend recently commented on one of your compiler’s Facebook posts.  (Being “in high cotton” means things are going exceptionally well, and we all say it from time to time.  Often, but not always, there’s at least a touch of snark to the usage.)

Conversely, if a family group of years gone by got to talking and day-dreaming about things, the comment most often employed to bring everyone back to ground level was something on the order of, “Somebody had better get to picking cotton!”   (That basically means, “Quit lollygagging and get on the stick!”)

“Get your cotton-picking hand off my shoulder!” is what we might bark to someone who’s invading our personal space or engaging in unwanted physical contact.   (Your compiler has never heard the adjective “cotton-picking” applied to any noun other than hand or hands.  It’s always used with at least a modicum of displeasure or warning, in your compiler’s experience, such as when his mother used to say, “Get your cotton-picking hands out of that cake batter!” or  “Don’t even think of putting your cotton-picking hands on that antique vase!”)

But your compiler’s favorite usage is the one the father of his dearest college friend employed sixty-five years ago in proposing to the woman he loved.   The proposer, Jack, lived on a farm in east central Georgia; his intended, Jeannette, in Westchester County, New York.  Jack’s proposal in May 1962 was in the form of a telegram, which said simply, “Cotton pickers needed in Georgia – come immediately.”  They were married two months later, and enjoyed almost fifty years together before Mr. Jack’s death in late 2011.   Your compiler understands the telegram was buried with Miss Jeannette in January 2025.

“Oh, Lawdy, pick a bale of cotton!”