Eulogy for a Texas Depression Era Farm Family
ISBN: 979-8-445173-21-2
by Preston Lewis
Finalist, Memoir, 2024 Independent Author Awards
The Cotton Culture
Cotton—like the families that produced it—is today undervalued for its contribution to Texas’s wealth and heritage, but for the region’s first century as a colony, a nation and then a state, the fluffy commodity carried the Lone Star economy bale by bale toward prosperity. In Cotton-Picking Folks, award-winning author of fiction and nonfiction Preston Lewis explores one family’s experiences on dryland tenant farms during the Great Depression and the waning years of the sharecropping and crop lien system.
As the grandson of a tenant farmer, Lewis in the 1970s collected the written and oral histories of his grandfather’s five daughters and two sons. Born into a poverty that demanded their child labor, all seven siblings picked cotton before they could read, and all faced a biscuit-and-gravy existence that typified the farm tenancy system in the cotton South in the first five decades of the twentieth century. The seven matured as tenant farming reached its Texas zenith in a labor-intensive industry that sucked children into the state’s cotton fields to feed the voracious global hunger for the versatile fiber.
Their coming-of-age recollections are enlightening and touching testaments to the enduring spirit and faith of the Greatest Generation, whose work in the cotton fields was little different than it had been the previous century. In the 78,000-word volume, Lewis provides a 16,000-word essay that puts the Depression-era cotton culture in perspective, then lets those who worked in the fields and farm homes tell their stories through their letters and recollections.
Cotton-Picking Folks is a heartfelt tribute to a farm generation poor in material goods but rich in spirit.
When
Press began farming the Forrester place in 1926, cotton was selling
at 12.47 cents a pound, rising to 20.19 cents the following year.
Average cotton prices would not surpass the 1927 level again until
1944, the year Press quit farming. Prices dropped from 1927 to 1931
when they bottomed out at 5.66 cents per pound, forcing Press to
take a job at the U.S. Gypsum plant in Sweetwater one year, leaving
it to his three oldest daughters to put in the
cotton.
“Marie, Myrt, and I made the crop,” Mildred said. “Dad had three teams and three one-row plows, planters, so we each had our own team. That was quite an experience, but we got the job done and even learned to set our own plows.” Mildred worked her team so much that year that it affected her driving. When she got permission to take the car and her sisters to Roscoe, both Marie and Myrt giggled every time she approached a stop sign and called “whoa.” As Marie explained, “She had plowed more than she had driven.”
Such humor eased the stress of Depression-era realities. According to Marie, “Mother and Daddy had a way of discussing the family finances at the table and [that] made us feel we had a part in it. We were always concerned when our prospects for a crop were not good. In fact, I can’t remember many times [of] we older girls asking for money, for we usually knew Daddy didn’t have it to spare.” Myrt recalled, “Our daddy worked hard, and so did the rest of the family, but when half of [the crop] belonged to the landowner, a living was all we had. I don’t ever remember going hungry, but many times our evening meal was hot biscuits, cream gravy, butter, and syrup.”
"The Great Depression really
taught all of us growing up during that period of time how to exist
with such a little portion of this world's goods and how to stretch
and stretch everything." — Mildred
Ruth Lewis McRorey
"Mother and Daddy had a way of discussing the family finances and the table and made us feel we had a part in it. We were always concerned when our prospects for a crop were not good. In fact, I can't remember many times we older girls asking for money for we usually knew Daddy didn't have it to spare." — Grace Marie Lewis Ammons
"After we moved to Blackwell, I met and married Bill McRorey on September 12, 1934. Our courtship was mostly in the cotton patch.... Our folks were all picking cotton the day we married." — Edna Myrtle Lewis McRorey
"We started picking cotton early in life as that was one thing we could do. And every pound any of us picked just helped out that much." — Ella Mae Lewis Whitworth
"My memories of childhood, I know, seem to always be happy ones. We certainly didn't have a lot, but there was a lot of love, and the boys and the girls, seemed to get along good." — Ray Franklin Lewis
"One thing I remember about the old houses we lived in when we were kids is I never remember having a living room. It was all bedrooms and kitchen." — John Bracken Lewis
"I was the last of eight children, so I am sure I got by with a lot of things the others didn't. I know they had to work harder than I did in the fields." — Juanita Myrle Lewis Roberts