Cotton Fields
I was driving through the North Carolina backwoods yesterday, in a dense fog thicker than I’d ever seen, when I came upon a cotton field running up against the highway. I pulled over to investigate. I’m not sure why. I had been driving for nearly an hour and was anxious, already being late to my gig, but something about it felt necessary. There was a small dirt road just big enough for my car so I pulled onto it, made sure my Corolla wouldn’t sink into the soggy ground, grabbed my camera and walked out into the field. The cotton had been harvested already; the pure-white bolls that litter fields after had begun to dirty and sink into the mud. Leftover stalks, jagged after a fresh harvest, still stuck out of the soil but had weathered and blunted with time. Weeds had made good progress in sprouting and reclaiming them for the earth. My shoes made soft sounds as I went. The cold fog had stagnated with no wind to push it and no sunlight hot enough to burn it off. I looked back and realized I couldn’t see my car anymore though it couldn’t have been but 100 feet away. There was no road, no tree line, just endless rows upon rows of small wooden pikes jutting out of tilled earth, frosted with white gold. In that moment I closed my eyes and did the best I could to imagine the black souls that would have worked fields just like this one, stretching out into the fog; the sound of thousands of muffled footsteps over soft earth, of hundreds of burlap sacks on black skin, the rhythmic voices birthing centuries of American music punctuated by the shouts of an overseer, my ancestors, or the thunder of a horse’s footsteps or the crack of a whip. And what about the Southern summer heat? I walked on until the tree line appeared out of the fog, I don’t know how long.
So little has changed in The South. Even less has been freely taught and investigated in its schools, and adequately understood and contextualized in its communities. Its facade has changed, having been modernized and dragged to a hint of progressiveness by the greater United States, but the same hierarchical race and class structures still exist, evolving and nuancing themselves as their continued survival necessitates. There is no national museum dedicated to wholly preserving and presenting the history of slavery in the United States nor are the few-and-far-between privately preserved plantations well-enough publisized. Until the time that either or both of those facts are untrue and even beyond, we, my white brothers and sisters, must make it a point for ourselves, our children, our children’s children, for the potential of true social progress in our time, to pull over and walk out into cotton fields and reflect.