ONE BOY WHO GREW UP IN A COTTON PATCH.
BY MISS LAURA A. PARMELEE.
His name is Frank, his cotton patch is in Mississippi, near the Sunflower River, and he is teaching school in that neighborhood at this very time. Although he is quite grown, he is not so tall as his highest cotton stalk, and doesn’t look a bit as if he had a story. It is not an uncommon story, and might be true of a good many Williams, or Henrys, or Johns. That is why I am so particular to tell you his name and where he lives.
Most of his time was spent in the field, but he ate and slept in a rough log-cabin of one room. The chimney was built outside of the cabin, and was made of sticks and clay. The one window was a board shutter, swinging on leather hinges. Two beds, a table, a few dishes, two or three pots and kettles, three or four leather-bottomed chairs and a barrel of meal furnished the house.
Poor as the building was, a good mother’s love made it a dear home to her little children. Roses and honeysuckles bloomed around the door all summer, and in summer and winter the white sand was swept clean with brooms made of twigs tied together. Health and work gave appetites for the fried bacon and hoe-cake that furnished the daily meals. Baked sweet potatoes with pones and greens were sometimes added to their bill of fare.
There was no father to provide for the family, so the little ones must try the harder to care for themselves. When Frank was scarcely more than a baby, he followed his mother and sisters to the field and pulled trash; that is, pulled up old stalks and sticks for burning, to clear the fields ready for the plow, and, after the furrow was prepared, little fingers dropped the fuzzy gray seed into the soft earth.
By the time he was five years old, Frank had his own light hoe and “chopped cotton” almost all day. When the feeble plants had been cut up and the strong ones cleared of weeds, there was the corn to be hoed and the melon patch to be attended to. In August the fleecy white fibre had pushed itself out of the green bolls and the pickers must go to work. With a large bag tied around his neck and shoulders, Frank went up and down the cotton patch, his nimble fingers pulling the feathery cotton from its casings. Carefully as he gleaned each bush, no sooner had the field been once picked than other bolls unlocked their treasures, and again and again he must go over the same ground. Sometimes Christmas came before the crop was all gathered, and in January the fields must be cleared once more for plowing. Playtime never seemed to come to Sunflower River. To plow, pick cotton, roll logs and build rail fences—was that all of life? Frank wondered about it.
Two Sabbaths in the month the family went to the little brown meeting-house that nestled under the trees down by a spring of sweet water. No bell called the people, yet they came, on foot, on horseback, in wagons from miles around. Four or five hundred gathered in and around the church. Three or four preachers would occupy the rude pulpit, and often the services did not close until sunset. Some of the ministers could not read a word; some barely read the text and lined out the hymns. They said a great deal about
“The green hill far away
Without a city’s wall,
Where the dear Lord was crucified,
Who died to save us all.”
And as Frank thought of that wonderful scene and how