Out on the Blacktop

Martina and I hit the blacktop for some R & R and the chance to see a little swathe of Texas neither of us had ever visited. On our way down Highway 67 between San Angelo and Brownwood we passed many fields of cotton. Some were blanketed white and awaiting harvest. Others were now rust brown with huge white modules covered in tarps awaiting pickup. In one field we saw a green John Deere cotton picker harvesting cotton six rows at a time. Along the highway we also passed a ginning facility near a railroad siding. It was as if we were enjoying a mobile presentation of the final production stages of cotton farming.

As we drove along, we passed through the little town of Bangs, where my great-grandmother was born and raised. My great-grandmother, Viola Pace Cate, joined her family to work those cotton fields when she was just a child. In her old age, when she lived in Haltom City by way of Lonesome Dove, she told me about the backbreaking work of picking cotton. She talked about how hard it was on your hands. She talked about getting up early in the morning and picking the cotton when the dew was still upon it so that the sacks weighed heavier. Driving past those fields I imagined my ancestors toiling the rows together, men, women, and children alike.

From my childhood I remember a copy of this painting, or perhaps a similar one, hanging on my great-grandmother's wall. Memory is fallible, of course, but whatever did hang in her house conveyed a similar message.