Page 49 - Firehouse Pond

Around ages seven to eight, I cleaned out rabbit hutches and chicken houses

and worked in gardens picking peas, beans, or strawberries. Neighbors would
pay me what they could. Sometimes they'd let me eat some strawberries while
I picked.

I got the idea at about age ten to offer my labor to landowners who would
plow up and plant cotton on vacant lots. I would contract for a plot and it
would be exclusively mine to take care of from the start to finish after it was

planted. The patches were about fifty feet by seventy-five feet. I did this for
two owners. I'd do it after school when I wasn't working in the cotton fields
with Mom and Dad. On the weekend I worked in the big cotton fields with

Mom and Dad.

We worked with about forty to fifty black men; they recognized my dad as a

super worker and called him the "cotton machine." If ever you are unhappy
with your job-try picking cotton. We got three cents a pound. We were bent
over most of the time, dragging a sack (twelve to fifteen feet long for adults, a

little smaller for us kids), our hands would bleed from grabbing the burrs and
getting poked thousands of times. Mom told me that when I was a baby, she
would drag me along on top of her sack behind her. By age three I was
making little piles of cotton to help her get her bag full.

I also picked up corn in the fall of the year. The corn picking machines back
then weren't very good, so we could contract to pick up the corn left on the

ground.

We'd make piles, hundreds of piles. The farmer would then bring the tractor
and we'd throw all the piles on the wagon. We'd get so much per bushel.

Pecans were a high-priced commodity then. We couldn't go into fields, but
the farmers couldn't keep us out of the road ditch. We'd pick up pecans off the
ground in the road ditch. Just one time I crossed a fence, heard a shot, and

jumped out of there as fast as I could.

A woman named Fitzpatrick had a bait shop for fishermen. We learned that in

the dump, under wet newspapers, the nightcrawlers were much bigger and
thicker than her bait. So, we'd go "dump diving" and sell her our bigger
nightcrawlers.