260 HUMAN FACTORS IN COTTON CULTURE 



John Smith is as handy a name as any for this man whose 

 house can be seen from Raleigh, whose story is set down here 

 just as he told it not three afternoons ago. His father may 

 be called Jim Smith. 



Jim Smith was a day laborer, working on a farm in the 

 eastern end of Wake County. He got eight dollars a month 

 50 years ago, and rations. By rations, his employer meant 

 five pounds of meat and a peck of meal weekly. He plowed 

 throughout the crop-growing months, and was paid his eight 

 dollars. The agreement held until September, and then Jim 

 Smith picked cotton. He got 35 cents per hundred, and his 

 weekly wage could be raised to as much as five or six dollars. 



The land was owned by Southerland Stewart. He had a 

 farm of 600 acres, 18 mules, and two horses that were used 

 for the family buggy through the week, and to hitch to the 

 carriage on Sunday. He raised cotton, ginned it at his own 

 gin, and in due season marketed it. About half the plantation 

 population was the wage-earning negro, and half the wage- 

 earning white men. 



Jim Smith had married a wife. She couldn't read or write, 

 but she could work. They both worked hard, she at a fixed 

 wage per day, usually 25 cents, and Jim got his eight dollars 

 per month. She hoed cotton all day, rising before dawn to 

 cook breakfast and often cooking the three meals at night 

 to do them the next day. The house was small, two or three 

 rooms, and its furniture exceedingly scant. 



Children were born, and for a few weeks the wife stayed 

 home from the fields. Cotton picking time saw her again in 

 the field, with the child left on a quilt in the shade of a bush 

 nearby. Its mother suckled it occasionally, and picked cotton. 

 The father picked cotton also at that season. In the spring 

 the mother returned to the field, working if possible near 

 her own house, and leaving the child at home. 



Saturday afternoons the mother did the week's washing 

 for the family and the father went off somewhere. Sometimes 

 to a town nearby, and perhaps brought home a sack of candy 



