HUMAN ELEMENTS IN COTTON 261 



to the wife and the children. If the mother had time after 

 she had done the week's washing, she hoed the family collard 

 patch. In the fall, the father went hunting, most likely, and 

 Sunday for dinner there was squirrel. 



Nine children were born to Jim Smith and his wife. They 

 were reared in the field where the mother was at work, and 

 by the time they were seven or eight years old, the smaller 

 ones were left to care for themselves, and the older went to 

 work. They were very handy at cotton picking time, and 

 often the family income was swelled to the point that enabled 

 them all to have a pair of shoes, or to go to the circus or 

 something. Maybe the woman got a dress and hat that she 

 could go to church in. They rarely went to church. Such 

 social life as they had they got from visiting around the 

 plantation on Sunday. 



The children were not healthy. Fat meat and corn bread, 

 with an occasional ration of biscuit are not conducive to 

 health, nor is work at the age of six years conducive to 

 strong growing. When John Smith was 23 years old, he 

 married. The other eight children had died. Presently his 

 father died, and his mother. John Smith was alone in the 

 world, with his young wife. Neither had ever been to school 

 a day in their lives. They had no vices, other than the use 

 of snuff. They knew how to work. 



They went to work. The first year as wage-earners, and 

 the second as croppers. A new system had taken hold, and 

 was rooting out the wageworker. The second year he bar- 

 gained with Southerland Stewart for a one-horse crop, agree- 

 ing to plant 20 acres of cotton, and five acres of corn. That 

 ratio was maintained all over the plantation. Smith was to 

 get one-third of the cotton, one-third of the corn, and Stew- 

 art all the cotton seed. 



Back of the big house where Stewart lived he had built 

 a place that was called the commissary. Here the landowner 

 sold to his tenants at prodigious prices, meal and meat and 

 flour and sugar and molasses, the simpler working garments, 



