288 HUMAN FACTORS IN COTTON CULTURE 



sene on sacks and dragged these sacks across the cotton every 

 week or two to keep the boll weevils away. I remember very 

 well having often found as many as twenty-four boll weevils 

 in one cotton blossom. We were in despair. What could we 

 do? Nothing we tried did any good. 



We made no crop to speak of. The creditor offered my 

 father the choice of share cropping or finding some money 

 somewhere. My father was closed out. The next year we lived 

 in poverty, selling everything we could to live on. The next 

 year my father moved to North Carolina and at the age of 

 fifty started life over again at a salary of $60 a month and 

 with six children. My mother cannot bear the idea of a farm 

 since we had so miserably failed, but father wants to try 

 again and is looking for a little farm where he can start the 

 game once more. I like to grow cotton, but I have little faith 

 in it as a money crop. 31 



THE LANDLORD 



The highest position in the tenure ladder is that of 

 landlord. The passing of the old planter and the rise of 

 the new small town merchant into absentee ownership 

 as a speculative venture is shown in the following case. 82 

 A. genuine love of the soil and a desire for the increased 

 social status of the landlord can be seen: 



Barnes Dickson died soon after the close of the Civil War, 

 and his modest cotton plantation in the Arkansas River bot- 

 toms, mortgaged and involved, went into the hands of a 

 factor. He left a son, Willey, age seven, who went to live 

 with his elder brother, Hubert. Hubert had taken to the up- 

 lands where land was cheap and was working a "hill farm." 

 Willey went behind the plow and stayed there until he left 



31 Abstracted from the letter of a student in a southern university, 

 May, 1928. 



32 Summarized from an interview. 



