AROUND THE YEAR WITH COTTON GROWERS routine of any group of workers forms the skeleton on which the living flesh of their social life is developed. To the diurnal, weekly, seasonal, and annual cycles, the community, civic, recreational, and even familial routine of the worker must conform. Thus a highly informing study of any human group would be found in charting its diurnal rounds. The typical daily record of a factory worker, an office girl, and a modern business executive would furnish significant data for so ciological analysis. An annual record of the routine of the agricultural worker, a wheat farmer, a cattle ranch man, a truck grower, would be pertinent in that it would show variations in economic and social life due to the sea sons. In his The Peasants: Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer, Reymont has depicted this cycle of the routines of Polish folk life with the graphic method of fiction. Such a study, it must be admitted, possesses descriptive value. It serves to enfold the abstract and generalized terms by which the economist describes the industrial processes with the warm reality of the cultural and social practices which accompany them.
It is suggested, accordingly, that a study of the men who tend cotton should also be a record of days and works as interrelated with cycles of the seasons. This chapter deals, then, with the routine, the movements, and processes of the human factors in cotton. The patterns for these processes are set by nature; they are cultural in the sense that they are determined by the demands of plants for cultivation; they are also cultural in the broader sense of social culture that has resulted from the adaptation of men to land and has been handed down as patterns to be followed.
If the man from Mars could obtain a bird's-eye view of the agricultural workers of the South as they move around the seasons with King Cotton he would observe a vast and ever changing panorama. In cotton fields over ten million men, women, and children each season are to draw most of their sustenance from the fleece of the cot ton boll. He would see in many parts of the Cotton Belt men who from year to year seemed constantly moving about in aimless circles ; in other parts he would look down upon men whose habitations were fixed. He would find black men and white men going around the season with cotton, Negro croppers in the deltas and the Black Belts of Mississippi and Alabama, working for white planters on great plantations ; white tenants interspersed with black in the East ; owners of small farms in red upland cotton areas. In Texas he would see a great new expanse of prairie cotton land coming more and more to be cultivated by white tenants. And as the cotton plant grows, flowers, and fruits he would note the human forces of many regions, men, women, and children, mo bilized in cycles of movement that synchronize with the seasons and the plant.
The cotton year begins with January. By Christmas the cotton has been sold, the landlord and tenant have settled, the fertilizer has been paid for, and the supply merchant has balanced his bill. If the season has been a failure, the tenant may be informed that he owes, say, fifty dollars on his next year's crop. If the tenant al ready stands restless under the weight of failure, he may be driven to attempt to cancel his debt by moving out of the reach of the landlord or merchant. He may carry the debt to a new landlord who agrees to charge it to the unmade crop. Sometimes landlords wishing to keep good workers who have failed through no fault of their own wipe out the balance of debt and begin the year anew. At other times book credits seem so to keep them selves that the cotton worker, unlearned at accounts, never quite gets out of debt and remains bound to the land and a hard taskmaster. Many a harassed, hard working Negro family must have gained its first release from debt in the migrations of 1916-21.
It is in December that the tenant in the Cotton Belt "takes a mind to move." The small owners stay with their places from season to season. But the last of De cember is for the cropper and tenant a time for deals. Over the neighborhood the tenant rides, holding con ferences with this and that landlord about a place. A favorite meeting place is the small town on Saturday. Landlords looking for good tenants and tenants looking for good landlords hold conversations in country stores, at crossroads, in backyards, and on front porches— wherever they happen to meet. The landlord's questions are likely to deal with the crop made under the renter's former landlord, his reasons for leaving, the number in the family able to work, the acreage to be planted in cotton. The tenant wants to know the kind of house on
the farm and the details of supplies to be furnished. The deal may be closed verbally or a lease may be signed. If the renter is satisfied that he can better himself by mov ing, he agrees to terms and announces to the family on his return home that next year "we are going to live on the old Brockton place over across the creek." The mobility of the restless, roving cotton grower has become a proverb. Dr. E. C. Branson says of these ten ants, "They move from pillar to post from year to year. They are a migratory type of farmer. They are cursed with the restless foot of the wandering Jew."' After the cotton harvest is over, one meets them in every nook and corner of the rural South, driving along the country roads with their scanty household goods piled in wagons, painfully exposed to the gaze of an indifferent world. In the United States it was estimated in 1922 that 19 per cent of all farms changed occupants. In eight cotton states from 30 to 40 per cent of the rented farms changed their tenants, the average for the whole South being 32 per cent. Less shifting occurs among the Negroes on plantations than for white tenants. The 1910 Census showed that Negro tenants had longer average periods of occupancy than white farmers, exceeding them from a third of a year to a year and a half for different tenure classes.' Why do cotton renters move? They are driven by a restless search for something better. It may be they de sire a better house, a flower plot, a better school. Less likely they have fallen out with a landlord, and with a strange mixture of pride and inferiority they seek to show their independence by moving. Sometimes they move secretly and with no warning in order to leave him in the lurch for some slight, real or fancied. Most of all they move because they believe that just over here they can make better crops, "get a holt of some money," "come out better'n we did last year." The Department esti mated in a study of reasons assigned for shifts by 3,360 tenants in Kentucky, Tennessee, and Texas that 20 per cent of the moves indicated progress up the tenure lad der for renters and croppers. Partial or complete crop failure accounted for 14 per cent of moves for croppers, and 9 per cent for share tenants. The desire to obtain a farm better adapted in size, soil, and improvements was assigned as reason for moving by 25 per cent of the shifting croppers and 31 per cent of the share tenants.' Elizabeth Madox Roberts has performed a service to art and truth in The Time of Man by her presentation of the tenant as forever moving in search of the unreal ized yet to be attained. Like many of his more fortunate brothers, the tenant lives on hope with his daily bread. It may be that moving is the one luxury that comes in the dull and monotonous round of the tenant life. "Mov ing day means a different thing to every member of the family, but on the mothers the most burdensome part of it falls. To them it means the labor of taking down and packing up in the wagons all the family possessions, . . . traveling to the new place of existence, cleaning, scrub bing, and placing the household goods."' To the children there is nothing quite so thrilling as moving day. Miss Roberts, writing from first-hand knowledge, describes convincingly the pleasure of the tenant child at explor ing each new house to which the family comes. If so, it is a cheap luxury, and who shall begrudge it to their hard lives? After renting the land the tenant has to see about get ting furnished for the year. If a share tenant, he has his own work stock and tools ; if a cropper, he has nothing. On a delta plantation his supplies would be furnished by the landlord. The landlord, however, may agree to stand for him at a supply store. Small owners unable to keep themselves during the growing season also apply to these stores. In such cases goods are furnished on open book credit at credit prices which may reach 25 per cent. Very often the grower may be limited to drawing a certain sum, say $10 or $15 a month. In emergencies he may secure an increase by 'special pleading with his landlord. Crises in the family, such as illness, play havoc with these makeshift budgets. The families tide it over as best they may. Either the doctor goes uncalled or realizes that he must wait until fall for his fee. Oftentimes he never gets it. The services rendered for sweet charity's sake by harassed country doctors in the South have not received adequate recognition.