100% Cotton
by Dorothy Barnett
I.
We were travellers those years
riding the winding blacktop,
always reaching westward towards
the next river and back again
Row after row of heavy brown
plants, curled
and straight, clicked-
by,
outside the car window
For miles the cotton fields released
white into drifts gathering
in eddies
along the railroad tracks
New
England snow-white
littered the Panhandle
roadside
in dead of summer hell
At the roadside turnaround
we stopped for our lunch
of yellow-orange cheese
and big wheel bologna
sandwiches
In the distance I could see
the u-shaped stooped backs
of the pickers as they
worked
their way down the long
rows stretching out
a lifetime
My mother’s hand took me
into the fields to touch
the white
bolls of her history,
we waded past
knife sharp brown leaves
waist
high, we waded deep into
the field,
our car a faded blue speck
under the trees in the
distance
My mother’s hand took mine there
in the field, she covered
the boll
with our hands, her hand, my hand
the soft white hidden
by brown broken
sharp as glass blades
II.
My mother’s people came
from Oklahoma
dirt to Texas
during the Depression
Her mother walked barefoot on the reservation,
twisted her long black
hair into a braided
crown, dipped brown acrid
snuff
and married a Dutchman
wandering through
They worked the hard land for
fourteen years and thirteen
babies
before the dust nearly
buried them
then they let the dry
wind blow
them south to Houston
Where tent city slums waited and poverty
wore the color gray, where
muddy
water gathered around
the base
of communal copper spigots,
where
mosquitoes and dusty shell
roads
stretched out a lifetime
My mother’s father pulled her out
of school in the third
grade, put her
in fields to pick cotton,
to help out,
she was eight, years later he would crawl
into her bed at night,
sink into her and
her cotton mattress, touch
her while her mother cried
The fields of cotton-white clouds sweeping
the earth-became her haven,
her quick hands found
the sticky
bolls fast and sure, she
pulled her weight
fifty pounds, then a hundred, the long
full bag following behind
in the narrow row,
stretching out her lifetime
The plants towered above her, hiding her,
her shape hiding, hiding
her from his shape,
at thirteen she ran away,
married a drunk
wandering through,
he kept her in the fields
to help out,
years of abuse left the
dry landscape
of her body barren
III
That day of my childhood field, as our hands curled
around the cotton white, my mother’s voice said,
there’s a softness in life and a hardness
sometimes there’s no difference
in the two
That day in the field-white, my mother’s voice,
my mother’s hand, my hand,
the cotton,
sometimes all we have
are the memories.