What it was like to pick cotton in Sussex County, Virginia

Women Picking Cotton in a FieldPhoto byEconomist Screenshot

Some people have only seen the small piece of cotton found in some medicine bottles. However, this writer had to pick cotton from a field to help with finances while growing up in rural Sussex County, Virginia in the late '50s and early '60s.

Cotton PlantPhoto byPublic Domain/Wikipedia Screenshot

She and her sisters had to miss days out of school to work for farmers in their cotton fields. At that time, the pay was only 3 cents a pound. Cotton is very light; therefore, we had to pick a lot of cotton for a day's pay. For instance, we had to pick one hundred pounds just to get $3 a day, which never happened.

Cotton Being Weighed on a ScalePhoto byShuhrataxmedov/Wikipedia

We wore burlap sacks around our waists to put the cotton in as we made our way up and down the row while picking the fluffy fiber out of the cotton bolls. At the end of an 8-hour day, the farmer took each person's sack, hung it up on a homemade scale, and called out the weight while people stood around to hear the number of pounds they had picked. Most of the time, the range was around 60-70 pounds. Only the fast pickers could pick 100 or more pounds in a day.

Today, there are machines that do what we had to do by hand in the past.

Cotton Picking MachinePhoto byGlobal Times/Wikipedia Screenshot