When my lifelong friend and mentor Jaybird picked me up that Friday morning, he said, “Harvest time is near, and we still haven’t replaced that worn-out vacuum box in the cotton gin. Monday, that will be job number one.” The old black man taught me all about gins, and explained that vacuum boxes work in tandem with large fans, using air to push and pull cotton through all the gin’s machinery.
Eager to show my mentor how much he had taught me, I boasted that I could knock that job out by myself in one day. Suspecting that I would undertake such a foolish, impossible task, he warned, “The vacuum box is twelve feet wide, weighs two tons, and is forty feet above the floor. If it fell on the machines under it, we’d still be repairing damage when harvest starts. I’m warning you, boy — don’t get no foolish notions.”
