Don’t Get No Foolish Notions!

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.”

Ignoring Jaybird’s admonitions always led to trouble

Ignoring Jaybird’s admonitions always led to trouble. On Saturday morning, when nobody was at the gin, I set about lowering the vacuum box. First, I attached a hoist to a beam in the gin’s roof and a chain between the hoist’s hook and the vacuum box. Next, I pulled the hoist’s rope until it separated from the machine to which it was attached. To pull it forward and clear of the machines below, I positioned a second hoist to “stair-step” the box down by pulling first on one hoist and then the other. Because a wide bay door that served as the gin’s main entrance was across from where the box would have to be lowered, I had nothing to which the second hoist’s rope could be attached while lowering the box with the rope attached to the first hoist. To solve that problem, I positioned my pickup outside the door and attached the second hoist’s rope to its rear bumper, which proved to be my worst idea in twenty years as gin manager. With ropes and chains in all directions, I pulled the first hoist to raise the box, but when I pulled the second hoist’s rope to clear it of all below, it jerked the pickup into the gin and the vacuum box avalanched straight down over the machines below it. The catastrophic disaster left nothing recognizable — the vacuum box and machines over which it crashed were jumbled in a mangled mass, tools were scattered everywhere, and the pickup was teetering, halfway in the gin and halfway out. Then my father and Jaybird pulled up. Staring first at a wrecked gin and then across fields of cotton ready to harvest, both men were stunned into disbelief. “Well, Jaybird,” Dad snarled, y’all will have to work can-to-can’t until all this damage done by my stupid son is repaired.” After Dad stormed off, Jaybird studied the mess, not sure where to start. Then, with the most frustrated look I’ve ever seen on his face, he turned to me and growled, “Dammit, boy, I told you: Don’t get no foolish notions!”