Just A Dude Choppin’ Cotton

Often during boyhood, whenever Dad warned that stubbornness would prevent me from succeeding in life, I protested that he was confusing stubbornness with persistence, to which he replied one day, “Since you work with Jaybird, I’ll ask him about all this persistence you profess to have.” The next morning, my boyhood best friend and mentor Jaybird took his work crew, myself included, to a field on Dad’s Mississippi Delta farm where cotton seedlings needed thinning to prevent crowding as the plants grew. After handing us hoes, he said those words we heard so often: “Okay, boys, start yo’ rows.”

“Leroy was ‘a cotton-pickin’ dude’; you were just ‘a dude picking cotton’

Later when we stopped for lunch, I asked Jaybird if Dad told him about my claim that I was persistent, not stubborn. Referring to his son Leroy, a tall, muscular, strapping lad who picked four hundred pounds of cotton daily during harvest, he pointed out that I rarely exceeded a hundred, and added, “Leroy was ‘a cotton-pickin’ dude’; you were just ‘a dude picking cotton’. He’s got persistence, which you claim to have, but Boss and I know better, so we came up with a plan to decide who is right.” The next morning, Jaybird drove me to a cotton field at the farthest end of the farm, dropped me off, handed me a sharpened hoe, a file, sandwiches, and a jug of water. Chuckling, he waved goodbye and said, “This is yo’ field, boy. Thin every row. Now, by gosh, we’ll find out if you’re a cotton choppin’ dude, or what we think you are: just a dude choppin’ cotton.” In five minutes, my clothes were sticking to me in the rising heat and humidity. The old black man’s thinning instructions were precise: In that 40-acre field, on every row I must leave no less than one and no more than three plants in each grouping, called hills. By my country-boy calculations, the field contained 440 rows, all a quarter of a mile long. Placed end-to-end, they would span the equivalent of 110 miles! The daunting project evoked some serious soul-searching. Should I give up and accept being just a dude chopping cotton, not a cotton chopping dude, or should I prove to Dad and Jaybird that I am persistent, not stubborn? Recalling one of my mother’s favorite Bible verses from the Book of Galatians — “Let us not be weary … in due season we shall reap” — I bent to the long task ahead. I cannot recall how many hot, humid days, sunup to sundown, I endured before finishing those seemingly endless rows. When the job was almost done, I looked back across the field, and an immense sense of accomplishment flooded over me. While completing the last row, Jaybird pulled up with boxed lunches. As we ate, he said, “Son, you have made me mighty proud. You proved Boss and me wrong; you really are persistent, not stubborn. Now we know what you are — a cotton choppin’ dude — not what we thought you were: just a dude choppin’ cotton.”