White Gold: Can Cotton Make a Comeback in the Land Where It Was Once King?

Photographs by John Montfort Jones

Agiant cotton picker in one of the fields of farmers Heath and Keath Killebrew, west of Yazoo City, MS, early October 2013.

As you drive west out of Yazoo City, Mississippi, you pass the railroad tracks, fried-chicken and crawfish takeouts, a car wash, and the Calvary Baptist Church. Coming off the high, arched bridge over the Yazoo River, you find yourself in the dead-flat landscape of the Mississippi Delta. On this late-September day, a few brittle stands of soybeans are waiting to be cut. But most of the ground is vacant, its naked furrows running to the vanishing point, its corn already collected in gleaming steel bins. There has been no rain here in sixty days, but this afternoon the sky is leaden, and wispy trails of precipitation can be seen tumbling in the distance.

Beyond the cypress swamp rises the weathered silhouette of Hines Grocery, renowned for its seasoned pork chops and homemade sausage. I leave the highway and turn onto a dirt road, tracing the sinuous shoreline of Wolf Lake. On the right is a cotton field bursting with white bolls. At the far end, a great green contraption—a cotton picker—is churning across the landscape, emitting a bass rumble and a brownish haze. In this corner of the Delta, it is the first day of the cotton harvest.

The picker belongs to Heath and Keath Killebrew, the identical twins who farm this land along with several other parcels straddling the hills and Delta. From his vantage point in the picker’s cab, Keath has spotted my car, and when he gets to the end of the row, he pauses so I can climb the metal ladder and take the seat beside him. He shakes my hand, his blue eyes and dark good looks hidden behind wraparound sunglasses. He began at nine o’clock this morning, he calls over the roar of the engine. If the weather holds, he will work until nine o’clock tonight, maneuvering in the glare of the picker’s headlights and eating his supper out of a Tupperware box. Keath is in high spirits. The start of picking is always cause for celebration, the culmination of months of work and worry. And the cotton looks good. In places the bolls are so thick that the rows seem to merge in an unbroken mass of white.

Heath and Keath grew up in the small city of Lexington, some fifty miles northeast of here. I first met them when they were little boys dressed in camouflage jumpsuits, picking pecans one balmy Christmas along the banks of Horseshoe Lake. Their father, Zack, is my wife’s first cousin. Nine years ago I spent a season with Zack as he coaxed his crop out of the ground, an experience I wrote about in a book called High Cotton.

From an early age, Heath and Keath wanted to do nothing but farm. Their favorite plaything was a miniature farm set with tractors, a planter, a picker, even a cotton gin, but the only thing they ever cultivated was the living-room rug, because they prized the toys too highly to risk taking them outdoors. After high school, the twins worked briefly on an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico and earned associate’s degrees at a nearby community college. At twenty-two, they rented some land and began planting. Gradually they added acreage, until now their holdings—some rented, some purchased—stretch across parts of seven counties; they’ve bought an airplane to help close the distance. Keath lives in the town of Flora, in a brick house across the street from one of their fields. His wife, Alyssa, commutes half an hour to the state capital, Jackson, where she works as a psychologist. Heath lives seventy-five miles to the north, in Greenwood, with his wife, Mary Taylor, and their two young girls.

Though Heath tends to look after the northern acreage and Keath the southern, the brothers consult...