Risk, Courage, and Women: Contemporary Voices in Prose and Poetry

sharecropper’s daughter

312 sharecropper’s daughter Jean Flynn There were worse things than being a white sharecropper’s daughter in the 1930s and ’40s. But at the time I didn’t think so. I didn’t compare myself to people in the same economic class as I was. I compared myself to landowners’ daughters who seemed to have everything: new, store-bought dresses; more than one pair of shoes at a time; their own rooms at home; white, manicured hands; and popularity among the classmates. My dresses were hand-sewn from flour sacks or hand-me-downs from my sisters, cousins, aunts, and friends, altered to fit me. My mother had no sewing machine and sat by lamplight in the evenings hand-stitching clothes. We had one pair of shoes at a time and wore them until we outgrew them or they wore out, which generally happened about the same time. My hands were callused by the time I was a teenager, but there are advantages to having older sisters. I wouldn’t let them polish my nails because I didn’t want to spend that much time keeping them looking fresh, but I let them trim and file them as long as they didn’t take up too much time. I had never thought a great deal about my childhood until I was in my forties . There is nothing like researching other women’s lives to bring your own life into perspective. My life span ran parallel to many of the women I was researching for my book Texas Women Who Dared to be First. I began to look at my own background and the experiences I had as a female in the twentieth century. I was born near Fitzhugh, Oklahoma, in 1934, during the Depression when women, especially poor women, had no voice but had as many children as possible to help support the family. In 1941, my family—mother and father, six siblings and two cousins—moved to northwest Texas and settled in the Lockett community nine miles southwest of Vernon, Texas, the nearest town. Two of my father’s sisters lived in nearby communities and had encouraged my mother and father to join them. My father had always done odd jobs including working for the Works Progress Administration (wpa). The government established wpa in 1935 to relieve the jobless situation in the United States after the Great Depression. My mother and my older siblings had worked in the cotton fields and picked up pecans for extra money. Although my father knew nothing crossing borders 313 about farming, it was an opportunity to find work that provided a house for his family. Northwest Texas was cotton country. The cotton rows were long and straight in flat, sun- baked fields. We looped around at the end of the rows to begin another long row only to loop around at its end. Chop out the weeds and grass around the short, new cotton. Thin the rows with a rhythmic chop, skip, chop. Never look up hour after hour. Stop only to drink cool water from a burlap-wrapped, tin milk can buried in the sand and to sharpen hoes when they became dull from chopping. The same concentration went into pulling bolls from the cotton we had chopped during the summer. Some people in the South “picked cotton” from the hull and left the shell on the stalk. We pulled bolls including the hull which was later separated from the cotton, ground and used as feed for animals. We bent over row after row, not looking up until it was time to weigh a full cotton sack. Except, I did look up. Often when I reached the end of a row that bordered a road, I paused and looked both directions up and down the straight, unpaved, hazy, red road that disappeared into the horizon. I don’t know how old I was when I thought There must be more beyond this road. My experience with a world outside my own limited life was in the pages of Heidi and western movies at the Pictorium Theater in Vernon on Saturday afternoons. My father was a sharecropper and when we finished the fields owned by our landlord, we hired out to other farmers. I was considered a full hand by the age of ten. As most children began a new school year after Labor Day, we began pulling bolls and went to school only when it was too wet to work in...