024-037 Cotton and tobacco (old
book 23-31)
Vincents text
Norsk oversættelse Min nye bog
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24 On my way to Florida in the winter, I discovered where this fear and
hostility, which blossomed into my terrifying encounter in the Northern
streets, had its roots. Few blacks today pick cotton, but meeting those still
trapped behind the cotton curtain, in the midst of
the affluent society of the 1970s, seemed so surreal that I immediately felt
thrown back in history—smothered by the cotton whose white tyranny once
shrouded all black life in the South. When I worked in the cotton fields, I discovered the reality was quite
different from the one suggested in the historical photos and caricatures I
recalled of smiling, almost childishly happy cotton pickers. The smiles in
this picture were in fact the only ones I saw on the cotton plantations—when
one of the pickers couldn’t figure out how my camera worked. It took me a long time to overcome their hostility and fear of me as a
white, but in the end I got to stay with Martha and
Joe in return for giving them all the cotton I picked. Though I toiled from
morning to night and was aching all over, I never succeeded in picking more
than four dollars’ worth a day. The others were more
experienced and could make over six dollars a day. This was relatively the
same as today, where I see Martha and many of the others working for Walmart
and still unable to pull themselves up by the bootstraps. We worked on a
piecework basis and were paid four cents a pound. The white landowner then
resold it on the market for 72 cents a pound. I began to understand how the
landlord could afford to live in a big white mansion while his black pickers
lived in shacks. At quitting time the son of the landlord
arrived to weigh the cotton and pay us on the spot. We were exhausted and
there was no joy in receiving the money, which could hardly be stretched to
cover kerosene for the lamp at home in the shack, which was probably no
bigger or better than the ones the slaves originally lived in. How can these
people be called free, when everything around them reminds them of the old
master-slave relationship? Slave driver The tables are turned now catch a fire you’re going to get burned now. Every time I hear the crack of the whip my blood run cold I do remember on a slave ship how they brutalized my very soul. Today they say that we are free only to be chained in this poverty! Good God I think it’s illiteracy it’s only a machine that makes money. A century earlier,
whites had believed it their “natural right” to invest in human beings as
private property. Hour after hour, in an updated version of this belief,
well-to-do Northerners swept past us in the cotton fields in their big
motorhomes on their way to sunny Florida. (Many of the northern universities
where I later spoke, such as Harvard, were once financed by slavery.) Today
each of their rolling homes burns up as much gas in an hour as we could buy
after a whole day of picking cotton. Why are paper-shufflers
in New York and Massachusetts, who already have huge homes, able to have
these motorhomes while the cotton pickers don’t have even a waterproof shack
to live in? In the tobacco fields also, I saw that whites owned and directed
everything, while blacks had to trail after them, both in the spring, when
the tobacco was planted and unemployed women watched from their shacks, and
in August, when it was picked. “It’s real nigger-work,” I heard whites say.
“They’re already black so the tar doesn’t stick to them as much.” By law the
workers are guaranteed a minimum wage, but it’s only 1/3 of Denmark’s. Worse,
since tobacco picking is seasonal work and there’s not much work the rest of
the year, it was indeed a meager income they scraped together. These people,
who could’ve gained equality and freedom if they received just a couple of
cents per packet of cigarettes sold, wore facial expressions as they worked
only a slave could wear.
Later in the summer, the tobacco was dried and sold at auction. In few
other places do we so visibly and forcibly continue to imprint the
master-slave relationship on the consciousness of blacks. Wherever I go, I
see white buyers from the tobacco companies who walk in front, giving quick
discreet signals with pointed fingers and wagging heads, while the blacks
rush behind them packing the tobacco bundles. The whites drive right into the
auction hall in big flashy cars. They eat plate-size steaks for lunch at
indoor tables, while the blacks have to eat their
brown-bag lunches outside. Today, most blacks have abandoned the
tobacco fields to underpaid, illegal immigrants from Latin America. |
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24 The tables are turned now catch a fire you’re going to get burned now. Every time I hear the crack of the whip my blood run cold I do remember on a slave ship how they brutalized my very soul. Today they say that we are free only to be chained in this poverty! Good God I think it’s illiteracy it’s only a machine that makes money.
I
dag har de fleste sorte givet op og overladt tobaksmarkerne til underbetalte
illegale latinamerikanske indvandrere. |