| Summary: | (8:45) Ms. Sharp describes her life in Arkansas living and working on a cotton plantation.Florence-Lauderdale Public Library Digital Archive
Interview with Artie Sharp
September 20, 2011
Florence, Alabama
Conducted by Rhonda Haygood and Patti Hannah
(Also present are: Lee Freeman and Mrs. Sharp’s son, Jack Sharp)
Clip 2
Artie Sharp: We lived on hard times out there on our cotton plantation. We was caught in two back waters and we lived about a, oh, must have been about a half a mile from the main river, Tyronza River. Well if it come a lot of rain it would overflow and we was farmers and we had a crop. We had got off the cotton plantation and rented a farm. And we’d get a crop planted and it would get up big enough you could chop out your cotton, have your garden growing and then it’d set in raining and the river would overflow and it’d drown it all out. And it would just take everything you had. We was caught in two of them and so we moved at a place called Marlin Swamps. Arkansas land is level like that porch out there. You don’t have no ditches, no drains, only man-made ditches or levees and in the levees is swamps and it was cypress swamps. No, no trees like we got here. Cypress. And in them swamps the mosquitoes and the buffalo gnats would almost eat you up. In them swamps there’s blackberry patches would grow and we’d pick them to can and to sell and the mosquitoes would almost eat us up. Then one day, one man was picking blackberries in there and they saw a bear asleep, sleeping behind a log and one man got tore up by the bear. They sleep all winter, but they laid down in the summer by the blackberry patches and you couldn’t hardly pick the blackberries. But we’d have to sneak in there and pick them anyway. And so we lived in the swamps for—we was out there six years. That was gumbo and you living in gumbo, now you can grow cotton out there over your head. The limbs will be big enough you could step up on the bottom stalk and they was big, and well they’d tower up over your head. But that was good cotton country. But it was gumbo. The land when it rained it was like clay here that you go dig out of these big ditches that you make slip out of to do ceramic. Same thing. And it’d come a rain and you’d walk out in that field chopping your cotton and you’d have to have deep furrows so the water could stand in the middles and you cotton’s way up on a furrow up here and you’re walking in that and the gumbo’s building up on your feet. Wherever you walk more gumbo built up. You’d carry a paddle in your pocket to rake the gumbo off your hoe when you’re chopping. It’d get built up on it and you’d get so discouraged you’d just cry. Gumbo’d build up on your feet and it was just impossible. You go home, you might go to bed that night and you’d get up and you, your steps are moved out yonder in the yard. It’d crack, the ground would crack and we got up and the steps was moved way out yonder. And the little chickens would fall in the cracks of the gumbo. It’d crack open and they’d be following the hen and they’d fall in them cracks and we couldn’t get them out. They’d just stay in there and die. And so you couldn’t plant a garden in gumbo. It wouldn’t come up. So Daddy got out of Tyronza, out of the gumbo and moved us to Trumann where we could—we was living in mixed soil—we could raise a garden there then. So we began to accumulate, we’d raise a garden and had pigs and we had two cows and a yard full of chickens and we could eat but there was no money. Nobody had no money. You raise a garden and you can your food. If
you didn’t can it, you didn’t have it. Well, before we left Tyronza though they had a place up there they called Narcross supply store. And what it was, you worked all summer in this, ah, fields and you didn’t have no money, you didn’t see no money, but Narcross had things that they called doodlum books. And he had these doodlum books and you’d go up once a week, they’d take you to town, the man that run the plantation, and let you go up and you’d buy a week’s supply of groceries and you come back, well he puts that all down, the man does. And come fall and you go pick your cotton and gather your crop, the man’s crop and you pay your bill where you have traded all summer, you’ve eat all summer. You couldn’t buy nothing but food. Then when you pay him you don’t have anything left. You start right back from the beginning to end. And we was about to starve to death over there on that plantation. And besides there was a riding boss that rode a big red horse and he had a big whip on his back and if the little kids cut down a stalk of cotton they wasn’t suppose to cut down, he’d pop that whip and sometimes it’d hit them and it would split the hide. It had a popper on it made out of leather about that long and he’d take that and pop that thing to scare you and make you work faster, do more, pick more cotton or chop, whatever you was doing. And this old boss had two boys, I’m trying to think of their name, but anyway, they would go around and, and ride up and down the middle and whip you with a whip if you didn’t work fast enough. Now, mama’s dragging the baby on a pick sack; everybody had to work. Mama’s dragging the baby on a pick sack, if she’s picking cotton and the little baby’s crying, but you’re not suppose to stop and do nothing except change its diaper and go on down the row. Anyway, Daddy made me a pick sack out of a flour sack. We’d get twenty-five pound sacks of flour and wash out that sack when we emptied the flour and he’d tie a string on it and put it around my neck, “Now you get out there and pick cotton. Pick and put in Daddy’s sack.” Anybody big enough to pick a boll of cotton, would be picking. And you’re starving to death for water and the row, the cotton rows could be a mile long. And so, the water boy would come around and Arkansas weather is hotter than it is here. Hot, you just can’t hardly bear it. There’s no electricity. You just as well forget that. You lived in a cotton sharecropper’s shack is what you lived in. Two little rooms. Little front porch, living room and a little kitchen. And no sense taking water to the field with you. It’d be boiling in a little while. Here come the water boy down through there pulling a wagon, big two-horse wagon and he had big ol’ wooden barrels on the back of the wagon and they had a big spigot on the barrel and you spitting cotton before he gets there. You’d get one drink in the morning and one in the afternoon. And you out there about to starve to death and kids are crying for water. When he come through it’s so warm you couldn’t hardly drink it. And then no use wanting anymore till quitting time, you wouldn’t get it. Anyway, Daddy left Tyronza, off of that gumbo farm and moved to Trumann. We had it a lot better over there. And so Daddy got down sick with malaria and he almost died and then I got the malaria fever and I almost died, from buffalo gnats. When you go out to milk a cow, you’d have to take old rags and pile them up and get them a-fire and put the fire out, the blaze, and just have a big smoke and hold it as close to the cow on a stick or any way or right by it to milk the cow to keep the buffalo gnats and mosquitoes off of you. And then you got to run to the house and get out of the mosquitoes. And that’s how Daddy got sick and how I got sick with malaria fever. And so Daddy almost died and we like to lost a little sister out there. She got real bad and we’s all getting sick and Mama kept begging Daddy to let us go back to Alabama and to get out of that weather.
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