Hold Your Cotton-Pickin' Tongue!

My folks grew up in a rural part of East Texas in the 1920s. They both picked cotton in their youth, and neither of them ever had anything good to say about it. They used the term "cotton-pickin' " as an adjective all their lives, as in, "Get your cotton-pickin' hands off of me!" Country singers used it, too. Johnny Cash, who picked cotton as a sharecropper's son in Arkansas, used to sing, "I'm a cotton pickin' man, and these are cotton pickin' hands..." They also sang about "Them Old Cottonfields Back Home." There were references to "snatchin' and grabbin' " -- the method by which cotton was hand-picked. "Fair to middlin' " -- a term used to describe a cotton crop -- was a stock answer to "How are you?" long after its meaning was forgotten. In fact, "cotton-pickin' " had lost its meaning. It was an empty modifier, much like the timeless "fuckin'."

 So when, in the recent elections, a white candidate in a southern state used the term "cotton-pickin' " when speaking of his African-American opponent, I thought nothing of it. But a lot of people did. It was "racially tinged," or some such, apparently referencing slavery. I never know these things are offensive until somebody gets called out for saying them. Fortunately, only a few dozen people hear or read any of my words, so I'm reasonably insulated, but public speaking is a minefield of potential [insert simile here].

Single Pigeon

Today we drove out to Northeast to get our affairs in order. We've been kicking this particular can down the road for thirty years, but the shadows are beginning to lengthen. On the way home we saw two pigeons on the steaming asphalt of Hondo Pass. One was dead. The other stood close to the body -- motionless -- and didn't flutter out of the path of our car until the last possible moment. Both of us knew immediately that they were mates. It was heartbreaking. We didn't say much the rest of the drive home. Not about projected scenarios of our deaths or about those two poor birds. But a line from an old Hank Williams song keeps going through my mind: "Like a bird that's lost its mate in flight / I'm alone and oh, so blue tonight..."

22 July 2018