Cotton Field in Calhoun Co.

In July, this cotton field in Calhoun County, Alabama, is hot and still with thick green plants. In a few more weeks, the plants will produce the cotton that Rick Bragg remembers from his childhood. He wrote: "The first memory I have is of a tall blond woman who drags a canvas cotton sack along an undulating row of rust-colored ground, through a field that seems to reach into the back forty of forever....The tall woman is wearing a man's britches and a man's old straw hat, and now and then she looks back over her shoulder to smile at the three-year-old boy whose hair is almost as purely white as the bolls she picks, who rides the back of the six-foot-long sack like a magic carpet" (23)

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