Cotton picking, and the scales

An intercalary chapter on cotton picking, told in the pickers' own voices. Orange handbills draw the cars in. A bag costs a dollar, taken out of the first hundred and fifty pounds; the pay is eighty cents a hundred the first time over the field, ninety the second. The work has real pleasure in it — fingers that find the bolls without looking, talk across the rows, kids picking into their father's sack — and the constant argument at the scales, over rocks in the bag and crooked weights, with each side keeping its own book. Winter is coming and there is no work in California then, so the advice is to save, and the fear is that five hundred pickers will finish the field before a man has even paid off his bag. A cotton-picking machine is rumoured. At the end of a good day there is money for side-meat and biscuits.