Dusk now settled, achingly slow, over the field’s white glow. At last, tired eyes could not tell boll from leaf. The overseer grunted. Men, women, and children straightened their stiff backs. They trudged to the ends of their rows, emptied their last sackfuls into their cotton baskets, and hefted the wicker containers onto their heads—Ball, too. He arched his tired spine to bear the weight and began swaying slowly back toward the open shed that held the cotton. A long half-mile later, the final drops of sweat squeezed out of pores, lining tracks in the dust that caked the pickers’ bodies. The outbuildings of the camp loomed up from the now-full dark.
Another day was almost done. Ball had almost survived it. But now, in the yard in front of the cotton-shed, he would learn the secret that made hands pick cotton like machines.
In a semicircle outside the “stand,” the open shed that sheltered the gin, Ball and the others put their baskets down. They waited while drivers hung each basket by its handles on a “steelyard,” a balance-beam scale that measured their day’s picking. The overseer called out the weight and then chalked the numbers by the picker’s name on his slate. Ball had thirty-eight pounds—at least ten less than most of the other men, even though they were not as strong with the axe or as swift with the hoe. Yet some, and some women and teenagers who had also picked more than Ball, were being taken to the patch of ground where Lydia had been beaten.37
Twenty years after Ball’s first day of picking, Israel Campbell went through his own first season at a Mississippi slave labor camp. Try as he might, Campbell could pick no more than ninety pounds between first light and full dark. But the planter, “Belfer,” had told the young man that his daily minimum was one hundred pounds—and that on this day he would “have as many lashes as there were pounds short” in the “draft of cotton” recorded beside the name “Israel” on the Irish-born overseer’s slate. (A “draft” was a check that paid off a debt, in the commercial lingo of the time.) On the hard-packed earth of Belfer’s cotton yard, between the rough-hewn timbers of the gin stand and the packing screw that squashed cleaned cotton into bales, a kind of accounting took place. It used slate and chalk, balance beam, and one more tool as well. And as Campbell brought his cotton up in the growing darkness, he knew that his weight left him with a negative balance. Desperate to avoid a reckoning, he set his basket down and silently slipped behind the other slaves lining up outside the circle of torchlight where the Irishman was weighing baskets. He went to hide in the hut where the slaves did their cooking. But just a few moments later, the door opened, and looming backlit on the threshold stood Belfer—lantern in one hand, four stakes and the bullwhip in the other: “Well, Israel, is that you?” The Irishman had weighed Campbell’s basket. The account was negative. “I will settle with you now,” Belfer said.38
Image 4.3. Carrying the cotton from the fields to the gin stand for the weigh-in, at the end of the day. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, March 1854, p. 457.
We can find this system of accounting, experienced by Campbell and Ball, reported again and again by people who were moved to the southwestern cotton fields. Southern whites themselves sometimes admitted that enslavers used the vocabulary of credit and debit accounting to frame weighing and whipping—like this Natchez doctor, who in 1835 described the end of a picking day: “The overseer meets all hands at the scales, with the lamp, scales, and whip. Each basket is carefully weighed, and the nett weight of cotton set down upon the slate, opposite the name of the picker. . . . [O]ccasionally the countenance of an idler may be seen to fall”: “So many pounds short, cries the overseer, and takes up his whip, exclaiming, ‘Step this way, you damn lazy scoundrel,’ or ‘Short pounds, you bitch.’”39
Charles Ball’s first-day total on his slate became the new minimum on his personal account. He understood that if he failed on the next day to pick at least his minimum, thirty-eight pounds, “it would go hard with me. . . . I knew that the lash of the overseer would become familiar with my back.” In contrast to the task system of the South Carolina rice swamps, on the cotton frontier, each person was given a unique, individual quota, rather than a limit of work fixed by general custom. The overseer, wrote one owner in the rules he created for his Louisiana labor camp in 1820, “shall see that the people of the plantation that are fit to pick cotton shall do it and to Pick clean as much as possible and a quantity conforming [to] their age[,] Strength & Capacitys.”
Sarah Wells remembered that near Warren County, Mississippi, where she grew up, some slaves picked 100 pounds a day, some 300, and some 500. But if your quota was 250 pounds, and one day you didn’t reach it, “they’d punish you, put you in the stocks,” and beat you. If a new hand couldn’t meet the set quota, that hand would have to improve his or her “capacity for picking,” or the whip would balance the account. “You are mistaken when you say your negroes are ignorant of the proper way of working,” wrote Robert Beverley about a new crew transported from Virginia to Alabama. “They only require to be made to do it . . . by flogging and that quite often.” A few years later, having received another batch of people, he wrote, “They are very difficult negroes to make pick cotton. I have flogged this day, you would think if you had seen it[,] without mercy.”40
Learning how to meet one’s quota was difficult, and those who met it before sunset still had to keep picking. As William Anderson moved toward his quota in a Mississippi field, his new enslaver repeatedly knocked him down with a heavy stick, claiming William was lagging. In Alabama in the 1820s, “Old Major Billy Watkins” would “stand at his house, and watch the slaves picking cotton; and if any of them straitened their backs for a moment, his savage yell would ring, ‘bend your backs.’” In 1829, also in Alabama, Henry Gowens saw an overseer force slow women to kneel in front of their cotton baskets. Shoving their heads into the cotton, he would pull up their dresses and beat them until blood ran down their legs.
Women were disproportionately targeted. Enslavers who were obsessed with getting crops to market were not interested in hearing about recovery from childbirth or gynecological problems. “To make money men are required[,] or boys large enough,” wrote one frustrated enslaver, and another, “[Because] we have not a pregnant woman on the plantation[,] the females are the better pickers and have saved much the larger portion of the crop.” Women nursing babies in the shade where they had been laid, or toddlers among the cotton plants—all could become flashpoints for white fury. “Gross has killed Sook’s youngest child,” wrote a white woman to her slave-trader cousin. “He took the child out to work (it was between one year and eighteen months old) & because it would not do its work to please him he first whipt it & then held its head in the [creek] branch to make it hush crying.”41
So, afraid of what lurked behind their bent backs, afraid of the scale and slate that lay before them, enslaved people kept picking till the end of the day. When the weighing and account-balancing by whipping was done for the evening, they tried to salve their wounds. Yet as they slept, the enslaver sat in his house. By the light of a candle, he transferred chalk totals into the more lasting ink and paper of a ledger. Then he erased the slate. And then, he wrote down new and higher minimums. After Israel Campbell figured out how to meet his quota, Belfer raised Campbell’s requirement to 175 pounds per day. John Brown remembered that “as I picked so well at first, more was exacted of me, and if I flagged a minute the whip was applied liberally to keep me up to my mark. By being driven in this way, I at last got to pick a hundred and sixty pounds a day,” after starting at a minimum requirement of 100.42
Cotton-picking increased because quotas rose. In 1805, Wade Hampton and his henchmen gradually increased their demands on Ball until he was picking 50-odd pounds a day. By the late 1820s, enslavers in Mississippi and Tennessee demanded 100 pounds. Five years later, that total had gone up another 30 pounds. Hands now moved “like a bresh heap afire”—“as if,” a Mississippi planter wrote, “some new motive power was applied in the process.” As if, in other words, mechanical engines humm
ed inside the enslaved, as if the disembodied hands of whites’ language moved by themselves over the cotton plants in the field. By the 1850s, ex-slaves reported, enslavers demanded 200 pounds or more of most slaves on some places, and even 250 on others.43
Image 4.4. Enslavers used cotton-picking records to measure and record each enslaved person’s output. Such ledgers served, along with the scale and the whip, as key parts of the “whipping-machine” system that raised cotton output steadily over time. Here we have two pages of the picking record used in 1852 on the Laurel slave labor camp in Warren County, Mississippi, owned by R. C. Ballard. R. C. Ballard Papers, Folder 447, University of North Carolina.
Thus enslavers extracted a massive rise in cotton productivity from the 1790s to 1860. While planter-entrepreneurs did not publish their method for making cotton-picking as efficient as possible in a textbook or an agricultural journal, they created practices, attitudes, and material goods—whips, slates, pens, paper, and the cotton plant itself—that made up the method’s interlocking cogs. White overseers also played an important role, and not just as the ones who often put this system of violent labor rationalization into hour-by-hour practice. They probably invented many of the practices of accounting and torture as they carried their slates and bullwhips ever west and south. Eager to impress their employers, associating with each other, they, too, shared ideas and pushed their peers to conform to an ideal of absolute control over their captives through a commitment to violence. But whoever created the pushing system and the dynamically increasing picking quotas, they were crucial to what one overseer called this “great revolution in the commerce and manufactures of nations,” the continuous increase in cotton productivity that shaped the nineteenth-century transformation of the world.44
In 1861, the basic mechanics of arms, backs, and fingers remained as they had been in 1805, when Charles Ball came to Congaree. They were unchanged from the time when human beings invented agriculture. Nor could enslaved people imagine, when they were confronted by ridiculously high quotas, how they would pay their debt from their hands and not their skin. Often, their first solution was to try to fool the weight and cheat the whip. They hid rocks, dirt, and pumpkins in their baskets in order to make them heavier. Sometimes it worked. Israel Campbell hid watermelons in his baskets to cover the ten pounds he could never quite make. He got away with it for a year. Another method took teamwork: distracting the overseer as he manned the scale, taking advantage of the darkness outside the circle of his lamp to swap a heavy basket for a light one. “Such tricks as these will be continually practiced upon an overseer who is careless or ‘soft,’” wrote one planter.45
Overseers, however, were selected for their “hardness.” If they caught enslaved people trying to short the scales on their daily cotton debt, the punishment was severe. Surveillance and physical intimidation in the fields also made it difficult for pickers to cheat the scale by loading in field rocks, or to run away before weighing time. Sometimes, fast workers tried to help slower ones by putting cotton in their baskets, or taking their rows for a while. But enslavers usually made rules against cooperation, and enforced them. Instead, as minimums increased for all over time, entrepreneurs and exploiters forced individual enslaved people to marshal the forces of their own creativity against their own long-term health and independence, and even against each other. So, fearing punishment or even death, minds scrambled to come up with ways to speed hands. And the dramatic increase over time in the quantity picked reveals that somehow they succeeded.46
But how? Look at enslavers’ language. It assumed that some human beings could be reduced to appendages of others. Yet it also mirrored the words that formerly enslaved people used to describe the experience of picking cotton. For they remembered that to pick quickly enough to turn cotton entrepreneurs’ calculations about profit into reality, one had to disembody oneself. Picking all day long until late at night, even by candlelight, they had to dissociate their minds from pain that racked stooping backs; from blood running down pricked fingertips; from hands that gnarled into claws over a few short years; from thirst, hunger, blurred vision, and anxiety about the whip behind and before them. One had to separate mind from hand—to become, for a time, little more than a hand. Or two hands, like novice picker Solomon Northup’s neighbor Patsey. While Northup lurched down his row, “the long cumbersome sack” making “havoc with [cotton] branches,” and groping single cotton bolls with both hands, Patsey worked both sides of her row in perpetual motion, right and left. She reached with one hand and dropped cotton in the bag hanging from her neck with the other, “lightning-quick motion was in her fingers as no other fingers possessed,” Northup later wrote. She moved like a dancer in an unconscious rhythm, though of displacement rather than of pleasure.47
Patsey’s hands—both of them, right and left—each did their own thinking, like those of a pianist. For most of the laborers, however, the left hand was a problem. Symmetry can be beautiful to witness. In tests, people seem consistently attracted to more symmetrical faces and bodies. But in fact human beings are in crucial ways asymmetrical. Nine out of ten of us prefer to use the right hand for most tasks. Virtually all of us prefer one hand over another. And we know now that the left side of the brain controls the right hand, and vice versa. The left side of the brain is more heavily involved in analytical, detailed, specific processes and thoughts. These include language, and they also include skilled work with the hands. The right is more responsible for “global” processes, such as general perceptions of the world. Many believe it to be more artistic, more emotional. Of course, the reality is slightly more complex than a simple right/left spatial separation inside the brain. Nor is the nature of asymmetry always the same: in some left-handers, language faculties are primarily based in the right side of the brain, rather than the left. But either way, different sections of the brain play specific and distinct roles, and specific parts of the brain are linked in different ways to our dominant and nondominant hands. Right and left hand, right and left brain are neither equal nor interchangeable. Our hands are crucial elements of how we are wired to the world and the brain and the mind and the self.48
Our strong hand, whether we are right- or left-handed, is the dexterous partner of our conscious, planning mind. We write, we touch, we gesture, we take more with one hand than the other. And we also work with one hand more than the other, and that hand links our work to the mind and the self, making them all one whole identity. In the skilled tasks that Charles Ball did back in Maryland, the right hand always led his body. Like a woodcarver or a blacksmith, a man like Charles Ball often identified himself with the day’s work he could do with an axe (led by one hand) or the scythe (ditto.) So would a cook, or a housemaid. She, or he, was more than that work. But in skilled labor in which one hand was the leader, the mind at work could sometimes express the self with mastery and joy—even if the work was forced and the product stolen.
On the cotton frontier, however, quotas kept rising. Now, there are switch-hitters in baseball, piano and guitar players with equally (though differently) skilled left and right hands. There are those who as a trick or because of an injury have learned to write with each hand. But these are specific skills, learned for the purpose of distinguishing and expressing the self. In reality, almost no one is truly ambidextrous. Enslaved people were only able to pick the required amount of cotton by learning how to unhook their nondominant hand from the tethers of bodily asymmetry and brain architecture that they had developed over the course of a lifetime. For eventually, only by using two hands that operated independently and simultaneously could they meet the rising quotas.
“Some hands can’t get the sleight of it,” said one white man, who had tried to whip a young woman to “make her a hand at cotton-picking.” Enslavers and their victims sometimes described the skill of working with two hands that operated independently, with neither one dominant, as the “sleight” of picking cotton. The word means craft, cunning, the special knack or trick of so
mething done too quickly for the eye to see. There is something left-handed about the word, something that is distinct from right-handed force. We think of sleight of hand as something employed by pickpockets, magicians, three-card monte dealers. But this sleight was different: extracted by power, it exposed and commodified hidden, individual skills. In the case of those who, like Patsey, developed the sleight of picking, what they achieved was not a mobilization of left-handed tricks to undermine right-handed power and entertain audiences, but a kind of detachment from their own consciousness. Patsey was beautiful as she moved, a sense that drips out of Northup’s description of her performance between the rows. Yet her achievement was also a thing of horror; she was a person forced to toil in a hot field, but she was also one of the “hands” sketched in words written on paper by men sitting in cool, dark offices.49
Picking one cotton plant clean was much lighter work in terms of weight lifted or aerobic energy expended than cutting down a tree. Yet picking cotton was at the same time much harder labor than anything else enslaved people had to do. Here, for instance, is the rest of the story of the woman who didn’t “get the sleight of it”: “I whipped her, and if I did it once I did it five hundred times, but I found she could not; so I put her to carrying rails with the men. After a few days I found her shoulders were so raw that every rail was bloody as she laid it down. I asked her if she would not rather pick cotton than carry rails. ‘No,’ said she, ‘I don’t get whipped now.’” Repetitiveness, and above all the demand that one become a different person—or not even a whole person, but a hand, and the wrong hand at that—these things made cotton-picking horrible. People remembered it as “irksome” and “fatiguing.” “I was never thoroughly reconciled to it,” they said, for it never felt like their own work or their own body.50
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