A dozen or so years ago, I attended a funeral in Louisiana for my last grandmother. One of the men told me a story one day not long after driving across the bridge of the Ouachita River.
When he was a young man, he was enterprising. Like the others, he picked cotton and he picked plenty. He decided to organize some of the others and pick multiple fields. This was the way to make extra money, as the landowners only needed so much. He and his brother got the trucks together and picked one of the biggest loads anybody in the area had seen. He took it to the gin to be weighed and sold. The family that owned the gin was different from the family that owned the land. They controlled the wholesale market for the county. When the young man's cotton was weighed, the gin man said 1500 pounds. The scale said 1800 pounds.
The young man considered his situation at length right there on the spot. He decided not to burn down the gin. He decided not to shoot the gin man. He would never pick cotton again. Instead he left for the city the next day and had not returned until the death of my last grandmother about forty years later.
We drove by the gin several miles across the river. The man, no longer young, was wary of the local police. That seemed out of character for him. He was angry that the place still made him nervous and he didn't want to be around. He knew the whole county to be corrupt and there was the gin, just off the road still with the name of the gin family in white letters on the roof. His breathing became short and he told me the story as I sped up the car heading towards the airport. He couldn't be out of this place soon enough and hoped never to come again.
I've taken that story to be the story of many thousands of men. It is the story for me of the origins of the Great Migration, and it is the story of those who moved beyond and those who stayed behind.
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