"You must never let on like I mentioned it," said Mrs. Minna Lee Raynor, A few nights ago via telephone," but have you forgotten the twelve cents my little boy made picking cotton for you that time?"
If we were a bit slow on the uptake, Mrs. Raynor, it wasn't because we weren't listening. What had us worried was how much twelve cents would come to, al compounded Interest, across eighteen years. For we thought, from the way you said it, that we had forgotten to pay Walter.
And what you were really asking was quote, had we forgotten the time we had paid him off, so handsomely, for the harvesting of twelve pounds of our cotton from the bumper crop of 1937.
There were other pickers in that group from Central Avenue. Richard Eskrigge, Humphreys McGee, Bimmie McGee, and Libba and Laura Calvert had all gone along with Walter Raynor, Jr. that afternoon and. between them, had picked about half a sack of cotton.
This was before the days of paying off at the scales, when you settled on Friday afternoon for the entire week's picking. And that was why Minna Lee could remember the detailed weight and settlement (at a dollar a hundred), because we had driven down Central and paid off, house-to-house like, same as if it was Sunflower Alley or Muscadine Street.
And the thing that brought the above incident to this author's mind was the fact that Walter Raynor had been overlooked in a recent editorial in this newspaper, wherein there was a partial listing of hometown boys now associated with the National Cotton Council.
It had all started when Greenville's Billy Wynn received an editorial! tribute for being elected president of the organization. Aller that one was rolled, it suddenly occurred to its writer that no mention had been made of General A. G. Paxton's election to the board of directors of same.
So Galla, In due time, received accreditation for honors so richly deserved. Then the editorialist let fly, just in case someone else had been neglected, with confetti and congratulations, from both barrels of his scatter gun, for everyone he could think of from these parts who had anything to do with the set-up and workings of the National Cotton Council.
There were pats for Oscar Johnston (the founder), Rhea Blake, Read Dunn, Sonny Russell, and the late Dorothy Black. But "Boxhead" Raynor received not one single nod. Yet he's the one who calls at the gins, compresses, railroads, cotton-mills, or wherchaveyou and whathaveyou for that ten cents per bale which supplies the sinew for the National Cotton Council. And it could be that old Boxhead is the only one in the group who ever picked cotton by the hundred. So he riz from the ranks!
Meanwhile let this be a lesson lo us name-droppers.
And let us bear in mind the legend of the mistle-toe. If the latter hadn't been left out that time, Spring would be a permanent affair rather than a three-month deal and Boy howdy wouldn't Southern California and Florida be strictly out of luck? All of which bears out what a smart preacher those Leland Presbyterians have in the Rev. Ed Brazzington. For Ed stood up in his pulpit, on the closing night of his Paul Jones Mission, and thanked everyone who had taken part in the success of the meetings. Furthermore, he called them "Everyone" and did not breathe a single name.
Ed knew he'd run into trouble if he tried that. How did he know? Probably because Ricky, that smart wife of his, told him so. It was during that same final meeting night that Rev. John Wilson, of the Rolling Fork Presbyterian Church, offered the opening prayer. Brother Wilson had a degree in engineering before he took off for Divinity School (In Decatur Illinois Rev. Jay Logan's education took the same course, and what a man). and John preached a well-informed sermon in the Greenville church during his seminary days. His late father, Bob Wilson, had a brother named Willard who played on Greenville's state championship team in the first decade of the century, with Kenneth, lHaxton, Will Elkas, Ike Roman, Zeke Alexander, Judge S. B. Thomas, the late Howard Lewy, and other notables.
Willard Wilson went to college at Purdue and lives up north in the Great Lakes country. We don't know if Purdue-man Wilson is a boilermaker or not, but we do know that he subscribes, to the Delta Democrat-Times just to keep with what he still thinks of as up his old hometown.
-BC.
