Word: cottoning
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...public squabbles. Spike Lee's most recent venting appeared in the Hollywood Reporter, decrying the curious lack of slaves in the Mel Gibson movie The Patriot, set in 1776. "While holding myself back from shouting at the screen, I kept wondering, Where are the slaves? Who's picking the cotton?" Indeed, screenwriter Robert Rodat gives Gibson's South Carolina gentleman farmer a cadre of African-American "employees" who refer to themselves as free men. "Did Rodat get his dates mixed up?" asks Spike. "The Emancipation Proclamation was 100 years away." Moviegoers learned all about that from the famously accurate Gone...
...Missouri, acres of Kansas prairie swallowed by flooding and swept downstream. Mark Twain's characters claimed that a man who drank the water could grow corn in his stomach. You know all this, and yet you are unprepared for the Delta, otherworldly and flat, the best place to grow cotton on this earth, once a hellish jungle, cleared by the backbreaking labor of slaves and sharecroppers. It's a wet western Kansas, a beautiful, flat, fertile window...
...Charley Patton, Son House, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. The history of the music is the story of the people who invented it and the suffering that created it. Without black work gangs to clear the thickly wooded Delta plain and sharecroppers to pick the cotton, there would have been no plantation economy; without African Americans to sing the work songs and field chants and slide their knife blades and bottlenecks across the strings of diddley bows and mail-order guitars, there would be no Delta blues. And without the blues, there would be no rock...
...buried, although the truth is that when they die, no one comes, and they get buried right here on the Farm. Cain thinks he can summon hope through a four-year Bible college, or the amateur rodeo the prisoners put on every year, or having them pick cotton by hand in the fields that were once a real plantation, and still really are, for 4[cents] an hour...
...Clothes were weapons for the original Shaft, whose fierce styling created fashion conventions that survived for decades. Despite the Armani imprimatur, though, the new Shaft looks like a catalog shopper. He may have dissed the drug dealer Peoples in his Egyptian cotton as a "cheap knockoff mutha-----" but Shaft's own styling is unlikely to inspire any new look, precisely because its baldheaded, black-polo-neck-and-raincoat look has long since been a mainstay of R&B music videos...