A Song for Father's Day

“My mama was a cotton picker and

My daddy was a field hand.

My mama had the face of an angel and

My daddy was a mighty man.”

I googled those lyrics again and again before they finally came up in a Twitter.  Here at Father’s Day, I needed the words because they are a good poetic description of my parents.  

And yet, these words are not just poetry.  They are pretty literal.  

Well, not quite literal.  When I was growing up in West Texas, my whole family spent the fall months in the cotton patch.  This meant my brothers and sisters and I missed most of first semester of school — however long it took to harvest Uncle Jim and Aunt Chessie’s crop — but we didn’t pick cotton.  We pulled bolls.  The end result was similar: We filled Uncle Jim’s trailer with the white fluffy stuff.  But the process was different.

When you picked cotton, you plucked the cotton out of the burr or boll.  When you pulled bolls, you broke the boll off the stalk with the cotton in it, removing the stems and the leaves, and put the boll and cotton into the sack. West Texas gins had an upfront process that separated the cotton from the burr.

Everything about manually harvesting cotton — whether picking or pulling — has disappeared with technology.  It’s all gathered by machines, and I’m not at all nostalgic about “the good old days.”

Even so, if the harvest had been mechanized in the 1940s, Daddy would have had to find some other way to scrape out a living for his wife and five kids, probably involving all seven of us in that endeavor as well.

Another way the words to the song aren’t literal:  We never called our female parent “Mama.”  She was always “Mother.” In retrospect, it seems odd that the softer, more outwardly loving parent had the more formal appellation, while we called our sterner parent the softer name.  “Father” would never have worked.  He was “Daddy.”

Some of the lyrics to that song about cotton picking fit our family to a T: 

Mama in the song wore a skirt made from a flour sack.  So did Mother and my two sisters.  And my brothers and I wore flour-sack shirts — all made on a foot-powered sewing machine — to go with our overalls.

Another line from the song hits home: “I still draw strength from my daddy’s strong back and my mama’s sweet face.”

Daddy was not big and muscular, but he was strong.  In the cotton field, owned by his youngest sister and her husband, Daddy moved quickly along three rows at a time, straddling one and working the one on either side.  He did that while we toiled over one or two rows, depending on our level of physical maturity.

He quit school when he was thirteen or fourteen, probably because his mother or daddy one too many times told him what he was supposed to do.  To show them, he left home and was on his own the next fifty years.  Along the way, he was no more disposed to taking orders from the men who signed his paychecks than he had been with his folks back home.

He never learned a trade, but he was good with his hands, stacking feed, chopping cotton, milking cows, driving a John Deere or Farmall tractor on somebody else’s farm, or pushing a wheelbarrow of cement for a building contractor.

We lived in a string of different communities, most within a thirty-mile radius of Sweetwater, the county seat of Nolan, County, Texas, as Daddy moved from farm job to farm job.  But we frequently returned to the small farm belonging to Mother’s mother. As Robert Frost said, in “The Death of the Hired Man,” “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

Grandma was always ready to take in Mother, her only child, and us grandchildren, but she probably felt a case of “have to” when it came to her son-in-law.  

Daddy had a quick mind.  If he’d had the patience to learn chess, he would have been a master.  In card games, checkers, or dominoes, he could anticipate his opponents’ moves and what cards or dominoes were in their hands.

Texans play “Forty-two,” a bidding game with dominoes.  I’ve seen him get, literally, fighting mad when his partner in Forty-two made what he considered a dumb play.  Once, with a nephew as his partner, Daddy jumped up and almost knocked over the card table in his effort to hit my cousin.

Though he owned no house, he was the head of any house he lived in, other than his mother-in-law’s.  You argued or disagreed with him at your peril.  As the eight of us were at breakfast in Grandma’s crowded kitchen one morning, I was seated next to Daddy.  I expressed my opinion about something, and he said, “I don’t care what you think.”  In return, I said, “And I don’t care what you think.”  Before there was time for another thought, I found myself in the back yard, he had his belt off, and my back end was stinging.

He and Mother struggled financially all their lives, never owning their own home and buying their first car after I was out of college and seminary.

With his harsh exterior, “loving” was nowhere near the top of my list of adjectives for Daddy.  But with hindsight, I can see, even as he lived with pressures of holding a job and keeping Sears, Roebuck and Piggly Wiggly at bay as they pressed for payment, he found ways to express his love:

When he and my older brother Lee Roy and I would hitchhike into Sweetwater on Saturdays, he would buy us hamburgers and give us enough change for movie tickets.  

He expressed affection by getting me or one of my brothers in a headlock with his left arm and raking his right knuckles across the scalp in a “Dutch rub” or a “dry shampoo.”

If any of us got sick, Daddy left the nursing to Mother, but he kept close watch to see whether it was anything serious.

When we made good grades or received recognitions, we would get a hug or a pat on the back.

When I went forward during a revival meeting to acknowledge my faith in Christ, he wasn’t there to see it because he wasn’t much into church in my pre-college years.  But he was visibly moved when we came home and my older sister told him and Mother, “Lawrence professed this morning.”

When any of us got recognition in school, he and Mother were proud. When I was in high school plays, he was there. When I graduated from high school, they were there.  

When I publicly declared my sense of calling to the ministry, he expressed his joy, and he was there to hear my first “sermon,” all three minutes of it.  When I started to college to study for the ministry, he told me he was proud of me as he apologized for having no money to spare that he could give for financial support.

He was on the edge of tears when I told them I was going to the seminary in Kentucky, rather than the one much closer by in Fort Worth.

Both he and Mother readily came to love Pansy, with good reason.  They were always glad to see us back for visits, and they loved our sons.  The last time I saw Daddy alive, he was heavily sedated and in and out of wakefulness.  Shortly after I arrived, when Mother said, “Lawrence is here,” his very last words to me were a question just before he sank back into sleep: “How are Russell and Jonathan?”

Today, thirty-five years after his last Father’s Day, I think of positive examples he left me:

• A deep desire for honesty — even though it often cost him a job because he was too quick to speak his mind

• A determination to work hard — leaving me in the dust when it comes to manual dexterity

• An unembarrassed, unapologetic love for his wife — often finding ways to get her small gifts, a box of handkerchiefs or inexpensive perfume for no special occasion

 • A love for his children -- even though it may not find expression often enough

So, though he and I didn’t often say it in words to each other when he was alive, I’ll say it now:
 I love you, Daddy.