Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I used to work in the cotton fields a lot when I was young. There were a lot of African Americans working out there. A lot of Mexicans - the blacks and the whites and the Mexicans, all out there singing, and it was like an opera in the cotton fields, and I can still hear it in the music that I write and play today.
When I worked picking cotton as a boy with my grandparents, when blacks were moral and hard-working, we loved the country, too. It only makes sense to love the place where you were born - especially the United States of America. But as blacks fell for the lies of socialism and communism, they also fell away from love.
I prefer 100 per cent cotton Ts. They are kinder to lumps and bumps than figure-hugging stretchy Lycra ones and feel nicer against the skin. Extra-long-sleeved T-shirts are a lifesaver for me. I wear them either underneath a shirt with the sleeve pulled out of the cuff, or underneath gypsy tops, tunic tops and waistcoats.
Sometimes I go crazy - get into a mindspace where it doesn't matter what I spend. Like, on impulse, I might buy a $600 Dolce t-shirt, you know, just because it's silk and maybe there's some suede leather detailing. Or two of my favourite hoodies, I don't even know the brand, but they're' very thin soft cotton. $300 apiece!
My grandmother, who picked cotton, and my mom, who picked cotton as a child - my grandmother had a work ethic. She had 13 children that she had to raise and ended up for a time moving into the projects, but because my grandmother had a work ethic, she didn't stay in the projects... that's not how she wanted to raise her children.
Without U.S. independence, North America would have remained a rural, non-industrial breadbasket. Blessed as it was with natural resources, agrarian North America would have supplied cotton and beef and lumber to industrial Britain. America would thus be more like Australia - a nice enough place to live, but no kind of world power.
My grandfather on my dad's side was the first in our family to settle in the U.K. He came from Pakistan on his own in the '60s and worked in a cotton mill in Bolton, earning enough to bring over the rest of his family. My dad, Shah, was only about eight when he came to this country. Like most immigrants, he has a fierce work ethic.
I will not undertake to offer an opinion on the capacity of Hindustan to produce cotton. The region is large, and the soil and climate various, the population great and wages low; but I must be permitted to doubt the success of the experiment of driving us out of the market, though backed and patronized by English capital and energy.
I walked around feeling, in a sense, that people of color, we began at the bottom of a slave ship. We were enslaved; we picked cotton. There was Honest Abe, who wore a top hat and was taller than anyone and who said, 'Enough is enough; slavery must end.' And then, black people could stand up again. But after that, we didn't catch up.
No generation has escaped it - one morning, your skill with the eight-track or the record player or the cotton gin suddenly ceases to impress. It's just one of those inevitable disappointments that come with growing up, like the realization that Santa doesn't exist or the way that music always takes a turn for the worse after you turn 30.
The use of slave women as day workers naturally broke up or made impossible the normal Negro home, and this and the slave code led to a development of which the South was really ashamed and which it often denied, and yet perfectly evident: the raising of slaves in the Border slave states for systematic sale on the commercialized cotton plantations.
I found so many Jews and speculators here trading in cotton, and secessionists had become so open in refusing anything but gold, that I have felt myself bound to stop it. The gold can have but one use - the purchase of arms and ammunition... Of course, I have respected all permits by yourself or the Secretary of the Treasury, but in these new cases (swarms of Jews), I have stopped it.
