There was a moment last Sunday afternoon where old words became new again. Really new. The words affected me a lot differently than the first time I heard them so many decades ago. On this day, they became seismic. 

They painted a clearer picture in my mind that both saddened me and urged me to take a few people on victory laps to society’s applause. 

It all happened in a little rural Black Baptist church in the north Louisiana town of Delhi.

My wife Eva, a native of the town, was speaking at the funeral of her aunt “Dut.”

She explained how she and “Dut,” who was the same age, grew up as sharecropper daughters on a plantation.

In telling the congregation of her childhood years with her aunt, my wife said, “We would get up early in the morning and go pick cotton together.”

Those last three words, “pick cotton together.”

I knew that was part of her life, but speaking those words out loud on Sunday blew the doors open.

The impact of hearing that phrase in a conversation of two or three people, versus out loud in a church setting, was totally different. One was like a pipe dripping, the latter like a wall of water crashing into a house. 

Her comment was followed by a couple of “Amens” from folks who apparently remembered their youth doing the same thing. And, there was a specific outpouring from a woman who simultaneously raised her hand and nodded her head, a combination that means “Tell it” in the old Black Baptist church. 

Everything seemed so different as my wife went on to talk about her aunt and their life. It was difficult to get that vision out of my head of them picking cotton. This was like hearing it for the first time and watching it in a movie. 

It was so matter-of-fact, as if she were saying “My aunt I and would play ball,"or “My aunt and I would go to the Friday night dance” or “We would go to a movie.”

But to say so nonchalantly, “She and I would go pick cotton.”

One other thing about sharecropping. The sharecropper family worked the property of the landowner generally without pay. The family lived in a house owned by the property owner and got food and other things on credit from the owner. 

At the end of the year, the owner would assess what is owed to him and would determine how much the family would get. Generally, the amount was enough to keep the family indebted to him and to continue to work on the property.

Add to that, sharecropper children could not attend school until the crops were in, generally a month or more after school had started. How they caught up in school is a testament in itself to them and their teachers. 

Now comes the other part of what made Sunday so special.

The people that were “amening,” especially the woman who turned out to be a childhood friend of my wife and a sharecropper, were dressed really well. They were in nice suits, dresses, impressive jewelry and other fine attire. You did not see "sharecropper" on them.

I wish I could have had dozens of children and their parents, who are scrambling to make it today, in that church on Sunday. If they could have heard those words “picked cotton” and see how those people who said “Amen” had fought and scraped their way into better lives. 

Maybe they could see that there are chances out here even when the storms of life seem so overwhelming, even for little sharecropper children who had no real vision of how bad they had it, nor how they could change it. 

I feel the grit and sheer will of those sharecropper children and their parents is saluted by an unknown writer who said, “A river cuts through a rock not because of its power, but its persistence.” 

And, the church said, “Tell it!”

Email Edward Pratt, a former newspaperman, at epratt1972@yahoo.com.