COTTON MAGIC

In the south, cotton planters' profits depended on the volume of the fall-winter picking season. By the combined efforts of men, women and children, slaves averaged 100 pounds a day, but were driven hard to produce more, they were also offered bonuses - tobacco, molasses, calico, liquor, etc.
Likewise, picking contests were held, and whites made bets among themselves as to the outcome - a planter's boast of having harvested the greatest poundage with a given number of slaves was called his 'cotton brag.'

Here are some superstitions regarding cotton:

Cotton enjoyed a different kind of prestige in the eyes of the slaves who worked the plantations. To them, cotton was a source of signs, 'conjure' and folk medicine, based in part on the belief that cotton contained spirits of the dead.

When the cotton was still green, spirits haunted the plants, it was said, but when the crop ripened, the spirits emerged to haunt people and animals, continuing even after the fields were gleaned.

* For example, a story was told that one cold December night, after a heavy snowstorm, some horses were in a cottonfield when the ghosts of long-dead Indians came and mounted them. The next morning, not a horse was alive. They had all been run to death.
This tale may reflect real life observation, because cotton contains a poison from which animals occasionally die, like the horses in the story, gasping, a bloody froth at the mouth, as if they had been ran to death.
The poison, a yellow pigment called 'gossypol,' is present especially in the seed, and sometimes occurs in toxic quantities in processed cottonseed used in livestock feeds.
The same poison in smaller doses was used as a medicine.

* Cotton was chewed as a toothache remedy, and a preparation from it was locally applied for chronic headaches - a use that is still honored to this day in India, cotton's Old World homeland, where the plant was introduced to Africa in antiquity, long before most European whites had ever seen or heard of it.

* Likewise, and again precisely as in India today, Negro slaves used a concoction of of powdered cottonroot bark as a stimulant and it was used to induce miscarriage. Perhaps by association with these owers, cotton was at once credited with aphrodisiac virtues and blamed for conjugal unhappiness.

* Sometimes a young couple would keep a boll to symbolize their marriage.
If the boll turned white, the marriage would be successful, and if it changed to a creamy color (meaning the gossypol content was high), the couple would soon seperate.

* To insure that they would never lack money, a newlywed couple had to sleep on a cotton mattress on their wedding night.

* Bolls were a source of much other procnostication concerning sex and marriage.
If an unmarried girl found a twin boll, one of her suitors was on his way to claim her.

* If a newlywed couple found a twin boll, the birth of twins could be expected within the year.

* It was taboo to use a cotton tablecloth on one's wedding day - crippled offspring would result, it was believed.

* It was also said that good luck was bound to come to anyone who made love during daylight hours in a cottonfield at harvest time.
This belief relates to the universal idea that sex in the fields promoted good crop groth and general welfare, and anyone preforming the feat was likely to be young, vigorous, and bold - a better-than-average candidate for good luck!

* Associated with this was the notion that the plant possessed powers of attraction, not only for people, but fish could be lured with it!
So, when going fishing, black fishermen would always carry 20 dried cottonseeds and place them at the water's edge, to insure a bite.

* In slavery days, it was dangerous to find a boll with no cotton inside, because some of that person's kin would be sold before nightfall, unless they dropped everything they were doing and counted slowly to 10.

* It was widely believed that anyone who dreamed of a cottonfield would shortly be compelled to pick cotton.
By the outbreak of the Civil War, several million Negroes in the U. S. South were obliged to do just that.