In a Field of Cotton: Mississippi River Delta Poems

Inasmuch as the first three of Larry D. Thomas’s eleven full-length poetry collections were largely set in West Texas where he was born and reared, his poetry became associated by many of his readers with the landscapes and people of West Texas and the Trans-Pecos region of the state. Although eleven of his print books, however, contain poems inspired by the Mississippi River Delta, In a Field of Cotton is his first poetry collection dedicated entirely to the Delta region and culture to which Thomas is vitally connected in spirit, emotion and by bloodline. The following is excerpted from his preface to In a Field of Cotton: I am inextricably connected to the Mississippi River Delta in spirit, emotion, and by bloodline. Three of my grandparents, born in western Tennessee around 1880 (my paternal grandfather was born in Texas; his father was born in Mississippi), migrated to west Texas in the late 1890s. They traveled by covered wagon. All four of them worked their entire lives as tenant cotton farmers, although my paternal grandfather was also a mule trader. They plowed the cotton fields with mules, and hand-picked the cotton as soon as it was ready for harvesting. My mother and father, who were thirty-nine and forty years of age, respectively, at the time of my birth, also hand-picked cotton into their late twenties until my father started working at a Mobil service station. From the early years of my childhood, I heard stories about my family’s experiences on the tenant farms, and was fascinated by how they hand-picked cotton much like the black slaves on plantations throughout the American South. These stories made me feel a strong connection to blacks and black culture which I still feel to this day.