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Memories of Golde Dicks Markham (1996) Golde Markham Dicks 19/125

One day when they were in the cotton fields, I went into the old house where their
bedding was and saw a pistol on one of the beds. It scared me. I got out of there real quick.
They would finish picking in a couple of weeks, and then Pa would hitch up two-horse

wagons and take them back to Lake City.
They improved the short cotton to a long cotton. Pa planted a small area right in front
of the house. But the long cotton didn’t yield as muchcotton per plant as the short cotton

did; however, it wasn’t as backbreaking to pick.
Pa hauled the cotton to Lake City to sell. As I got older, my parents expected me to
pick cotton in the fields every day. I hated that job. I would pick, wipe the sweat from- my

face, and wish something would come along to prevent the cotton from growing. Well, it
wasn’t no time before the boll weevil took to the cotton—and those boll weevils did stop the
growing of cotton in Florida.

In the evenings, Pa weighed all the cotton pickers’ cotton sacks. Then he emptied the
sacks in the largest room in the old house. Lots of times when he’d get about a half bag
emptied, rocks would come pouring out of the sack. He would laugh and look them straight

in the eye, put the rocks back in the sacks, and go back to the scales. He then weighed the
rocks and subtracted the weight from their original weight.
Pa piled the cotton into one comer all the way up to the ceiling. I thought it was so

much firn to climb up to the top of the pile and roll down- to the bottom. One day the window
was open, and I rolled out the window and landed on the porch. I traveled pretty fast and got
a good jolt. It made me awfully sick.

One day in 191'8, Pa took the wagon to Lake City. He had the extra sideboards on the
wagon for hauling off cotton. He left early in the morning and returned before sundown with

a wagofr full of furnishings including a piano, a dresser (that Delvey and Cindy Dicks now
own), and a grass rug for the living room.
He also bought a pretty hand-painted kerosene lamp whose globe had a fringe of

colored beads. He brought the bookcase that Tevis and Missy Gay bought at the auction
sale. He also had a little square-topped table with a shelf underneath, now belonging to

Elona (“Renda”) and Lou Kisala. These articles have since been beautifully refinished—but
we were as proud as a peacock of these used furnishings.

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