High Cotton: Four Seasons in the Mississippi Delta [Hardcover]

Gerry Helferich (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 5, 2007

Combining an engaging personal narrative with a strong sense of American history, "High Cotton" details a year in the life of a modern-day cotton farmer. The rich, flat topsoil of the Mississippi Delta has seen both astonishing economic production and some of the most tragic history in America's past. Contested ground since European explorers first set foot there three centuries ago, it turned out to have the ideal climate for growing cotton, a crop that seemed destined to a marginal role in America's economy until technology and politics combined to make it one of the driving forces behind the bloodiest war in the country's history. Its legacy echoed in the racial divide of the century that followed. Against this historical backdrop, Gerard Helferich traces the life of a modern cotton farmer, exploring the traditions of growing cotton that have endured since ancient times - and the current forces that threaten to drive small farmers from the land. "High Cotton" spends a year with small-time farmer Zack Killebrew and his family, recording the annual cycle of planting, cultivation and harvest, as Zack teeters between the promise of a six-figure payoff and the ever-present peril of financial ruin. Combining an engaging personal narrative and a strong sense of time and place, "High Cotton" is a story with deep roots in American history.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Helferich (Humboldt's Cosmos) chronicles in exhaustive detail a year on a small cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta. Working alongside his wife's first cousin, Zack Killebrew, who farms 1,000 acres of cotton in the town of Tchula, he observes every aspect of the cotton-growing business—machinery, planting procedures, irrigation, harvesting, weeds and insects and the chemicals used to control them. He even visits the spinning mill where Zack's cotton is processed. His matter-of-fact approach does not make for exciting reading, but he paints a sympathetic picture of Zack, a practical, resilient man who must contend with the vagaries of the weather, unreliable hired hands, broken machinery and the realization that the government subsidies that keep him going may soon vanish. At his best, Helferich provides valuable insights into the historical and cultural significance of cotton in the United States and the implications of the transition from slave labor to the sharecropping system, a more insidious method of binding the workers to the land. When mechanical pickers replaced hand labor, many sharecroppers flocked into cities, he observes, leaving the Delta region with a continuing legacy of poverty and racial inequality. Zack treats his hired hands fairly, but, as the book makes clear, not much has changed in the past half century for the children of the Delta's black sharecroppers. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Weather, weather, weather—it's pretty much all about the weather when you're a cotton planter in the Mississippi Delta. That's the area writer and editor Helferich calls home, and for a year he dogged one particular cotton planter, Zach Killebrew. He looked over Zach's shoulder—well, stood at his side—during an entire growing season, from spring to spring again, and got down on paper all the details of the hard life anyone interested in raising cotton is agreeing to take on. Interesting facts are the foundation of Helferich's riveting and ironically inspiring account: since colonial days, economic, social, and political life in the Delta has been tightly wrapped up in the cotton industry, and 80 percent of Mississippi's cotton is still grown there. Zach has been involved in it for 30 years, and not only his dedication but also his gut wisdom about the cycles of nature are to be marveled at. The history of cotton cultivation, the tractor as a farm implement, and sharecropping are all topics explored for the grateful reader. Hooper, Brad
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 328 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint; 1 edition (June 5, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582433534
• ISBN-13: 978-1582433530
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #504,184 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Gerard Helferich is the author of Stone of Kings: In Search of the Lost Jade of the Maya, as well as the highly praised Humboldt's Cosmos: Alexander von Humboldt and the Latin American Journey That Changed the Way We See the World and the award-winning High Cotton: Four Seasons in the Mississippi Delta. Before turning to writing in 2002, he was for 25 years an editor and publisher at several houses in New York, including Doubleday, Simon & Schuster, and John Wiley. He lives in Yazoo City, Mississippi, and San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, with his wife, the writer Teresa Nicholas. Visit his website at GerardHelferich.com.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Who would ever think nonfiction about farming would be interesting?, August 15, 2007

By 

RobRoy (Lakeview, Arkansas) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: High Cotton: Four Seasons in the Mississippi Delta (Hardcover)

High Cotton is a fine book, enjoyable and interesting reading. It is hard to believe a non-fiction description of cotton planting could be recreational reading but the author pulls off the feat; blending descriptions of the actual farming activities, flash-backs to the role of cotton in American history, the financial pressure planters deal with, to the after-work social activities of the planter. You feel you know the people, feel the hot sun, hear the equipment, ride in the truck and taste the cold beer when the planters take a day off.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Letters from an American Farmer, December 7, 2008

By 

Philip W. Henry (Rialto, CA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: High Cotton: Four Seasons in the Mississippi Delta (Paperback)

High Cotton: Four Seasons in the Mississippi Delta
I've been fascinated by the Mississippi Delta since reading "Rising Tide:
The Great Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America" by John Barry.
The ways this relatively isolated and incredibly fertile region have influenced America are diverse and wide-ranging: literature and music (The Blues and Faulkner); political and legal (the Civil Rights Movement;Parchman State Prison) and agricultural (cotton and more cotton) To say "High Cotton" is a book about raising cotton is like saying "Moby Dick" is about hunting for whales. There are the facts, of course, like the fascinating history of the Cotton Weevil and the gradual elimination of DDT because of environmental considerations raised by Rachel Carson. But there is much more here: the Southern male culture of bird hunting and catfish "noodling," Bud Lite and Nascar; and the lives of the black sharecroppers, basically unchanged since the Civil War.
This is a liesurely, fond look at a vanishing way of life.

Suggestions for Further Reading:
The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity
Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice
RISING TIDE: THE GREAT MISSISSIPPI FLOOD OF 1927 AND HOW IT CHANGED AMERICA

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Summer closing over the Mississippi Delta.", May 8, 2010

By 

Kurt Grussendorf (Pensacola, Florida) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: High Cotton: Four Seasons in the Mississippi Delta (Paperback)

Helferich weaves a fine tale of life in the Mississippi Delta from the perspective of cotton farmer Zack Killebrew. It is nearly the Moby Dick of cotton culture--taking you from planting to ginning to weaving the white gold that has proved itself a blessing to a few and a curse to many. From descriptions of "ice cream" soft brown soil to eradicating the weevil--with excursions to Horseshoe Lake to noodle for catfish while avoiding water moccasins--big around and about as long as a man's arm--and the deer camp that resembles something out of Tobacco Road--not sure the denizens of the Delta would appreciate that comparison--but the author has personal roots in the Delta and makes every effort to understand the culture.

The foray into civil rights marching in Selma and on to the weaving and dying in Georgia seem to take the reader a bit far from the Delta landscape. Helferich's descriptions of the relationship between Zach and his black hired hands is enough to let the reader know of the subtleties that exist in the relationship between black and white--the era of slavery and feudalistic tenant farming still haunts the land.

And cotton itself may soon be in the position of merely haunting as soybeans, corn, and even forestry replace it--all being rushed by the cut-off of government subsidies. The Delta continues to fascinate with the heat like a lid closing over the flat landscape, old sharecropper cabins now smothered in Kudzu vine, and some of the richest soil on earth that once grew giant trees and sheltered bears and panthers. And as its population dwindles and agriculture becomes more tenuous it may return to its primeval roots someday. Hunters, ecotourism, and Blues fans may sustain it after all is said and done.