oblige. Those who do replant pine, which grows to harvestable size years be-
fore deciduous trees. Thus pine cover in the South expands yet further, far
beyond fall lines, past the piedmonts and prairies into the hill country. In
such country, generations of local, family-sized sawmillers, often the back-
bones of rural communities, find themselves without mature hardwood to
cut and sell and with grim prospects for the coming generation.
Finally we come to the old plantation heartlands: the red clay piedmonts,
the blackland prairies, and the deltas. It was here, during the s, that
sharecropping ended and that plantations, after generations of functional
subdivision, were recentralized in a new regime of mechanization closely
resembling big agriculture in the West. Then, during the s, cotton cul-
ture suddenly returned to many parts of the South, from southeastern Vir-
ginia out to Texas, following introduction of an effective new boll weevil
pesticide. Cotton had been abandoned for so long in the northeasternmost
sectors of its renewed domain that no one alive during the s could
remember what a harvesttime field looked like. Maybe the most bizarre
aspect of cotton’s revival appeared in Southampton County, Virginia, the
site in of the antebellum South’s best-remembered slave rebellion,
named after its leader, Nat Turner. About , a black farm laborer named
Turner was photographed driving a cotton-harvesting machine belonging
to a powerful white planter, not far from Courtland, the county seat once
called Jerusalem and the objective of Nat Turner and his men. No worker in-
surrections have been reported; on the contrary, Southampton and neigh-
boring counties produced such bumper crops that regional gin companies
were backed up so far that planters dumped truckloads onto the runways at
Franklin’s airport, to wait their turn at the gins. More gins were soon built,
and Franklin’s little airport was at last cleared for aircraft.
A few folks in revived cotton country worried about the new pesticide,
which is applied aerially. Mostly they were relieved to have a substitute for
tobacco, which had come upon hard times, and peanuts, which had failed
too often. The earth seemed peaceful again, especially around Thanks-
giving. The cotton is in and there are traces of ‘‘snow’’ along roadsides and
in the fields. It is really cotton, of course—the debris that escaped from the
harvesters or blew from trucks—but festive in a way, if one can forget the
pesticide residues.^13
tMore typically, however, the former plantation South is no longer rec-
ognizable as such. In the sprawling Georgia lower piedmont, the old