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head, would straighten up in the rows and begin to speak to Jesus in the rising dust.
    No one was quite sure what to do then, in the middle of a field, when a woman was getting right with God.
    “She’d just break out praying, and we stopped and listened,” Floria said.
    He loved me ‘ere I knew Him
All my love is due Him
And plunged me to victory
Beneath the cleansing flood
    ___
    The big truck came to get them in early morning. At the field, they climbed out into a chill, moisture beading on the bolls. The air always smelled of snuff and Juicy Fruit and the lunches they carried to the field in brown-paper bags: fried bologna sandwiches with mustard, leftover biscuits filled with cold potatoes and fatback, peanut butter and saltine crackers. A few sipped cold coffee from glass jars and fed their babies from bottles full of diluted canned milk.
    The old women picked in impractical dresses—they owned no pants, considering such dress un-Christian—and carried yesterday’s wounds on their shins, fine, razor-like slashes of the briars, now dried into thin, red lines. They wore bonnets and used wooden ice cream spoons to fill their lips with snuff before they slung on their sack. Old men rolled one last cigarette. They smoked it down to a nub, wet their thick fingers and pinched it out, leaving the shreds of paper and tobacco to blow through the field.
    The younger women, like Floria, picked in pants and sneakers and wore long sleeves to keep stalks and burs from cutting them up. She always picked beside her friend and sister-in-law, Jewel, sometimes with their children. But on this day the children were in school, leaving Floria and Jewel unencumbered.
    That day, the sun rose on a field owned by a farmer named Naugher, an honest, hard-working man who never acted as if he was better than them. He did not sit in the shade or the cab of his truck, figuring his profits. He picked in the cotton beside them. He paid two dollars for every one hundred pounds, the going rate, and some of them would work all day for that.
    This field was different from others they picked. Its rows went on, it seemed, for miles. Naugher called the pickers around him to give them their sacks, and to make them a promise that, in all the years men and women had picked his field, he had never had to keep.
    “I don’t expect y’all to finish a row and back,” Naugher told them. “But if y’all can finish one row out there and back, before quitting time, I’ll pay y’all a dollar extry.”
    The pickers didn’t say a word. It was like being promised a slice of the moon if you could knock it down with a rock.
    Then Floria, perhaps the most quiet among them, spoke up.
    “I can do that,” she said.
    She did not mean it to sound like bragging; it’s just that ideas are not real, maybe, until you hang them on the air.
    She weighed one hundred pounds, more or less, and worked chest-high in even short cotton.
    Naugher had seen big men fail, men who moved as if they had wheels under them, and picked as if they had three arms.
    “No,” Naugher said to her, not mean, just matter of fact. “You can’t.”
    He turned and walked away.
    Jewel looked at her friend.
    “Floria, we can’t…”
    “Yes, we can,” Floria said.
    They entered the field about six thirty, side by side.
    Quitting time was when Naugher said it was.
    They worked fast and steady. It did no good to rush faster than their hands could strip the bolls so their hands had to fly over the stalks to keep pace with their feet. They barely talked. They ate cornbread and buttermilk at dinner, the noon meal, stopping just a few minutes. By the afternoon, Jewel was already bone weary, trying to keep up. Sweat soaked them. Red dust and black specks of trash, from the stalks, slicked their faces.
    If Floria was hurting, or exhausted, it was invisible to Jewel.
    “I can’t do no more,” she said.
    “Come on,” Floria said.
    She dragged her friend along by force of will.
    They made the turn in