Mart Payne Drags a Bag Bigger than Himself
Hine captured this image of Mart Payne at work, peering stoically from behind a large floppy hat he used for sun protection at his cotton picking job. At age five, Mart Payne worked in cotton fields in Comanche County, Oklahoma, picking around ten to twenty pounds of cotton each day. His bag, sized for an adult, drags along the ground beside the boy.
Mart’s mother told Hine, “Mart, he haint old ‘nuff to go to school much, but he kin pick his twenty pounds a day.” Children could pick about ten or fifteen pounds on average. Cotton fields in the United States had been full of child slave labor before the Civil War, and continued long after. If children earned wages, they were small, or based on how much cotton they could pick. And this practice continues, with forced child labor occurring today in cotton fields around the world.
