Cotton Symbol in The Warmth of Other Suns

For Ida Mae Gladney, cotton transforms from a sign of poverty, Jim Crow, and repression into a symbol of freedom and her own identity. In her youth, she works as a sharecropper picking cotton, and so the plant defines her life in many ways. She needs to pick 100 pounds per day, a nearly impossible quantity for her, in order to keep afloat. Little known to her, cotton is the foundation of the Southern economy. Indeed, the need to produce it helps explain the longevity of slavery in the South—as well as the slavery-like labor system of sharecropping. Thus, at the beginning of the book, cotton represents the lack of true freedom in Ida Mae’s life.

But at the end of the book, when Ida Mae returns to her native Chickasaw County with Isabel Wilkerson, cotton comes to represent just the opposite. At one point, Ida Mae asks Wilkerson to pull the car over so they can pick a few buds of cotton—just for fun. Wilkerson realizes that Ida Mae isn’t picking the cotton just to relive her youth, but also to show herself what she has overcome. She has come full circle: she managed to leave and live a better life so that now, when she returns to Mississippi, she can pick cotton for pleasure and not for work. In fact, cotton blankets the Mississippi landscape—just like snow in Chicago—and so Ida Mae’s cotton picking also comes to represent her ability to maintain social, emotional, and spiritual ties with her home even as she pursues better opportunities elsewhere.

Cotton Quotes in The Warmth of Other Suns

The The Warmth of Other Suns quotes below all refer to the symbol of Cotton. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:

Above her was an entire economy she could not see but which ruled her days and determined the contours of her life. There were bankers, planters, merchants, warehouse clerks, fertilizer wholesalers, seed sellers, plow makers, mule dealers, gin owners. A good crop and a high price made not much improvement to the material discomforts of Ida Mae’s existence but meant a planter’s wife could “begin to dream of a new parlor carpet and a piano.” […] On Wall Street, there were futures and commodities traders wagering on what the cotton she had yet to pick might go for next October. There were businessmen in Chicago needing oxford shirts, socialites in New York and Philadelphia wanting lace curtains and organdy evening gowns. Closer to home, closer than one dared to contemplate, there were Klansmen needing their white cotton robes and hoods.

Related Characters: Isabel Wilkerson (speaker), Ida Mae Brandon Gladney

Related Symbols: Cotton

Page Number and Citation: 97-98

Explanation and Analysis:

We cross a gravel road with cotton on either side of it. “That cotton’s loaded,” Ida Mae said, her eyes growing big. “Let’s go pick some.”

“You sure that’s alright?” I ask. “That’s somebody’s cotton. What if they see us?”

“They not gon’ mind what little bit we pick,” she says, pushing open the passenger door.

She jumps out and heads into the field. She hasn’t picked cotton in sixty years. It’s as if she can’t wait to pick it now that she doesn’t have to. It’s the first time in her life that she can pick cotton of her own free will.

Related Characters: Ida Mae Brandon Gladney (speaker), Isabel Wilkerson (speaker)

Related Symbols: Cotton

Page Number and Citation: 517

Explanation and Analysis:

Cotton Symbol Timeline in The Warmth of Other Suns

The timeline below shows where the symbol Cotton appears in The Warmth of Other Suns. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.

...the northeastern hills of Mississippi. When she’s little, her father, Joseph Brandon, struggles to grow cotton and raise hogs on a parcel of depleted land. Ida Mae is no good at... (full context)

...her new husband, George Gladney. They live in a ramshackle wooden cabin and work Pearson’s cotton from sunrise to after dark. Like most sharecroppers, George and Ida Mae keep half of... (full context)

Decision, Consequence, and Regret Theme Icon

The benchmark for cotton pickers is 100 pounds a day—or 7,000 cotton buds. The work is backbreaking and monotonous.... (full context)

Ida Mae wears burlap dresses because she can’t afford clothes made of the same cotton she picks. George’s family sharecrops on the Pearson plantation, too, and his niece teaches Ida... (full context)

...When he can, George joins Babe and Reuben Blye, the only Black foremen. Like with cotton, fruit pickers are paid by weight, so they have all kinds of tricks to improve... (full context)

...northern recruiters, publications like The Chicago Defender, and the boll weevil (a beetle that devastated cotton crops). But in reality, migrants were just making an informed decision to find better work... (full context)

...man named Eddie Earvin leaves the Mississippi Delta in 1963. He has worked as a cotton and spinach picker since the age of five. One day, he cuts his finger and... (full context)

...on the assembly line at the vast Campbell Soup factory. It’s as monotonous as picking cotton, but it’s also indoors and stable. He avoids the racial conflicts that plague many Chicago... (full context)

...After Mr. Edd Pearson’s death in 1945, a planter named Willie Jim takes over his cotton plantation and runs it with sharecropper labor until the mid-1960s. Otherwise, the remaining Black residents... (full context)

...ago. Wilkerson goes with her. They drive into Chickasaw County, past bales and fields of cotton. At one point, Ida Mae gets out of the car and picks some of it,... (full context)

...a dilapidated old shack that may or may not have been Miss Theenie’s, a new cotton-picking machine, and many of Ida Mae’s old friends. Most haven’t seen her in 60 years, but... (full context)

...end of the Great Migration. It’s snowing outside, which is as normal in Chicago as cotton is in Mississippi. (full context)

...debated how much factors like Jim Crow, lynching, the boll weevil pest crisis, and new cotton harvesting machines influenced migrants’ decisions. While none of these factors correlates perfectly with migration statistics,... (full context)

Cotton Symbol Analysis

Cotton Quotes in The Warmth of Other Suns

Cotton Symbol Timeline in The Warmth of Other Suns