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
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.
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.
Cotton Symbol Timeline in The Warmth of Other Suns
