Like Cotton
May 25 2024
She reached down and adjusted the fold of her soft tan cotton skirt. The skirt had a scalloped edge and was embroidered with tan thread to match the fabric. The shirt she wore, was cotton as well, a navy blue loose fitting shirt with silver buttons, lined up down the front, as well as one on each shoulder at the end of a loop, as if to hold the folded cuff in place. But the button was just decorative, not functional. She knew the difference, because she knew how to sew.
The cotton fabric was natural, and allowed a person to breathe, walk and move through the day without overheating. It endured, and yet it was practical and inexpensive. It could even endure over the course of a lifetime.
She felt the skirt again with her hand and recalled how she had learned quite a bit about cotton and she closed her eyes and rubbed the fabric between her thumb and index finger. In that moment, she was again, back in time, surrounded by cotton… and far south, in the little Texas town she grew up in near the border.
She should know more than most people about cotton, she thought, because she had been around it since she was young…She had worked in the cotton industry when she was barely out of high school and during junior college.
In her mind’s eye, she could see herself walking up to her first job, a place she did not have to drive to get to. It was a place where her mother, with one of her older brothers who drove, would come pick her up when she was done, sharp at five pm, unless of course she walked, which she did most times. She would leave from the sprawling house on 421 Levee street where she lived with her parents and their family of eight children, and walk through the roses and flowers along the front path. Her mother loved flowers, and she also someday hoped to open a tea shop.
Her mother, Sarah, who did not drive herself, had nine children, starting her family as a young girl, at only seventeen, when she got married. Sarah and her sister Lidia, had been raised by two devout aunts, who had managed to use religious faith to serve as an adequate guide for raising children of family members who needed help. The girls were raised like little princesses but they were orphans without their original parents.
This mindset of close supervision and moral integrity helped to guard the two girls purity, and ensure their obedience to good, and success.
Once Sarah married, the young couple moved into the top floor in the home with her aunt Cleta who lived nearby and had room to help provide housing. Sarah lost her first baby, which must have been hard for her, which was when her aunt Cleta had stepped in and helped her learn how to cope with that loss, as well as how to cook, clean, and raise a happy family.
She thought to herself how she had loved her aunt Cleta as a mentor for her mom, and she also was her namesake. The progeny of her mom had now grown to almost two hundred members. She thought about this and she wondered if her mom Sarah, had worn a wedding dress and if it had been cotton.
Cotton could be made into some very elaborate dresses, even back in the day. She did not know about the dress, because she had never seen a photo of her mother on her wedding day. Her dad Ralph, had proposed to her mother, probably on the front porch swing of the two aunts who raised Sarah, and had gone to get permission from her mothers brother, one of the original Campioni’s who had arrived into the USA at port Isabel.
Sarah’s father had brought her and her two sisters here, as well as her brothers, but no one knew what had happened to Sarah’s mother. The Father could not take care of the two girls which was why they had been taken to his sisters in Brownsville.
She heard the Viennese music playing on WCPE which matched her vivid memory of those aunts, because the music that they played was such.
She turned in her thought back to the cotton industry, and she mentally walked down the street she lived on, past the flowers and a few blocks away until she had arrived at the large and impressive El Jardin Hotel, which housed the Cotton Exchange on the street level where she had worked.
Like many other Hotels, the El Jardin provided space on it’s ground floor for businesses and that was where the Cotton Exchange was.
She could see the brick building, as she walked in and could see the stairs leading to the boss’s office which took up the whole upper floor. Downstairs was her office in the front, and the accountant’s office was across the hall and to the back.
The accountant was a quiet man and kept to himself mostly, and the boss man was short and always seemed busy, not looking at her at all when she was doing her job, which was to post stock prices on the board as the ticker tape changed. She posted about every hour as well as doing a variety of other tasks.
There were always men coming in and out of the building to see what cotton prices were doing, whether they were up or were down. The Cotton exchange was a busy place and the cotton industry in Brownsville was growing daily.
She worked hard but when she was not working, she would sometimes go to the beach with her friend Rita or her friend Alicia from Villa Maria High school and sometimes she would also go with her family.
When her brothers and sisters wanted the family to go to the beach, her younger sister Marie was the one who would be sent to ask their dad if they could go to the beach for the day because the children knew he would never refuse her. “Go tell mamma to pack and we can try to leave in an hour” he would say.
They would pack hot dogs and sticks to cook them on a fire. They always had a huge watermelon and marshmallows to eat after cooking (and burning) them on the fire. Her pop had an old coffee pot that he would use to perk coffee on the fire pit and the family stopped at the store on the way out of town to pick up a great big bag of sopapillas, or Mexican sweet rolls.
Her mother who never put on a bathing suit, would eventually pull her dress up to her knees and wade into the water while the rest of the family jumped and played in the ocean. It was a fun day at Boca Chica beach, a beach they could drive up on instead of taking the ferry to Padre Island.
But this day she had to work, and she walked the several blocks down Levee Street from her home on 421 E. Levee to the El Jardin and the Cotton Exchange. When her boss told her she was going to need to work late, she had not known what to say, so she did what she always did, and called her mom.
“Find out HOW LONG he wants you to work late” her mom had said, and then “call me back when you find out”.
She smiled as she thought about how great her mom’s instincts were, back then, for an innocent girl who had gotten married at seventeen and had nine children, who was raised as an orphan by her two aunts.
After talking to her mom, she had gone back up the stairs, to that large office and repeated that question to her boss. Without looking up, her boss had said she would need to be working about three extra hours. So she had gone back down the stairs to call her mom and report. Her mom had answered immediately, and said “ok Eight o’clock is when he says you will be done and that is fine”.
At seven thirty, before she was even done with her office work, her mom and her big brother were there in the family car, at the entrance to the building, waiting for her to be done. They were leaving nothing to chance. And so it was that she was picked up immediately because she left right on time, at eight, even though she usually left by walking home at five pm sharp.
She had never really paid much attention to her boss, she thought, but knew he was married to a wealthy lady. The boss’s wife probably had millions of dollars, she thought, maybe even was a heiress or something.
After working late, the next day she was back at work as usual, wearing her cotton long fitted skirt belted with a white blouse, paired with black heels. Cotton was the fabric much of what she wore and stored, in her little room that she shared with her sister. The room was small and always had to be shared because the family was large, so she never had her own bed, except when she was spending the night at her aunt Cleta’s.
Those nights were a real treat, because she was able to sleep all by herself in a beautiful canopy bed with curtains around it and little steps that led up for someone small to use to climb up on.
She had felt like a princess every time she stayed at her Aunt Cleta’s home. She smoothed the skirt as she walked and thought how each thing she wore to her job, was exactly appropriate for work attire, as she had a noticeable role placing stock prices on cards, on the large board.
This day when she arrived, her boss had taken her aside and, this time, instead of asking her to work late, he told her he needed to meet her after work. He told her that he would have a judge with him as well. He had asked her specifically, if she would be able and willing to meet him and the judge, after work.
The meeting was to happen in a weird and unusual place, and she had not known what to do. She had said ok at the time, because she did not know what else to do. But that night, when she was in her room, going to bed early, as was the routine of her family, she had wanted to tell someone that she had been asked to meet her boss after work, but was afraid to do so.
“Come stand with me by the window” she said to her younger sister, the same one who would get their dad to take them all to the beach, and when her sister asked “why”, she said, “oh just because it is a beautiful night and I wanted you to look out the window with me”.
When they got the the window sill, they could see a car slowly driving by the window, multiple times, the same car, a dark sedan, which made repeated passes by the window in the dark.
The girls scampered back to their beds and went to sleep, yet she had a really hard time falling asleep because she did not know what would happen to her the next day at work. She had said she would go but she had been afraid to go. Maybe it was her instinct, like the instinct of her mom, speaking wisdom to her.
The next day she wore another light blue, crisp cotton blouse, again belted at the waist, and a long black below the knee skirt with low black heels. Her boss called her to his office.
“Where were you last night?” he asked.
“You said you would come and you did not come!”
“I was there with the judge and I waited a long time.”
“You agreed when I asked but then you did not do as you agreed”. “You need to tell me why you did not come”.
His face was angry and his words were sharp and biting and he was staring right at her. Her eyes closed as she remembered that scene as if it had just happened yesterday.
She thought about her mom, and how her mom must have had a sixth sense about this situation with her boss, which was why she had come early to pick her daughter up, with reinforcements, the time before, when her boss had asked her to work late.
Her mom must have had a sense that something was “off”. She also had a sense of something off. Her “sense” was not one that came from dating experience because she only went out in groups, with her friends. Her “sense” came from the oddness of behavior that came from her boss.
She had no idea that he was even interested in her because he never looked at her, but in spite of that, she knew that if she had gone to meet him in the dark at that odd place he had wanted her to go, nothing good would have happened.
She could not of course say any of this to him so she had burst into tears.
“You need to answer me right now” he had said, practically yelling at her.
She had run out of his office bawling and run back down the stairs.
She was met at the bottom of the stairs by the man who was the accountant.
“Come here, what happened” he said. “What’s wrong” he asked?
That’s when she told him that her boss had asked her to go somewhere with him last night with a judge, and she did not go and so now her boss was probably going to fire her. She was sobbing, tears running down her face.
The accountant had patted her on the shoulder and comforted her, telling her everything would be ok. He had gone up the stairs after that, marching determinedly, unlike the quiet “to himself” man she had thought he was. She watched him go all the way to the top and then he firmly closed the door behind. He was in there a while. She realized he was a friend. He cared about her well being. He had integrity, like her father.
She had not gotten fired.
She had not had to quit her job. Her virtue was intact.
Her boss had never looked at her in a weird way ever again. Her purity had not been damaged or abused and her boss had stayed married to his wife, his honor hopefully restored.
Like the fabric of cotton, there was the fabric of society and she was living in it. That fabric that her parents had started to weave was strong and now that she was weaving it for herself, it had not ripped under pressure and was not stained by things that could not touch it and did not belong.
A family that abides and lives, according to God’s laws will flourish she thought…and recognized that almost all of her siblings had gone on and were still married to their original mates, and that each had celebrated the birth of many children, now more than 180 strong.
She had learned a lot, with cotton and was appreciated for the work that she did well, as she continued to do her job, without compromise, and without evil.
She remembered listening to a priest at mass one time, give a sermon about a cotton quilt and how in life, a person might only see one patch of the quilt, and might not understand why some things happen, but how God sees the entire quilt, front and back. The point he made was that even when someone cannot see the bigger picture, God has a beautiful master plan for each person.
She smiled, and opened her eyes and was still surrounded by cotton, her tablecloth, the napkins she had fringed herself years ago, and even the dishtowels in her kitchen and the soft thick towels in her bathroom. Like cotton, she had endured. Like cotton, her beliefs were tightly woven into her being and had intrinsic value.
She had married, and had five little girls. She had seventeen grandchildren, and eight great grandchildren and they were beautiful, strong and good.
She also still was, someone useful, strong, pure, good and natural, like cotton…
