My now 80-year-old (white) mother picked cotton as a child in Texas. She always told me about how heavy the long sack was and how the bolls pricked her fingers.
My grandmother, deceased since 1965, picked cotton in South Carolina and I remember seeing her do it as a 4 year old child — along with her oldest daughter, now deceased, my other, still living, and a couple of cousins, still living. My grandmother was born in 1888. In upper S. Carolina one saw practically no one but whites picking cotton in the waning days of cotton in the 1940s and early 1950s on small farms.