My Daddy grew up in North Mississippi with a widowed mom, and several siblings, working as a sharecropper. He laughs about the times they'd be sitting down to eat their bag lunches and an old black lady who lived on the edge of the field would call them in for lunch. He said those were the best biscuits he ever ate.
I never knew his family well; they weren't much for gatherings. I knew about 6 cousins of the 15 or so on his side. They were mostly Scots-Irish, with some Cherokee thrown in.
On my Mama's side, her parents were both originally from New Orleans. It was a big Italian-Irish family, I had 39 first cousins, and we got together almost every Sunday afternoon, after dinner, at Granny's house. We're all still pretty close.
During the days I would walk mile after mile, struggling to keep up with "Old Mr. Shelly", who at almost 70 years of age put everyone else to shame. Mr. Shelly always had a ton of stories to tell, and we talked a lot of politics too. (At the time I didn't realize how ridiculously futile it was to try to convert a farm hand in the cotton fields to the Republican cause - I was fighting not only against the "victim mentality", but also against Richard Nixon).
A couple of years later I hung up my hoe to become Joe College, and the "wick bar" and the chemical "Roundup" teamed up to relegate cotton chopping to the pages of history.
These days I guess chopping cotton is what they would call "A job American's won't do" - but somehow my memories of it remain quite fond.