Hazeline

It’s 1937 and Hazeline Morrison is a grieving sharecropper’s widow on a cotton farm in Mecklenburg County, North Carolina. She earns a bit of money as a seamstress and does laundry for the landowner’s family in iron pots set over a fire. Other parts of the county have electric power but lines are just being run in this north end. The sharecroppers will not get electricity, but the landowner will, and she fears he will buy an electric washing machine and she will get her hand caught in the wringer.

Two years ago her beloved Joshua died. Now she lives with the fear that Mister Robbins will decide to move a family of workers into her little house. Then what would she do? Where could she go?

Barbara Kidd Lawing lives in North Carolina on property adjacent to where her grandparents owned a cotton farm in the days when across the South cotton was king. She moved back to her family’s farm in the 1990s and often walked on what had been her grandparents’ cotton farm – and each time passed by one remaining very small falling-down sharecroppers’ house.