Close my eyes, there it all still is. Everything that needs me tending to it. Children, chickens, cooking. Cotton ready with rain coming. Lord don’t let the mold get started. No end to reminders of what has to be done. Even the light from snow on plowed fields wakes me, thinking it’s time to pick. Dreams of my fingers looking like boll burrs, moving fast.

Rest is coming, I know. But I don’t see how it can last like the preacher says. Can’t see how joy can make worry never come back, ’less I forget everything has need of me. And if I forget that, what’s being saved?

Maybe it’s just the once in a long while kind of rest, but it lasts. Sleep coming quick and deep, because all you had to do got done that day.

Better get up off this bench. Nothing going to wait for me to not be tired.

Cabin in the Cotton (oil on cotton, mounted on Masonite, ca. 1931-37)
is held by the Art Institute of Chicago (reference number 1990.417):
https://www.artic.edu/artworks/111617/cabin-in-the-cotton

Image is designated open access by the AIC and appears here
under CC0 (Creative Commons Zero) universal license.

Publisher’s Note:

Links above and below were retrieved on 13 April 2025.

Horace Pippin (1888–1946) was an African-American self-taught painter and disabled veteran who had served during the first World War in the 369th Infantry Regiment, an all-Black group of soldiers which became known as the Harlem Hellfighters. Pippin “painted a range of themes, including scenes inspired by his service in World War I, landscapes, portraits, and biblical subjects. Some of his best-known works address the U.S.’s history of slavery and racial segregation” (source: Wikipedia).

Some of Pippin’s drawings are included in Bryan Martin’s Perspectives article at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (26 July 2023), “Considering Horace Pippin (How has art history overlooked the crucial role disability played in Pippin’s painting?)”:
https://www.metmuseum.org/perspectives/considering-horace-pippin

See also Pippin’s painting School Studies and his biography at the National Gallery of Art: https://www.nga.gov/collection/artist-info.25.html

Bio: Daryl Scroggins