As fate would have it, Chris was reading me a chapter from Michael Twitty's brilliant book "The Cooking Gene" on how King Cotton shaped this continent, and notably a couple paragraphs about the opportunity it afforded European immigrants working in northern textile mills. We were on our way home from Christmas with my family and the map app thought we'd avoid traffic by driving through Shelton, Connecticut, a town that I'd never been to, and where my great great grandfather Vicenza "James" Lauriello of Salento, Italy lived and worked dying yarn for over 40 years. These textile mills, including the one that was the engine of my hometown of Willimantic, CT, were built to extract wealth from cotton grown in the Cotton Belt, possibly even Mississippi. In the Mississippi Delta, where cotton bolls still tumble across the highways in the fall, Chris's family harvested this plant for countless generations, first enslaved and then as sharecroppers. His father grew up picking cotton as a sharecropper, while living on an Italian family's land. He was paid to shell peas all day not in cash but in nearly rotten fruits - which you may be surprised to hear they were grateful for, since they never tasted these fruits otherwise. This plant, fluffy (and dangerously pointy) like no other, is medicinal, majestic, and more notably the source of the fabric you are wearing right now, has transformed everything about our landscape, economy, culture, and relationships. It is the reason Chris and I know each other, and the reason it was highly unlikely we'd know each other despite our entwined histories in this country. Cotton (well, really the racist systems created to exploit it for centuries) is also the reason we will spend lifetimes tangling and untangling, learning and relearning how to coexist and to love each other well. @thecookinggene
