Terrell had these paragraphs  --

[... snip ...]
>    The farm allows Twain to have the Tom Sawyer youth intact.  The farm
>exonerates Hannibal. It cleanses Twain's immediate family. It is the alibi.
[... snip ...]
>    I am troubled about what to do with Tom for my own utilitarian reasons.
>I am trying to decide how the story in Hannibal should be told. It has to
>change. How do we keep the fun and mirth, but have the substance and the
>truth at the same time? The real childhood  -- with the financial hardship,
>the deaths of siblings, the omnipresent racism of slave culture, the having
>to go to work at age 11 or 12 -- is fairly bleak. But the themes that you
>literatti and academinistas are so fond of exploring have their genesis in
>the murky pre-creation waters of this wonderfully contradictory spot. There
>has to be a way.

dee c -- but some things may have happened differently on the farm than in
Hannibal.

When I was a teenager in the 1950's, picking cotton was a no-technology,
stoop-labor process no different from picking cotton in the 1850's.  But in
the lunch-time shade of the cotton wagon, there was more racially, genderly,
chronologically blended democracy and fraternity than there was in any
church, courthouse or school in the county [West Tennessee, about 200 miles
south of Hannibal].  The dozen or so of us who regularly picked for Mr.
Baxter included young and old, black and white, poor and less-poor, the
landowner and his wife and daughter.  We all got tired together, and you
know who your friends are when you get tired together and are still friends.

There was some fun and mirth in the cotton fields -- stories, mostly, told
between neighbors in adjacent rows.  Everybody was paid the same rate -- 3
or 4 cents per pound -- just the right amount to keep the kinds of fun and
mirth limited.

So understanding the influence of the farm experience on young Sam depends
on knowing something about how tired he got, and who else was tired with
him.

If you want to experience some cotton pickin' sociology -- too late --
mechanical pickers dominated by 1970.

r d colvett
florence  al
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http://home.hiwaay.net/~deec   examples of cotton pickin' speech patterns