Nellie Mae Rowe: Picking Cotton

As a young girl, Rowe picked cotton and worked in the fields with her family in Fayette County, Georgia. Her father, a blacksmith and farmer, occasionally hired the children out by the day to work in the neighbors’ fields.

The sack on her back takes the form of a misshapen white figure.

In front of her is a black mule, a symbol of forced labor. Its color is suggestive of death.

To the right, a seated woman, perhaps representing Rowe’s many employers during her years as a domestic worker, scrutinizes the action.

Beneath the chair is a rodent, a symbol sometimes used by Rowe to suggest an unsavory situation.

A green man lounges in the lower-left corner. He sits and watches Rowe as she works, perhaps illustrating a frequent complaint she had voiced about her husbands.

From a creature on his head unspools the scene of a bird tempted into what could be the maw of an unseen beast.

A second bird is shown pecking at fruit on a tree. It may symbolize, as many of Rowe’s animal metaphors do, a characteristic of society, in this case, its predatory, scavenging instinct. Or it may represent sickness, pecking away at what remained of Rowe’s life.