March 14 -- Slave work became a bit easier...
Wait, what?
March 14, 1794…
Eli Whitney secured the patent for the Cotton Gin, which quickly and easily performed the task of separating the cotton fibers from the seed from whence they came.
“well what in the great blue hell does this have to do with black history?”
Well…
Slaves, and then indentured servants, and THEN sons/grandsons of those indentured servants did this work in the state where my roots are seated.
Speaking of sons and grandsons, my own grandfather dropped out of high school, to join the army and come back to finish that AND college to avoid this future. Hell, his brother left the fucking mule in the field and left to go to DC for the same reason.
Fun fact: the cotton that your drawz are made of are basically of the “flower” of the cotton plant.
Funner fact: that “flower” is damn near as thorny – and a WHOLE lot more leathery – than the hulls around a ROSE.
With fun facts behind us (or above us, as the nature of written language espouses), the invention of a machine that separates the fiber from the thorny blood by an apparatus that cannot hurt or bleed is very much relevant to the history of a peoples who picked that sumbitch up into a generation of people I know and love dearly enough to go to their grave and discuss the outcome of Lakers’ seasons lived in.
(Phlip note – yes, I go talk to my granddaddy as often as possible about the same shit I would if he was alive, fuck you!)
Anyway…
Today’s date, 217 years ago, the apparatus that separated the “hurt” from the “profitable” was patented…
Since then, others have come along to make more of what was once wasted, but that has so little to do with this post and I only know because of The Discovery Channel at that, so that is another blog of another topic for another time.
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