Thurman was 5 when he moved from his native Lexington to Minter City's Avent Plantation with his aunt and uncle. His mother died a year earlier, and his father was not up to raising him on his own, Thurman said. They'd get you out there and give what they wanted you to have. Work for 50 cents or six bits a day. That's as high as it got until after 1919.
Man get a dollar a day.
Women get 50 cents a day for chopping cotton. Children didn't get nothing unless you had a good size boy. Might make 50 cents. Griping would have earned him a beating or worse when he was young, he said, so he worked, kept to himself and did what he needed to do to survive the times. He left the fields at 21, three years after he married, for a job in a Minter City cotton-seed mill.