Bill Ganzel. Nettie Featherston in the door with her dog Sandy. Lubbock, Texas, August 1979

"We were on the road, just trying to find something. We stopped at a filling station in Carey, and this cotton grower come by and seen our bedding on top of the car. He asked if we’d like to go out and pull some bolls [harvest the cotton] for him. We did that all winter. After that we had to wait for chopping time [in the summer]. My brother went back into Childress and played dominoes. That’s the way we lived, from what he made playing dominoes.

"We lived in a little two-room house. Had a wood stove that we cooked blackeye peas on. We ate so many blackeye peas that I never wanted to see another one. We even slept on ’em, laid our pallets on the pods of blackeye peas and hay. Your kids would cry for something to eat and you couldn’t get it. I just prayed and prayed and prayed all the time that God would take care of us and not let my children starve. All our people left here. They live in California. But we were so poor that we couldn’t have went to California or nowhere else."

—NETTIE FEATHERSTON