The Cotton of Their Bones

The Cotton of Their Bones - (Bb Major)

("As long as the English cotton manufacturers depended on slave-grown cotton, it could truthfully be asserted that they rested on a twofold slavery, the indirect slavery of the white man in England and the direct slavery of the black men on the other side of the Atlantic." — Karl Marx writing in the New York Daily Tribune on 14th March 1861:)

“Those who pat the slave-owners of America on the backs would like to be slave-owners in England too…I trust that we shall find that in establishing liberty universally throughout the American continent we shall be placing the crowning pinnacle on the ediface of freedom here as well" — Chartist orator Ernest Jones, The Rochdale Observer 13th March 1864. .

"...I know and deeply deplore the sufferings which the working people of Manchester and in all Europe are called to endure in this crisis. It has been often and studiously represented that the attempt to overthrow this Government which was built on the foundation of human rights, and to substitute for it one which should rest exclusively on the basis of slavery, was likely to obtain the favour of Europe”.— President Abraham Lincoln.)

Young girls in the cotton mill are slaving at the Jenny; Work from dark to dark, to earn the miser’s penny. And all the great white cotton that flutters through each mind, Is gathered by the slaves, of another kind.

Girls, growing up beside the Missisippi; They’re tired of picking cotton, being a Mistress of a Missie; They don’t know the girls in the mills of Lancashire But what they’ve got in common is the slavery they share.

And down upon the Famine Road in Rochdale they will wander, But their sisters in America have little time to ponder, And the letter to the president contained their sighs and moans, It was all about the cotton, It was all about the cotton, Ir was all about the cotton of their bones.

Bring me all your bundles, bring me all your labour I’ll make it into profit! O that’s something I can savour. Your sweat is what I live from, your toil is what I own I own the ground you stand on, I own your flesh and bone.

I see them in my mind’s eye, they’re growing old together Though the ocean runs between them — their skin is now like leather; They never got their freedom, a nd all their days were owned By the man who loved the cotton, The man who owned the cotton, The man who owned the cotton of their bones.

— © Frank Callery, February 6th, 2017.