This is taken from the fact that in the Old South, when cotton was good, it stood rich and tall and full. It was called high cotton. If you made your living from cotton, this was a good thing. The expression has carried over to include things that have nothing to do with farming or cotton.

Short stories, for example.

I can't say that this is the best cotton grown. But in my personal field, this is the best cotton I've grown in the short form.

I hope, that as you pluck it from my field, you will enjoy the work better than those who pluck actual cotton, and I hope the product, once plucked, is satisfying.

I have been a published writer for nearly twenty-seven years now, and these stories were written in the last seventeen. They are fewer and farther between these days, but I hope that long before another twenty-seven years, there will be yet another book produced from my field, and if talent, luck, ambition, and hard work stay with me, perhaps the cotton produced will stand even higher.

The Pit

I read an article in «GEO» magazine — a magazine I believe has come and gone — about dog fighting. It struck me as horrible and cruel. I had heard it compared to boxing, a comparison I don't buy. Boxers can choose to get in the ring or not, and they are taught how to protect themselves and there are referees. Dogs do it for the love of their masters and for something to eat. For a reward, when they lose, they are most often killed or abandoned. These dog-fighting guys don't want "losers".

I thought about that, added in another story told me by a friend. Supposedly, back in the late fifties or early sixties, there was a small town where a black man's car broke down and he was captured and made to pull a wagon around the town square, and was fed axle grease on crackers. Finally, he escaped.