Sharecropper families worked from first visible light to full darkness

Evidence

My mother, Mattye Pearl Thompson-Lanier, was born on June 8, 1926, in Mount Meigs, a small township in Montgomery County, Alabama. She was the fourth of six children born to Pearl Jackson and Frederick Douglass Thompson, whom everyone called “Fed.” They were sharecroppers who grew up in what she called “the cradle” of the Jim Crow South, and while she knew of the racist violence that permeated the region, she was protected from it by her family. She also talked about working from “kin” to “can’t,” or from sunrise when you can first see, to sunset when you can no longer because it is too dark. — Tamara Lanier, From These Roots, 26

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the idiom ‘from kin to can’t’ - from sunrise when sight begins to sunset when it fails.
• CANDY: ‘From kin to can’t’ is a vivid vernacular phrase worth quoting.