You Have Seen Their Faces
I
THE South has been shoved around like a country cousin. It buys mill ends and wears hand-me-downs. It sits at second table and is fed short rations. It is the place where the ordinary will do, where the makeshift is good enough. It is that dog town on the other side of the railroad tracks that smells so badly every time the wind changes. It is the Southern Extremity of America, the Empire of the Sun, the Cotton States; it is the Deep South, Down South; it is The South.
Twice a year it takes life easy, lolling in the shade when the sun begins to blister, huddling around the stove when the cold winds begin to blow. The rest of the time it works harder than anybody else, chopping its cotton and sawing its wood from dawn to dusk. In return for its labor it does not expect much, does not ask much, never receives much. It has pockets in its pants, but there are holes in the pockets. When it is paid in nickels and dimes, the money dribbles along the wayside before the day is over; when it is paid with a dollar bill, the money is stowed away in the toe of the shoe, and kept there until Saturday.
This is the place where anybody may come without an invitation and, before the day is over, be made to feel like one of the home folks. Scientists with microscopes and theologians with Bibles come to the South to tell it what is wrong with it, and stay to buy a home and raise a family. Gaping tourists come to pick its flesh to pieces, and remain to eat fried chicken and watermelon for the rest of their lives.
Mark against the South its failure to preserve its own culture and its refusal to accept the culture of the East and West. Mark against it the refusal to assimilate the blood of an alien race of another color or to tolerate its presence. Mark against it most, if not all, of the ills of a retarded and thwarted civilization. The South has been taking a beating for a long time, and the pain and indignity are beginning to tell. That fact can be seen any day now in the lean and hungry faces of men. It means unrest.
The troubles of this part of America have been laid first to one cause, then to another, and finally to the entire list of civilization’s plagues and afflictions. Slavery, climate, and hookworm have been favorite causes for generations of finger-pointing pulpiteers and pamphleteers. High-tariff and free-silver advocates had their opportunity to pin something on somebody somewhere, but after they had had their day the South was still sick. Blaming it all on the failure to build the Nicaraguan Canal was for a time a serious-minded occupation. The coming of the boll weevil, the army worm, and the screwworm brought forth a new generation of bush beaters and stump thumpers who were certain they held the secret of the South’s troubles in the palms of their hands. After all these years the sun still rises in the east and sets in the west and the South is still sick.
II
The Mississippi Valley Delta and the Black Belt of Alabama are two sections of the South that still produce cotton in abundance. It grows, matures, and yields without fertilizer and without effort. The soil there will be deep, fertile, and productive for a long time to come. Elsewhere the subsoil, both sand and clay, is being ploughed up to be mixed with the little topsoil that remains in an effort to make plants grow. There is no fertility in subsoil, but when brought to the surface it gives the appearance of fertility and, when mixed with fertilizer, will produce enough cotton, provided that the rains and sun are not extreme, to pay for the fertilizer in normal times. Farming in sand or clay is a backbreaking, spirit-crushing existence.
There are reasons for this impoverishment of the soil that go deep into the economic life of the South. The successful cotton raisers have always been plantation owners. The plantations were large, generally from five hundred to five thousand acres of land in size. The owners for the most part had one main concern, and that was to make as much money as they could as quickly as they could.
Nothing made money like cotton. Nothing else grew like cotton. Cotton was king.
Now the day of the plantation is over, except in the Delta country and in the Black Belt, and cotton is not king any longer.
The plantation system pauperized the soil to such a great degree that raising cotton became a means of making a bare living rather than a method of making a fortune. The plantation owner, when he became aware of what had happened to the soil, withdrew to the nearest city to live the remainder of his life on his accumulated wealth.
What he left behind was eroded, depleted, unprofitable land. His tenants still had to work for a living, even if he did not, and out of their desperation grew a new system. He became an absentee landlord. The plantation was divided into one-man farms and rented to the tenants. The rent was paid either in half of the cotton produced or in an agreed-upon number of bales, or on the basis of a combination of the two. The plantation system was traded for the share-cropping system, and the South, to its sorrow, got much the worst of the bargain.
Rent was paid to the landlord for the use of the land on a sharing basis. When a hundred tenants produced six bales each, the landlord received three hundred bales, the individual tenant three bales. The tenant who set out to farm his portion of the plantation discovered that the land required fertilizer. Without fertilizer he could not grow enough cotton to provide himself with a living, and to pay rent. The rent came first. The landlord generally saw to it that the tenant paid his three or four bales for rent before the sharing began. If there was nothing left to share after the rent had been paid, there was nothing the tenant could do about it. He could only look forward to the coming year, hoping he would be able to make more than the minimum number of bales the rent required. If the following year was a good one for him, he paid off the chattel mortgage he had given in payment for fertilizer he had bought in an effort to produce the rent cotton.
Much can be said about the detrimental effects of such an agricultural system, more especially when there are ten million persons now living under its yoke. They live in this cotton country on tenant farms which, in many cases, are little more than sand dunes and clay stacks. They are either already wornout physically and spiritually, or in the act of wearing themselves out. They are grouped in families of man and wife and from one to sixteen children. They are farming, for the most part, soil that has been yielding diminishing returns for fifty or a hundred years. No matter if they get up an hour earlier to work by lantern light, no matter if half a dozen more children are begotten to supply additional hands in the field, they will continue to fall steadily behind as long as they live on land that produces less and less each time a new crop of cotton is planted.
It is foolish to ask a tenant farmer why he remains where he is. He does move from farm to farm from time to time, but only rarely can he improve his status. There is cotton to be raised, and he has trained himself to raise it. That is his specialty. It is his life and, as long as share-cropping is an institution, it will become his death. The tenant farmer in the South is trying to hold on to a spinning world until by some means he is enabled to get a grip on a better way of life. He knows he cannot buy land of his own from the profits of share-cropping. He knows just as well that he cannot save until he earns, and that he cannot earn much more than a bare living from sterile, barren land. He does well, under the circumstances, to hold on at all. Now that his condition has sunk to depths that stop just short of peonage, there has appeared the first sign of hope. What there is in store for him in the future remains to be seen, but now for the first time there is hope. There has been talk, from one end of the South to the other, of joining with other tenant farmers to take collective action against the institution of share-cropping. The day when it was a sacred bull has passed.
III
Government and God put together in a lifetime could n’t beat a pinch of sense into those fool cotton farmers. They think all they ’ve got to do is go out there and get hold of forty acres of land, plant cotton, and look at the pictures on hundred-dollar bills. Most of them don’t even try to raise feed for their mules. They think if they touch anything but cotton they’ll be doing something beneath their dignity. When I was out there twelve years ago trying to make a living raising cotton, I did n’t act with any more sense than the farmers do now. It seemed as though cotton went to my head just like a drink of raw whiskey. I thought I was somebody. I’d come to town and tell everybody how to raise cotton, how to run a farm, how to educate children, how to treat a woman, how to keep the blacks in their place, and how the government ought to be run. All that time I’d have amounted to something if I’d tended to business and tried to do what a farmer ought to but don’t have the sense to do. I thought it was beneath my dignity to plant a garden and raise feed for the stock. The first thing I knew, I did n’t have an inch of land left, and I was so puffed up being a cotton farmer I did n’t have the sense to know I was drunk on cotton. That’s the worst thing cotton does to a man. It makes him think he’s sitting on top of the world, and the first thing he knows he’s spending more on food for himself and feed for his stock than cotton brings in. Storekeeping is no high-minded calling, but it teaches you what a fool cotton can make of a man.
— CLINTON, LOUISIANA
The Delta and Black Belt landowner has been systematically eliminating the white tenant from his plantation for a number of years. The white tenant was given to understand that he was no longer wanted. Next, if he did not take the hint, he was told to leave. Finally, if he persisted in remaining where he was, he was driven off the land. As soon as he was out of the way, his place was filled by a black tenant. The white tenant farmer was forced to gather up his family and make his way into the eroded and depleted hill country. The landowner in the rich plantation country wants a man who can be subjected to his will by means of fear and intimidation.
The Negro tenant farmer is the descendant of the slave. For generations he has lived in mortal fear of the white boss in the cotton country. He has seen his women violated and his children humiliated. He himself has been discriminated against, cheated, whipped, and held forcibly in an inferior position. Every white face he sees is a reminder of his brother’s mutilation, burning, and death at the stake. He has no recourse at law, because he is denied the right of trial before his peers. The Negro tenant farmer on a plantation is still a slave.
Arnold Berry is a Negro tenant farmer on a plantation in Eastern Arkansas in the Delta country. He is twenty years old, single, and lives with his grandmother, who is fifty-five years old. They live, rent free, in a tenant house of three rooms on the Teacher Plantation. This plantation, within sight of Mississippi River levees, is near Wilson, Arkansas. The Delta country there is part of the best cotton-producing land in America. The soil is black, well watered. The plantations in that section are large, generally of one to eight thousand acres.
Berry has worked on the Teacher Plantation as both share-cropper and field hand. When he works as a sharecropper, he averages about $180 a year. When he works as a field hand, he receives seventy-five cents a day — not seventy-five cents every day in the year, but seventy-five cents a day when there is something for him to do. He has averaged $190 a year as a field hand. He has never made more than $200. He has often wondered why, at the end of a year, he has never been able to make more than that.
Like all the tenants on the Teacher Plantation, he is allowed a maximum of $4.50 a week credit at the plantation store. At the end of the year, as far back as he can remember, his store bill has always amounted to $234, which represented the total of his weekly credit for fifty-two weeks. Sometimes he bought less than $4.50 worth of goods at the store, but always his bill for the year was the same. When he found that out, he made up his mind to use his credit to the limit. He always found himself in debt anyway, according to the books in the plantation office, and whether the debt amounted to $34 in a $200 year, $44 in a $190 year, or $54 in a $180 year, it was carried over as debt and entered on his account for the following year. He works off the debt at seventy-five cents a day and, when the cotton crop is unusually good, by deducting for his store account all money due him over and above $200. The method of paying off his yearly debt was suggested by the plantation owner.
The plantation store carries in stock staple groceries and clothing. Berry buys flour, meal, bacon, coffee, lard, and candy; he also buys overalls, shirts, and shoes, and his grandmother buys calico, buttons, and shoes. He can buy anything in stock that he wishes, up to $4.50 worth a week. He could get cash if he asked for it, but the plantation store is the only one near by, and if he walked to the next store it would be a store owned by another landlord, and then he would be called upon to explain why he earned his living on one plantation and spent his money at another.
When Berry is sick, his weekly credit is reduced to $3.50 a week for as long as he is unable to work. The plantation pays the doctor’s bill and the medicine bill, and they in turn are entered on the account books to be deducted from his credit when settlement day comes at the end of the year.
There has been talk of the daily wage being raised from seventy-five cents to one dollar. When Berry heard about it, his first thought was that he would be able to get out of debt. He did not wish to marry, or go to Memphis, or buy an automobile. He wished to be able to stop cotton farming and to sell household supplies, such as soap, to tenants on the plantations in the Delta. If that turned out to be successful, he wished to save enough money to buy some cotton land of his own — not a plantation, but ten or fifteen acres. He had given up hope of ever getting ahead by working on the plantation.
Berry considers himself fortunate. He does not own anything, except the clothes on his back, and a change of them in his house; he cannot move from the plantation without getting permission from the landlord; if his grandmother should die, he would have to marry and produce children, since it is a custom on the plantation that each tenant shall supply one or more additional hands for the fields.
He considers himself fortunate, nevertheless. Most important of all, to him, is the fact that he is a tenant on the Teacher Plantation instead of being a tenant on the Harris Plantation. The Harris Plantation adjoins the Teacher.
The Harris Plantation is one of the largest, most prosperous, and most notorious in the Delta. Berry has friends who are tenants there, and who wish they were somewhere else. He has seen things take place there that he is afraid to talk about, and after seeing one of his friends whipped by a rider he was more determined than ever to get out of debt and into house-to-house salesmanship.
The policy of the Harris Plantation is to pay tenants for their labor and their cotton in coupons instead of in money. The coupons can be used only in the plantation store. The white share-croppers and wage hands protested against the coupons, and asked for payment in money. Thereupon a systematic exclusion of white tenants was instituted. The plantation offered to buy, at approximately fifty cents on the dollar, the white tenants ’ crops. If the offer was accepted, the white tenant took the money and moved off the plantation; if it was rejected, the white tenant was forcibly evicted and the crops confiscated. When the white tenants had been moved off, Negro share-croppers were brought to the plantation. They were more easily intimidated, and were afraid to protest against the coupons. Those who did object attempted to leave; the riders caught them, and they were whipped for leaving without permission. They were then told that if they wished to leave they could do so by paying the plantation fifty dollars in cash. None of them had fifty dollars, or any part of it. They remained.
The white share-croppers and wage hands who were forced off the Harris Plantation scattered in all directions in the South. Some found farms in the Delta, some went to the Arkansas hill country, others crossed the Mississippi River and settled on whatever tenant farms they could find.
Whether life is like this in Arkansas or Louisiana, in Mississippi or Alabama, is of small importance. Plantation life for the share-cropper, no matter where, is difficult. The fact that some plantation owners conduct their farming operations humanely is not enough to overbalance the defects of the plantation system itself. It is an antiquated method of agricultural production that has no place in a social order where, notably in industry, labor demands and receives compensation for services rendered. Workers at other trades in America may have longer hours, may even receive less pay, but plantation share-croppers live in bondage.
These are the plantation-bound families that eat corn bread and molasses, that buy a fifty-cent bottle of patent medicine when one of the members is ill because the doctor and his medicine cost three dollars, that have neither newspaper nor magazine in the house, that have no lamp because kerosene costs twelve cents a gallon.
These are the people who have to take off their hats when they meet a white man walking along the road, keep their mouths shut when their children are allowed but four months of school a year or none at all, accept without the batting of an eye an oral accounting of their year’s labor.
The Negro share-cropper on a Delta plantation who has learned the white man’s rules, and who keeps them, is allowed to live a peaceful life. On many of these plantations, if he protests, or even so much as presumes to argue over the number of bales of cotton he has raised, he is a bad nigger, a human being who is hounded and persecuted for the rest of his life.
They’d have to call out the regular United States Army to make me go back to Eastern Arkansas and work on one of those cotton plantations. I’m making good pay bossing a road construction job for a contractor, and I know when I’m well off. Two years ago I was out there living with my sister and her husband in Arkansas and we had a good prospect of clearing twenty bales of cotton, after sharing with the landlord. The crop came along fine all summer, the sun was just right, the rain was just right, and the insects held off just right. We’d been there four years, and it was the best-looking cotton I’d ever seen. After we got it laid by, in late summer, my brother-in-law and me started talking about buying a farm of our own up close to Little Rock. Then the first thing I knew, the landlord came down and said he wanted to buy us out. I told him we’d sell out our crop for what twenty bales would bring. He said ten bales, or nothing. We told him nothing doing. The next day he sent a colored family down to move into our house. We did n’t budge an inch. Pretty soon half a dozen of his riders came down and stood us off while the colored family was moved in. Our things were dumped out in the road. I went to town to see the landlord, and he was there waiting for me with a bill for back debts against us for three hundred and some dollars. We had n’t done any buying at the plantation store on credit, but there the bill was, and he had a deputy with a warrant all made out to serve. He said he’d deduct the bill from ten bales of cotton and would n’t make any more trouble if we’d leave the county. There was n’t anything to do but take what we could get and move our furniture over to Memphis.
— EDGEFIELD, SOUTH CAROLINA
IV
The Mississippi Valley Delta is the garden spot of the South, but it is a relatively small spot on the map. From the Atlantic to the Ozarks and from the Gulf of Mexico to the Tennessee River, in eleven Southern states, there are thousands and thousands of tenant farmers vainly struggling to squeeze a meagre existence from an almost totally impoverished soil.
The Delta country can and does produce one and two bales of cotton an acre; every rain and flood in the Ohio and Missouri River valleys brings downstream more silt and loam to add to its fertility. The eroded and depleted tenant farms in the hills do well to produce from one-eighth to one-half bale of cotton an acre; every bale that is gathered from these hardscrabble acres hastens the land’s depletion.
The Negro tenant in the Delta receives as much as two hundred dollars a year for his labor; most of the hillcountry white tenant farmers consider themselves fortunate when they receive a hundred dollars for their year’s work.
In Emanuel County, Georgia, there is a share-cropper whose name is John Sanford. He is forty-seven years old, and he has worked on tenant farms since he was a boy of eleven. He was born in Emanuel County and has never left it except for infrequent trips to near-by towns.
Sanford has been married twice, his first wife dying after the birth of her first child. He has already had four children by his second wife, who also had one child by her first husband. Inevitably they expect others to come, since both are resigned to the conclusion that there is no way to stop having them. There are ten persons now living in the Sanford home. Sanford’s son by his first wife married his wife’s daughter by her first husband. This union has produced two children. These four live in the house with Sanford and his wife and their four children. The building has four rooms.
Sanford is a share-cropping cotton farmer. He has been raising cotton on shares, first on one tenant farm and then on another, for twenty-seven years. Once he made enough to buy two beds, half a dozen chairs, a dresser, a washstand, and the kitchen stove. Another time he made enough to buy cheaply a secondhand automobile. The furniture has lasted, except for three of the chairs; the automobile did not last. He does not own anything else, except a change of clothes, beyond a few odds and ends. His wife cuts his hair; he pulls the children’s teeth when they begin to bother. He has a form for making concrete grindstones; and, when he can get the cement, he makes several every year to sell to his neighbors.
Three times a day the family eat corn bread and molasses, and with one of the meals they generally have meat. The meat comes from one of the hogs running at range, — some of the hogs belong to Sanford, although he does not know how many do, — or from a rabbit caught in a rabbit-gum. They have twelve or fourteen hens and a rooster; every year his wife saves enough eggs to make two or three sittings, and the rest of the eggs laid are used to make cornbread batter. A chicken furnishes meat for the table when a hog or rabbit is not at hand.
The fifteen-acre farm is worked on shares. The landlord furnishes a mule and half the fertilizer used; he furnishes also half the seed for corn and cotton. One of the acres is a cane field, planted every year to supply molasses. The landlord does not take a half share of that. There is also a garden, about a quarter acre in size, planted every year in cabbage, turnips, and sweet potatoes. Sanford has no cow, nor has he had one for six years.
The land that Sanford farms borders a brook that runs well most of the year. In midsummer it usually runs dry for a month or six weeks. The land slopes upward from it, away from the brush and undergrowth that hide it from view. The soil is sandy. When Sanford first began farming it, the soil was fairly productive, making almost, in good seasons, a bale of cotton to the acre. After seven years, the length of time he has farmed it, the rains have washed much of the loam and topsoil away, and what remains is sandy white earth that becomes whiter after every rain. The sand acts as though it were a filter. The fertilizer that is mixed with it each year in the spring produces what cotton there is to gather in the fall.
Sanford has never made any money, as making money goes in the United States, except during the two years when he had enough left over after food and clothing to buy the furniture and the automobile. He has worked for twenty-seven years, on seven or eight tenant farms, but there has hardly ever been enough to buy food and clothes for the family. He raises four acres of corn each year, half of it going to the landlord and half being ground into meal to make the corn bread.
Twelve of the fifteen acres are planted in cotton every year. With the help of his wife and children, Sanford grows cotton. He grows cotton as though cotton were food and drink and wine and music. When he can make a pound of cotton, he has made a little sugar for the table, a little tobacco for his pipe. Cotton will keep them, and, next to corn and cane, nothing else can. He plants cotton, cultivates it, and picks it; he works every dry day during the season from dawn to dusk. The last crop was an average one: he made three bales of cotton on twelve acres.
After dividing the cotton with the landlord, sharing it in halves, Sanford’s part was 640 pounds of lint. The ginned cotton was sold for 10¼ cents per pound. The seed did not amount to anything; his share had to be kept to plant the next year’s crop. He received, in cash, $65.60 for his crop of cotton. He received also, as his share of the government’s crop-benefit payment, $4.88. The two sums made a total of $70.48. He did not receive any other money during the year.
Seventy dollars and forty-eight cents for his year’s labor bought Sanford and his family some salt and pepper; snuff for his wife; some sugar and coffee-and-chickory. It bought smoking tobacco for himself, some candy for the children. It bought several yards of gingham, thread, and buttons for his married daughter; two dresses for his wife, and a pair of shoes; enough material to clothe three of the children so that they could attend school. It bought several bottles of patent medicine, a cane knife, kerosene, and stamps for letters to his wife’s relations.
There were several articles which his wife expressed either a wish or a need for. One of them was soap; soap could be made from hog fat, but all the hogs ran at range, and the ones that were caught and butchered supplied lean meat but not enough fat for soap making. Clothing was another; most of the time during the cold months the children took turns going to school, since there were not enough coats for all.
Sanford works hard — not as hard as some men, harder than many. He was the son of a tenant farmer, and he learned in childhood from his father that tenant farming required all the energy a man could bring to it. He works a little harder each year, because the soil grows thinner after every rain, because the children grow larger and ask for more food, because he is not satisfied with what he makes.
John Sanford is not the kind of sharecropper a landlord takes pride in. He has grown surly. He accuses the landlord of weighing the cotton short. He tells the landlord he wants more than half the cotton because making a crop requires more labor on farmed-out land.
He is not a good farmer now. There is no incentive for him to take care of the land. As it is, he is a little lazy, but still energetic enough to work in the cotton when the cotton needs it. He cannot stand the sun so well as some men now, but by putting green leaves in the crown of his hat he can work through the hottest part of the day without stopping.
He might have become much lazier than he is. Instead, he became resentful. He became critical. He wanted to know why a bank would not lend him enough money to start buying a farm of his own. He wanted to know why it was that a landlord would give a Negro share-cropper the best land, taking it away from a white share-cropper if necessary. He wanted to know, finally, why all the white share-croppers in the country did not get together and run all the Negroes out.
He is of little or no value to his landlord. He has tried to find a new landlord who will give him a farm to work on shares, but most of the men he has seen are afraid he will not be able either to make enough cotton to pay the rent on shares, or to support his family, or both. They are afraid they would have to supply food for the family once Sanford moved on their land.
One of these days the tractor and the mechanical picker are going to catch up with cotton, but by that time it’s going to be too late to help the tenant farmer. He’ll have ruined the soil for raising any other crop, and broken his back, to boot. Don’t ask me whose fault it is. I don’t know. I don’t even know anybody who thinks he knows. All I know is that one man out of ten makes a living, and more, out of cotton, and that the other nine poor devils get the short end of the stick. It’s my business to sit here in the bank and make it a rule to be in when that one farmer shows up to borrow money, and to be out when those other nine show up. I don’t even know how to make money raising cotton myself. If I knew, I’d be out there doing it, instead of sitting here trying to lend money to one farmer while trying to keep nine others from knowing I don’t want to lend them money.
Some nights I can’t sleep at all for lying awake wondering what’s going to happen to all those losing tenant farmers. A lot of them are hungry, ragged, and sick. Everybody knows about it, but nobody does anything about it. The tractor and the mechanical picker — if it comes or if it does n’t come — won’t make any difference in the end. The world can get along without cotton as soon as something comes along that’s a cheaper substitute, and as soon as it does, cotton will pass out just like spinning wheels and onehorse buggies. — AUGUSTA, GEORGIA
V
The share-cropper’s life generally follows a well-defined course. He begins life just as most men begin, hopeful, eager, confident. He works with all the enthusiasm and zest of youth. Then something happens; what it is, he does not always know. The first indication that something has happened is when the children beg for food, then cry for it. It is then that he knows something has happened. He works harder than ever before in his life after that realization has come to him. But there is still no more food, perhaps less, and the children continue to beg and cry for it.
Then he looks about him and realizes that the land he has worked all these years has been farmed-out, or that erosion has washed the topsoil away, or that he has broken his health until he cannot work. Usually all of this comes to him at once. With bitterness and resentment come hopelessness and despair.
It is then, perhaps for the first time in his life, that he looks at the landlord and wonders what it is the landlord represents. The landlord has the power of law and wealth behind him. His word is final. A share-cropper cannot dispute his word, cannot question his honesty. He represents an agricultural system that acquires share-croppers and mules for their economic usefulness, and disposes of them when no more profit can be extracted from their bodies.
We’ve been here most of our lives, my husband and me, and I feel like I’m done for, and my husband looks it. If it was n’t for our boy, we just could n’t get any cotton raised to pay the rent. I’ve got body sickness and can’t stand working in the fields any more, and it’s all I can do to drag myself around the house and cook a little food. My husband is just no account. He sits there on the porch all day looking out across the road and don’t pretend to move. Sometimes he sits there three or four hours, looking like he’s dead, but he’s not. He’s just no account.
Sometimes I think I ’ve had more than my share of hard living. My daughter is only half-bright, and can’t do nothing much more than sweep a room, and she’s not good at that. If I could get over my body sickness, I might be able to do a little something. I don’t reckon I ever will. All I feel like doing most of the time is finding me a nice place to lay myseld down in and die. — TROY, ALABAMA
VI
Being a social welfare worker in Philadelphia is one thing, but being a union organizer among these share-croppers is something else again. I thought I had case histories up there in Philadelphia that would make your hair stand on end, but what I’ve found out down here in Arkansas and Mississippi is the kind of thing that makes cold-blooded murder look like child’s play. Trying to put slum people on their feet when they are so down and out they don’t care one way or the other is a heart-rending task. You soon get the feeling that they don’t expect to stand on their feet, and about all you can hope to accomplish is raising their standard of living a few degrees. Down here in the cotton country you are dealing with individuals who want to rise above privation and degradation, and you soon get to where you are fighting mad about the subjection and intimidation they live under. Any one of these tenant farmers, once the fear of the landlord is taken out of his mind, will fight for his rights at the drop of a hat. That’s why these peons will be dangerous people some day.
MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE
Eighteen years ago I went to the bank and said I wanted to buy me a farm. I don’t reckon it made any difference if I was a colored man, because they said they’d sell me this place if I thought I could pay for it. I asked them how much it would be, and they said $1800 on time, or $1100 cash. I still don’t know if thirty-seven acres of this hillside cotton land is worth that much, but I signed up to buy it on time. They knew I didn’t have $1100 in cash, but I did n’t mind paying $700 more than it might be worth, because I wanted to own my own land and not have to rent or share-crop for a living. I’ve paid a little on it every year since then, but I don’t know how much I’ve paid. I don’t reckon I’ll ever finish paying for it, because the interest keeps adding up and I don’t make much more than a living for me and my wife as it is.
RIPLEY, TENNESSEE
There have probably been as many methods offered for the elimination of economic distress among field hands, renters, and share-croppers as there are cures for warts, and none of them has proved to be any more effective. Four persons out of five can be counted upon to give pat answers to a question for which no reply is yet available.
The plantation owner usually answers the question to his own satisfaction by saying that white tenant farmers, if they are worth their salt, will acquire their own land, and that Negro tenant farmers do not need anything more than a bare living anyway.
Politicians and ministers will sometimes agree with each other to the extent of saying that the remarkable curative properties of time will produce an equable balance between the landlord and the tenant, and that some day in the future the owner and the worker will share and share alike in the distribution of wealth.
Sociologists of one school stake their reputations on a plan for sterilization of the mentally and physically unfit among the tenant farmers, and those of another school hold to the belief that educational advantages and health instruction will suffice.
Economists, although agreeing on the fact that a need exists, find it more difficult than any other group to reach among themselves an acceptable programme of action. The more radical among them insist that the feudal plantations should be broken up at any cost. The more conservative advocate helping the tenant farmer buy his own land.
Tenant farmers have lived for so long a haphazard, catch-as-catch-can existence that most attempts to help them have proved to be wasted effort. Furnishing them with mules, either by outright gift or by selling to them on small payments, is not wise, because mules can be sold, starved, or beaten to death. Providing land to a man not qualified to take care of land means that it will be allowed to erode, that it can be sold or traded, and that it can be exhausted of its fertility. Supplying farm machinery, by gift or sale or rent, means that in all probability the tractors and ploughs will not have proper attention and care, and that the life of the implements will be shortened by exposure to the weather and by abuse.
There is no evidence to show that any plan thus far advocated will in itself be sufficient to change the economic condition of the Southern tenant farmer. There is no reason to believe that any plan would succeed unless it were accompanied by reëducation and supervision. There are two means of bringing about a change; one method is collective action by the tenant farmers themselves, the other method is government control of cotton farming.
Unionization of tenant farmers has been in progress for some time, principally in Arkansas and Alabama, but it has been difficult to bring together such a widely scattered mass of people under a central organization. The greatest hindrance to collective bargaining has been the fear that has been instilled in cotton-field workers by landlords for generations. For that reason the most successful attempts to organize have been in the heart of the plantation country where the density of population gives the tenants a feeling of safety. The isolated share-cropper in the hills is sometimes afraid to run the risk of being a union member in a region where the closest neighbor may be ten or fifteen miles away.
The landlords, no matter how sympathetically inclined at heart, will not of their own volition take steps to alleviate the tenant farmer’s condition. An individual landlord will, to the best of his ability, consider that he is doing all he can, without injury to himself, to give his tenants a reasonably high standard of living. But no matter what his motives are and no matter what steps he takes, he is continuing the operation of a ruinous system of agriculture. It is ruinous because the system itself is not a collective venture, but one of personal profit.
The fact that the landlord operates a plantation for profit places him in the position of a business man, and business elsewhere has long had laws imposed upon it to assure the public of fair treatment. Business, other than plantation cotton farming, is conducted under restrictions that prohibit the owners from inflicting injurious practices upon labor and customers alike. Pure-food laws, minimum-wage laws, and child-labor laws have protected the worker. But in the cotton country a landlord employing a hundred workers enjoys special privileges that exempt him from paying a living wage, furnishing a healthful dwelling, and guaranteeing periodic settlement in money for work performed. Some tenant farmers are lucky to get even scrip with which to pay the interest on their food bill at the plantationowned store.
There will always be farm laborers. Not all tenant farmers have a desire to be the owners of land. But all men, women, and children who work on tenant farms have the right to demand adequate pay for the work performed. If the landlord refuses to pay for work done, he should either be barred from employing labor or be forced to post a bond that would ensure the payment of wages. Field hands and share-croppers should have the same protection from unscrupulous employers that workers in steel mills and department stores receive. If the states and the Federal Government refuse to provide protection to this class of citizen, tenant farmers have every right in the world to protect themselves against unscrupulous and untrustworthy employers. In that case, it is the duty of the states and the Federal Government to inspire, promote, and protect unionization of cotton farmers in the South.
Some provision has been made for the farmer who wishes to leave the plantation and work his own crops. Rehabilitation and subsistence farms, land loans and crop loans, have appealed to men who are capable of making a living without the supervision of overseers. These are a small percentage of the tenant farming class. Most tenant farmers are content to work as field hands and share-croppers, provided they receive a living wage for their labor, and would much prefer not to have the responsibility of land ownership. No provision has been made for these workers, and it is on them that the hardest blow falls. They are the men and women who work for from fifty cents to a dollar a day, from three to six months a year, and who are forced to live in a dwelling detrimental to health, to wear insufficient clothing in cold weather, and to exist on an insufficient quantity and variety of food. These are the people who develop pellagra, and who use snuff to deaden the desire for food.
There is an urgent need for a government commission, invested with authoritative power, to make a study of tenant farming in the cotton country. The commission, in order to produce effective results, should be nonpolitical in membership. It should propose to study all phases of tenant farm life over a period of time long enough to familiarize itself with the needs of the tenant farm class.
It would be difficult to anticipate the final result of such a study. No surmise could be undertaken until the facts of the survey were known. Whatever the first results of the study would be, they would be enough to show how little was previously known about the tenant farming system, and that some planning is necessary in order to regenerate ten million persons who are actually threatened with the possibility of living in economic slavery in America.