About Sharecropping Essay Research Paper SharecroppingTrudier HarrisA

About Sharecropping Essay, Research Paper

Sharecropping

Trudier Harris

A practice that emerged following the emancipation of African-American slaves,

sharecropping came to define the method of land lease that would eventually become a new

form of slavery. Without land of their own, many blacks were drawn into schemes where they

worked a portion of the land owned by whites for a share of the profit from the crops.

They would get all the seeds, food, and equipment they needed from the company store,

which allowed them to run a tab throughout the year and to settle up once the crops,

usually cotton, were gathered. When accounting time came, the black farmer was always a

few dollars short of what he owed the landowner, so he invariably began the new year with

a deficit. As that deficit grew, he found it impossible to escape from his situation by

legal means. The hard, backbreaking work led to stooped, physically destroyed, and

mentally blighted black people who could seldom envision escape for themselves or their

children; their lives were an endless round of poor diet, fickle weather, and the

unbeatable figures at the company store. Those with courage to match their imaginations

escaped under cover of darkness to the North, that fabled land of opportunity.

As a theme in literature, sharecropping stretches from the late nineteenth century into

the contemporary era. Charles W. Chesnutt would write in The Wife of His Youth and

Other stories of the Color Line (1900) as well as in his novels of the convict lease

system that imprisoned black men in the same manner as sharecropping. Jailed on false

charges of vagrancy, these men would in turn be hired out as cheap labor to local whites.

This new prison environment was practically inescapable. Sterling Brown would paint

equally vivid pictures of the inability of sharecroppers to escape their plight and of

their paltry efforts to make do with what they had. His collection of poems, Southern

Road (1932), documents the lives of rural blacks tied to unyielding soil and

uncompromising landowners.

Sharecropping as an impetus to migrate north occurs in some of the works of Richard

Wright and John O. Killens. A different kind of freedom is suggested in "A Summer

Tragedy" (1933), a short story by Arna Bontemps, where a defeated elderly couple

simply get into their car and drive into a river. The story therefore captures the spirit

of despair that informs a lot of Wright’s works. For most of the characters in his Uncle

Tom’s Children (1938), freedom is not something they can begin to

visualize. Many of the characters in Ernest Gaines’s works find themselves locked onto the

Louisiana plantations where they were born, their futures dictated by local whites. Set

from the 1940s to the 1970s, Gaines’s works illustrate that not much had changed for black

people in some parts of the South.

Alice Walker’s characters would find sharecropping equally inescapable in The Third

Life Of Grange Copeland (1970). Grange finally manages to steal away under cover of

darkness, but his son Brownfield allows himself to become so damaged by the system that he

kills his wife. Walker, born to sharecroppers in Eatonton, Georgia, drew upon firsthand

knowledge of this practice when she wrote her novel.

In another literary portrait from this period, Jean Wheeler Smith’s "Frankie

Mae" (1968), a young girl who has learned rudimentary math skills finds that she is

no match for the figures at the company store. When at thirteen Frankie Mae questions Mr.

White Junior’s addition, the landowner barely restrains himself from shooting her and her

father. He sends her away with these words: "Long as you live, bitch, I’m gonna be

right and you gonna be wrong. Now get your black ass outta here." This defeat leads

to Frankie Mae’s realization that education can never provide the way out of her family’s

predicament. She gives up school and slumps into the destructive existence that

sharecropping engendered. At fifteen she has her first child; by nineteen she has three

more. She dies giving birth to her fifth child. Several years after Frankie Mae’s death,

her father, inspired by the civil rights movement, works for change by going on strike

against Mr. White Junior.

Sharecropping reflected the power and ownership whites wielded over black people in

spite of the Emancipation Proclamation. African-American writers have used this theme to

texture their portraits of Southern culture, to perpetuate the cultural myth (or warning)

of the South as a place of death for black people, and to enhance their portraits of the

realities of African-American life.

From The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States.

Copyright . Oxford University Press.

Southern Tenant Farmers Union

Mark Naison

In

the summer of 1934, a remarkable interracial protest movem

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