The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson Read Free Book Online

the planter subtracted the “furnish”—that is, the seed, the fertilizer, the clothes and food—from what the sharecropper had earned from his share of the harvest, there was usually nothing coming to the sharecropper at settlement. There would have been no way for George’s grandfather to sell that one extra bale without the planter knowing it in that constricted world of theirs. In some parts of the South, a black tenant farmer could be whipped or killed for trying to sell crops on his own without the planter’s permission. 50
    Even though John wouldn’t be able to keep the extra bale, Reshard was considered “a good share, a good boss, a good master,” in George’s words, “ ’cause he let us break even.”
    Most other sharecroppers ended deeper in debt than before. “They could never leave as long as they owed the master,” George said. “That made the planter as much master as any master during slavery, because the sharecropper was bound to him, belonged to him, almost like a slave.”
    The anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker, studying the sharecropping system back in the 1930s, estimated that only a quarter to a third of sharecroppers got an honest settlement, which did not in itself mean they got any money. 51 “The Negro farm hand,” a colored minister wrote in a letter to the Montgomery Advertiser in Alabama, “gets for his compensation hardly more than the mule he plows, that is, his board and shelter. 52 Some mules fare better than Negroes.”
    There was nothing to keep a planter from cheating his sharecropper. “One reason for preferring Negro to white labor on plantations,” Powdermaker, a white northerner, observed, “is the inability of the Negro to make or enforce demands for a just statement or any statement at all. 53 He may hope for protection, justice, honesty from his landlord, but he cannot demand them. There is no force to back up a demand, neither the law, the vote nor public opinion.…  Even the most fair and most just of the Whites are prone to accept the dishonest landlord as part of the system.”
    That did not keep some sharecroppers from trying to get what they were due after a hard year’s labor. During the lull before harvest time, one of George’s uncles, Budross, went to the little schoolhouse down in the field and learned to read and count. When it came time to settle up over the tobacco George’s grandmother Lena had raised, the uncle stood by while the planter went over the books with her. When they got through, George’s uncle spoke up.
    “Ma, Mr. Reshard cheatin’ you. He ain’t addin’ them figures right.”
    The planter jumped up. “Now you see there, Lena, I told you not to send that boy to school! Now he done learn how to count and now done jumped up and called my wife a lie, ’cause my wife figured up these books.”
    The planter’s men came and pistol-whipped the uncle right then and there.
    The family had to get him out that night. “To call a white woman a lie,” George said, “they came looking for him that night. They came, fifteen or twenty of them on horseback, wagon.”
    George’s grandparents knew to expect it. “We got to get you away from here ’cause you done call Mr. Reshard a lie. And you know they ain’t gon’ like that.”
    George was too young to understand what was happening but heard the grown people talk about it in whispers. It was the middle of the 1920s, and George never knew exactly where the uncle went. The particulars were never spoken.
    “They hid him out” was all George would say. “He left from out of there.”

    Lil George and his parents didn’t stay in Alachua much longer after that. They fled to St. Petersburg on the Gulf of Mexico, where they would no longer be under a field boss or overseer. They could work in the big high-rise hotels going up, and with all the tourists from up north and the building boom in the beach towns on the coast, they could be free of the farm and find plenty of work.
    They