In my last column I mentioned how Tenant Farming and Sharecropping was a way of life for lots of farmers in the rural south after the Civil War and even up to the 1950’s. In the first book of the Bible the Lord told Adam that he would earn his living by the sweat of his brow and so it has been since then; especially for farmers.
You see a tenant farmer typically paid a landowner for the right to grow crops on a certain piece of land. This was one reason our ancestors came from Europe because of the high rent their landlords were charging. Hard cash was hard to come by after the Civil War but rent was cheap and some managed to come up with enough to rent land, raise their crops and feed their families. Tenant farmers in addition to having some cash to pay rent, also generally owned livestock and farming tools.
Sharecroppers on the other hand were more impoverished than a tenant farmer; with fewer resources and little or no cash. A typical sharecropper agreed to farm a certain plot of land in exchange for a share of the crops that were raised. Some had nothing and as the old fellow said, “you do the best you can with what you got.”
Between 1865 till the early 1900’s, 80% of black farmers and a large percentage of white farmers in the south, didn’t own their own land. Life for them and their families became a circle of no land, debt and poverty.
While tenant farmers were perhaps a little better off than sharecroppers, some were just one crop away from slipping into the same circle as the sharecroppers. Slavery had been abolished but both whites and blacks still had to eat and earn a living for their families. A white man from Scotland Co. whose family had been sharecroppers told me that his Dad died with stripes on his back, not from a whip but from the plow line he put over his head while plowing mules.
Most sharecropper families and even tenant farmers lived in old run down houses or shacks. The floors in these houses might still be dirt or at best board flooring with large cracks so big you could count the chickens under the house. When the winter winds blew cold on these weathered home places, people would take flour, mix it with water and make a paste. Then they would use it to paste old newspapers or cardboard on the walls to help keep out the wind. Later on in the 1900’s, folks started buying cheap linoleum rugs to cover the cracks in the floor and even nailed it on the walls to help insulate the old house.
With no electricity, water had to be drawn by hand either from a dug well or a spring. Oil lamps and candles were used to partially light the house at night. Milk was kept in pottery jugs or glass jars and lowered into the well or kept in a small spring house built into a spring. Wood cook stoves and fireplaces were their only heat until they could afford to get a wood heater.
To have enough labor to work the farms, most tenants and sharecroppers had large families. I’m talking several on up into the teens. Living in small one to three room houses, this could be a problem. Why five to six young’uns would sleep in the same bed, while others slept on pallets on the floor. Babies slept in chest of drawers. Most clothes were made from cloth feed sacks and there were a lot of hand me downs. Clothes were worn completely out, then torn apart to make everyday handkerchief and patch work for homemade quilts. Nothing was hardly ever thrown away. Most folks back then didn’t think they were poor if’n they could keep a little food on the table. There was a lot of pride in whatever they did.
Before daylight every morning, folks would get up; eat their meager breakfast; milk their cows and feed the livestock just to be in the fields when the sun came up. Won’t no such things as baby sitters back then. Why folks would just take their babies with them to the field and lay them on an old quilt at the end of the rows.
Folks would work till the sun was straight over head and then go home, cool off a spell, and eat a cold biscuit with some fatback, if’n they had any, or a little homemade syrup. It’s a fact, won’t much left over with all those mouths to feed. Then it was time to return to the fields or what chores they were working on.
When the sun started setting in the west, the men folks would take their mules to the barn while the women washed their feet in the spring and then start supper.
One good bath was taken on Sat. night, whether you needed it or not. Water was drawn from the well, heated on the woodstove or left in the sun, and then poured in a barrel or tin tub to take a bath in. Homemade lye soap was used to clean your body and to wash your clothes.
At “settlement time”, in the fall, the landowner or local merchants (who folks had bought supplies on credit from during the year) would deduct these charges and interest from the sharecropper’s share of the crop. Many a time a poor sharecropper owed more than he had made. This meant at least another year of working for the landlord to pay off the debts. You can plainly see why poor farmers could very easily get caught up in this vicious cycle of debt.
Tenant farming and sharecropping began to die out in the late forties and fifties. After World War Two, federal farm programs were put in place to cut the output of farms so farm prices would rise. With crop allotments cut, less land was needed for cultivation. Tractors and new farm equipment took the place of mules and plows and less human labor was needed to operate a farm. A lot of black folks moved up north to get better jobs while white folks took jobs in the local textile mills and construction business.
You know our great country has seen many changes in its history; some good; some not so good. But it seems when you talk to most old folks about the past, they say the old days were sometimes hard but they were good because people cared more for each other and helped each other out during the hard times. I wonder can we say the same thing for our generation!!!