Sharecropping in Bontemps and Gaines

Following Reconstruction, Miss Jane talks about staying in the South, even with the oppression she would inevitably face, until she could find a place where she and Ned could live free of being subjected to subjection based on the color of their skin.  Eventually, Miss Jane calks the conditions after Reconstruction slavery: "It was slavery again, all right" (72). She mentions the fact that throughout the area there are no more "colored troops, colored politicians, or a colored teacher"; instead, only white teachers could be find and the "secret group[s]" became even more active (72). After the Civil War, sharecropping arose as a means of maintaining the agricultural output of the land and as means of keeping African Americans oppressed. Sharecropping involved a landowner supplying a farmer, typically an African American or a poor white, with land, tools, housing, seed, and other items necessary to farming the land. When the farmer harvested the crops, he would receive a portion of the crops to pay off the landowner, and the rest would go to the landowner. Through this system, landowners kept sharecroppers in perpetual debt, coming up with various fees that the farmer owed and making the farmer buy his or her goods through the plantation store using plantation money. The picture above is from the Ernest J. Gaines Collection, and it is River Lake Plantation store money.  

When trying to leave Colonel Dye's Plantation, Miss Jane and Joe Pittman experience the "slave-like" system discussed above. After numerous trips to Colonel Dye to tell him that they are leaving, the Colonel finally offers Joe and Miss Jane a prime piece of bottom land for Joe to sharecrop. Joe refuses, and the Colonel, who acts like he was losing his best friend at first, becomes furious. As he turns to leave, Colonel Dye speaks up, calling after Joe, "Ain't you forgetting something?" (85). The Colonel commences to tell Joe that he owes one hundred and fifty dollars before he can leave. Joe asks why, and the Colonel responds, "That hundred and that fifty to get you out of trouble when the Klux had you" (85). On top of providing tools, seed, food, housing, and other essentials, as the landowner, Colonel Dye could mitigate between Joe and the Klan. However, after leaving the plantation, the Colonel could not do a thing. The Colonel's persistence that Joe owes him $150 is, as Miss Jane hints at, a way for him to enact some kind of retribution on Joe for leaving. Joe and Miss Jane sell everything they have to pay the money, and then they leave for the Louisiana-Texas border. 

As mentioned in the previous post, Arna Bontemps' "A Summer Tragedy" also brings to light the horrendous conditions caused by sharecropping. Working the same land for forty five years, and not having anything to show for it, Jennie and Jeff decide to end their own lives by driving their car off a bridge into a river.  Driving to their watery grave, Jeff notices the bountiful crops of cotton, reflecting on what that meant. Thinking about the crops, his mind begins to drift towards Major Stevenson, the landowner. He thinks about the fact that the Major only supplied Jeff with one mule to work a thirty-acre plot of land. Jeff thinks, "It was an expensive notion, the way it killed mules from overwork, but the old man held to it" (140). In order to save money in the short term, the Major chose to supply Jeff with only one mule, causing Jeff to work the mule to death. Later, Jennie begins to waffle some regarding their plan. She asks Jeff how many bales of cotton he could get this year. For Jeff, the number does not "make a speck o' diff'ence" because not matter how much they get "[they] still gonna be in debt to old man Stevenson when he gets through counting up" (143). No matter what, the Major owns Jeff and Jennie, never allowing them to get a leg up. In essence, they are in a form of slaver, as Miss Jane says. 

These are not, of course, the only instances of sharecropping in African American, Southern, or American literature. Lyle Saxon has a discussion about it in Children of Strangers for instance. What are some other novels, short stories, or plays that discuss sharecropping in the South after the Civil War through the mid-twentieth century? How are their depictions of sharecropping similar or different to Gaines' and Bontemps'?

Bontemps, Arna. The Old South: "A Summer Tragedy" and Other Stories of the Thirties. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1973. Print.

 Gaines, Ernest J. The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. New York: Bantam Books, 1972. Print.

     

Arna Bontemps "Why I Returned (A Personal Essay)"

Arna Bontemps left Louisiana for California around the age of three. He talks about this movement in "Why I Returned (A Personal Essay)" which opens his 1973 collection of short stories The Old South. In many way, Bontemps reasons for returning can be seen in a similar manner to those of Gaines. While Bontemps came from a middle-class family and Gaines from a family of sharecroppers, both started their lives in Louisiana, moved away, then eventually either returned to their home state or to the Deep South. Bontemps, after going to New York, returned to the South teaching in Alabama (during the Scottsboro Boys trial) from 1931-1934. For the next two posts, I want to speak briefly about what Bontemps' essay says about African American literature and the "arts" and how it relates to not just Gaines' life but to the lives of many others as well.

Originally published in 1965, Bontemps' essay focuses on a major debate regarding African American literature that raged during the Harlem Renaissance regarding whether or not "art" should maintain its link to "folk heritage" or whether it should link itself to more Eurocentric forms of artistic expression. From the outset, it is clear which position Bontemps sided with. He applauds and quotes from Langston Hughes' "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain":

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain free within ourselves. (958)

Bontemps' struggle to determine whether or not he should break with the "folk heritage" manifests itself in his father's and great-uncle's (Buddy) differing views on what to do with the South once they start their lives in California. Bontemps recalls dinner conversations where Buddy and his father brought up the South. When reminiscing about Louisiana, Bontemps' father would say, "Sometimes I miss all that. If I was just thinking about myself, I might want to go back and try it again. But I've got the children to think about--their education" (8). For Buddy, he would simply reply by saying, "Folks talk a lot about California . . . but I'd a heap rather be down home than here, if it wasn't for the conditions" (8-9). In some ways, both men miss their home in Louisiana, but due to differing circumstances both do not wish to return.

Bontemps' father had to think about his children. He continually approved of Buddy's ability to read and write well, but he disparaged Buddy for his "casual and frequent use of the word nigger;" for his love of "dialect stories, preacher stories, ghost stories, slave and master stories;" and for his belief "in signs and charms and mumbo jumbo" (9). Not wanting his son to look at Buddy for an example and to better his education, Bontemps' father sent him to a white boarding school for high school. He told his son, "Now don't go up there acting colored" (10). The tension between hanging on to the "folk heritage" of Louisiana and the South manifests itself in Bontemps' father and great-uncle. As Bontemps says, "In their opposing attitudes towards roots my father and my great-uncle made me aware of a conflict in which every educated American Negro, and some who are not educated, must somehow take sides" (11).

Portrait by Weinold Reiss

Bontemps concludes his essay by providing examples of African Americans staying or leaving the South, and he states, "The southern Negro's link with the past seems to me worth preserving" (23). In support of this statement, Bontemps talks about those who have migrated away from the South and now talk about "Soulville," "Soulbrothers," and "Soulfood." The South and its "folk heritage" serve as a source of inspiration and as means of connection with the past. Bontemps taps this in the in the stories collected in The Old South, and like Gaines, even though he may have, at times, tried to distance himself from the region, he kept returning, both physically and mentally. In the next post, I will delve more into Bontemps' relation to Gaines. I did not do this here, but this post will serve as a background to expand the discussion next time.



Bontemps, Arna. The Old South: "A Summer Tragedy" and Other Stories of the Thirties. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1973. Print.
Hughes, Langston. "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain." The Prentice Hall Anthology of African American Literature. Eds. Rochelle Smith and Sharon L. Jones. Upper Saddle River: Prentice Hall, 2000. 955-958. Print.