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.
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