Survival Essay

“The Man owned the land. Then he give you the cotton seeds, and the fertilizer, and the mule, and some clothes, and everything else you need to get through the year. ‘Cept he don’t really give it to you: He let you buy it at the store on credit. But it was his store on his plantation that he owned… Supposably, you gon’ split that cotton right down the middle, or maybe sixty-fourty. But by the time the crop comes in, you owe the Man so much on credit, your share of crop gets eat up.”- Denver Moore

Sharecropping- the modern slavery. Even though slavery was abbolished after the end of the Civil War, it still persisted. Farmers, in the south especially, changed the name of their crime from ‘slavery’ to ‘sharecropping,’ offered free land in trade for work, and sat back and grinned at their genius. However, the people who were trapped in this never-ending cycle of work without pay could survive if they were willing to either A) pick cotton for the rest of their lives or B) be homeless.


Two options presented themsleves when one was a sharecropper: staying or leaving- and both offered their own problems. One problem with the former were the high interest rates landlords, or the “Man,” charged. According to Digital History’s page on sharecropping, landlords charged “as high as 70 percent a year.” To help articulate this, imagine yourself as a sharecropper- you bought a block of cheese at the landlord’s store. At the end of the year, when it came time to get paid for all of your hard work, one would have had to pay the landlord back for the cheese, along with 70 percent of the cost of said cheese. Seeing as sharecroppers only got paid once a year, the cost of buying things of credit became pricey. In short, sharecroppers rarely had spare money. Denver Moore, a former sharecropper who escaped his circumstance and went on to write a book called Same Kind of Different as Me, remembers his time working on a plantation in Red River Parish, Louisiana- “Lotta times the men would be sharecroppin on them plantations and look around and wonder why they was workin the land so hard and ever year the Man that owned the land be takin all the profits.” This kind of unfair treatment lead to the saying “freedom could make folks proud but it didn’t make ‘em rich.” Sadly, this was the reality for almost every sharecropper because, as Moore would say, “you never stopped owning the Man.” Poverty was the norm on most plantations because of these unfair interst rates, and even though most sharecroppers had enough food to survive, they never had money to impove the situation they found themselves in.


As bad as staying might sound, leaving could be considered worse. Leaving meant throwing yourself into the unknown and learning to adapt, much like Buck in the Call of the Wild. Ex-sharecroppers faced the same problems Buck faced, like finding means of nourishment, finding proper shelter, and learning, for lack of better words, “the law of club and fang.” Denver Moore escaped Red River Parish by jumping on a passing train and ended up homeless, and he even says “we was like animals livin in the woods, just tryin to survive.” He recollects his experience with being homeless in Fort Worth, Texas, and the lengths he went to to obtain simple things like food and water. One of his schemes, something called ‘hamburger drop,’ was his favorite way to get food.

“After I’d get my dollar for the day, I’d go on down to the McDonald’s and buy me a hamburger, take a coupla bites out of it, and wrap it back up. Then I’d pick me out one of them big, tall office buildins that’s got a trash can on the sidewalk out front. When nobody was lookin, I’d stick that wrapped-up burger down in the can and wait. Soon as I saw somebody comin, I’d pretend like I was diggin in the trash. Then I’d come up with that hamburger and commence to eatin it. For sure somebody always gon’ stop and say “Hey, don’t eat that!”- and they gon’ give you some money…”

 Moore also remembers bathing in the Water Gardens Park. According to him, he and one of his buddies would go and stand by the fountain, “act like tourists,” and wait until the coast was clear. Then his buddy would push him down in the water, “laughin and jokin like we was just friends horsin around on vacation,” but in reality they would be scrubbing themselves as fast as they could. Money was another hard thing to come by when one was homeless. Moore found work at the local Labor Force, “doin work nobody else want to do- like pickin up trash, cleanin out ole warehouses, or sweepin up horse manure after a stock show.” At least with staying on a plantation, you were guaranteed some food and (mediocre) shelter. But becoming homeless starts the process of dehumanization, making one an animal just trying to survive.

Some would argue that sharecropping was not as bad after all; some would argue that sharecropper’s thrived. My great-great aunt was a sharecropper; Pearl and Lawrence Taylor moved to Oklahoma in the early 1930’s and started their new lives as sharecroppers. In one of Pearl’s letter’s home, she comments on how tired she is of pinto beans and and how thankful she was that Lawrence had gotten some real meat as payment for helping a neighbor. In another letter, Pearl writes of her garden worms and how they had eaten through all of her potatoe plants. She also says “have about eighty little chicks. Sure are proud of them. Am going to try to have some cotton if I can get some to a hoe.” In yet another letter she speaks of sending her kids to school. She states that they all loved it and that she lets them “wear anything just as long as it’s clean.” In spite of poverty and unfairness, My great-great aunt Pearl Taylor, a sharecropper, was happy with the things she earned. She and her husband worked hard for what they had, sent their kids to school, and had food on the table every night.


Even though sharecropping is illegal now, some of the survivors are still alive. They live everyday with the horrors of poverty they experienced in their childhood, haunted by the lengths they went to survive.