Normally the work on the cotton plantations was well underway by March 1st. The land was first broken, then harrowed, and the rows were laid out for planting the cottonseed by the time the frost was out of the ground. March 1st was “Furnish Day,” when the company store opened its doors to the sharecroppers to take on credit. Each family was entitled to draw its groceries and other supplies. There was a credit limit based on one dollar per month for each acre in cotton the cropper was to cultivate and harvest that year. The “furnish” was allowed only until the crops were laid by in July. Usually by about the 4th of July nearly all the work was done in the cotton fields, until picking time in the fall.
Cotton planting started in April. A single-row cottonseed planter was driven down each row in the field, dropping the seeds and lightly covering them. In a couple of weeks, depending on the weather, the cotton plants pushed through the soft crust of soil. When the plants were firmly set and up to the right height, the sharecropper took a special plow to scrape the weeds and dirt away from his cotton. Great skill was required to scrape the cotton on each side of the row, leaving the plants still with a firm foundation. Then the sharecropper’s wife and all children old enough to chop came to the fields with long-handled hoes to thin the cotton to a stand. As it was chopped and thinned, the sharecropper used another plow to gently cover the row without destroying the plant.
The weeding of the cotton continued along with the plowing for at least six weeks. Everyone who was old enough to swing a hoe was needed to keep the field clean of weeds. The sharecropper kept his cultivator and his mule going from daybreak to dark. There would be a hurried meal in the middle of the day. Sometimes, if the work was going well, everyone had a short nap, resting on the shady side of the house . . . If a family was caught up with the work on its own piece of land, its members were often called upon to help other croppers who had fallen behind. Also, the owner might have a day-labor crop, where there was some extra work to be done. Usually there was a fixed wage for such work, 75 cents a day for grown folks, 40 cents for the young ones. I often worked chopping cotton back in Tennessee for 50 cents a day when I was growing up. By the time I was fifteen I was paid a man’s wage . . . however, wages were seldom ever paid in cash. The family was just given credit for its account at the company store. Sometimes payment was made by printed pieces of paper to exchange for goods at the company store. These slips showed that the bearer was due the amount shown on the cover, and they came to be known as “doodlum books,” or “due books.” In some places they used pieces of brass: 1¢, 5¢, 10¢, 25¢, 50¢ and $1 pieces, good only at the company store. This money was known as “brozeene.”
The prices at the company store were always much higher than those charged by the few small grocery store operators who managed to survive in town. In addition to the higher prices that the sharecroppers had to pay for basics such as flour, meal, and the fat back meat also called sowbelly, they were charged interest on the “furnish” they received. Usually this was 10 percent per month, on each dollar. An interest rate of 40 percent annually was considered normal . . .
After the crop was laid by in July, there was no more work for the sharecropper and his family until the last of September when the crop was ready to harvest. Naturally, credit was cut off at the commissary. It was a time for hunting, fishing, and going to “big meeting” where hellfire and damnation preachers held forth in the small churches of the black folks, and in hastily erected “brush arbors” for the white folks, which sheltered the sinners from the hot sun. All were there to repent their sins. Sometimes a white evangelist would come along who had his own tent. The plantation owners encouraged and often paid the preachers something extra to conduct the big meetings, so that field hands could hear their troubles blamed upon their sinful ways, rather than on the economic conditions under which they lived. . .
About the middle of September when the cotton started to open, the labor of every man, woman and child was needed in the harvest. Black and white, old and young were all in the fields. Schools, where they existed, always closed for “cotton picking time,” . . . The same thing happened in the spring when schools were let out for “cotton chopping.” . . . Children didn’t get much learning anyway. As soon as a boy became strong enough, he became a plowhand and a valuable addition to the family economic unit. Since plowing was considered man’s work, girls as a rule did not plow, so they got a little more schooling than the boys. Some girls even learned to read and write quite well.
The obstacles to education, especially for African Americans, are stated vividly by historian Robert J. Norrell: “In 1934 the expenditure for each white pupil in Macon County was $65.18 and for each black student $6.58. White teachers’ salaries averaged $867 in 1934, as compared with $348 for blacks. White class enrollment averaged twenty-two students; black schools had almost sixty pupils in each class. County buses transported sixty percent of the white students to school, but no black children. Nearly seventy-five percent of black schools in the county in 1934 had only one teacher.” And all this was, Norrell said, despite the participation in Macon County of the Rosenwald Fund. Julius Rosenwald was a white philanthropist from Chicago who became interested in education in the rural South after talking with Booker T. Washington. Rosenwald’s money helped build a number of black schools in the rural South, and the very first was in Macon County. As we will see, Rosenwald’s philanthropy played a role in the initiation of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, too.
H. L. Mitchell’s description of sharecropping continues:
On some of the plantations, the sharecroppers were allowed to keep half of the money for which the seed was sold when their cotton was ginned. This was “cotton pickin’ money.” Sometimes black sharecroppers carrying their cotton to the gin to be baled were heard to say: “Git that white man’s cotton off my seed.”
After the crop was all about picked out, usually just before Christmas, “settlement time” came. Sharecroppers would gather hopefully at the plantation commissary and the owner or his agent would call each man into the office in turn. The verdict would be handled down something like this: “Well, you had a good year. You raised twenty bales of cotton. We sold it for seven cents a pound, that comes to $35 a bale, or a total of $700. Half of that is yours — $350. BUT you owe $200, plus interest of $80, on the furnish. You know we had to get the doctor when your wife was sick, and we deducted the doctor’s calls and the medicines he gave, and then you bought some clothes for the children, too. The amount due you is $49.50. At least you got some Christmas money.”
. . . Often the crop was not too good, or the sharecropper’s account was over the amount the cotton brought when sold, and the man would then start the next year still in debt. He could not leave the plantation owing a debt. If he found a way to get his things moved at night, the law—usually the deputy sheriff—would be sent to hunt the man down and force him and his family to return. Sometimes a man’s debt would be bought by another plantation owner, and the sharecropper would start off in debt to the new owner. Sometimes a planter to whom a sharecropper owed money would just pass out the word that the sharecropper was unreliable, and no one would let him have a place where he could make a crop. When that happened, his only hope was to find part-time work as a wage laborer, but that was a downward step to an agricultural worker.
H. L. Mitchell was a white man, and his personal experiences as a sharecropper were in Arkansas and Tennessee. But he organized for the Southern Tenant Farmer’s Union in Alabama, too, and he gives a good account of what it was like across the South in this time period. Mitchell’s union, though handicapped by charges that it was Communist-inspired, was a very interesting early example of organizing across racial lines, and some of its leaders later became active participants in the civil rights movement which developed in the forties and fifties. Ned Cobb was an African American farmer in the Notasulga area of Macon County whose involvement with Mitchell’s union led to a violent 1932 confrontation with the law that was memorialized in the epic poem “In Egypt Land” by the Alabama poet John Beecher. From that poem, the author Ted Rosengarten later tracked Cobb down and further popularized his life, as “Nate Shaw,” in the oral autobiography All God’s Dangers. And Ralph Ellison describes life in Macon County