Eli Wilkins was my laid-back buddy. Mother felt he performed his tasks as the family’s butler, chauffeur, and yard man without enthusiasm. But he was my friend, somebody to play catch with, a passable Ping-Pong player who let me win sometimes. When I began to have aches in strange places and noticed girls, he explained the birds and bees to me in an arcane style that left me still clueless about female anatomy and the mechanics of “going all the way.” He told me that the first time he had sex, he was embarrassed because he thought he had peed in the girl. This only deepened the alluring mystery. Once I embarrassed myself in Eli’s presence by uttering a remark typical of the thoughtless racism of the time and place. He was driving a group of us boys to a party and the subject of mixed nuts came up. I said I liked everything but “nigger toes,” our colloquialism for Brazil nuts. The word hung in the air, a frozen, ugly thing. I wanted to die, but Eli, either gracefully or with resignation, acted as if he had not heard me.
Though I never heard Mother and Dad utter the word “Nigger,” I can only imagine the indignities overheard by Mildred and Eli from dining room guests in the 1940s and ’50s. Mildred had room and board in a two-room apartment, with bath, attached to the garage. The pay back then was no more than seven to ten dollars a week; it hardly compensated for the social slights they suffered, though Eli’s and Mildred’s meager salaries put them in an economic bracket above the army of black and white sharecroppers.
Clarence Cason, a writer and University of Alabama journalism professor from neighboring Talladega County, explained the economics of sharecropping in his 1935 book, 90° in the Shade. This is how it worked: In March, the typical tenant borrowed about $200 from his landlord or banker. Of this sum, $50 might be designated for the fertilizer dealer, $50 for stock-feed, and $10 for interest. With luck—which seldom visited tenants in the Depression years—the “cropper” would sell three bales of cotton for $200 in the fall. After paying off his loan, the tenant would have left about $15 for each of the next six months until March. Jimmy Carter described the same cycle of hard work and hard poverty in south Georgia in his book An Hour Before Daylight. These are the people about whom James Agee wrote in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Despite Agee’s elegant and sympathetic account, the book shamed the families depicted in it because, among other details of their pinched lives, he revealed that the Whites and Gudgers had only two pairs of threadbare underwear. Agee pulled back the curtain so these formerly invisible people and their miserable lives could be seen by the educated, articulate, and well-heeled. He told the croppers’ story in language that sophisticated readers could understand; it was their language, only better. It was important for that audience to know what life was like in the Black Belt but the book shamed the people about whom Agee wrote. They felt as if they had been exposed, in their threadbare underwear, inside a circle of wealthy, educated, fashionable, and powerful elites.
The Gudgers and Whites are also the people about whom the Star alumnus Rick Bragg wrote in his memoir of growing up dirt poor in Possum Trot, a cluster of rural Calhoun County houses whose post office closed decades ago. Bragg knew the people of the hardscrabble South, was one of them from his earliest memory: being dragged on the end of a cotton sack by his mother. His books All Over But the Shoutin’ and Ava’s Man gave Agee’s people a voice, a story they could be proud of, written by one of their own. Bragg’s work did not “sing the praises of famous men,” as in the opening passage of the verse from Ecclesiastes. He wrote for those who “have perished as though they had never existed; they have become as though they had never been born, they and their children after them.” They are the people you didn’t know, if you were an east-sider like me. They lived in the weathered gray shacks on rural back roads, the people who fought and drank and populated the hospital and police reports in the paper. They were poor people with a code of honor we east-siders didn’t know or understand, but which made them worthy of respect. About them, about his own black family, the late James Tinsley said, “They call it sharecropping, but the big man, he didn’t do too much sharin’.” Mr. Tinsley’s parents escaped the farm to do “public work” in the textile mills for the lordly wages of $7.50 to $10 a week, which they stretched to send their son to Tuskegee Institute.
The Tinsleys’ migration from farm to city came after the agricultural depression of the 1880s and 1890s. Families by the thousands fled from “Tobacco Road,” the indentured servitude of sharecropping, to cities where the mill owners had jobs and housing for the workers—including the children. In fact, the small hands of children were more adept at working the machines than parents whose hands were gnarled by years of cotton picking. By 1900, 30 percent of Alabama’s millhands were children, according to an essay in Alabama Heritage magazine.
Many of these children never saw the sun, trudging to work at dawn and dragging home in the dark for a few hours sleep. A brief survey at the time turned up 450 children under age twelve who worked twelve or more hours every day, Saturday included. They were an army of unschooled (many totally illiterate), indentured slaves—not unlike children in rural Turkey today who sit on stools weaving rugs for tourists all day—some, the family’s only source of income.
Alabama children brought home wages of a dime to forty cents while the mill owners were cushioned by profits of 35 to 40 percent or more. In 1900, the state was no different than a small, third world nation today, ruled by an economic elite. The oppressed workers and yeoman farmers, especially blacks, were soon to be disenfranchised by the 1901 Constitution, written by a convention of our “best” citizens.
A generation of persistent effort, appeals to the conscience of many “best” citizens, and the shocking images of photography—as powerful then as TV was to the civil rights movement—eventually achieved some reform. Mill owners fought against the reformist onslaught in the legislature, arguing that the mills had saved white Southerners from the ravages of poverty, a generally accepted perception at the time; further, mill owners argued that mill parents would migrate to Georgia if the children’s income stopped.
A partial victory for reform was won with the reluctant compliance of Governor B. B. Comer, himself a textile magnate. Even the minimal, sixty-hour week for children under fourteen proved unenforceable. Reform got another boost in 1911 when the National Child Labor Committee convention was held in Birmingham. Former President Teddy Roosevelt told a packed house that Alabamians, who had recently improved their livestock breed, should put equal effort to raising their children.
An exhibit of Lewis Hines’s photographic essay on child labor dramatically galvanized public opinion. Photography was as new to the eyes of early twentieth-century citizens as television was in the 1950s and ’60s. A shocked Birmingham Age-Herald reporter wrote, “There has been no more convincing proof of the absolute necessity of the child labor laws . . . than by these pictures. They . . . depict a state of affairs which is terrible in its reality—terrible to encounter, terrible to admit that such things exist in civilized communities.” With the election of Thomas Kilby as governor, reform finally triumphed. In 1919, the Legislature passed an act reducing to forty-eight the maximum number of hours that children under fourteen could work. In addition, child workers were required to complete the fourth grade.
Working-class Southern blacks and whites, rescued from share-cropping, were in turn exploited by Southern mill owners, and also fell victims to national political and economic forces—the part Calvinist, part Darwinian belief that “to the victor belongs the spoils.” No Marshall Plan cushioned the South’s recovery from the error of attacking the great industrial nation to the north. When the war ended in 1865, capital in the South vanished. Confederate currency and bonds were worthless. A hundred million dollars in insurance investments and twice as much bank capital evaporated. Merton Coulter, who authored the Reconstruction volume for the LSU History of the South series, estimates the lost capital from the emancipation of slaves to have been between $1 and $4 billion. The desolation couldn’t have been more drastic if mid-nineteenth century Europe had been transformed into the Indian subcontinent.
A society without any currency, and few opportunities to earn any, must invent its own peculiar economic and social system. Of course, a nation without capital will not grow industries and cities where the arts, finance and health