All God's Dangers (2 page)

The people of the lowlands still grow cotton, along with corn, sugar cane, peanuts, watermelons, and other table foods. The land is smooth and fit for extensive cultivation. This was plantation country and the population today is largely black. After the Civil War, owners of the plantations divided their lands into tenant plots. To their surprise and uneasiness, poor whites came down from the hills to compete with the freed slaves for land. For about twenty-five years, or until the 1890's, whites and blacks worked adjacent farms as sharecroppers and tenants. Then, hoping to counter falling cotton prices by exploiting a more submissive class, landlords pushed the poor whites back into the hills and filled their places with blacks.

Cotton prices reached new highs during the First World War, but farmers at the bottom of the tenant system shared little in the profits; for the system that encumbered them with mandatory debts also deprived them of authority to sell their crops. Thus, poor black farmers lived under the twin yoke of race oppression and economic peonage. Taking advantage of new openings in wartime industry, many fled to the cities. This great movement north intensified during the early years of the boll weevil's devastation through about 1920, and again during the Great Depression and the Second World War. The migration continues at a regular pace today.

Nate Shaw stayed in Alabama because he believed his labor gave him a claim to the land. He watched his neighbors pick up and leave but “
that
never come in my mind.” Though he loathed his situation, he thought, “Somehow, some way, I'd overcome it.… I was determined to try.”

I was hoping Shaw's autobiography would be a first installment in an intensive study of the family. I had no idea what shape it would take, or if I would have the means to do it, or if the children would cooperate. I did know that the Shaw family's experience was typical of many southern black families: the voyage from farm to factory, from country to city, from south to north. These relocations had profound effects on family life, class situation, and consciousness. There was much here to lure the historian.

I returned in June with a hundred pages of questions to ask Shaw. It became clear during our first session that I'd never get to a fraction of them. It would have taken years; moreover, my prepared questions distracted Shaw from his course. Since it was my aim to preserve his stories, I learned how to listen and not to resist his method of withholding facts for the sake of suspense. Everything came out in time, everything.

We would sit under the eave of his tool shed and talk for two to six hours per session. Shaw would whittle or make baskets as he spoke. He would quarter and peel a six-foot section of a young trunk, weave the strips into the desired shape, then put a handle on it. A large laundry basket would take him half a day to make, working steadily with wood cut the day before.

When it rained we would move our chairs inside the shed. There, in near dark, cramped among baskets, broken-bottomed chairs, sacks of feed and fertilizer, worn harnesses and tools, Shaw enacted his most fiery stories. I am thankful for all the rain we had, for it moved us to a natural theater and pounded the tin roof like a delirious crowd inciting an actor to the peak of his energy.

To start, I asked Shaw if he knew how he got his name. This tapped an important source of his earliest knowledge—the stories of old people. Shaw announced a ground rule for himself: he would always distinguish between what was told for the truth and what was told to entertain, between direct experience and hearsay. He went on to recollect the content and flavor of his childhood. In sum, he described how a black boy growing up in rural Alabama at the turn of the century acquired a practical education. At the death of his mother and his first barefoot days behind a plow—events separated by two months—he learned what sort of hard life lay ahead.

Beginning with his recollections of the first time his father hired him out to work for a white man, in 1904, Shaw recalled
events and relationships according to the year, as though he had kept a mental journal. Thus we would spend one session covering 1904 and 1905, pick up at 1906 and so on. Once he married and left his father's house and had his own crop, each harvest completed both his work cycle and the perimeter of his experiences for that year.

For each place he farmed I asked about the quality and extent of the land, changes in the technology of farming, the size of his crops and the prices they brought him, his contracts and relationships with white people at every stage of the crop, the growth of his family and the division of labor within it, and how he felt about all that. Shaw told me how he moved from farm to farm seeking good land and the freedom to work it to its potential. By raising all his foodstuffs and hauling lumber while his older boys worked the farm, he became self-sufficient. At every step along the way he faced a challenge to his independence. Landlords tried to swindle him, merchants turned him out, neighbors despised his success. In spite of their schemes and in spite of the perils inherent to cotton farming, he prevailed.

When we came up to the crucial events of the thirties the sessions turned into heated dialogues. I pressed Shaw for his motivations and challenged him to justify himself. Here, I want to make my sympathies clear. Nate Shaw was—and is—a hero to me. I think he did the right thing when he joined the Sharecroppers Union and fought off the deputy sheriffs, though, of course, I had nothing to lose by his actions. My questions must unavoidably have expressed this judgment but they did not, I believe, change the substance of his responses.

Our sessions dealing with the prison years were more even-tempered, just as Shaw had had to keep cool to live out his sentence. I asked him about conditions at each of the three prison camps in which he served. He answered with stories about his work life and his relations with prison officials and fellow convicts. During these years, his wife Hannah and son Vernon presided over his family and property. His mules died, his automobile ran down, but he forced himself not to think about it.

Shaw was fifty-nine years old when he came home from prison. The years following his release were the most painful for him to talk about. For in his struggle to reclaim a portion of his former status he faced insuperable barriers—his age, poverty, and
obsolete skills. Again, my questions pursued him from farm to farm. I asked about the issues foremost in his mind—his new relationships with his children and, after the death of Hannah, with his second wife, Josie; the social and economic changes that directly affected him, his family, and his race; and still, his stand that morning in December, 1932, against the forces of injustice.

After sixty hours spread over sixteen sessions we completed the first round. Shaw had given me the outlines of his life and many representative stories. I hadn't asked the questions I'd come with and I had to choose between doing that and going over the same ground with a finer-toothed comb. Shaw wanted to add details and whole stories he had remembered after we passed their places in the narrative. Taking his lead and working from notes I had written while playing back the tapes, we began again. We lasted fifteen more sessions and another sixty hours. As our talks drew to a close the sessions grew longer. The initiative was his. Our work strengthened him and sustained his belief that his struggles had been worth the effort, although he had only his recollections to show for them. These filled his days with a reality more powerful than the present.

A
FTER
working with Shaw I began making the rounds of his children. They had, of course, their own views of what he had done. They knew I had been attracted to him because of his connection with the Sharecroppers Union, and while they acknowledged his courage they were invariably critical of his stand. For they had lost their father for twelve years and watched the task of raising a large family during hard times take its physical toll on their mother.

The ambition that drove Shaw to prosperity also led him to his “trouble.” Rosa Louise, his youngest daughter, calls his drive “the white man in him.” She means that her father demanded as much for himself and his family as the white man demanded for his own, and when he got it he wouldn't let it go without a fight.

Shaw was, without question, a hard worker and a great provider, unrivaled in his settlement. One could be guilty, however, in the eyes of the settlement and before God, of excessive zeal in the pursuit of a good life and excessive pride in attaining it. Righteousness consisted in not having so much that it hurt to lose it. This notion appears to cater to landlords, merchants, bankers, and furnishing
agents by discouraging resistance or ambition on the part of their farmer-debtors. But people who lived by it achieved a measure of autonomy. Shaw describes his brother Peter as a man with just this spirit in him: “He made up his mind that he weren't goin to have anything and after that, why, nothin could hurt him.” Two of Peter's sons who migrated to Detroit after the Second World War say that their father decided he never would own an automobile, an electric stove, or other trappings. He could have raised larger crops than he did, on larger debts, but he chose to live plainly, avoid commercial contact with white people, and not work himself to death. Under a system that deprived farmers of sovereignty over their crops and severely limited their social and political liberties, such self-restraint was one way a man could control the course of his own life.

Nate Shaw's spirit led him on a different course. To his children he felt obliged to leave an inheritance—mules, tools, wagons, etc.—that they could use to earn a living. And to his race he wanted to set an example. He was, for instance, one of the first black farmers to buy an automobile. “There's a heap of my race,” he says, “didn't believe their color should have a car, believed what the white man wanted em to believe.” Shaw's defiance peaked in the face of imminent foreclosure. When he walked out on his “mission” he had no definite plan for a new world; he just couldn't endure the old order.

Was this an impulsive act of bravery? Did Shaw miscalculate the support his union could deliver? Did he know that organizers of the union belonged to the Communist Party? And if he did know, did it matter to him? There are no easy answers. Shaw admits he learned little about the origins of the union. He was less concerned with where it came from than with its spirit, which he recognized as his own. Nor were the details of its program essential, for he knew that even the most meager demand black tenant farmers could make undermined the white man's prerogative upon which the whole system rested.

While Shaw occupies the foreground of his stage he makes no claim for the uniqueness of his struggle. On the contrary, he is careful to stress the social position each actor represents. The opposition between him and his landlord, for example, which culminates in the confrontation with the deputies, is historically significant because it is common.

W
HEN
Shaw came home from prison many people he had known were gone. Some were living in the north, some in nearby counties, and some had died. There were other important changes. The federal government had stepped into agriculture and guaranteed small farmers, even sharecroppers, the right to sell their own cotton. Local textile mills had begun hiring blacks for the most menial jobs, thereby opening an alternative to the farm. Farming itself had become more complex and prohibitive to an uneducated man: you had to fill out forms and participate in government programs; to ensure an adequate yield you had to buy imported seeds, new fertilizers, insect poisons, and weed killers; tractors, too, were coming into style.

Nate Shaw was a mule farmer in a tractor world. The most meaningful and exciting episode of his life was behind him. It had given him a standard to judge human conduct; it put all of his skirmishes in perspective. But history seemed to have made a great leap over the twelve years he spent in prison. His recollections of his heroism and the events that led up to it belonged to a vanished reality. When he spoke about the past, his own sons shied away from the implications: “Some of em that don't like the standard I proved in these union affairs tells me I talk too much.”

Seeking a better judgment from God and his race, and aiming to leave his trace on the world, Shaw proceeded to narrate the “life” of a black tenant farmer. The result is an intimate portrait that reproduces the tempo of a life unfolding. Shaw has the storyteller's gift to suspend his age while reciting. Thus his childhood stories ring with the astonishment and romance of a boy discovering the universe. Similarly, stories of his old age are tinged by the bittersweet feelings of a passionate man who has lost his illusions.

Nate Shaw belongs to the tradition of farmer-storytellers. These people appear in all civilizations and are only beginning to disappear in the most advanced ones. Their survival is bound up with the fate of communities of small farmers. When these communities disperse and farms become larger, fewer in number, and owned more and more by absentee investors, the sources of story material and audiences dry up.