All God's Dangers (92 page)

Churches aint goin to save you—churches don't save a man, don't get that in your head. You got to be truly born again by the blood of our precious Savior above; that's all goin to save you. You needn't run around to the different churches and hoop and holler and clap your hands to get to heaven when you die. Just so you a believer of Christ, you a blood-bought soldier of God.

God says, “Shun sin as the deadly poison.” That makes you want to treat everybody right, treat em with respect for God's sake. He didn't put us down here to live like dogs and brutes. God's got people here in this world that aint goin to do right no way He approaches em. He knew all that before He created us here. He's all mighty, all wise God; there's nothin hidden under the cover from Him. I feel that when He created the heaven and earth He knowed just exactly how every man and every woman would conduct themselves. He knows all about you. He created you—what I mean by created, He done a large part. I had a lovin mother once in life; I didn't come in this world of myself, I was bred. And the Holy Father above blessed me to come into this world by my mother and father. Where did I originate? My mother was a Culver and my daddy was a Shaw. Hadn't a been for them I wouldn't a been here. But God fixed and planned a way for me. And He's kept His eyes on me all through my life. God don't tell me to use anger, hatred—that's of me, I'm goin by what suits me—

I'll make a parable of it: if I catch a white man havin nature-course with a colored woman, I don't like it. I'm mad as the devil. I don't want him messin around with my color, he don't want me
messin around with his color. Well, what do God say about this here chicanery? The niggers hates the white folks, the white folks hates the niggers—and they're brothers and sisters. So far as the creatin of us, we're just created with different colors. I don't know what God's cause was in makin us that way; it aint been revealed to me. And I don't know that anybody's found out.

He tells me the white is my brother—still I gets angry at it. God don't throw no chunks about it. He aint goin to come down here and keep a white man off of a colored woman; He aint goin to keep no colored man off of a white woman. After a while if that goes on everybody will look just alike, in a way. Take a certain length of time and all of em will look just alike, and all of em won't show to be niggers and won't show to be white folks. You don't know—you can read till your ears flop but you don't know all bout what God's goin to do. Maybe when the human race gets thoroughly mixed, that's the time God goin to call the whole settin off.

I
F
I'd a just reversed my words and said, “O, all we niggers is just gettin along fine, and all the poor white folks—we just havin a ball—” but I aint goin to tell it that way, I can't. No, it's right over to the other side: they been brutally treated and scorned.

I tries my best to tell people today about this past way of life but a heap of em don't want to hear me and let me know it to my face: “We'd rather you talk about somethin else. We wants to forget what you talkin about.”

But I have had my eyes open too long to the facts, and my ears, what I've heard; and what I have touched with my hands and what have touched me is a fact. And I treasures what I know and I so often think about it and how necessary it is to set an example before God and man. I feel my best sympathy and hold my best judgment for the poor Negro of my kind and the poor white man. God knows I won't jump back from tellin what I know. And if certain ones in this country knowed I've told all this, good God, they'd be hankin to string me out.

I tell the world: all I wants is protection. I aint stepped back nary a foot since I joined that union and furthermore, if you don't slip up and hurt me, you better mind how you walk up on me today. I stand now where I stood then, with the same thoughts and just
as willin as I started off. I aint huntin no trouble, but I'm flesh and blood and human. Do any man think that I wouldn't take some steps to help myself?

I went on after I come out of prison and bought me another good breech-loader. After that rip-it come off, the white folks runned all over this country takin all the guns they could find away from all the colored people. Even come and took old man Warren Jenks' guns from him. Took three breech-loaders from my house. Wasn't but one of em a stompin good gun and that was my father-in-law's—my mother-in-law gived it to me after the death of him and told me to keep it; she didn't tell me to keep it so long, she told me to
keep
that gun. That was one of the best breech-loaders I ever put up to my face. One of them guns, the plunge in it had done dulled up and got where it wouldn't bust a cap. I bought that gun when I was a young man and it was out of commission when it was taken from me.

They didn't get my short gun. That .32 Smith and Wesson is layin in the house now asleep—and loaded too. I been havin that gun more than fifty years and I takes care of it. I gived a fellow a dog and a little old shoat for it. That thing—on a Monday evenin, in December of '32, that thing squalled like a wildcat. I didn't let up until I emptied all six chambers.

There was a fellow in the crowd there at Virgil Jones' house that day went for a little kin to me, Lynn Cole. This boy is yet livin today in Birmingham. Walked up to me when the shootin had ceased and the sheriffs cleared out; told me, “Let me have your gun, Cousin Nate. Let me have your gun.” And, unthoughtable, I handed it to him and I left there and left him with my gun, walked on home.

I heard the next day about the mob crowd ridin the settlement and country over, takin colored folks' guns. I wondered a long time bout what become of my gun. Lynn had got away and went on home with it, and however God would have it—his mother was named Faye, we always called her Cousin Faye Cole. Her husband was dead and him and her was the father and mother of two boys, Greg and Lynn, and a girl named Nellie. She was married at that time, Nellie was, and Greg was married, but Lynn wasn't. Lynn got home and gived that gun to Cousin Faye, his mother. She hid it, hid the devil out of it. And durin of my wife comin to see me in prison—she had been in contact with Cousin Faye. Cousin Faye told her
she had my gun and one day she gived it to Hannah and Hannah brought it on home. And she come one Sunday and told me, “Darlin, I got your gun. Cousin Lynn gived it to his mother, Cousin Faye, and Cousin Faye gived it to me. She had your gun.”

I been havin that gun more than fifty long years. Now I don't love to just shoot around and be shootin, but I shoots it sometimes just to see if it will yet answer me. I come out my house and stand on the brick doorstep and throw it to the air—I never shoot it straight along. I throw it to the air and ask it for all six shots. Counts em just like a new born baby: YAW YAW YAW YAW YAW YAW.

Nate Shaw died on Monday, November 5, 1973.
He was buried at Pottstown Baptist Church,
Tukabahchee County, Alabama.

CRANE
'
S FORD
AND THE SHARECROPPERS UNION
(
SCU
)

During the early years of the Great Depression, the Communist Party sent organizers to Alabama to build a steelworkers union in Birmingham and a sharecroppers union in the countryside. The cotton system was verging on collapse. Cotton prices had been falling steadily since the end of the First World War, and now, as prices hit bottom, nobody could make a profit. Many poor farmers were uprooted; those who stayed were threatened with the loss of their meager property and means of support.

After crops were planted in the spring of 1931, landlords and merchants in the Crane's Ford area decided to cut off food advances to their tenants and sharecroppers while the cotton ripened in summer. Landlords also reduced day wages for field work.

The
Southern Worker
, a Party newspaper serving the southern states, printed letters from unidentified “farmer correspondents” at Crane's Ford, describing conditions there and asking for help. The Party sent an organizer to form a union local. Black farmers met with him and drew up a list of demands: food advances through “settlement” time; the right to sell their own crops and to plant small gardens for home use; wages for picking cotton to be paid in cash in full; a three-hour midday rest for day workers; a nine-month school year for black children and a free school bus. These demands went beyond measures to meet the current crisis; if met, they would have
given poor farmers some control over work conditions and improved their chances in the world through education.

Party strategists believed that fighting for specific demands would prepare black farmers for “self-determination.” In the Party's view, the black majorities of black-belt counties shared economic, territorial, and cultural identities; hence, they constituted a “nation.” This “nation” would become a reality if the black-belt counties were unified across state lines. Then, in theory, black majorities could enfranchise themselves and vote to decide if they would have an independent political system.

But in 1931, black farmers had to struggle simply to remain on the land. The confrontation at Crane's Ford was a defensive action characteristic of the Sharecroppers Union's (SCU) early history, from 1931 to 1933. Crane's Ford farmers had not yet planned any particular tactics to implement their demands when, on July 15, 1931, their meeting was raided by the high sheriff and his posse. The raid touched off several days of sporadic violence. One farmer was killed and his house burned, and thirty-five blacks were jailed on charges ranging from carrying concealed weapons to assault and conspiracy with intent to murder. They were never brought to trial. By September, all were released, possibly due to lack of evidence and possibly because the cotton needed picking.

But the SCU was effectively suppressed in Crane's Ford. In late fall, 1932, the Party sent a second organizer to Pottstown, some fifteen miles to the south. Nate Shaw describes what happened there. Following the shoot-out between farmers and sheriffs, legal prosecution and vigilante violence curtailed union activity in the area.

Beginning in 1933, the SCU concentrated its efforts in the black belt west of Tukabahchee County. There, organizers saw the large plantations as “factories in the fields.” Farm laborers who neither owned nor rented the land were brought by the wagonload and truckload into the fields to chop and pick cotton for wages paid daily, weekly, or monthly. The SCU claimed it had organized several thousand farm laborers, and in 1935 the union led wage strikes with modest success across the Alabama black belt.

Repression was severe, especially in Lowndes County, where whites, outnumbered by blacks seven to one, defended their supremacy with armed force. Seeking protection and additional resources, the SCU turned to New Deal agencies for relief. After
1935, the SCU acted more and more as a liaison between poor farmers and the New Deal.

When, in 1936, the Party called for a “united front” of communist and other “progressive” forces, SCU organizers were already proposing to affiliate with national unions. Tenants, sharecroppers, and wageworkers were each to merge with an older, established union representing its particular needs. By late 1938, SCU tenants and sharecroppers had transferred to the Farmers Union, a national organization modeled on the Grange and the Farmers Alliance of the 1880's and '90's. Wageworkers merged into the Agricultural Workers Union, which was chartered by the American Federation of Labor in 1937 as the Farm Laborers and Cotton Field Workers Union.

Affiliation signaled the SCU's shift from a strategy of “national liberation” of the black belt to positions squarely in the tradition of American agrarian protest. The Farmers Union stressed credit and market problems and lobbied for nationalizing the banks, dismantling monopolies, and reforming the tax structure.

The shift in goals was mainly a shift on paper. Organizers had always responded to farmers' actual needs for self-defense and occupational improvements. Slogans about self-determination of the black belt had little immediate appeal to people fighting to save their livestock or to earn an extra fifty cents a day. Changes in Party strategy, such as the call for a “united front,” did influence the SCU's direction and affiliation, but conditions in the field generally determined union tactics.

The SCU's struggle to secure a livelihood for poor farmers was resolved, in part, in the general “solutions” to the Great Depression. By the outbreak of the Second World War, war industries had begun to absorb black and white farmers displaced in the economic crisis; public welfare maintained others who could not or would not leave the land.