The Making of African America (20 page)

Within the rural South, particularly the plantation South, the geography of African American life had taken on a new form following the Civil War as black people abandoned the plantation, which they identified with the subordination of slavery. Rather than reside in the shadow of the Big House, they spread throughout in their old neighborhoods, often dragging their cabins near the fields they worked, an act which reflected the desire to live apart from the white people who once owned them. Before long, they evolved into small villages. These “little communities in the woods,” as one observer called them, with their stores, schools, and churches—although generally too small to be mapped—represented the collective interest of free people.
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Whatever the social implications for the spatial reformation of rural life, the new arrangement did not change the contours of African American geography. The reconfiguration of the plantation only tied black people more tightly to the countryside. The pronounced attachment of black Southerners to their place surprised white Northerners, who anticipated movement and perhaps feared a northward exodus. “Never was there a people ... more attached to familiar places than they,” reported a Union army officer in February 1862. Three years later, at war's end, when officers of the Freedmen's Bureau began the process of relocating the men and women who had found refuge in federal contraband camps, they discovered that freedpeople were loath to move, even with higher wages and other incentives in the offing. “There seems to be a great reluctance on the part of the majority,” wrote General Charles Howard, the brother of Freedmen's Bureau commissioner O. O. Howard, from Virginia in the summer of 1865, “to leave the miserable homes they have established here, and start forth to parts of the country new and strange to them.” Howard's observation was repeated many times by so-called labor agents, some of them former slave traders, who found few takers when they offered free transport and the prospect of high wages to freedpeople willing to move to areas of the southwest that were just coming under cultivation.
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These same local attachments shaped freedpeople's principal wartime goal of securing an independent proprietorship of the land their forebears had worked as slaves. “We has a right to the land where we are located,” a former slave declared at war's end. “Our wives, our children, our husbands has been sold over and over again to purchase the lands we now locates upon.... For just that reason, we have a divine right to the land,” he repeated for emphasis. In claiming their “divine right,” these former slaves were simply restating what Frederick Law Olmsted had earlier called the “fixed point of the negro's system of ethics”: that “the result of labour belongs of rights to the labourer.” From the freedpeople's perspective, as one Freedmen's Bureau officer noted, “the negro regards the ownership of land as a privilege that ought to be co-existent with his freedom.” But it was not simply that their labor had given it worth; their lives had given it meaning. For this reason, black people did not simply want land, but particular lands—the lands they and their parents had worked, the lands their “fathers' bones were laid upon.”
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A full half century later, the sense of ownership that derived from the generations who occupied the land and whose labor made it productive continued to resonate with former slaves. When an elderly black South Carolinian named Morris discovered his new landlord, Bernard Baruch, was going to evict him, he restated the connections that had created his sense of place there. “I was born on dis place and I ain't agoin' off,” Morris lectured one of the great financiers of the twentieth century. “My Mammy and Daddy worked de rice fields. Dey's buried here. De fust ting I remember are dose rice banks. I growed up in dem from dat high.... No Mist' Bernie, you ain't agoin' to run old Morris off dis place.” Morris stayed.
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Such emotive rendering of the importance of place reflected the centrality of family and community in the lives of former slaves. Husbands and wives, parents and children, and all manner of extended kin had found one another in the aftermath of the war, reconstructing families as they—not their former owners—understood them. No longer sold at their owner's whim, forced to beg permission to visit a wife or sweet-heart or live in fear of permanent separation, newly freed men and women cemented the once-precarious relations that bound them together as kin. They savored the creation of domestic life under one roof as many enjoyed, for the first time, what free people took for granted: the ability for husbands and wives to sleep in the same bed and for parents to know their children were safely under the same roof. The enormous energy—psychological and physical—of the reconstruction of black life and the memory of the difficulties they had endured to maintain their families during slavery only reinforced their connection to the land upon which they had grown up, courted, married, raised children, buried their parents, and lived within a web of kin and friends.

While the failure of forty acres and a mule as well as other efforts at land reform had crushed the hopes of black people for an economic independence that they believed to be a necessary element of freedom, it did nothing to reduce their ties to the land. Freedpeople, forced to cultivate the same crops in the same way, were determined to avoid any employment that smacked of slavery. They searched for ways to gain a modicum of landed independence, avoiding—as best they could—the direct supervision of a white overseer, gang labor, and other trappings of the old regime that would place them under the immediate control of white men. For many, wage labor was just another form of coercion and subordination, and the contract—touted by Freedmen's Bureau officers as the basis of equality with their masters-turned-employers—was seen as a snare that would once again reduce them to subordination. Although distinguished from slavery by the direct remuneration they would receive for their exertions, many freedpeople believed—in the words of one former slave—that “the contract system would tend to bring them back into a state of slavery again.” These desires for independence reinforced new connections to place.

Conceding what they could not resist, black people tried to piece together independent livelihoods, hunting and fishing, truck gardening, and selling items crafted by their own hands. It was a chancy business, especially as planter-controlled legislatures closed the open range to hunters, required licenses to fish and oyster, and enacted taxes that could only be paid in cash. Few black men and women—particularly those with large families—could secure a competency in this manner. In time, most turned to the work they knew and returned to the fields, reinforcing the ties to the places they knew best.

In the years following the war, a host of arrangements—many of them ad hoc—emerged that allowed freedpeople to secure control over their own lives. The character of these arrangements differed from place to place, depending on the nature of the crop, the quality of the land, and the demands of the planters and merchants who controlled the land. In some places, freedpeople worked by the task, setting their own pace. Elsewhere former slaves exchanged three days of their labor for the right to work independently the other three. Still other freedpeople organized themselves into squads or clubs for purposes to negotiate the terms of their labor.
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To escape the shadow of slavery, especially in the cotton South, various systems of tenancy emerged. Black farmers with capital of their own entered into straightforward rental agreements or simple tenancy, gaining access to land for a period of time, supplying their own working stock, feed, tools, seed, and fertilizer. They worked on their own and kept the proceeds of their labor. Those who had similar agricultural accoutrements but lacked the cash to rent land—or could not find planters or merchants who would rent to them directly—negotiated varieties of share tenancies. Under such agreements, they shared with the landowner the proceeds of the sale of their crop according to some agreed-upon formula.

Most black men and women had no resources besides their own labor and that of their family. For them, sharecropping—whereby the landowner supplied land as well as the draft animals, tools, seed, fertilizer, and even at times food and clothing—became the arrangement of necessity. Often landowners held a lien again the crop, which entitled them to the first rights for the return the crops produced. If anything remained, the sharecropper received that, but such surplus rarely amounted to much, thus creating a new cycle that trapped its victims in debt.

Sharecropping also took a variety of forms, differing from place to place, from crop to crop, and from time to time, depending on what precisely the farmer and the landowner supplied. The sharecropper's portion rested upon the size of his family and whether his wife and children worked, as well as his own abilities. In addition, sharecroppers could negotiate rights to take firewood from the forest, fish in the streams, run stock in the woods, or keep a substantial garden. At times, they were subject to rules that regulated everything from their deportment to the number of visitors they might entertain. The mixture of prerogatives and restrictions played out in limitless combinations, so that nearly each sharecropping agreement was unique. Whatever the peculiarities of the particular arrangements, they all operated to tie black people to particular places.
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Even when these arrangements were highly restrictive, black men and women saw some benefit in them, at least at first. They allowed impoverished, newly freed slaves to live apart from those who owned the land they worked, permitting them to control their own family life, and—to a degree—their own labor. Antebellum laws and customs had defined sharecropping as a partnership. By law, freedpeople also had a hand in determining what would be grown and how it would be grown. Under such arrangements, sharecropping was a sharp break with the slave economy, in which the slave master fixed the division of labor and determined when and how slaves worked and what they produced.

But if sharecropping allowed black people to avoid the reimposition of the old economic dependency, it was far from the landed independence they had hoped to achieve. Over time, sharecropping—and to a lesser degree share tenancy, and sometimes even simply tenancy—devolved into a system by which landowners directly extracted labor. As the rights of sharecroppers and tenants atrophied, control of the processes of production fell more and more to those who owned the land. The various forms of tenancy and sharecropping that once offered black people opportunities to control their lives became new mechanisms of exploitation.
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The transformation of tenancy and sharecropping took place at an uneven pace during the last decades of the nineteenth century, but everywhere they came to resemble wage labor. Landlords determined what tenants and sharecroppers planted, as well as sometimes when and how they planted it. As they took control over the work regimen, they also shifted their costs to tenants and sharecroppers by requiring them to purchase seed, fertilizer, mules, farm implements, and other equipment from their storehouse, as landlords transformed themselves into merchants or storekeepers. Tenants and sharecroppers often found themselves paid in scrip that was redeemable only at that very same store, where the prices for food, clothing, and other necessities were inflated far above those available elsewhere. Adding to the injury, planters charged interest on unpaid balances, often at usurious rates.

Although they resembled wage laborers in many ways, sharecroppers rarely received their remuneration weekly or even monthly. Instead, they were paid at the end of the crop year, a system that allowed planters to deduct the expenses that annually accrued to the sharecropper's account. When the year-end “settling up” arrived, black tenants and sharecroppers generally found they had little to show for their efforts. Many were deeply in debt. Often settling one year's debt with the proceeds of the next, they were entrapped in a cycle of dependence. Those who had a positive return often discovered that they stood in a long line of creditors, as planters and merchants also had many debts, some of which stretched to Northern factors and bankers. These moneyed men enjoyed the advantage of a superior lien—that is, a legal guarantee that gave them rights to proceeds of the sale of the crop. They would be paid before the tenants or sharecroppers. In some states, the entire standing crop fell to the landlord until the tenant's obligations were fulfilled. Tenants, in the words of the Georgia Supreme Court, had “only a right to go on the land to plant, work, and gather the crops.”
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Tenants who attempted to sell any portion of the standing crops could be fined or jailed. While the law spoke in color-blind terms of landlords and tenants, the weight of the new restrictions fell upon black workers.

As the obligations of black tenants and sharecroppers grew, and their rights shrank, many were forced out of the cash economy into a system of long-term mortgages and short-term barter in which their debts accumulated on the landlord's books. Unable to repay, they had no choice but to agree to work yet another year, often at the same terms, for the same landlord, on the same land. If they dared to break the arrangement, workers might be prosecuted under so-called false-pretences laws, which criminalized the breaking of a contract. Black workers saw their right to quit, the fundamental tenet of the free labor system, compromised again and again.

If, by some mixture of extraordinary effort and good fortune, black tenants or croppers turned a profit, planters and merchants were not above cheating them directly. Successful black tenants frequently found themselves stripped of the fruits of their labor. The blatant unfairness of the system broke many men and women. Conceding the realities of planter power, they simply stopped trying.
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