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Preface by Theodore Rosengarten This big book is the autobiography of an
illiterate man. It is the story of a black tenant farmer from
east-central Alabama who grew up in the society of former slaves
and slaveholders and reached maturity during the advent of
segregation law. For years he labored "under many rulings,
just like the other Negro, that I knowed was injurious to man
and displeasin to God and still I had to fall back.:
One morning in December, 1932, Nate Shaw faced a crowd of
deputy sheriffs sent to confiscate a neighbor's livestock. he
knew they would be be after his, next. Burdened by the
indignities of overturning "this southern way of
life," Shaw stood his ground.
I met Nate Shaw in January, 1969. he had just turned
eighty-four years old. I had come to Tukabahchee County with a
friend who was investigating a defunct organization called the
Alabama Sharecroppers Union. We had learned that a survivor was
living near Pottsdown, some twenty miles south of the county
seat, where we'd been sifting through trial dossiers and
newspaper files in the courthouse basement. one icy morning we
set out to find him.
The road from Beaufort to Pottsdown rolls and winds through
piney woods country. Nate Shaw lives just below the foothills
where the lowlands begin. We hunted for his house along the
asphalt byroads until we came across a mailbox with the name
Shaw in bold letters. A woman stepped out onto the porch of a
tin-roofed cabin and, seeing us hesitate, called us to come in.
Her name is Winnie Shaw and she is the wife of Nate's
half-brother TJ. She is a spare-built, walnut-colored woman with
wide-set eyes and a girlish face. She said she was seventy-three
years old but she looked much younger. We were already into the
front room of her house before we introduced ourselves. we
explained that we were students from Massachusetts and that we'd
come to Alabama to study this union.
TJ walked in. He had been overhauling one of his
machines--winter work when he heard our car drive up in his
yard. Winnie told him, "They want to see Nate." TJ
walked out again and across the road to Nate's house. TJ
completely filled the doorway walking in and out. He is six and
a half feet tall when he stands straight. but sixty-five seasons
of picking cotton have given him a stoop from the hips, so that
standing still he resembles a man leaning on a long-handled hoe.
He came back with Nate, who had been feeding
his mule--one of the last mules in the settlement. Nate is
six inches shorter than TJ and a shade lighter, though both are
dark men. He is trim and square-shouldered; he has a small, fine
hand and high Indian cheekbones and brow. We shook hands and he
announced that he was always glad to welcome "his
people."
He knew why we had come by our appearance:
young, white, polite, frightened, northern. People who looked
like us had worked on voter registration drives, marched in
Selma and Montgomery, rode those freedom buses across the
Mason-Dixon line. He had seen "us" on television and
it didn't surprise him to see us now because this was his
movement and he knew a lot about it; he had been active in it
before we were born. Raising his right hand to God, he swore
there was no "get-back" in him: he was standing where
he stood in '32.
Nate took off his hat and sat down with us by the fireplace.
We asked him right off why he joined the union. He didn't
respond directly; rather, he "interpreted" the
question and began, "I was haulin a load of hay out of
Apafalya one day--" and continued uninterrupted for eight
hours. He recounted dealings with landlords, bankers, fertilizer
agents, mule traders, gin operators, sheriffs, and
judges--stories of the social relations of the cotton system. by
evening, the fire had risen and died and risen again and our
question was answered.
TJ turned on the electric light, a single
high-watt bulb suspended in the center of the room. We talked
some more with the Shaws about how we planned to use the
information Nate had just given us. They were glad to help us,
they said, and if our "report" reached other people
who found their lives instructive, they would be gratified. We
thanked them for being so kind and for taking us into their
confidence and, promising to return, we left. . . . *
* * * *
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.
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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 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 him about the issues foremost in
his mind--his new relationships with his children and, after the
death of Hannah [his wife], 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 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 his 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 hurts 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 live 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 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.
* * *
* *
When 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.
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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 bitter-sweet
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.
But the decline of storytelling is more
complicated than this. It has to do with the passing of craft
activities, like basketmaking, which generate the rhythms at
which stories flow; with the appeal of competing voices of
culture, such as television; and with the unfortunate popular
assumption that history is something that takes place in books
and books are to be read in school.
What happens to the history of a people not
accustomed to writing things down? To whom poverty and
illiteracy make wills, diaries, and letters superfluous? Birth
and death certificates, tax receipts--these occasional records
punctuate but do not describe everyday life. In this setting,
Nate Shaw is a precious resource. For his stories are grounded
in the ordinary occurrences of the tenant farmer's world.
Furthermore, they display as few records could an awesome
intellectual life.
Shaw's working years span approximately the
same years as the Snopes family odyssey in William Faulkner's
trilogy. Shaw's narrative complements the social history
contained in the Mississippi writer's work. Faulkner writes
about the white south; Shaw speaks about the black. Both focus
on the impact of history on the family. Faulkner, heir to a line
of southern statesmen, pursues the decay and decline of white
landed families and the rise of their former tenants. Nate Shaw
records the progress of a black tenant family through three
generations. Both are steeped in genealogies.
With the rigor of an Old Testament scribe, Shaw names the
parents and foreparents of many of his characters. In fact, he
names over four hundred people. Shaw creates a human topography
through which he travels with the assurance of a man who knows
the forest because he witnessed the planting of the trees. The
act of recalling names is also a demonstration of how long he
has been living in one place. Thus, his family chronicles
express both the bonds among people and a man's attachment to
the land. Somerville, Massachusetts -- October
1, 1973 Source: Theodore Rosengarten. All God's
Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw. New York: Random House, 1984. * * * *
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updated 13 October 2007 |
