Stop Share Cropping: Owning for Little People

The Cotton Pickers, 1876. Winslow Homer

You have sown much, and harvested little. 
You eat, but you never have enough; 
You drink, but you never have your fill. 
You clothe yourselves, but no one is warm. 
And he who earns wages does so to put them into a bag with holes.

HAGGAI 1:6

I thought I lived in the South my entire life. But then I moved to South Carolina. I was surprised at how hard it was to assimilate.  How could a 9 hour drive north create such a drastic culture shock? I studied this area as if it was Pluto, and it is. It has it's own culture, dances, food, language, history, class structure, and niceties.

It has a feeling--a very old, settled, stale, shadowy, secretive feeling like a mold that you never knew was breeding quietly inside your walls or a crime scene covered in two feet of dust. You can feel that you are walking on top of tragedies-- dead Native American bodies, dead soldiers' bodies, dead slave bodies, and long lines of dead sociopaths that have streets named after them. The entire place is certainly haunted.

Original caption: "Home of Negro sharecropper near Marshall, Texas" 1939

But I'll stop and get to the point. While researching, I found an old book at our library with these horrifying imagines of poor farming people in shacks. It wasn't slavery, but it  wasn't freedom either. It was called "share cropping," and it was horrible. Here is an excerpt from PBS's Slavery by Another Name site:

"Sharecropping is a system where the landlord/planter allows a tenant to use the land in exchange for a share of the crop. This encouraged tenants to work to produce the biggest harvest that they could, and ensured they would remain tied to the land and unlikely to leave for other opportunities. In the South, after the Civil War, many black families rented land from white owners and raised cash crops such as cotton, tobacco, and rice. In many cases, the landlords or nearby merchants would lease equipment to the renters, and offer seed, fertilizer, food, and other items on credit until the harvest season. At that time, the tenant and landlord or merchant would settle up, figuring out who owed whom and how much

High interest rates, unpredictable harvests, and unscrupulous landlords and merchants often kept tenant farm families severely indebted, requiring the debt to be carried over until the next year or the next. Laws favoring landowners made it difficult or even illegal for sharecroppers to sell their crops to others besides their landlord, or prevented sharecroppers from moving if they were indebted to their landlord.

Approximately two-thirds of all sharecroppers were white, and one third were black. Though both groups were at the bottom of the social ladder, sharecroppers began to organize for better working rights, and the integrated Southern Tenant Farmers Union began to gain power in the 1930s. The Great Depression, mechanization, and other factors lead sharecropping to fade away in the 1940s."

How can we battle economic exploitation and debt servitude?  By owning the means of production. What "machines" can little people afford?

-Popcorn Air popper vs microwavable bags

Presto Air Popper 30.00 at JC Penneys. We bought it many years ago.

-Water filter and reusable Klean Kanteens  vs bottled water

-Good lawn mower vs lawn service

-Nice coffee maker/ espresso maker vs Starbucks

-Making a Chef Boyardee Pizza at home vs pizza delivery

-A used piece of exercise equipment in your house vs gym membership

-A simple set up of hand weights, bands, free YouTube Bob and Brad videos vs phyiscal therapy copays. 

-Hair clippers vs buying hair cuts for men or pets

-Dying your hair at home and painting your own nails vs the salon

-Sewing machine vs. buying curtains and paying for alterations

-Capsule maker and buying bulk herbs to make supplements vs. store bought supplements

-A bread machine, an ice cream maker, a deep freezer, a juicer, a dehydrator, a blender.

-Physical media books, CDs and DVDs vs, subscriptions, movie threaters and streaming services

-Saving up an emergency fund and paying for repairs vs home warranty insurance

-Fruit and nut trees, berry bushes, vegetable seed and flowers.

A very bad summer for yard flowers, still a lovely bouquet with scraps.

-Any information you can learn and reference books you can own.

-Copycat recipes for your favorite restaurant dishes.

-Skills like how to prepare your own taxes and fix broken things.

Have a running list of things you need and look at thrift stores or garage sales. It will take longer to save up the money and find one used. But it is worth it.  Stop paying to use others equipment and get your own. Even if it is used, save up and buy it outright. For years, we dreamed of a time we could stop paying rent and own a home. We couldn't wait to stop paying to wash our clothes at the laundromat and own a washer and dryer. Remember, you can own the little things while waiting and saving up for the big things. Lord give us the patience.

I highly recommend watching the documentary Slavery by Another Name here on forced labor in the South. We were blown away by this one.

A POSTSCRIPT FROM MR. PEASANT: One of the insidious ways that sharecroppers were trapped was through indebtedness to the plantation store. The croppers would buy things from the plantation store on credit, but they never managed to pay off those debts. When they died, most of their possessions would be repossessed even though they had paid for them multiple times. Later, factories would have their company stores with the same terms of purchase and repayment. Today, working people and even middle class folks sell their souls to rent to own places and credit card companies. Financing options exist for virtually everything you care to buy today, and stupid people never see the chains of debt they are fashioning for themselves. Debt is the illusion of ownership, but it is the trap of slavery.

Wife and children of a sharecropper in Washington County, Arkansas. 1935

You load sixteen tons, what do you get?

Another day older and deeper in debt

Saint Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go

I owe my soul to the company store

TENNESSEE ERNIE FORD, "Sixteen Tons"

I got myself a Cadillac

But I can't afford the gasoline

AC/DC, "Down Payment Blues"