Being a sharecropper or raising cotton in 1875 in Mississippi is exhausting, demeaning and destroys personal initiative. Being a share cropper might mean that you will have a little something left over for yourself if you have a very good crop. But without good crops, you will have nothing. My family and I work in the fields from sun up to sundown. We don’t own the land we work on. Our owner lets us grow crops on his land and takes a percentage of any profit. Sometimes we make enough money to have enough to eat and clothe ourselves. But it is more often that we just barely scrimp by. We eat what we can grow and on occasion, we can kill a chicken that we have raised. It is not a life you would wish on anyone.
