Edgar Williams...
Sharecropping was a thing where you would go to Tom Griffith, the owner, and get a little food for the week and then you would work the land as they wanted you to. You would plant in certain areas on the farm what they wanted you to plant. Then you had to work it and plow it, and cultivate it like they wanted you to cultivate it. The biggest thing the sharecropper got out of it was what they hid and what few clothes they wore. They didn't get much money. In my day they would get a dollar or two here and there. Maybe five or ten dollars here or there. All of the corn and cotton, peanuts, and beans were harvested and sold. They say they took it all to feed us and buy what few clothes we wore. You could get work clothes such as a shirt, a pair of overalls, an old pair of shoes and stuff like that. Most of the shoes were handed down from one child to the other. The oldest child would be bought a pair of shoes and when they would be too small for him, they would give them to the next child under.

I stayed there one year and in that year they did the settling up. It involves you going up to the store and they will let you know how much you had spent during the year and how much crops you had sold and what you had left. At that particular time I was on my own. I didn't buy anything because I didn't want to pay him anything back. I figured that if I didn't get it, I wouldn't have to worry about paying him back and when the crop was sold, he would just give me my money. When the crop was sold he owed me $30. That is all he paid me, but when he paid me that $30 I sweet-talked him to give me that receipt. I was so nice so he gave me the receipt. Once I got that receipt I knew then I didn't owe him anything. My corn that I had put in the barn, half of that was mine. I sold my half. It brought me a hundred dollars. Some of the blacks went and told him that I was selling corn. He came down the next day red hot and feeling the heat, I told him I didn't sell his corn. His corn was in the barn. I sold my half of the corn. He said to me, "All that corn is mine." I said to him, "No, it can't be yours, because you said you paid me $30. I have the receipt that you gave me. I didn't owe you anything. Half of the corn is still mine. Your half is in the barn and I sold my half." He replied to me that I was going to give him that check. I replied to him, "The only way you are going to get this check today is to kill me and take it, because I will never hand you this check. It's mine, I earned it, you got your half of corn in the barn, I sold my half which I had a right to do if I wanted to. I don't owe you nothing. Half of that corn was mine and I sold my half and this is the money that I got. I am going to use this money to have a little Santa Claus and a little Christmas for my two kids." I said, "I am not going to give you a dime of it." He got real angry. By that time I was getting angry too, because I know what I had already promised God and I had made up my mind that I was going to fulfill what I promised him. I said, "Mr. Griffith, if you put your foot on God's earth today I am going to whoop your butt for stuff that your daddy done to my daddy when I was a boy and I couldn't do anything about it. Now I can. Put your foot on God's ground," and he wouldn't do it. He was scared to do it. I got so angry I tried to drag him over the door to get him out of the truck and he rolled with his truck and went down the road and stopped and called my dad and told my dad that he needed to get some help for me because I was crazy. But he left. I had Christmas with my family with my check and with the rest of it I kept to eat, because I knew well I wasn't going to be there another year.

Each time I moved it was better. I eventually moved to work for Mr. Peels on his farm. Mr. Peels was a black man who owned land. Mr. Peels rented me the farm. When I moved over here with Mr. Peels the first year was rough. The next year after Mr. Peels found out that I wanted to make something for myself, I wanted a life for my family, and he gave me the benefit of the doubt. He let me work like I wanted to work. I made good crops for Mr. Peels. The second year I told him I wanted to buy a tractor. I said, "I found a tractor I want. I went to the bank and the bank said they would let me have the money if I get somebody to co-sign with me." When I asked Mr. Peels about doing this, he looked me in the face and said, "I will never co-sign for you to get that money." That kind of hurt when he first said that. I said to myself, "I didn't think he would do that." But, he said to me on the back of that, "I tell you what I will do. I will write you a check right now for the tractor and you can go get the tractor. I am not going to the bank, because if I do and you fall short I have to pay interest on that money, but if I let you have my own money the bank has nothing to do with it. You can pay me if you want to pay me, but I won't have to pay interest on my own money, because it is my money." He pulled out a check from the checkbook, wrote me a check for the tractor, and I went out and got my tractor the same day. I came back home, rented me three more weeks of tobacco that I would tend on his farm because I had a tractor to plow with. I tilled that back that paid for that tractor. He told me to pay him like I wanted to for that tractor. $100, $5, $10, whatever I wanted to pay him, I could pay him. He didn't bother me whatsoever. That is when I became a man of doing my work. I sold the crop, I got the checks, I cashed the checks to Mr. Peels. Mr. Peels would give me my half, and his half, and what have you. That is the way it should have been in the first place.

Fred Page...
A sharecropper can go two ways. If you don't have any equipment to work your farm with, the agent of the place--the overseer--had to furnish the mules, the horses, the ploughs and all like that. Or, you furnish your mules, your ploughs, you pay for everything. That was my family. We had two double-teamed mules, two wagons, and we're riding horses, we had a little cowboy life. So we lucked out.

If you had a big family, they'll loan you a little money, go by the commissary and get a gift, get what you want and go home for Christmas. The next year you might do the same thing. But we kept up with everything. Raised a lot of hogs, cows, milk cows. Some plantations wouldn't allow you to have a milk cow or hog on the premises. We had all of that ... It was just one of the lucky things if we work hard, and my daddy's the man for a lot of stuff and worked for a lot of rich people. He worked for a lot of rich people. Everybody can't work for rich people, because there were few rich.

But the regular hired workers made a living picking cotton. What I did when I was about 12 years old or 13, I could pick a couple hundred pounds of cotton by two o'clock, no problem. So I did that. Cotton is hard, it's tough on your hands. Then when you ginned cotton, you carried it to the gin and the gin was downtown. You get a seed check. And we always would pick out two bales of cotton and put about 1,500 pounds of seed in there to 1,600. Sometimes we'd put 1,800 in there because that would make the check be bigger for your seeds.

You see, you wouldn't see white people at all, hardly, unless the overseer was white. But when it's ginning time, you see all the great white men with suits and ties and all just watching everything. They go up there to make your seed checks out and tell you you're doing good. Then you picked all your cotton. Then when you get through with that, the ones with the necktie and white shirts disappear until next year. But if you want little loans like food and stuff, you go to the agent at the commissary.

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