It’s been more than a month since I’ve written in this blog, but that is because John and our family have been busy at work at our new jobs. We have been working as sharecroppers since early July, after a white man from the Freedmen’s Bureau found John a job. I was hesitant of the white man at first, and was reluctant to trust him. I couldn’t believe that John was trusting this white man, after all the white men humiliated, beat, and abused us in our previous slave life. But I was proven wrong, when the white man was caring and helpful, allowing us to gain access to sharecropper jobs. But even if I am grateful for this white man, I can’t forget the looks he always gave to John and my family. I just can’t stand it when people look at me in pity; when people treat me like their charity project. And that white man had the same exact expression when he looked at our family. And it angered me, when he kept repeating the words “ I feel so sorry for you.” When I was a slave, I constantly relied on Mr. Madison and the white men workers to live. The white men workers provided my meager food, clothes, and as long as Mr. Madison’s plantation was running, I had a place I could stay. I depended on white men. It was just another slap on the face when I realized, even as a free black woman, I needed white men in my life again to help me.
Life as a sharecropper is hard, but John and I are diligent. We wake up early in the morning to tend to our cotton crops growing out in the field right behind our house. It’s a refreshing change, being in charge of your own hours and work schedule. I no longer have to endure being cursed at from my overseers or have to come up with the endurance to drag myself to work in sick days. But even in these times of freedom, I constantly remind myself to be extremely hardworking to produce a good harvest. Our landowner provides us with the necessary tools, land, and crop seeds to harvest the land, but in exchange we must provide him a portion of our harvest money and reimburse him with the tools he has bought for us. Therefore, in order to produce enough profit to support our family, John and I must be diligent in coming out in the morning and meticulously farming and nursing the crops until late.
My children sometimes help John and I out on the field, by holding a sack and picking the cotton off when the cotton is big enough. My oldest one, Amy, also takes care of her brother and helps keep the house clean. Whenever I get the chance too, I teach her how to cook, so she can hopefully cook meals when she is older. However, I let my children have their fun with our neighbor’s children while John and I are working most of the times. I want them to finally have a childhood neither John nor I experienced, a childhood where they are free from working sun up to sun down and instead play games and run around. After a long, hard day in the field, it gives me joy to hear my children talk excitedly to Momma about all the games they’ve been playing.
Sometimes I get jealous of my neighbors, who are allowed to grow corn, potatoes, rice, and oats aside from cotton. From growing these edible crops, they are guaranteed to save money in feeding their family from harvesting their own food they can always go to. Our landowner demands that John and I only grow cotton. I understand that cotton is a popular product that makes the most profit for our landowner, but hell, can’t white men ever think of us blacks once in a while? There’s a lot of days when I worry that John and I won’t be able to provide enough food for our children. If a bad harvest comes along, John and I both decided to feed the most food to our children first and have us eat the smallest we can. But for everything, John and I need to keep our heads up and smile, for the sake of our children, and for the sake of our future, to keep an optimistic outlook and work hard.
But my greatest fear, is that one day Mother Nature will come and wreck our fields and wreck our harvest. I’ve heard of a man, Josiah, who was a sharecropper. His crops completely failed because of a natural disaster a couple weeks before his landowner came to collect the harvest. By then, it was already too late to successfully start a new one. So from then one, Josiah was in a constant cycle of debt from the harvest money he owed his landowner, to the debt that was piling up each year. When he died, his children inherited that debt. His children was stuck in his cycle. When my neighbor told me that, all I could think about was how this story sounded so much like the life I had left, slavery.