Ed<br />
A Black Sharecropper’s Story (February 1976 | Volume: 27, Issue: 2)

Ed<br /> A Black Sharecropper’s Story

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February 1976 | Volume 27, Issue 2

When Ed Brown finally left Abbeville, Georgia, in 1962, he id his wife worked as domestics for Jane Maguire’s family, first in Atlanta and then for thirteen years in New York City. During those years Ms. Maguire became fascinated by Ed’s sharp memories of what life was like for a black farmhand in Georgia, and she persuaded him—he is illiterate—to let her help tell his story. She interviewed him, taking careful notes over a period of about four years, and assembled the interviews into a consecutive reminiscence entitled simply Ed. His direct, unself-pitying, and often heartbreaking story will be published by W. W. Norton later this month, and we are pleased to publish the following excerpt from this unusual memoir.

Mr. Brown is now retired and lives in Brooklyn, New York, where his too daughters by a second marriage are in high school.

COPYRIGHT ©1976 BY JANE MAGUIRE

ON SHARES

In 1929 Mr. Addison bought a tractor. He was the first man I ever knowed to have one. Right away he cut the fifteen men on his place down to four hands. It would be a favor to him, he say, if I could get myself another job. That was the turrible year I worked on shares for Mr. Leslie Prince.

To buy food and to take care of the smokin and chewin me and my wife wanted to do while we was makin the crop, Mr. Prince said he’d loan me ten dollars a month. He would put it out, he say, but not all in cash, January through June, with interest at 15 per cent. He was aimin to make me take all the meat and syrup he could from his smokehouse.

Then, on shares, the boss furnish you with the land, mule, seeds, tools, and one half of the fertilizer. I was to put out the other half of the fertilizer and all the labor.

Things went all right for a while. I was the best cotton picker there. Whenever Mr. Prince hire anyone to pick by the hundredweight, he said, “I want you to beat Ed pickin.” The most I ever picked in an hour was a hundred and thirty-five pounds.

But hard work didn’t get me nowhere. Mr. Prince wouldn’t show me the papers the gin and the warehouse give him, so I didn’t know what the crop had brung and what my share should be. He took his share and all of mine and claim I owe him twenty-four dollars in addition.

In panic times ten dollars would buy a horse wagon full of groceries. You could buy ten pounds of sugar for fifty cents, fifteen pounds of bacon for ten or fifteen cents a pound. A gallon of syrup would cost fifty cents, and so would a peck sack of flour.

And usually I had a garden, either for myself or