Gaining financial independence was rarely accomplished without failed attempts for many of those interviewed, as well as for their older relatives, friends, and acquaintances. Yet African Americans, despite a legacy of subjugation during slavery and the prolonged and severe inequities enforced by a segregated society, were not powerless. Indeed, some managed to achieve a great deal, from owning their own farms and businesses to becoming physicians, teachers, and respected leaders. Various factors, however, often prevented or slowed many from escaping poverty.

One persistent stumbling block was placed in their paths by some white landowners and merchants who deliberately set out to cheat blacks by capitalizing on their lack of education. Before the Civil War, a few masters taught their slaves how to read and write, but for the most part Southern society frowned on educating African Americans, an attitude that persisted for years after. "See, people in them days, we didn't have no education, no nothing but go out there and work," explained Minnie Walker. Their illiteracy made African Americans easy prey for dishonest merchants and landowners who inflated the amount of money black tenants owed them. The result was a never-ending spiral of obligation for the tenants who were forced to work the land year after year to repay debts that far exceeded what they actually owed.

Edward Brownlee explained: "...you'd go to the store and just get, and then at the end of the year, the white man just charge you. Half the time, people didn't know what they was getting, that's how they'd cheat 'em."
 

Tenant farmers used a mule-driven press to extract juice from sugar cane for syrup-probably a late 19th century photograph from Millwood.

The experience of Randolph Davis demonstrates what could happen between a tenant and a landlord. Davis, the oldest person interviewed, maintained a sharp sense of humor into his advanced age. At first, he evaded answering when asked when he was born. "Now, you got on down to it, didn't you?" he laughed. "I'd been waitin' for this... That ain't been last year. That been years and years ago. I'm 111 years old."

As newlyweds with little money, Davis, who was 17 or 18 years old, and his bride moved in temporarily with her mother. "I stayed with her till I got a house of my own, moved in. I was pretty old. I was old enough to marry," he remembered. Eventually, the young couple rented their own small, one-room house on land owned by an African American, Will Cade. "The ole land wasn't no count, [not] much. Up the hill and down the hill. So I moved off that ole place 'cause I couldn't make nothing on it. I didn't know the white man who [once] owned the place, but he sold it to...Will Cade bought the land and never could pay for it, had to give it up."

Davis and his wife remained on the Cade land for about a year before they moved to another tenant farm. Then, after a short while, they relocated to yet another farm. It was at this tenant farm that Davis experienced a stinging injustice at the hands of his white landlord.

He had harvested his cotton and was ready to reap his small profit for a season of hard work. But instead he was cheated from getting any payment at all by the landowner. As Davis remembered, the man "made everybody on that place bring their cotton up there, about ten or fifteen bales, and he took every bit of it. I had ten bales of cotton. I didn't get a dime and I left. Ten bales of cotton, [the owner] took every bale."

Some of the other tenants, Davis said, retaliated against the unscrupulous landlord. "Other people got money the best way they could. They commenced to make cotton, sell it by the basketful to somebody else...keep [him] from it." Rufus Bullard recounted another method some African Americans used to extract a little extra money from the white cotton gin operators. "You could weigh a bale of cotton there today and lay it out at night and take it to town tomorrow and it might gain five pounds due to moisture," he said.

Born near Heardmont, Georgia in 1909, Bullard had farmed most of his life except for seven years he spent in Chicago and a time he served as a soldier fighting in World War II. He explained that work animals like mules and horses were crucial to farming in years past because the animals determined how much land a farmer could work. He described the place where he grew up in Elbert County, Georgia as "a one-horse farm." "We first started out with [a] horse of my grandmother's, just one horse, so after that, we went to four horses, which would be 40, 50 acres [we could farm], I guess, back in them days."
 

Carriages and bicycles passed on the dirt main street of early Abbeville, South Carolina. The town was an important center of commerce for farmers.

Randolph Davis explained that not having horses or mules seriously hindered his own grandfather's efforts to farm. "Back in those days, you couldn't work much land... .We didn't have nothing to work it with....Never had no horses, had to go out there and dig it up [by hand]." Despite their importance, however, the animals could also be a burden because they ate some of the precious harvests tenants needed to feed themselves and to pay their rent.

Helping one another in times of need was another way that African-American tenant farmers managed to cope with hardship. Louella Walker, whose father was renown for his fiddle playing at parties, recalled members of her extended family stepping in at various points to offer aid to her parents. She lived as a child at Millwood Plantation, where tenants often paid a set rent, rather than a share or percentage of their crops to the landlord.

"My granddaddy paid the whole rent for us. And my father would plow [with] one of my granddaddy's mules. And so my granddaddy, I think, had to pay about six bales for rent.... When you gin that cotton, you had to give him [the overseer] so many bales."

Minnie Clark, who eventually left the tenant farm of her childhood to become a teacher, spoke of the same sense of cooperation among African Americans. "We, in those days, like we have a neighbor. Now, his cotton might get a little grassy. Now, they [different families] worked together... Whole families got together and chopped his cotton out. And the next day, they'd go to another [farmer's place]. That's the way they worked." Women, she remembered, worked beside the men in the fields. "But I have worked now...I have put it down. I've plowed...took my grandmammy's plow to the shop. I couldn't put a point on it, but I could sharpen it."

The toll of years of hard physical labor on his father's health was enormous, according to Edward Brownlee, who was 65 years old when he spoke to investigators. His father "ran all kind of things in his lifetime, gin, sawmills, not for himself now, but for other folks. He didn't own them. I bet if you knew the little bit that they paid him, it would tickle you to death. You see, our folk didn't know any better. Well, I guess everybody was doing it though."

About a year before Brownlee was born, his father worked on a tenant farm and as a blacksmith. But when his wife became pregnant, he decided to "quit blacksmithing. At least Momma decided that they weren't getting anywhere, and the land was growing up and she kept on until he started farming [more]. My brother had been born. He [my father] said he just felt so tired because he was trying to do these two jobs, farming and blacksmith for this plantation. They had a lot of work to do. And about three months before I was born, he went [out in the field] and didn't get back. Momma went out to see what had happened, and she found him, and he was just sliding in the front of the house, and she caught him, and led him to the house. And when she sat him down, it was two or three years before he walked again."

Despite his father's poor health, Brownlee's family continued to eke a living from the soil, and Edward Brownlee was able to go to college. Long interested in his family's history, he accumulated many stories about his relatives and the past of the region, information which proved a boon to researchers tracking African-American lifeways.

Brownlee's interest in genealogy was first sparked during World War II when he became good friends with a fellow soldier. "He [the friend] said, 'Your name ain't Brownlee.' He said, 'That name came up in Ireland. Your name is really Brownleigh.' So, I just went along, teasing him, and didn't think anything about it. Finally, I decided to have it traced, and it came back just as he said."

The young Brownlee was able to track his roots all the way back to Ireland. "The way they got their name [was] they had a famine up in this little meadow [in Ireland], and everything just burned up at one time there, and there was no more food, so everyone had to leave. So, everybody who came out from there, they called them the Brown, which meant dry, and Leigh, which meant meadow. These were the folk who came out of the dry meadow in Ireland."

Brownlee's paternal great-grandfather was a white man whose family immigrated from Ireland to North Carolina. He married a woman named Mary Frost and "when times got hard" they moved to the small Georgia community of Heardmont, not far from the Savannah River, Brownlee explained. They raised several children, and one of them, Tom, eventually had a relationship with an African-American woman. Out of that union was born Brownlee's father, "the first black Brownlee." Brownlee vividly recalled his first meeting with his white grandfather, Tom Brownlee, whom he described as "very down to earth."

"The first time I saw him, I was a great big boy. He was the night watchman right down here at this little mill. My dad went over there to see him about borrowing a mule. He [my father] had a mule that had died. And they were talking, and after awhile, he [the grandfather] called me up there and pulled off his hat just as big, and he said, 'Look at me good, so you'll know me the next time.' He said, 'Boy, come here. What do you call me?' 'Well, suh, I never called you anything because I never knew you before.' He just laughed and pulled his hat off again and said, 'Look at me good.' And he said, 'You can call me anything you want to... .You can call me Mr. Tom Joe Brownlee, Old Man Tom Joe Brownlee, or Grandpapa, if you wanna.' He said, 'Now, I am frank. I don't deny a damn thing that I've ever done."'

Left: Miss E.M. Henry of Elberton around 1918.
 

Apart from raising crops and working other jobs when they could get them to make ends meet, African-American tenant farmers often exerted extra effort to keep their homes clean and neat. The Reverend Janie Hampton remembered her family cutting dogwood tree limbs and tieing them together to make a "brush broom." She and the other children also helped collect white mud to whitewash their rented home.

"That white clay, it was almost like lime. You just pull it back and it was so white. And you take and mix it with water, and it looked almost like milk. And the more clay you put in, the thicker it got. And then you could take that, and if it didn't rain too much, the house would be white. And if it rained, you just get some more."

And, she remembered, they"... kept their yards clean, kept the grass cut back. [In reality] you didn't cut the grass back, you scraped it down to the ground. You scraped it with a hoe. That's what you call a clean yard. What I'm trying to say," she continued, "that was extra work that black people did to make it look pretty. And yet we were labeled as lazy. And it's no, no truth to that. People worked at night so that their place would be nice and presentable. Back in those days, they did that."

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Buying Land

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