Sharecropper: A Southern Fantasy

by Bill Ed Scruggs

Sharecroppers in the mid-twentieth century spent their lives working in someone else’s fields and living in someone else’s house. They bore the knowledge that their children would likely spend their lives the same way, denied the education and skills required to escape farming and denied the money required to buy their own land. The title “landowner” was often shortened to “owner” and the shorter form was figuratively appropriate.

In the Caney River Valley in 1957 some sharecroppers have had enough. Whispers of freedom reach them on the wind from throughout the South, even as their children age and hope for their future fades one day at a time. Then a hideous accident devastates the community and sparks an unplanned lunge toward freedom far from the front lines of the larger battle.

A hardline conservative community is electrified. Pickups bearing arms and flying Confederate flags cruise past sharecroppers’ shacks. A desperate struggle envelops the land as the owners hurl their legal and economic might at a defiant and poorly understood enemy who seems unconcerned with counting gains and losses but responds ethereally and unpredictably to the inborn call of right and wrong.

553 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 25, 2022

About the author

Grew up in the hill country of East Tennessee.

Reviews

[J Hanberry · Rating 2 out of 5]

A small white girl and a small black girl meet and over 8 pages of the most uninspiring conversation imaginable, become friends. You need to wring all the joy you possibly can from that time, because that's the last conversation of any depth you'll see for many many pages. It's like the author exhausted his store of talk in drawing the girls' inane chatter out so long, and so had to tell us all about the country, culture, and citizens in prose rather than by demonstrating it for us through interactions between its people.
Not only that, but none of it was interesting, not even, or perhaps especially not, the chatter of two young minds gloriously unspoiled and untainted by racism. Over the next 20 or so pages, we are carefully mansplained the way things work (racism, classism) and that's not interesting either, mostly because we all live in the world and none of this is really new to us. Had it been especially well-written, with fiery, dynamic, or at least non-pedantic tones, perhaps it would have been readable. Just because the fields are dry and the culture inhospitable, doesn't mean the writing has to be.
As it was, I dosed off and dropped my phone. I generally take that as a sign that I'm wasting my time and should seek different entertainment.
I got this as a free book through Kindle Unlimited. Sometimes that's an opportunity to find a new talent, but not this time.

[henry smith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was way too long. Boring at times. Would have been a pretty good book if a lot had been shortened or left out. Hard to keep attention and not fall asleep

[Melba · Rating 5 out of 5]

A look at the life of sharecroppers - black & white; plus, the divide between those who have & those who don't. A compelling read, though I shed some tears throughout.