Theodore Rosengarten's All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw depicts the labor struggle of a black sharecropper in the years before World War II. It stands as the oral history of blacks in a southern rural economy, as recounted by Nate Shaw. Nate narrates his personal history involving the landlord-tenant system (sharecropping), the struggle for economic survival in the white man's world, and his enduring faith in the sanctity of hard work over adversity. Unfortunately, Nate's life was an uphill battle to change that which changed anyway, as New Deal policies made life easier for laborers everywhere, on the farm or in the city.
The landlord-tenant system of sharecropping favored the white man; in reality, it was slavery in another guise. The relationship between owner and sharecropper was one of exploitation, the white owner in most cases exploiting the black tenant. Theoretically, blacks should have been able to purchase and contract out land, just as whites did, but, as Nate explains, whites wrote the rules of the contract in such a manner that blacks could not win. The cotton sold by blacks was not "worth" as much as cotton sold by whites. Therefore, even if a black were fortunate enough to own a farm, his cotton would not be worth that of a white man's. In addition, black labor was paid less.
Nate explains these discrepancies in his section on "deeds":
Colored man's cotton weren't worth as much as a white man's cotton less'n it come to the buyer in the white man's hands. But the colored man's labor--that was worth more to the white man than the labor of his own color because it cost him less and he got just as much for his money. (190)
In reality, blacks could find an easy source of labor by working for whites, because whites preferred to hire them. They were an exploitable source of cheaper labor. In this sense, they found more work in the fields than poor whites. Whites migrated to the cities in ...