Sharecropping: Debt Peonage in Legal Form

The contract that replaced slavery in the Delta after eighteen sixty-five was called a sharecropping agreement. Its terms were simple on the surface: a formerly enslaved person, or a poor white farmer, worked land owned by a planter. At the end of the season, the worker received a share of the crop, typically one-third to one-half, after the planter deducted the cost of seed, tools, food, and housing supplied on credit during the growing months.

The planter kept the ledger.

What the WPA Federal Writers' Project discovered when it collected twenty-three hundred testimonies from formerly enslaved people and their children in the nineteen thirties was that the ledger was the weapon. The planter set the price of the supplies. The planter calculated the crop value. The planter determined the share. A sharecropper who ended the season in debt, which most of them did, owed labor for the following year. Departure before the debt was settled was a crime under Mississippi contract law: the cropper could be arrested and returned. Vagrancy laws made unemployment itself a criminal offense. Conviction meant being leased to a private employer at no wages.

The system required no chains because it used debt as the chain. It required no auction blocks because the courts served the same function. Historians Douglas Blackmon and David Oshinsky documented the mechanism in detail. Isabel Wilkerson, in "The Warmth of Other Suns," traced the sharecropping economy through three families who chose to leave it by moving north, a decision that the system was specifically designed to prevent.

The people who lived inside this system were the parents and grandparents of the musicians who built the blues. The songs they played on the weekends in the juke joints and on the plantation steps documented the contract, the debt, the departure that was forbidden, and the dream of departure that kept them alive. You cannot understand the music without the ledger.