A practice that emerged following the emancipation of African-American slaves, sharecropping came to define the method of land lease that would eventually become a new form of slavery. Without land of their own, many blacks were drawn into schemes where they worked a portion of the land owned by whites for a share of the profit from the crops. They would get all the seeds, food, and equipment they needed from the company store, which allowed them to run a tab throughout the year and to settle up once the crops, usually cotton, were gathered. When accounting time came, the black farmer was always a few dollars short of what he owed the landowner, so he invariably began the New Year with a deficit. As that deficit grew, he found it impossible to escape from his situation by legal means. The hard, backbreaking work led to stooped, physically destroyed, and mentally blighted black people who could hardly ever envision escape for themselves or their children.
This was not the case for in the short story "From Southern Bitch" by Carolina Pearl. Her families were one of the few white sharecroppers in a southern tenancy, which was becoming increasingly a white problem. Up to the Civil War, cotton laborers were Negro slaves. After Emancipation, however, white people began to compete with Negroes for the new kind of slavery involved in tenancy. The white tenants have increased steadily and rapidly, filling the new openings in the expanding industry and taking places left vacant by Negroes who migrated from the plantations to northern or southern cities. In the decade from 1920 to 1930, white tenants in the cotton states increased by 200,000 families approximately one million persons. During the same decade Negro tenants decreased by 2000 families as the result of mass movements to cities. Today the total number of individuals in cotton tenancy runs to approximately five and a half million whites and slightly over three million Negroes.
