Barn Burning : Loyalty Verses Conscience

Phillips writes that the defining characteristic of a ‘Southerner’ is a feeling of white racial solidarity which casts all other social considerations in the shade; it is the “cardinal test of a Southerner.” When Phillips touches upon the subject of non-slaveholding whites, he emphasizes their zeal for the primacy of white civilization as an end unto itself. He relates two contemporary accounts of non-slaveholders, one a tinner and the other an overseer, to demonstrate this fervor but pointedly devalues their economic attachments to slavery, writing, “Both of them, and a million of their non-slaveholding like, had a still stronger social prompting: the white men’s ways must prevail; the Negroes must be kept innocuous.” Phillips rejects out of hand the sway of overt pecuniary motives against the weight of racial ones and this rejection is so absolute in part because “it is otherwise impossible to account

In the Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass: an American Slave, written by himself, the author argues that slaves are treated no better than, sometimes worse, than livestock. Douglass supports his claim by demonstrating how the slaves were forced to eat out of a trough like pigs and second, shows how hard they were working, like animals. The author’s purpose is to show the lifestyle of an American slave in order to appeal to people’s emotions to show people, from a slave’s perspective, what slavery is really like. Based on the harsh descriptions of his life, Douglass is writing to abolitionist and other people that would sympathize and abolish slavery.

     After the devastation left from the Civil War, many field owners looked for new ways to replace their former slaves with field hands for farming and production use. From this need for new field hands came sharecroppers, a “response to the destitution and disorganized” agricultural results of the Civil War (Wilson 29). Sharecropping is the working of a piece of land by a tenant in exchange for a portion of the crops that they bring in for their landowners. These farmhands provided their labor, while the landowners provided living accommodations for the worker and his family, along with tools, seeds, fertilizers, and a portion of the crops that they had harvested that season. A sharecropper had “no entitlement

William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” takes a lot of real life cultural values and ways of southern life in the late 1800s. Many of those values and ways are expressed by sharecropping and tenant farming.

When, Moody first got to Madison County in Mississippi she was surprised to see that the Black community vastly outnumbers the white community and many Black people in the county owned large plots of land. She was at first under the impression that this would mean there was less poverty than what she saw in her hometown, however she soon learned that land did not directly relate to prosperity. “I just didn’t see how the Negros in Madison County could be so badly off…as Mrs. Chinn explained that night, the federal government controls cotton by giving each state a certain allotment. Each state decides how much each county gets and each county distributes the allotments to the farmers. It always ends up with the white people getting most of the allotments” (313). Though the action of the state, the opportunity for Black farmers to accumulate was non-existent. Economic prosperity would always favor white people because with economic freedom came power and influence, neither of which Black people were allowed to have in the Jim Crow south.

In the book titled The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South, author John Blassingame’s theme, focused on the history of African slave experience throughout the American South. After much research, the author said in the preface that most historians focused more on the planter instead of the slave. He also pointed out that most of the research on slaves by previous historians was based on stereotypes, and do not tell the real history of slave life and a slave’s inner self. Most of these historians, who focused on antebellum southern history, left out the African-American slave experience on purpose. Through much gathering of research, Blassingame hoped to correct this injustice to the history of African-American slaves, and show how slavery affected slaves, but also American life, culture, and thought.

Douglass’s description of the system of slavery speaks largely to how Blacks were conditioned for the prison system during the Reconstruction period. During this time, the state of Mississippi established the Parchman Farm. It was predominantly a labor camp for prisoners (Alexander 32). Slavery had been abolished just a decade earlier. The new source of cheap labor was the prison system. Alexander observes that this era, convict labor had just marked another phase in the long continuum of Black subjugation. She argues that when the appetite for labor was shifted to convict labor, prisoners suddenly became “younger and blacker” (Alexander 32). Therefore,

The development of sharecropping was associated with the endless debt cycles that afflicted the entire South well into the twentieth century. The freedmen endured an economic status likened to peonage, (Bowles, 2011) in addition to having their hopes for political and social equality dashed. The entire South suffered, it was the freedmen who paid the highest price. Ignorant and impoverished, they were easy targets for exploitation by landlords (Bowles, 2011) and merchants alike; moreover, their options were limited by the overt racism in the South, legal restrictions and partiality. Sharecropping resulted from the intense explicit or implicit desire of white Southerners to keep blacks subservient to them. African Americans possessed few skills, and those they did possess related almost exclusively to agricultural production; they owned no property but the clothes on their backs; (Bowles, 2011) Many dreamed of "forty acres and a mule" with which to begin life anew as an integrated part of American society and the proprietor of one's own land. Inside of a year, however, a different reality became obvious to most. By 1868, land confiscation and redistribution was not in the realm of American political possibility. Desperation, familiarity with people and surroundings at the old places coupled with reunion of many lost loved ones, as well as the urgings of

The beginning of ‘near slavery’ began soon after the convention meeting held on May of 1879 by black delegates, establishing the idea of sharecropping, tenant leasing, later leading to peonage. Sharecropping existed since the Reconstruction era. In the early 1870’s white landowners made their land available to black farmers in exchange for half or even more of the crops, offering black farmers less than what it is usually worth. Aware of this black farmers refuse to disobey in any way because of the consequences that they would face. Being equipped with all of the necessities for cropping it was their duty and task to determine when they wanted to work. Regardless they still had to pay the landowner the loan for the land and provide a share of the crop. Eventually, black farmers will face disastrous weather affecting crop production, resulting in debts. When one is inclined to debts it leads to peonage, which is when landowners hold debts against black farmers, preventing them from leaving until the debt is paid off. If anyone attempted to leave they will be arrested. Due to this, convict leasing was established and black people, both men and women who were imprisoned were forced to work to death. They were were no longer cared for and were forced to work with chains cuffed to their legs, literally returning to the forms of slavery (Section 14).

During the Great Depression, the bank frequently took over lands and kicked people out of their homes. This “monster” bank caused many people to move out west to California, leaving them with nothing. Towards the beginning of The Grapes of Wrath, the new owners of the land who were sent by the bank are seen conversing with the tenant men—the previous owners of the land, about how the land is dying. The owners then proceeded to kick the tenants off the land. “The bank, the fifty-thousand-acre owner can't be responsible. You're on land that isn't yours” (Steinbeck 34). As the land is going to be plowed over with a tractor “The man in the iron seat” (35), or the tractor driver, is found out to be a friend of the tenants. His response when asked why he would turn against his fellow farmers is, “Times are changed don't you know…Get your three dollars a day, feed your kids” (37). This shows that when given the

Crash! Boom! Terrified screams and rifle shots filled the air as Margaret snatched up her baby sister into her arms as she ran around frantically in search of shelter. Finally finding a safe hiding spot behind a large rock, Margaret and her little sister watched in desperation as their small shack was ransacked by John Brown and his raiders. As the sky grew black with smoke, angry tears began streaming down Margaret’s face. Why can’t the anti-slavery settlers just leave us alone? Why are they being so violent? What have we done to them? All we want is land to settle on! Margaret wondered in disheartenment. For settlers who had rushed to claim land in Kansas and Nebraska in the stormy 1850’s, facing violent clashes had become a daily

Fortune Magazine, in July and August of 1936, sent James Agee and Walker Evans to research a story on sharecropping. In the preface of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Agee describes it as “a curious piece of work.” They were to produce “an article on cotton tenantry in the United States, in the form of a photographic and verbal record of the daily living and environment of an average white family of tenant farmers,” (IX). James Agee and Walker Evans set out to write and photograph an article for a magazine, and ended up experimenting with the form of the novel itself.

Furthermore, hearing this every day causes a loss of self/identity. Thus, causing the slaves to do unspeakable actions since they are not equal to a humans, in the minds of the slave owners. For instance, the author recalls a memory of how the men acted during their life on the plantation: “All in their twenties, minus women, fucking cows, dreaming of rape, thrashing on pallets, rubbing their thighs and waiting for the new girl – the one who took Baby Snuggs’ place after Halle bought her with five years of Sundays” (Morrison, 13). The action of ‘fucking cows’ is a symbolic meaning to what they slaves thought of themselves. They were, in essence, called animals, which resulted in the actions of having intercourse with other animals. This type of action further drives home the sense of no identity. The slaves had no idea how to think for themselves since the slave owners did it for them. Another observation was, how the family referred to the house they lived in. For example, instead of the family calling it their house, they named it with a number: “Outside a driver whipped his horse into the gallop local people felt necessary when they passed 124”

Oxford provided Faulkner with intimate access to the rich character of the rural south which was conscious of its past and separated from the urban-industrial mainstream that Faulkner found very distracting. He wanted to accurately portray life in the south and he “could not have done otherwise than to include Blacks among the people who inhabit the lands of his novels”(Glissant, pp. 56). Faulkner did not pretend to understand the suffering and complexity of the lives of the black community but, because he grew up witnessing their struggle he was able to represent them in an honest and sometimes brutal fashion. He spent his whole life in the south and, “Blacks lived there … They were servants in the Falkner family or perhaps workers for the railroad company founded by his great grand-father. They were surely mule drivers or farm laborers …”(Urgo and Abadie, pp. 137). It is difficult to say whether or not Faulkner felt sympathy for these people but it is clear through Faulkner’s writing that he believed their story needed to be told.

Abner felt there was discrimination by the rich folks against the poor people and that he was always looked down upon. It was always the other man that got the lucky break and a poor man never would get to be so lucky. The only way he felt he could attempt to get ahead, was to beat the other man to the punch first. Abner was just like the fires he built, uncontrollable, ruthless, and destroying everything he comes in touch with.