![]() ![]() We hunted for his house along the asphalt byroads until we came across a mailbox with the name Shaw in bold letters. Nate Shaw lives just below the foothills where the lowlands begin. The road from Beaufort to Pottstown rolls and winds through piney woods country. We had learned that a survivor was living near Pottstown, some twenty miles south of the county seat, where we'd been sifting through trial dossiers and newspaper files in the courthouse basement. I had come to Tukabahchee County with a friend who was investigating a defunct organization called the Alabama Sharecroppers Union. ![]() He had just turned eighty-four years old. Burdened by the indignities he had suffered in the past and awed by the prospect of overturning "this southern way of life," Shaw stood his ground. For years he labored "under many rulins, just like the other Negro, that I knowed was injurious to man and displeasin to God and still I had to fall back." One morning in December, 1932, Nate Shaw faced a crowd of deputy sheriffs sent to confiscate a neighbor's livestock. It is the story of a black tenant farmer from east-central Alabama who grew up in the society of former slaves and slaveholders and reached maturity during the advent of segregation law. This big book is the autobiography of an illiterate man. ![]()
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