Sharecropper

A Southern Fantasy

By: Bill Ed Scruggs

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Sharecroppers in the mid-twentieth century spent their lives working in someone else’s fields and living in someone else’s house. They bore the knowledge that their children would likely spend their lives the same way, denied the education and skills required to escape farming and denied the money required to buy their own land. The title “landowner” was often shortened to “owner” and the shorter form was figuratively appropriate.

In the Caney River Valley in 1957 some sharecroppers have had enough. Whispers of freedom reach them on the wind from throughout the South, even as their children age and hope for their future fades one day at a time. Then a hideous accident devastates the community and sparks an unplanned lunge toward freedom far from the front lines of the larger battle.

A hardline conservative community is electrified. Pickups bearing arms and flying Confederate flags cruise past sharecroppers’ shacks. A desperate struggle envelops the land as the owners hurl their legal and economic might at a defiant and poorly understood enemy who seems unconcerned with counting gains and losses but responds ethereally and unpredictably to the inborn call of right and wrong.