Introduction:
“As a young person growing up, I always wonder why we were called colored people. I have seen: brown, light brown, dark brown, black, pink, red, cream, tan, beige, and yellow people, but never seen a white, blue, green, or purple people. Since the whole world is made up of colored people, I guess that’s why they started calling us negros On my birth certificate I am listed as colored, my kids as Negros, and my Granddaughter as Black or African American.” This is a quote from my Grandmother, Janice Berry. In this interview, Janice Berry discusses a prevalent time in her life when she was a sharecrop farmer in Northern Carolina.
Many people in the present think the past seems like a very long time ago. But the memories and stories of people who lived during the time of rampant racism in America still are alive to tell the tale. The history of sharecropping farming seems often forgotten in American education. Agricultural land can be sharecropped when a landowner allows the tenants to use the land in exchange for a portion of the crops that are produced there. Unfortunately, white tents would then sell the crop that black families were picking and gain more money than what they were charging the families who were picking and planting the crops.
Biography:
My Grandmother, Janice Berry, discusses her time as a sharecrop farmer in Rex, North Carolina. She is 79 years old. She was born on November 27th, 1942. She was 5 years old when she start working in the fields. She states growing up during this time, “There were 4 of us — Three girls and one brother. Two have deceased. One sister and brother.” She was born and lived during the Civil Rights Movement and the era where Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat for a white man on the bus. Janice Berry, too, had to sit on the back of the bus and had to enter stores at the back door because she is a black woman. She lived when water fountains and bathrooms were segregated and she had to use the ones that were labeled as being for “colored only” which means she was only allowed to use those.
[Meirra McChristian]
Hi Grandma!
[Janice Berry]
Hi Meirra.
[Meirra McChristian]
Okay, start off by saying what’s your name and your age.
[Janice Bery]
My name is Janice McRea Berry. I am 79 years old born November 27th, 1942.
[Meirra McChistian]
Okay, great. Now onto my first question, How did your family start working as sharecrop farmers, and can you explain what sharecrop farming is?
[Janice Berry]
My family was sharecropping when I was born, and we were the tenants and we lived on farms. We have the owners who raised/grow tobacco, cotton, corn, and peanuts. The main crop was cotton and tobacco. We were paid 30 cents an hour or $3 a day for gathering crops.
[Meirra McChristian]
Okay, know previously you had discussed how living during the winter was very challenging. Can you share/retell some of the challenges and struggles that you endured during the cold months?
[Janice Berry]
The cold months?
[Meirra McChristian]
Mhm. (in agreement).
[Janice Berry]
During the summer months, we had gather our food for the winter; like grow all our vegetables and can them in jars and grow our meat. Our chickens and our hogs and normally during thanksgiving we killed hogs and from the hog, we got all of our lard. We called it lard now you call it vegetable oil. So, we didn’t have to buy anything during the winter. Only thing we bought during winter we bought it before the winter to carry us through the winter was flour, grits, and cornmeal. Everything else we had. But sometimes we ran short.
[Meirra McChristian]
What did you do when you ran short?
[Janice Berry]
Sometimes we went hungry.
[Meirra McChristian]
Oh no. So you just slept? Slept for dinner?
[Janice Berry]
No, we would go to the sweet potato hill and get sweet potatoes and roast them over the fire. If we had a cow, then for dinner we would have sweet potatoes and buttermilk.
[Meirra McChristian]
Oh, that’s nice. (Interviewer said because she loves sweet potatoes).
[Janice Berry]
That was not nice. That was surviving.
[Meirra McChristian]
I know but the sweet potatoes. I didn’t know there was a mountain for sweet potatoes.
[Janice Berry]
Yeah, you had to bank them to keep them from getting ‘cold hurt.’
[Meirra McChrisitan]
What is–
[Janice Berry]
Cold hurt is when they (potatoes) are outside in the winter and if the temperature drops way down it would freeze the sweet potatoes and then they wouldn’t be any more good.
[Meirra McChsitian]
I meant the banked.
[Janice Berry]
Oh the banks, is when we built up something like a pyramid. You get your pine straw and you put pine straw down and you put the sweet potatoes between the pine straw and you build it up, build it up. It’ll it gets so high. You put your sweet potatoes in and cover them with pine straw and put a canvas of cardboard on the outside to keep them warm during the winter so that they won’t get cold.
[Meirra McChristian]
Ahh okay. What stories do you remember/stick out to you the most during this time in your life and why?
[Janice Berry]
Well, during this time was rough for me because when I was around maybe 10 or 11 I had to plow the crops. The tobacco and the cotton with a mule. I had to hitch him up to the plow and I had to plow the crops. Then I had to get together the cotton. At a young age that was a lot of work. A lot of work.
[Meirra McChristian]
I know you have a habit of saving food and not wasting any meals. Do you think you have any other habits that you realized you have now that you are older that are from the way you grew up?
[Janice Berry]
Well from saving food, we had to save food we couldn’t waste food. Clothes, we only got one pair of shoes or maybe two pairs of shoes a year. One pair to wear to school every day and then one for church. That one pair of shoes you bought it large enough so you wouldn’t outgrow it for the whole winter. That it was we call brogans/hightop shoes, that is what we wore. All of our clothes was homemade. Back then we wore whatcha call underskirts. When the owners would buy feed for their hogs they would always come in white sacks. So the owners would give the white sacks to us to wash them and then we would make underskirts. And we wore underskirts.
[Meirra McChristian]
What was it like going to school and also having to work?
[Janice Berry]
Going to school we had to walk probably sometimes I guess almost a mile to catch the bus. In the wintertime by the time the bus came to pick you up your feet was froze and by the time you got to school they didn’t warm up on the bus but you almost was about time to come back home before your feet felt warm. Then we were like moving from one farm to another so we started school over and over again. Which they don’t have today but they called grammar schools. If you started kindergarten and then you went up and moved at a certain age you would go to what they call grammar school. I guess what was seven or eight years old I guess.
[Meirra McChristian]
What was your family life like while growing up and working at this time?
[Janice Berry]
Family, well it was four of us. We were too young to be working as hard as we did. So your uncle David, when we cropped the tobacco and we strung it up on the stick and then we had to hang it up in the barn to dry out. So you had to heights the stickup. Like a 2 by 4 that runs parallel. I guess you call it parallel I guess. So the tobacco stick had to come from here (she tries to illustrate to me while I hold my arms out) and he would get up there and straddle (My Uncle David, my grandma’s brother who has passed away a few years ago) the pole and he was too young so it pulled his hip out of place.
[Meirra McChristian]
Ouch…
[Janice Berry]
Uh-huh, you see when he walked up on his toes and that comes from pulling his hip out. And we didn’t go to doctors so he would walk around there (the farm) bone on bone. It got so bad that when he went to go put the weight down on it he would almost fall down on the ground because he could put weight on it. The owner kept seeing him walk like that so he told my mom ‘you got to take him to the doctors’ So when she took him to the doctors, the whole socket was wore off. So he had iron build in socket but they put him in a cast. They put I think it was his left leg in a cast. So the right leg was growing and the left leg was in a cast and it didn’t grow. So that is why when he didn’t have any shoes on he was up on his toe because one leg was longer than the other. But he went to the hospital and they put that piece in there so that he can walk.
[Meirra McChristian]
When/why did you stop working on the farm?
[Janice Berry]
I worked on the farm until I graduated high school when I graduated high school I was done. So I caught the bus to Greensburg stayed with my brother. For a couple of weeks. Then I caught the greyhound bus and went to New York and stayed with my first cousin, Ruth. I stayed up there and then from New York I came back home for a little while. Then I went to Washington D.C. so I left the farm when I graduated from high school in 1962 I think it was.
[Meirra McChristian]
Oh my gosh. The farm stayed alive for that long?
[Janice Berry]
They were still farming after I left. People were still down there on the farms.
[Meirra McChristian]
Yeah, but oh my gosh. It start from 1942 to the 1990s? (That date was wrong it was the 1960s).
[Janice Berry]
Oh, when I started working on the farms? I started working when I was five years old. I was born in 1942… I started working in 1947 on the farm and worked till 1962.
[Meirra McChristian]
Do you know if the farm got shut down?
[Janice Berry]
No, they still have farms. Now the Mexicans are working the farms but now they have tractors because all the young black kids were tired of working on the farms so they migrated and left the farms. So the white people didn’t have anybody to work the farms so then they got the tractors because when all the black kids done grew up they left the farms. Cause we had to pick the cotton and we had to have a bag on our shoulders so they had no one to pick the cotton to break the corn. I had to break the corn, hitch up the wagon. So after we left the farm they got the cotton picker tractor to pick the cotton. They brought in the Mexican peoples to do the tobacco and stuff. They had to pay them like $30 an hour while they were only paying us $3 an hour. To pick a pound of cotton you only got paid $3 for 400 pounds of cotton and cotton is very very light so we had to pick like 200 pounds per person a day. If I picked 100 pounds I get $3 a pound and my mom would pick 200 pounds, your Aunt Gertha would pick 200 pounds, even Stella would pick 200 pounds. (Aunt Gertha and Stella are my grandma’s sisters) David picked 200 pounds. So we had to get out there early in the morning as soon as daylight we were out in the cotton fields picking cotton. So it was a rough life and that’s why we don’t know even if we get sick because we worked and they would say ‘well you’re not sick.’ I had tonsillitis couldn’t swallow, couldn’t eat and still in the field chopping cotton, picking cotton. And I got to where I couldn’t even swallow before my mom sent me to the doctor. My throat was so infected that I couldn’t even swallow a pill they had to give me shots to get the infection out.
[Meirra McChristian]
Did you ever see any black doctors?
[Janice Berry]
There was no black doctors. And the white doctors didn’t care about tending to black people. Because we weren’t allowed to go into the stores or sit at the front of the bus. But as they say I made it, I’m still here.
[Meirra McChristian]
I’m glad you’re here Gram Gram. (That is my nickname for my grandma).
[Janice Berry]
Yeah, they say because we worked so hard and stuff that is why we have such a longevity in our life.
[Meirra McChristian]
This is the last question after you stopped working on the farm, I know you said you traveled to New York but what else did your family travel to, or what other jobs did you have?
[Janice berry]
There was no family I was on my own. I mean I went to New York my cousin was already there but like your great-grandma Ola and Aunt Gertha and Aunt Stella they was still back on the farm when I left and I decided that I didn’t want to see them on the farm. So once I left I sent them back and got them. Well, I got Gert (nickname for Aunt Gertha). David had left the farm anyway he was like a migrant worker. But I left the farm and my mom was still there but like I say, when we left the white man he put them off of the farm because there wasn’t nobody there but her and they wanted all of us to stay and we weren’t going to stay. I weren’t going to stay. I decided that I wasn’t going to pick any more cotton or crop any more tobacco or pick any more tobacco worms off of the tobacco.
[Meirra McChrisitan]
What other jobs have you experienced throughout your lifetime?
[Janice Berry]
When I went to New York I worked at a restaurant called Schaffer, it is no longer there. When I came to D.C. I worked at National Geographic. I worked at Geico and the post office. The main post office there at Northeast D.C. and then when we moved to North Carolina that is where I worked at the warehouse Sawmill. Worked at that warehouse for 28 years and I retired and I’m here. No more working.
[Meirra McChristian]
Okay, do you have any final statements?
[Janice Berry]
Well, I’m glad that I did work hard but it was brutal, unnecessary. But I got a grandbaby out of it So that’s about it.
[Meirra McChristian]
Okay.
Resources used:
Groskop, Jessica. April 23, 2020. Understanding Crop Share Leases. The University of Nebraska-Lincoln.Access Date February 21, 2022. https://agecon.unl.edu/understanding-crop-share-leases
NCpedia. Sharecropping and Tenant Farming. A North Caroline History Resources.Access Date February 21, 2022. https://www.ncpedia.org/anchor/sharecropping-and-tenant
History.com Editors. History.com. Sharecropping. July 14, 2021. A&E Television Networks. Access Date February 21, 2022.https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/sharecropping
Follow up:
After the interview, my Grandma mentioned that she had to use a handheld tobacco plant setter to plant all the seeds on the farm. She said that it took a long time because she had to step on the tool to get the seed deep into the ground and do that multiple times throughout the farm. She also said that after she had left the farm the farmers invested in tractors for new people so that they would come and work on the farm.