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Throwed Away: Failures of Progress in Eastern North Carolina

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Nobody organizes tours to visit the old homes of Southern tenant farmers, unlike the mansions of the rich or even, these days, the shacks of the slaves. Not many outsiders even know the difference between sharecroppers and tenants, so Linda Flowers, daughter of tenant farmers in North Carolina, is at pains to distinguish between them.

A sharecropper owns little more than his overalls and, maybe, a mule. His landlord supplies tools, a house, seeds, fertilizer and food. A tenant is an independent businessman. He owns his own mule or a truck, maybe some furnishings and enough credit to capitalize a crop.

Materially, the difference in living standards may be small, but the difference in status is considerable. After the Civil War, tenants could make a living in North Carolina growing truck crops for expanding eastern cities. They were self-respecting people. After World War II, the terms of trade changed against eastern truck farmers on favor of latifundia in California.

The North Carolinians had not expected much. They did not demand much. They tended, often, to contrast their precarious economic state unfavorably with with that of the harvest laborers they hired: the pickers, Flowers notes, were paid so much per box by the tenant, a clear gain; while the tenant sometimes lost money on each box. (In `Cross Creek,' Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings makes the same point about her orange grove, though she was a hobby farmer; it did not matter if the bottom dropped out of the fruit market.)

About the time Flowers was ready to leave home, the tenants crossed over from barely making ends meet to a state of prolonged deficit. Again and again in `Throwed Away,' she regrets that farms of vegetables were turned over to grains (and, since this book was published in 1990, to hogs in confinement). Grain doesn't require a whole family's labor, so the tenants were displaced: th'owed away, as they would have said.

Children of tenants sought work in industry, mills in eastern North Carolina, furniture factories in the Piedmont. Flowers is bitter about this.

It is hard to see why. Her family cleared around $700 a year in the mid-1950s. Even accounting for housing and some homegrown food off the books, $15 a week was not much to brag about even in the poor South of that era. Certainly not enough to pay taxes to support universities, like UNC-Greensboro (Women's College, in those days), which Flowers was able to attend.

And what about those harvesters that the Flowers family hired seasonally? They were black people, and they had no assets to become tenants. If they were not strong, they could not even hope to farm on shares.

In the summer of 1966, U.S. Sen. Bill Spong of Virginia made a hunger tour of eastern North Carolina and found numerous black families (usually headed by a woman) whose sole opportunity for work was two months a year in a cannery.

Growing up tenants may have been a satisfying family experience, but this was not an economic system that was worth preserving, even if somehow California and its migrant workers had not offered competition.

`Throwed Away' is a heartfelt book, a well-written book, a valuable document from the inside; but the economic analysis is a travesty.

Linda Flowers herself escaped into academia. Most of her peers eventually escaped into a more humdrum life. By the 1970s, northern union organizers were frustrated and angry because they could not make any headway in signing up Southern factory workers who were making, perhaps, $5 an hour, when Ohio auto workers were making $17 or more.

They couldn't understand why these crackers were so loyal to their exploitative employers. Why wouldn't they be? $200 cash money a week was a long way up from $700 a year.

I bought this book because my family is from East Carolina and the stories in this book are very likely my stories and countless others over the decades upon decades.

Whether you are from East Carolina or not this book is worth the initial culture shock and slowness of (plot?). That is because the author whom I've never met (and has passed away unfortunately)is determined to tell the awful truth about a people and region that will likely never be on the "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous."

In the process she touches on vital and agonizingly current issues such as American economics of exploitaton, subtle to overt racisim, nobility and independence amid depression and an inept and unaccountable educational system which ensures the repitition of a "throwed away" people.

Yes this is the book that you "should" read. But I think truth is where you find it and this book tells it like it is.