Ned Cobb was a good man who hid his name for no good reason when a white college kid paid a visit in the middle of his busy season and said
"I'm recording the voices of poor ol' boys and maybe you'd like to be heard."
"Yes, sir, the voice of the blowin' wind is too soft for Tallapoosa."
He'd been bewildered and confused by three hundred years of abuse. Cursed into the womb by his worn out father, Ned was taught to go no farther than the plow at his shoes. So he pushed the dirt, but also plucked the feathers from the absurd Jim Crow bird.
"I'm not afraid of Alabama! Hear the howlin' train that carries my new bosses home! Walk in the sullen field they gave me in the corner! In the corner turn around and listen—my masters' tongues whip and moan.
"My cotton was stolen for a fistful of nickels by those foul, fickle bastards. The Union helped us weave ourselves some dignity from the tatters of our dusty, brown souls. So we did, and my loyalty to anything else ain't never comin' back.
"And now I'm old. By the same rail track, in the rusty arms of this wooden barn, I remember. The white men said, 'That nigger ain't a thing more than his daddy was, but a displaced slave too bold.'
"But I came up. I don't hold anything against those who treated me ill, though they might hate me still. I was the man I wanted to be. The man my masters didn't want to say was real. I became the man I needed."
Ned Cobb (1885-1973) was a black man in Alabama. He is also known as Nate Shaw. Ned succeeded in life despite mistreatment and the horrible racism of the American South during the Jim Crow years. He fought constantly against the blackguards who hated his skin. The man is an inspiration.
The college kid I mention in my above free verse is Theodore Rosengarten, who wrote a most interesting biography of Ned. All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw is about 600 pages, but I wrote a much shorter summary of Nate's struggle, which can be read here.
