Nate Shaw is a name once buried deeply in history’s annals. Slowly, since the man’s departure from this world in 1973, his story has found its way to a more proper place in the records of rural America. Nate Shaw was not a great political figure or a leader of a revolution. Nor did he lead an economic transition or attend a technological change. Shaw was a simple man and, though very intelligent, was illiterate with no formal education. He stood at the bottom of the social ladder throughout his life. However, Nate Shaw deserves his narrative to be heard not in spite of, but due to the fact of his normality. He lived in the South during a time of sweeping changes in social, racial, and agricultural terms. All of these factors had long been a part of the rural American South. A change in any of them meant a change in life for all—agriculture affected everyone. Nate Shaw played a role in this particular act of the American saga. His story is gripping, heartbreaking, and important to history. The narrative is his own, but it is also the story of countless black citizens oppressed by an entrenched racial system. The only difference is that Nate Shaw was fortunate in finding ways to make a lasting impact on those around him and for the future.
The first of his fortunes was the remarkable life he led. The second, which he probably considered the greatest blessing, was the opportunity to tell the story of that life to the world. This was achieved by way of Theodore Rosengarten, a student and author of history. Rosengarten’s 1974 book All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw serves as Nate’s autobiography. Unable to record his narrative, Nate delighted Rosengarten through dozens of interviews, laying out his life for future publication. After thirty-one sessions and more than 120 hours of discussion, Nate had imparted the core of his plot, Rosengarten implying that Nate—a wealth of information—surely had more to give. Regardless of that fact, Nate Shaw’s record stuns the reader with his story. Rosengarten merely acted as transcriber.
Nate turned fifteen years old as the twentieth century was born. His short life had already been dominated by economic and emotional hardship. His mother died when he was nine and his brother a year later. Living by the order of white men, his family had always been poor. Nate first learned of the realities of race in America by way of his older relatives, many of whom had lived before slaves were officially freed, or, as Nate remembered his kin calling the event, “the surrender”. As soon as Nate was able to think for himself, he saw firsthand the disadvantages he faced in life. Compounding his adverse fate was his father, named Hayes, the man who influenced Nate more than anything else.
Nate’s mother was a kind woman, humble and weak, but willing to stand up to her abusive husband in defense of her children. Nate never recalls hunger while his mother was alive. Afterward, however, due to his father, he and his siblings often survived on small, tasteless meals, with bread their main sustenance. His father was a selfish man, taking not only all the meat the family had but also every bit of labor available—utilizing the only resources he could draw from, his second wife and several children. His wife and sons were forced to work in the fields as though they were men. Hayes paid little respect to any system of morals. He cheated on his wives constantly, beat all members of his family, and avoided work as much as possible. In all of this came Nate’s first lesson from his father: moral principles. Nate had a natural awareness and sentimentality about him that enabled the growth of ethical values despite such a harsh childhood. He understood the importance of integrity by defining himself as a man unlike his father.
The other lesson Nate’s father unwittingly instilled in him was that of strong work ethics. Nate was in the field at nine years old and quickly learned the value of hard work. He knew that he was a black man in a white man’s world. His labor was perhaps his lone asset. There is another facet to this second lesson, however; Nate also learned just how tenuous and genuinely dangerous white men could be. It was the first decades of the twentieth century, when segregation and racial exploitation were common. Nate remembers his father twice being stripped of his money and property. For example, his father kept cattle that a white man, Mr. Albee, owned by way of credit given to Hayes. Mr. Albee agreed to let Hayes sell one of the cows to earn a little profit. As soon as Hayes did, however, Mr. Albee accused him of selling “mortgaged property”. Events such as these also lent Nate insight to the business side of farming. If his father had acquired a written statement from Mr. Albee allowing him to sell the cow, he would have been unable to trick Hayes. Through experiences such as these, Nate came to understand the dangers unscrupulous white men could inflict in such a prejudiced world, legally and otherwise. Though Nate’s father was rough, even cruel at times, and generally unprincipled, Nate came from his troubled youth with wisdom.
Nate’s suspicion of corrupt white men carried over into adulthood. As tenant farmers, he and his father had been misused by such men. Often, landowners such as a Mr. Clay would hire black families. They would be given crops to manage, but received little to none of the yield. For Hayes and Nate there was nothing to be done about the situation. It was “just somethin to keep us alive while he was workin for nothin”. In all of this, Nate witnessed the realities of the rural South, both agriculturally and socially. White men often controlled blacks as though they were still in bondage. It was extremely difficult for blacks to earn any type of true financial independence in Alabama because they would rely on the nonexistent mercy of the landowning whites. Nate remarked often of his father: “He wasn’t a slave but he lived like one”. The truth of life in the rural South for African Americans was all too well known to Nate even by the time he was a teenager. The mentality that resulted affected the remainder of his life.
Nate worked under his father until he married at the age of twenty-one in 1906. He had learned much about farming from his work experiences under various white men. Unfortunately, Nate was sometimes unable to practice what he knew as the best farming methods due to his employers’ intransigence. He never received a proper education, but had acquired a great knowledge of land, crops, animals, and farming techniques. He knew how to fertilize, where to plant the right crops, and how to produce an ample yield. Whenever he tried to apply his wealth of knowledge, intolerable landowners often suppressed him.
Obviously, Nate held a deep resentment to his racist, dishonest employers. But this is not to say that he was a racist himself. Nate practiced unwavering morals throughout his life. He disliked the men not due to their being members of the white race, but because they utilized that attribute to their benefit in a long-standing system of racial inequality in the rural South. Nate considered himself fair to everyone. It is a large stain of shame on the history of rural America that such a man was burdened with this undue lot in life.
But here is where Nate’s story finds its greatest worth. Despite his subjugation, it proved impossible to stop Nate. Over the next several years, he gradually accumulated money. His employers constantly tried to take advantage of his ignorance and lack of education. For years after he became an independent man, he was in debt to his white landowning bosses. They attempted many times to orchestrate his financial ruin. Contracts would be written with great disadvantage for Nate; he would be given the worst parcel of land on which to grow crops necessary to his survival; his status as a black man was the basis for incessant abuse in the market, on the roads, and in the fields. In the face of all this, however, Nate remained a dignified black farmer. Due to his hard work and great knowledge of land and animals, his money slowly accrued. Naturally, any white racists who previously held enmity for Nate found themselves with a greater hatred after his financial success. Nate saw the way white men reacted to his material prosperity. They didn’t want a black man to possess anything they didn’t have, but Nate did: excess meat, new buggies and mules, and two new cars in the late 1920s. He recalled, “The white people was afraid—I’ll say this: they was afraid the money would make the nigger act too much like his own man. Nigger has a mind to do what’s best for hisself, same as a white man. If he had some money, he just might do it."
Nate relied on cotton for the bulk of his income, but supplementary income from other jobs helped him achieve economic independence. He visited town once a week to sell butter, milk, eggs, vegetables, and so forth; he also often hauled lumber, kept bees for honey, and wove baskets to sell. During World War I, cotton prices rose to a new high and he prospered further. After the war and throughout the 1920s, prices dropped to a fraction of what they had been. It was a tough time for rural farmers, especially once the Great Depression occurred. Many of Nate’s friends and acquaintances left Alabama for better hopes farther north. Nate never considered leaving. He knew a great deal about farming and little else, so his chances were better in Alabama than elsewhere.
Here is where his story takes a stark turn—where his narrative reaches the proverbial climax for the main character. In 1931, Nate heard of a union dedicated to farmers such as him, the Sharecroppers Union. Nate sensed the winds of change whipping around him, and decided he should look into such a group. “And I knowed what was goin on was a turnabout on the southern man, white and colored; it was somethin’ unusual. And I heard about it bein a organization for the poor class of people—that’s just what I wanted to get into, too." Whites were immediately concerned about such an organization. Nate was warned not to join, but did so anyway—he saw it as a real opportunity for change. As far as Nate could see, the Sharecroppers Union had no strict agenda or plans other than to guide black farmers in supporting one another through times of trouble. That was enough, though, to convince Nate he needed to be a part of the union; it was more than anyone else had done for black farmers. With communist leanings, the group met with collective support as their basic tenet. This was a major step for Alabama sharecroppers. Afraid of their white employers and paranoid about one another, blacks had previously been unable to effect change. As more joined the Sharecroppers Union, they began to feel an identity. As they came together, so, too, did their common desire for true freedom.
The union met secretly. Nate was unable to recall the name of the “teacher,” or the leader of the union meetings, but his words motivated Nate. Throughout his life, Nate had witnessed and knew the dreadful condition of the black man in the rural South. At this time he grasped a sense of great urgency for change. He had stood up humbly and respectfully to his would be oppressors since he became a man, but this union would be his vehicle for a more definite remedy. Succinctly put, “Somebody got to stand up."
The meetings began to thrive, which the white community inevitably discovered. They were afraid of the effects such a union would have on blacks. It was an unjust and discriminatory fear when simply measured by the nature of white men’s concern; but, the fear was justified in terms of the nascent social change detected. As we have clearly seen through Nate’s eyes, for decades after slavery was officially claimed abolished, blacks maintained no higher status and were treated just as poorly by many whites as they had been under slavery. As the Sharecroppers Union began to have influence in Nate Shaw’s Alabama, it met head on with this deeply established social, cultural, and economic system. Fear was the prime motivator on both sides—blacks were afraid of white men’s undue authority; whites feared collapse of the social hierarchy and their supremacy therein. It was a time of great anxiety and concern for the future.
For Nate and his community, these new emotions and the old, deep-seated animosities converged in 1932 to form the apex of Nate’s story. His friend, Virgil Jones, was a poor sharecropper, in debt but always hardworking to sustain his family. Jones’ employer had dispatched the sheriff to collect his stock. Essentially, all of his property and means of livelihood were to be repossessed. However, this was not solely a matter of business but an act of aggression and intimidation toward members of the Sharecroppers Union. In such seizures, Nate knew that he and others would follow. He decided to stand up to the sheriff by attempting to politely negotiate the situation. This proved impossible. Both parties left after an innocuous altercation, only to confront one another later in the day. A shootout occurred in which three shotgun blasts to Nate’s hindquarters impelled self-defense. He fired back with intent to harm, but injured no one as the police ran away.
After his arrest, the International Labor Defense, which was associated with the Sharecroppers Union, sent a lawyer to defend Shaw. Nate knew it was virtually hopeless. He witnessed the injustice that plagued the Scottsboro Boys, a group of nine young black men falsely accused of raping two white women. Some of the women recanted their stories, and there was no medical evidence of rape. However, as Nate Shaw points out, the legal system was not inclined to provide justice for blacks. Like the Scottsboro Boys, his full story was not allowed to be heard, and he did not receive a fair trail. Nate served twelve years in prison.
The consequences of Nate Shaw’s story are heavy and abundant. By cooperating in a scheme of activist populism, he represents the struggle of thousands of poor black agriculturalists in the rural American South. With no political means of defending their inherent rights as full citizens, blacks had to take up the cause by their own efforts. Men such as Nate Shaw were fundamental to any type of movement that attempted social change. While incident over Virgil Jones’ property was taking place, he stood to face his white oppressors when the police came; everyone else ran. Nate was not afraid. He knew he was right, that the white supremacists were wrong, and blocked their attempts to suppress and manipulate him. Nate had acted with this sense of valid defiance all of his life: tacitly as a boy, now explicitly as a man.
Most black farmers did not succeed financially as did Nate Shaw. In this we see his tenacity and skill. However, though he achieved a better place in life by his labor and virtue, his plight for equality was common to all black farmers in southern rural America. It was the struggle of not achieving parity per se, but simply securing the ability to freely strive for that goal. For some, this hope was lost. Nate’s father was born a slave and, as Nate saw it, died a slave. Many chose not to fight. They lived in a world hostile to their being, and they acquiesced to longstanding racism. Others, like Nate Shaw, used any scarce assets they had, namely their bodies and minds. For such men in Alabama, hard work, self-respect, and the Sharecroppers Union served as their instruments for change.
© 2006 Brian Hathcock. DO NOT COPY ANY OF THE ABOVE TEXT OR USE IN ANY WAY WITHOUT MY WRITTEN PERMISSION.
