All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw
From OHA Wiki
Contents |
Author(s)/Editor(s)
Theodore Rosengarten was born in 1944 in Brooklyn, New York. Receiving his B.A. in American studies from Amherst College and a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University, Rosengarten is a teacher and writer; along with All God’s Dangers, which won a National Book Award for contemporary affairs, Rosengarten has authored Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award for best biography. Rosengarten was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1989 and currently resides in McClellanville, South Carolina. 1
Summary
Theodore Rosengarten initially met the then 84-year-old farmer, Nate Shaw, while researching an Alabama Sharecroppers’ union in 1969. After sixty hours of interviews that were divided into sixteen sessions, Rosengarten had amassed enough material to complete a full autobiography on Shaw’s life before, during, and after his time in the union. Rosengarten felt that Shaw was the perfect candidate for an oral autobiography, arguing “What happens to the history of a people not accustomed to writing things down? To whom poverty and illiteracy make wills, diaries, and letters superfluous?… In this setting, Nate Shaw is a precious resource. For his stories are grounded in the ordinary occurrences of the tenant farmer’s world. Furthermore, they display as few records could an awesome intellectual life”. 2
Beginning his story in the late nineteenth century, Nate Shaw describes his childhood, the loss of his mother when he was just nine, and the lingering social system from “slavery time days,” which forced his family into sharecropping. He also expresses how many of his family members were unsatisfied with the freedoms afforded them in the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments, saying “They felt like motherless children – they wasn’t satisfied but they had to live under the impression that they were…. But they would open up every once in a while and talk about slavery time – they didn’t know nothing about no freedom them, didn’t know what it was but they wanted it. And when they got it they knew that what they got wasn’t what they wanted, it wasn’t freedom really. Had to do whatever the white man directed em to do…. That was the way of life I was born and raised into”. 3
Shaw eventually became a sharecropper as well, but when he had the chance to make a stand against the oppressive system, Shaw joined the sharecroppers' union in 1932 because “I knowed what was goin on was a turnabout on the southern man; it was something unusual. And I heard about it been' a organization for the poor class of people – that’s just what I wanted to get into, too; I wanted to know the secrets of it enough that I could become in the knowledge of it”. 4 After attempting to save a neighbor’s property from confiscation, a violent altercation ensued, causing Shaw to be injured and arrested. After being sentenced to twelve years, Shaw converted to Christianity, saying “all of a sudden, God stepped in my soul. I got so happy – I didn’t realize where I was at. I lost sight on this world to a great extent…. I heard these words plain… the Lord spoke to me that morning, said ‘Follow me and trust me for my holy righteous word”. 5 When Shaw was released, his home was in tatters, his wife was dying, and his children had been scattered to extended family members. However, Shaw still maintains that he made the right decision in joining the sharecroppers' union, Shaw still works on the farm and continues his defiant stance against the oppressive system under Jim Crow by “looking for ways to prosper with dignity”.6
Methodological Comparisons within the Oral Autobiography Genre
As we see in Theodore Rosengarten’s All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw, Shaw’s life is deeply effected by his decision to join the sharecroppers' union in 1932. Shaw and the union were trying to break out of the social system in the south that still utilized many of its pre-emancipation practices toward African-Americans, including the creation of a hierarchy where African-American farmers were physically and economically controlled by their white landlords. During his time in the union, Shaw attempted to help a neighbor from having his property confiscated by four white deputy sheriffs during a violent struggle, leaving Shaw wounded and under arrest. Shaw was convicted of a felony and served twelve years for his crime. In the revelations chapter, Shaw affirms that he does not regret his actions: “I’ve gotten along in this world by studyin’ the races and knowing that I was one of the underdogs….I got tired of it but no help did I know; weren’t nobody to back me up….I just ain’t goin’ to go nobody’s way against my own self”. 7
Sidney Bechet describes a similar incident against a policeman in Treat it Gentle: An Autobiography:
“One night…they had a new policeman on the beat; I guess he wanted to show he was new and he didn’t like coloured people anyway. Well this man who had music all the time was sitting on the stoop that evening, just sitting there…. And this policeman walked up to the man. ‘Go on inside,’ he told him. The man, he was sitting there; it was his own stoop, and he didn’t pay any attention. ‘You be inside by the time I get back or there’ll be trouble.’ And the policemen went off…on his beat. And when he came back the man was still sitting there. The policeman told him again, ‘ Go inside,’ and he took out his club and hit him, and the man jumped up and grabbed the club away from him and starting hitting the policeman back with it”. 8
Bechet then describes the ensuing riot and siege of the man’s house by both the police and an angry mob, leaving many dead, although the man from the stoop disappeared. In his conclusion about the riot, Bechet seems to affirm Shaw’s above statement on race: “It’s something you can’t hardly help thinking, when you see a black man and a white man fighting…. The decision is easily made that the black man is wrong. That was one of those things of that time”. 9 These two incidents demonstrate that, although these men lived hundreds of miles apart, police brutality and racially motivated violence became a part of the daily lives of African Americans in the South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Compared to Sticking to the Union: An Oral History of the Life and Times of Julia Ruuttila, Rosengarten provides a more detailed description of the sharecropper’s union and the confrontation at Crane’s Ford, which was the impetus for Shaw’s induction into the union. Although his experience in the union drastically altered his life, Rosengarten devotes only a small portion of the book to Shaw’s description of events and meetings in the sharecropper’s union when compared to other subjects. 10
Sources
- http://authortree.com/9781570034459 (Accessed May 12, 2009).
- Theodore Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw, (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), xxiii.
- Ibid., 8
- Ibid., 296.
- Ibid., 334.
- http://www.answers.com/topic/all-god-s-dangers (Accessed May 14, 2009).
- Rosengarten, All God's Dangers, 545.
- Bechet, Treat it Gentle, 55.
- Ibid.
- Rosengarten, All God's Dangers, 296, 559-561.
