One of my favorite things to do is drive out on country roads to see old farm houses and farm buildings. Working on my current documentary, which is about sharecropping, gives me the perfect excuse to spend time photographing these humble structures before they are lost to time. Above is an old farm house in northern Pender County, which was built for a landowner's family but was later occuppied by tenant farmers. Sharecropping and tenant farming was the backdrop against which most Rosenwald schools were built (see Stack's Rosenwald school documentaries).
There should be a name for this fascination with the structures that tell the stories of our ancestors. Well, "fascination" is a gentle way to put it. It segues easily into obsession. At any rate, I am on a mission to document the lives of early 20th century farmers, particularly sharecroppers and tenant farmers. They did not own their land and sometimes were barely able to eke out a living. Yet if you talk with my 80-something year old friends today, you won't hear any self-pity. Rather, they take pride in their resilience.
There is an element of faith that is central to most of their stories. The widowed mother/sharecropper praying over the sick mule. The boy who checks his rabbit boxes with trembling hands, hoping against hope to find something he can contribute to the family table. As they tell it there was an ease and a naturalness to their appeals. They had conviction, then and now, that God walks with them in their hardship. They know we weren't promised anything except grace. Somehow it was enough.
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