Because I was brought up on a coffee farm in Kona and toiled there until my mature years, I have a deep and sustaining interest in farms and farmers. Therefore, I wanted to observe the sharecropping system while in the South.
When I attended the University of Georgia at Athens during the school year of 1940-41, I took frequent walks to the outskirts of town to talk to farmers, both Negro and white. I saw dilapidated farm shacks, seemingly in the last stages of general decay, where Negro families lived. There was a school building in almost the same condition where Negro children studied.
During the cold winter months in various places in Georgia, Negro students do not go to school. It is too cold to study, for either the school buildings are full of cracks and holes or there is no appropriation for heating fuel, or both. These students are taught by Negro teachers, many of whom had not had the same opportunity for training in the segregated colleges, as did the white teachers.
The white students enjoyed better facilities. Thus when I heard the often-used terms, the "American Way" or "making better citizens," I wondered if the speakers realized what they were saying. Which was the "American Way"—the life enjoyed by the whites alone, or the whole social pattern of master and oppressed relationship? There was nothing to boast about in either case. The life which the Negroes led certainly could not have meant the "American Way" to those who used the term.
The Negroes were kept from voting to exercise their public responsibility. They were segregated, kept from attaining decent education. They could not eat in public places or sit in movie houses or buses with the white. But they were hired to cook the food or non-Negro customers in restaurants or private white homes, and to do janitorial work in movie houses and churches, some of which segregated them while others banned them altogether.
I wondered how the white people actually felt toward me. I noticed that a Chinese family, the only Oriental people in Athens to my knowledge, lived what seemed to me to be a lonely existence. When I used to pass their shop I noticed that their social activities were severely restricted by the pattern of segregation. They were not accepted by the whites because of their color. The Negroes who were inhumanly discriminated against and constantly "shown their place" through lynching and other violent methods, kept to themselves. And the attitude employed against the Negroes by the whites was carried over in their dealings with the non-white people like the Chinese family and myself, although not in the extreme form.
The "gook" attitude toward Koreans by certain Americans in the present war and the "slopey" attitude toward the Chinese during the last war are part and parcel of this white supremacy. The mouthing of the "American Way" and "democracy" must therefore, be alarming to Asians who have been victims of Western imperialism with all its ramifications of white supremacy. They see today, Korean civilians maimed and destroyed by area and napalm bombings. They are told in propaganda that such destruction is part of the fight to preserve freedom. But Negro troops are segregated in Korea. At home in the U. S., non-whites do not enjoy equal rights. Years later I learned at first-hand that these conditions are quite clear to non-white people, especially in colonial areas.
At the YMCA where I lived, its director, "Pop" Pearson, and its secretary, Miss Annie Foster, were very friendly toward me. They and the Negro janitors made my stay there extremely educational and enjoyable.
Freedom of Association Banned
I became intimate with the Negroes who worked at the YMCA but as I tried to build a friendly relationship, I noticed that this made them ill at ease.
Once when one of the janitors called me "Mr. Koji," shortly after my arrival in Athens, I asked him to call me "Koji."
He quickly replied: "No sir, Mr. Koji."
"Why?" I asked him.
"Mr. Koji, it is not proper. I respect you, Mr. Koji."
"Sure you do, and I respect you, too."
"No sir," he said, "I can't do that. It's not proper. But I thank you just the same, Mr. Koji."
I asked him to regard us as equals. He seemed uncomfortable and almost scared. After he had left I thought the whole matter over. He could have imagined that I was a plant who might stool on him if he adopted a familiar attitude toward me. He and the other Negroes lived in constant fear of the white supremacists who wanted to keep them "in their place." Actually, the white people feared any tendency that would make the Negroes conscious of independence and equality. And non-whites like me were denied the freedom of association with Negroes on an equal basis, the only way human beings can live with each other in self-respect and decency.
"There Is No 'Tobacco Road' In Georgia"
One day Margaret Mitchell, the author of the popular novel, "Gone With the Wind," visited the university. In the chapel where she spoke a student sitting beside me said: "She's the greatest writer Georgia ever produced."
"Why do you think so?" I asked.
"She wrote of the true, great South," he answered.
Actually, what Margaret Mitchell had done was to glorify the past that belonged to the slave-holders. She had actually portrayed the desperate struggle of a decadent class that went down fighting because it did not wish to give up its privileged position.
"I'm sure glad Miss Mitchell wrote of that ol' South. She recaptured that period for us; we Southerners won't easily forget," the student later said.
"What do you think of Erskine Caldwell as a writer of the South?" I asked him. "He writes trash. I don't care much for him," he answered.
"He writes about the present, about the life and death struggles of the poor whites," I said.
"There is no 'Tobacco Road' in Georgia," he answered.
Condition of the Poor Whites Is a Sore Spot
In the weeks that followed I tried to find out more about "Tobacco Road." This is the title used by Erskine Caldwell in describing conditions of the poor whites, in one of his novels.
Most of the students I talked to denied that there is such a, condition as brought out by Caldwell. I found that students in general resented the fact that the novelist made Georgia the locale of his book on poor whites.
One day a student talked to me in private after a group of us had discussed "Tobacco Road" and its writer.
"I have heard from a good source that Caldwell acquired first-hand information from the actual life of white sharecroppers. We resent the book because Caldwell set the scene in Georgia."
Why don't you go down to "Tobacco Road"? There is such a road. But don't expect the poor whites to talk to you, the student warned me.
"Tobacco Road" Can Be Anywhere
Then at the YMCA I met a student whose sister had taught school with Mrs. "Ira S. Caldwell, the writer's mother. He asked his sister to write me an introduction to the Caldwells and this she did for me. I intended to write a series of articles about the sharecroppers.
In her letter, my friend's sister asked me this: "There is one tiling I would like to ask you to include in the article and that is something to the effect that Tobacco Road can be anywhere in the world—not just in Georgia. Most Georgians resent the book because it gives Georgia as a setting. You really can't blame us."
Told I Was On a Wild Goose Chase
As the ground began thawing in the spring, I hitch-hiked to Augusta, about 100 miles away, during a weekend. I went to a teachers' convention there in hopes of meeting Mrs. Caldwell. I did not see her, but teachers I talked to indicated that I was on a wild goose chase in trying to find conditions written up by Caldwell.
Toward evening I headed for Wrens where the Caldwells lived, about 33 miles from Augusta. At nightfall I passed Tobacco Road and saw the wide, red-clay road running through barren land. There was no signpost since tourists have always taken them down since Caldwell popularized the name.
The following morning I met the Rev. and Mrs. Caldwell. They told me about their son who has always been a quiet observer, always questioning, always curious.
Mrs. Caldwell said he just presents a problem and "he never accuses. He never blames anyone in any of his works."
Ma Joad Had a Message
I thought of another contemporary writer. John Steinbeck in his "Grapes of Wrath" had written of the same kind of people the Oakies, who gave up their land or were forced off it. Yet Steinbeck had focused the bright ray of hope on the common people, who would keep on coming by the millions to fight fort their place under the sun, as Ma Joad says in the novel. Caldwell's characters in "Tobacco Road" are presented as completely beaten down people.
When I asked the parents if it was true that Erskine Caldwell had exaggerated, the Rev. Caldwell said it was for me to observe. He said he would take me around the sharecroppers' shacks. Before we left, Mrs. Caldwell asked her husband if he wanted to take clothes to the poor. She said the Jews of Pennsylvania, Boston, New York and Detroit areas sent clothes to them for distribution to the Tobacco Road people.
"They understand what suffering is. As a group, the Jews have already suffered a lot and many of them are thoughtful and generous," the Reverend said.
Tobacco and Snuff Drive Away Hungry Feeling
Mrs. Caldwell gave the Reverend some small coins.
"This is tobacco and snuff money," the Reverend said. "As you may know, tobacco is the main thing poverty-stricken people want It helps to keep them from wanting food they can't get. It gives a burning sensation inside and takes the feeling of hunger away."
The first farm shack we came to was that of the Amersons. Dude, in the book "Tobacco Road," is Dude Amerson. He was out selling wood in Augusta. His wife complained she was hungry, with nothing to eat in the house. She said the landlord gave the family a plot to cultivate but the men folks just didn't feel like doing it yet. Her skin was dry and cracked, her lips parched, her eyes sunken and her stomach bloated. She spit brown tobacco juice that rolled on the ashes in the fireplace. Her daughter-in-law, about 16-years-old, looked much older. She had snuff in her mouth. Her children, one aged three and the other a year, looked hungry and tired. The mother said there wasn't a spoonful of food in the house.
As we went from farm to farm, many shacks were vacant because sharecroppers move from farm to farm almost every year or two, hoping to hit a fertile field. With almost all sharecroppers doing the same, not taking care of the land, the soil gave less and less each year. It was a vicious circle.
Snuff and Cornbread for Generations
Everywhere we went we met poor-white sharecroppers who seemed too exhausted to work, and children with sunken eyes and bloated stomachs.
"A man must have decent food to eat. If he hadn't had much for generations, lived on snuff and cornbread, how much energy and desire would he have to work," the Reverend said to me.
He said that most people in nearby towns ignored these people and many do not know how much poverty and human degeneration exist. You have to go to the sharecroppers, he explained. They have been pushed back to the sand hills and have gone down with the poverty of the soil worked over and over, year after year.
When we returned to the Caldwell home that evening, I told the Caldwells about farming on leased land in Kona. We talked of land monopoly and the Reverend said the sharecroppers were beaten even before they started.
The Meaning of Tobacco Road
Before I left Wrens, Mrs. Caldwell asked me if I had learned what "Tobacco Road" actually meant. And she explained:
"It is poverty—poverty wherever you find it.
'Tobacco Road' is not only in Georgia; it is a belt road for poor folks that runs around the earth for people who have been pushed back by soil erosion, land tenancy and monopoly, and progress of physical science far beyond advances in social sciences."
I did not understand all that she said then. But since then, I have seen "Tobacco Road" conditions in the Far East. All people —Negroes, Asians, poor whites and Middle Eastern people—tread that road.
What is the solution? How can relief be brought to millions of land-hungry, exploited people? Who will help them? Can they solve their own problems?
I asked these questions.