![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() White landowners rented farms to black farmers, supplying “furnish” (money for equipment) and taking a “mortgage” (a share of any proceeds from farming). He recognized at a young age that the tenant farmer’s life was futile: “ain't nothin’ but go day, come night, God send Sunday.” In retrospect, Shaw acutely analyses the racial and economic injustice of the tenant system. Shaw worked on his father’s farm from early childhood, learning to plow, drive mules, and plant crops. Nate Shaw grew up in the 1890s, the son of a tenant farmer who was born into slavery. It has been hailed by critics, readers and academic reviewers as an invaluable testament to the Southern black experience: “Nate Shaw strides directly off the page and into our consciousness, a living presence, talking, shouting, sorrowing, laughing, exulting, speaking poetry, speaking history, thinking and feeling-and he makes us hear him” ( New York Times). The book won the 1974 National Book Award for non-fiction, beating out All the President’s Men, Studs Terkel’s Working, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Based on four years of interviews, the book narrates the life of illiterate African-American sharecropper “Nate Shaw” (real name Ned Cobb) in Nate’s own words. All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw is a 1974 work of oral history by American historian Theodore Rosengarten. ![]()
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