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1. Southern Strivings This story begins in Egypt, a tiny trading town in northeast Mississippi. There, in the heart of Dixie, Owen Whitfield often spent his summer nights in 1910. Sitting at a makeshift poker table in the back room of a pool hall, Whitfield, although not yet twenty years old, possessed a sharp mind, quick wit, and cockiness beyond his racial station. Like other African Americans in the South in the early twentieth century, he felt the influence of Jim Crow in nearly every aspect of his life.1 What Whitfield, the son of sharecroppers , remembered most from these years was his parents’ bid, through their labor, to achieve some independence from the white Mississippians who employed them. The Whitfields wanted their own farm. Yet even such seemingly modest aims provoked the rage of whites, who preferred to keep blacks desperate and dependent as growers of other people’s cotton. For thousands of African Americans like Whitfield, this system of Jim Crow was like playing a hand of poker dealt from a stacked deck, but with even less chance of winning.2 Owen Whitfield had ambitions beyond a subservient existence. He was like a lot of country boys who came to towns like Egypt to drink corn liquor, smoke cheap cigars, and gamble for coins. There was a place in Jim Crow society for these excitements, so long as African Americans did not contest their lack of citizenship rights. Whitfield, however, grew restless with such rudimentary privileges. He was keen for the kind of autonomy that might create a bit of space for him to apply his talents, particularly his gift for powerful speech. The young Whitfield worked variously as a farmer, a gravedigger, a coal heaver, a lumber sawyer, and a tap dancer. His search both confirmed and tested the boundaries of Jim Crow. Despite the stacked deck, Owen Whitfield continued to gamble against the fate that white people prescribed, because to accept a losing hand was to accept day-to-day survival, bare and raw. I We do not know the year of Owen Whitfield’s birth. The reason for this absence is as simple as it is evocative. The state of Mississippi did not care much about the births or deaths of African Americans. It issued no birth certificate for Owen Whitfield, nor did it add his name to any register of births. Relegated to second-class citizenship, at best, African Americans lived, worked, and died in 1890s Mississippi without official recognition of their humanity. Since he could not say for sure what year he was born, Whitfield and others guessed: his registration for the World War I draft cited 1892; the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) later claimed 1894; his obituaries listed both.3 If the year slipped the family memory, the day of October 14 stuck.4 Whitfield arrived on the Eagle Nest plantation near the town of Aberdeen in Monroe County in the middle of the cotton-picking season—a mixed blessing for his parents. His mother, Jane, must have been doubly relieved to have a healthy baby boy after carrying the child through a Mississippi summer. The addition was to be celebrated, for this new mouth to feed would in time provide additional field labor for their family. They named the boy Owen after his paternal grandfather, who was born enslaved in South Carolina in the early 1840s.5 But his birth also complicated the immediate work of bringing in the year’s crop, upon which hung the family’s survival. Few sharecropping women could escape field labor, even when pregnant, especially at harvest time. To make matters worse, whether it was 1892 or 1894, the economic depression of the early 1890s deflated the price of cotton. The Whitfields needed to pick all of the cotton they could, as fast as they could, in order to get the best price possible. A pregnancy in these circumstances was dangerous. Given the lack of adequate medical care for sharecroppers, any complication during the birth threatened the lives of both mother and baby. At best, Jane Whitfield would have had only a few days to recover from the delivery before she had to hoist her cotton sack and go back into the fields.6 That Jane Whitfield’s maiden name has been forgotten offers poignant testimony to the particular difficulties black women endured in the rural South. However much black families prized the Victorian ideal of the home as the woman’s sphere, few could...

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