First Short Quiz – The Meaning of “Sharecropper”

[johnkarls]

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1. Does the sub-title of the Washington Post book review say that Up Home is “a love letter to everyone who helped her make her way out of poverty”?

2. Does this speak to her exquisite character that she wants to credit others for what she accomplished?

3. And does she not explain fully the depths of poverty from which she ascended?

4. Instead of parroting her Amazon.com bio from the book’s dust-cover, did our Original Proposal (viewtopic.php?f=859&t=2669&sid=a48fae9e ... cf7ec97e5e) blast past her modesty with the following bio –

• Born 78 years ago in Grapeland TX, the last of 12 children fathered by a sharecropper.
• Earning a scholarship to Dillard University – a historically-black university in New Orleans affiliated with the Congregational and United Methodist Churches.
• Earning her MA and PhD from Harvard in Romance Languages/Literature.
• Professor and various types of Dean at e.g., USC and Princeton U, before becoming President 1995 – 2001 of Smith College (one of the fabled “Seven Sisters” women’s colleges which included the de facto co-ed side of Harvard and Columbia) – where she started the first engineering program at a U.S. women’s college.
• First African-American woman to head an Ivy League school – serving as President of Brown University 2001-2012.
• BTW, serving simultaneously 2000-2009 on the Goldman Sachs Board.
• Coming out of retirement to serve 2017-2023 as President of Texas’ Prairie View A & M University – a historically-black university which is one of Texas’ only two land-grant universities and Texas’ second-oldest institution of higher learning.
• Shunning a second retirement, Ruth Simmons began June 2023 as an advisor to Harvard regarding its relationship with HBCU’s and began April 2023 as a President’s Distinguished Fellow at Rice U.

5. To understand the abject poverty of “sharecropping,” do we need to consult the most popular and IMHO most-authentic historian of the last century – James Michener (1907-1997)?

6. Did Michener write 25 books that were called “historical novels” because the history they contained was impeccably researched – but to which he was wont to add some fictional historical characters to illustrate/dramatize what was happening?

7. Was the first (“Tales of the South Pacific”) made into the Broadway/Hollywood Musical “South Pacific” by Rodgers and Hammerstein? And of his 9 (yes, count them nine) other historical “novels” that were made into Hollywood movies, was Sayonara nominated for 10 Oscars, winning 4?

8. Was “Mexico” the 22nd of his 25 historical “novels”?

9. Does his “Mexico” record that following the American Civil War, most Southern Plantation Owners simply crossed the border into Mexico where they resumed “business as usual” on newly-formed Mexican Plantations with Mexican slave labor???

10. And that virtually all of America’s former slaves who had worked the American Plantations remained on the land being permitted by the persons into whose hands legal title had fallen (usually relatives of the former owners who had absconded to Mexico) to work the land for a “share” of the “crops” they raised???

11. After all, wasn’t it World War II that caused the “Great American Migration” of former slaves to Detroit to work in the automobile factories that were converted to build America’s tanks and jeeps AND MOST OF ITS BOMBERS (which took off for the war from Ford Motor Company’s Willow Run Airport at the end of the Ford assembly lines)???

12. But back to the American sharecroppers, how valuable do you think their crops were if those crops were competing with crops raised on the new Mexican Plantations with slave labor?????

13. And how impoverished do you think Ruth Simmons was as the last of 12 children fathered by a sharecropper!!!???

14. BTW, in preparing this quiz, did Yours Truly research the common phrase when he was born 83 years ago – “dirt poor” – because he thought the “dirt” might refer to the “dirt” in which the sharecroppers struggled for mere survival, many unsuccessfully???

15. Was Yours Truly surprised to learn that the phrase “dirt poor” referred to DIRT FLOORS in the hovels of the impoverished – vs. wooden or stone floors in the homes of those who could afford such???

16. Do you think it safe to assume that sharecroppers had dirt floors in their hovels – assuming they could even afford hovels???

17. Do you hope that Ruth Simmons never sees this Short Quiz because it would probably bring back beaucoup NIGHTMARES???