Rings of Trust
By Kittie Howard
Cover Design by Morgan Media
Copyright © 2012 Kittie Howard
This is a work of fiction. Except for autobiographical inclusions, characters are the products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved. Except for quotations imbedded in reviews, no portion of this book may be reproduced in any format without permission from the author.
Kindle Ebook ISBN: 978-0-9857971-1-9
Also by Kittie Howard:
Remy Broussard’s Christmas
Kindle Ebook ISBN: 978-0-578-09623-0
Table of Contents
Dedication
Historical References
Da Lingua Franca
Glossary of Cajun French Words
Chapter One: Dandelion
Chapter Two: Gardenia Bush
Chapter Three: Petunias
Chapter Four: Magnolia Tree
Chapter Five: St. Augustine Grass
Chapter Six: Oak Tree
Chapter Seven: Lilies
Chapter Eight: Rose Bud
Chapter Nine: Pine Trees
Chapter Ten: Marigolds
Author’s Comments
Acknowledgments
About the Author
I dedicate Rings of Trust to my grandfather, a soft-spoken, spiritual man who helped build the Panama Canal to earn the money to purchase the Louisiana land he turned into a farm. He didn’t believe in the sharecropper system, abhorred racial slurs, and stood up to the Ku Klux Klan when challenged. Thank you, Pa, for so much, but especially for the twinkle in your eyes.
Historical References
Historians estimate 620,000 combatants died between 1861 and 1865 in the Civil War between the North and the South in the United States: 360,222 Union soldiers and 250,000 Confederate soldiers. The South’s economy also became a casualty of its failed effort to secede from the United States, primarily over the issue of slavery.
When the Civil War ended, economic turmoil trapped many slaves into remaining on southern plantations as sharecroppers. The sharecropper system provided landowners with an inexpensive labor source. Since the Confederate States of America had raised taxes to 50% to generate war revenue, landowners who hadn’t lost properties to the CSA’s taxation struggled to survive. Congruently, the South’s shattered economy and the North’s post-war Reconstruction prevented many Confederate soldiers from re-building their lives. With nowhere else to go, some disenfranchised whites entered the sharecropper system.
For both races, the sharecropper system became generational.
The sharecropper system provided dilapidated houses commonly called ‘shacks’ at a reduced rent; a small stipend for work landowners applied to increasingly high rents and/or purchases at inflated prices in the landowner’s store; a plot of land to grow vegetables or raise animals, usually chickens; and a percentage of the landowner’s profits the sharecropper rarely received as the landowner controlled the books.
There were principled landowners who followed the guidelines. However, most did not. Few sharecroppers escaped the system’s economic slavery.
As indebtedness grew, it became common practice for sharecroppers’ kids to quit school to sharecrop. Large families needed the money child labor provided. However, the additional income did little to improve hard-scrapple lives but usually kept the family on the farm. Families feared eviction for they usually lacked an alternative place to go. Police routinely cleared areas near dirt roads where evicted sharecroppers camped.
Black sharecroppers lived separately from white sharecroppers, with the former at the bottom of the economic ladder. Tensions often existed between the two races. Larger farms employed an overseer, usually white, to ensure sharecroppers worked full days, often with a more lenient tilt toward white sharecroppers.
The Ku Klux Klan, commonly called ‘the Klan,’ was a white supremacy organization formed in 1867. It preyed upon sharp racial and economic divides in the segregated South. The Klan’s membership pulled from those within the Southern Aristocracy who harbored resentment at the South’s loss of the Civil War and exalted positions that disappeared when they lost their land; white sharecroppers who resented working alongside blacks in the fields; and those Southerners who fervently believed the races weren’t equal. However, the Klan’s signature white pointed hoods and sheet-like garments intimidated both races. The Tuskegee Institute reports the Klan lynched 3,446 blacks and 1,297 whites between 1882 and 1968.
In the 1930s, emerging leadership from both races attempted to organize sharecroppers into somewhat of a pan-southern collectivity. The attempt failed.
In the 1960s, national outrage at the Klan’s lynching of white Civil Rights workers in the South empowered Federal intervention to override a consolidated South and end the Klan’s power. The 1964 Civil Rights Act eventually dissolved the sharecropper system.
In the 1920s, the Klan claimed five million members nationwide. The Klan’s doctrinaire found eager followers in states far removed from the South. According to available FBI statistics, today’s Ku Klux Klan varies between 3,000 and 5,000 members nationwide. Even though the Klan’s power and influence have largely disappeared, the FBI continues to monitor the organization. Though not Klan affiliated, between 1,200 and 2,000 ‘hate groups’ exist within the United States and espouse some of the Klan’s rhetoric. The FBI also monitors these extremist groups.
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