Sharecropping Analysis

Introducing Miss Gilly

The wrinkled old woman looked up from her pea shelling and gave me a searching look. I had asked if she knew anything about sharecropping. Our class was studying Alabama History and the teacher had instructed us to each write an essay covering one of the topics we discussed. One of the topics we discussed was sharecropping during the Great Depression. I remembered my great-grandmother saying that when she was a child her father was a sharecropper. It stirred my curiosity about them as a society, what they were like and such as that, so I chose to write my essay about Sharecropping.

When I finished with high school, I wanted to go to college to study journalism. The only way we would ever afford it was if I earned a scholarship,

The land it sat on contained over a thousand acres. That was a lot of land for one man to own. The resort they built had serpentine walks, guest cottages, tropical gardens, variegated rose gardens, and flowering trees such as dogwood, crepe myrtles, and magnolias. It even had its very own train station in front of it so that visitors could ride right up to its front doors. They named it the Hygeia. I had to look that up one time just to see what it meant. I found out Hygeia was the Greek Goddess of Health.

Another well-known fact about this town was that on May 4, 1865, at the end of the Civil War, one of the last of the Confederate armies surrendered here. General Richard Taylor surrendered his army down yonder, under what later became known as “Surrender Oak.” This was the third in a series of five major surrenders of the war.

The two previous surrenders occurred at Appomattox Court House, in Virginia between General Robert E. Lee and General Ulysses S. Grant. The second and largest surrender was at Bennett Place near Durham, North Carolina. It was between General William Tecumseh Sherman and General Joseph E.