When we would go to Tell City to visit our grandmother, sometimes we went to see my Uncle Frank at his farm. Saying it was his farm is a bit of q misnomer. They were sharecroppers. It is funny that I thought al the time after I reached the age of reason that being a sharecropper was a poor way of living. My understanding was they ran the farm just as if it was theirs, and after harvest the owner took the lion’s share of the profits.
They always seemed to be happy. They always seemed to have been eating okay. Their vehicles, although not new were actually younger than the ones in our family. We were three kids, and they were six kids, but we always had much fun playing together. I learned to ride a horse there. The big warn was a perfect place to play hide and seek. On the whole all the visits were fun and favorable memories. The meals we shared were plentiful and had lots of fresh vegetables from the farm.
It wasn’t until as an adult, I was visiting with my cousin John, who became an executive for a furniture company, that I found out about sharecropping. John explained that the years on the farm were the most relaxed and worry free of his life. They were supplied with the seed and livestock for the farm and paid a fair portion of the profits. Their only worry in life was the weather.
Now I can see how they were so happy and so much fun when we came to visit.
