Tuckabatchee floodplain

April 3, 2006. We spent the morning at Fort Toulouse, just a short walk from our campground. The director of the park suggested what turned out to be a good route for my afternoon ride to Tuckabatchee. It was a somewhat hilly ride along county roads 4 and 8. I then took county road 143 across the floodplain where the Tallapoosa River makes its turn to the north. (See map below.)

Tuckabatchee country

Here was another place to take some photos of cotton fields, such as they were this early in the spring.

For the past few days I anticipated getting this book from the university library: “Reading Southern Poverty between the Wars, 1918-1939″, edited by Richard Gooden and Martin Crawford (2006). It finally came today, but reading it was somewhat of a letdown. I had learned about the book from the review here. The part that caught my attention was this:

Two of the most interesting essays deal with Alabama topics. My favorite essay was by James C Giesen of the University of Georgia. His insightful essay on the making and unmaking of black Alabama sharecropper Nate Shaw/Ned Cobb is the most original in the collection. He carefully dissects the way author Theodore Rosengarten, who won a National Book Award for his oral history of the radical Alabamian from the 1930s (All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw, New York, 1974), actually crafted, rearranged, and left out of the text materials that might have led to different conclusions about the way Cobb actually maneuvered successfully within a market-driven economy. The result was a book, now considered an epic, that is not entirely biography, autobiography, memoir, or even oral history.

One object of this bike trip had been to see the places from the history of Tecumseh, Tuckabatchee, and the Creek Indians. The other had been to see the country that Ned Cobb had told about. If I had any misconceptions or deficiencies in my knowledge from reading the “All God’s Dangers” book, I wanted to learn about them.

Unfortunately, the chapter about him does not live up to the billing given in that review. Contrary to what it said, there is no dissection of the way Rosengarten “crafted, rearranged, and left out” materials. There is talk about the fact that he did that, but that was not news to me. I had hoped to learn of examples of how alternate interpretations were possible. I learned that a lot of readers and reviewers of the book over the years drew certain interpretations, and that others were possible, but I had already come up with my own alternate interpretations of Ned Cobb as a capitalist entrepreneur based on my own naive reading, and have blogged briefly about them. It’s not news to me that I might have a different angle on the subject than other people do. I would very much have liked to learn about things that Rosengarten left out, because it might correct my own impressions, but there was not a single such example.

Oh, well. The other chapters in the book might be worth reading anyway. In the introduction there is mention that some of the New Deal programs of the 1930s actually worked to increase poverty, such as the farm programs intended to support the price of cotton. What they did was provide incentives for the landowners to plow their crops under, which meant the sharecroppers were then without even the meager livelihood they had had until then.

From the looks of the equipment in the field pictured above, we can see that cotton farming is now a capital-intensive business rather than a labor-intensive one. This place isn’t exactly where Ned Cobb did his sharecropping and where he later owned a farm of his own. That was on the other side of the Tallapoosa River. But I wonder what this floodplain looked like in the sharecropping days. I got the impression from Ned Cobb that in the richer farming country of the Black Belt, sharecroppers were even more under the thumb of landlords than in the hillier country where he farmed. I don’t think this floodplain is what’s usually thought of as the Black Belt region, but it does look like rich cropland. I presume that’s why Tuckabatchee, the largest of the Upper Creek villages, had been located down on this floodplain, too.

I was trying to get more photos of the cotton left behind after the harvest. Unfortunately it was a windy day and my bike blew over on me a few times. I didn’t realize until later that I had lost the nice LED flashlight I had in the side pocket. It might still be there alongside the field. I haven’t yet found as good a one to replace it, either.