AROUND THE YEAR WITH COTTON 153 



his return home that next year "we are going to live on 

 the old Brockton place over across the creek." 



The mobility of the restless, roving cotton grower has 

 become a proverb. Dr. E. C. Branson says of these ten- 

 ants, "They move from pillar to post from year to year. 

 They are a migratory type of farmer. They are cursed 

 with the restless foot of the wandering Jew." x After the 

 cotton harvest is over, one meets them in every nook and 

 corner of the rural South, driving along the country 

 roads with their scanty household goods piled in wagons, 

 painfully exposed to the gaze of an indifferent world. In 

 the United States it was estimated in 1922 that 19 per 

 cent of all farms changed occupants. In eight cotton 

 states from 30 to 40 per cent of the rented farms changed 

 their tenants, the average for the whole South being 32 

 per cent. Less shifting occurs among the Negroes on 

 plantations than for white tenants. The 1910 Census 

 showed that Negro tenants had longer average periods 

 of occupancy than white farmers, exceeding them from 

 a third of a year to a year and a half for different tenure 

 classes. 2 



Why do cotton renters move? They are driven by a 

 restless search for something better. It may be they de- 

 sire a better house, a flower plot, a better school. Less 

 likely they have fallen out with a landlord, and with a 

 strange mixture of pride and inferiority they seek to 

 show their independence by moving. Sometimes they move 

 secretly and with no warning in order to leave him in the 

 lurch for some slight, real or fancied. Most of all they 



1 Home and Farm Ownership, North Carolina Club Yearbook, 

 1921-22, p. 74. 



2 L. C. Gray, et al., "Farm Ownership and Tenancy," Dept. of 

 Agriculture Yearbook, 1923, p. 692. 





