A Kentucky Sharecropper's Struggles: The Lives of Paul & Rosa Clark

ISBN-13: 9781501002700 / Angielski / Miękka / 2014 / 242 str.

Norbert Clark

Opis

In the early 20th century, Joseph Paul Clark (1913-64) and Rosa Catherine Milliner (1914-1952) were born in a remote corner of Grayson County Kentucky. They travelled the one-lane dirt roads dating back to the Indian trails used by the original settlers in the late 1700s and attended the one-room schools in which their parents had been educated. Growing up before modern technology reached the area, they learned the skills used by their parents and traditional to their ancestors for generations. Those skills were critical to their survival during the difficult years of the Great Depression and the 1937 flood. As sharecroppers living in abandoned log cabins on remote farmsteads, their survival depended on using hand tools, growing and preserving their food, reclaiming old farms and training work horses. As energetic, productive workers they succeeded, raising a large family, until both died early deaths. In this book, author Norbert Clark describes their simple but difficult lives as they moved nine times to sharecrop different farms, and, at last, to their own land. The author, son of the two sharecroppers, celebrates their successes and details how they survived their struggles.