At the turn of the twentieth century, blacks made up one-third of the Southern population and 40 percent of the farm laborers. However, few of them earned enough money to buy land for themselves. By 1910, out of 800,000 farms in the South, only 175,000 were owned by blacks. Like most black agricultural families there, the family in Sounder worked as sharecroppers.
The sharecropping family. Every member of a black sharecropping family contributed to the family welfare. The father not only worked in the fields but also hunted local game to supplement their food supply. In Sounder, the boy's father hunts for possums and raccoons. Because the family needed its children to work and earn money, they helped in the field and with household chores, which left them little time to attend school. In any event, these schools were often located quite far from the sharecroppers' cabins.
The mother took care of the children, worked in the fields, engaged in small moneymaking activities, and prepared the meals.
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