Nineteen
seventy-four was a good year for nonfiction writing in America. Robert
A. Caro’s monumental biography of Robert Moses, “The Power Broker,” came
out. So did Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s “All the President’s
Men.” So did “Working,” by Studs Terkel, and Robert M. Pirsig’s “Zen and
the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.”
Each was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Yet the winner in general nonfiction — the category was then called
contemporary affairs — was “All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw,”
an oral history of an illiterate black Alabama sharecropper. Its author,
the man who compiled it from extensive interviews, was a writer named
Theodore Rosengarten.
Forty
years later, we remember “The Power Broker,” “All the President’s Men,”
“Working” and “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” But in a
troubling quirk of history, “All God’s Dangers” has all but fallen off
the map.
Somewhere along the line, people stopped talking about it. Friends of mine who talk about nothing except Southern literature have barely heard of the book. I pounced on it after I discovered that Richard Howorth,
the well-read owner of Square Books, the independent bookstore in
Oxford, Miss., utters its title aloud every time a customer asks the
question, “What one book would you say best explains the South?”
I
wish I could say that, this early spring, I read “All God’s Dangers” in
one sitting. It’s not that kind of book. It’s a meandering thing; its
pleasures are intense but cumulative. This book rolls. But it is superb —
both serious history and a serious pleasure, a story that reads as if
Huddie Ledbetter ( the great musician known as Lead Belly) spoke it while W. E. B. Du Bois took dictation. That
it’s been largely forgotten is bad for it, but worse for us.
“All
God’s Dangers” collected euphoric reviews in 1974, from Robert Coles
and Studs Terkel himself, among others. On the cover of The New York
Times Book Review, H. Jack Geiger wrote that in Nate Shaw, America “had
found a black Homer, bursting with his black Odyssey.”
“All God’s Dangers” remained in print for years as a Vintage paperback. In 1989 it was turned into a one-man play,
starring Cleavon Little. (If the clips on YouTube are any indication,
it was unwatchable.) These days, a hefty paperback edition is available
from the University of Chicago Press. But it seems to have vanished from the culture at large.
This book has a back story. Nate Shaw is a pseudonym. The sharecropper’s real name
was Ned Cobb (1885-1973). Mr. Rosengarten changed the name for the
safety of Mr. Cobb’s family— a grim commentary on race relations in
Alabama in 1974.
In
1969 Mr. Rosengarten was a recent Harvard graduate who went to Alabama
with a friend who was researching a defunct organization called the
Alabama Sharecroppers Union. Someone suggested they speak to Mr. Cobb,
then 84.
Mr.
Rosengarten relates what happened: “We asked him right off why he
joined the union. He didn’t respond directly; rather, he ‘interpreted’
the question and began, ‘I was haulin’ a load of hay out of Apafalya one
day ...’ and continued uninterrupted for eight hours. He recounted
dealings with landlords, bankers, fertilizer agents, mule traders, gin
operators, sheriffs and judges — stories of the social relations of the
cotton system. By evening, the fire had risen and died and risen again,
and our question was answered.”
No
fool, Mr. Rosengarten returned many times, over several years, to speak
with Mr. Cobb. He’d found a powerful American voice, one that cracked
open a world never so fully explored in print. The result is “All God’s
Dangers,” which deserves a place in the front rank of American
autobiographies.
There
are many reasons, in 2014, to attend to Ned Cobb’s story. It is dense
and tangled social history, a narrative that essentially takes us from
slavery to Selma from the point of view of an unprosperous but eloquent
and unbroken black man. In some ways, the book is a reverse photographic
image of “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” the 1941 classic from James
Agee and Walker Evans. Agee and Evans scrutinized the lives of white
tenant farmers; in “All God’s Dangers,” we witness a black tenant family
through three generations. The book is Faulknerian in its weave. Mr.
Cobb’s working years, Mr. Rosengarten notes, “span approximately the
same years as the Snopes family odyssey in William Faulkner’s trilogy.”
The
book has its share of drama. We read about Cobb’s joining the radical
union, about getting into a shootout with police while protecting a
friend’s property from a fraudulent foreclosure, about his 12-year
prison stint. But, in general, it moves gently; it’s more a stream than a
river.
You
will learn more about wheat, guano, farm implements, bugs, cattle
killing and mule handling than you would think possible. Mr. Cobb loved
and took good care of his working mules. About one, he declares: “She
was just as pretty as a peeled onion.”
“All
God’s Dangers” also happens to be a dense catalog of the ways that
whites tricked and mistreated blacks in the first half of the 20th
century. “Years ago I heard that Abraham Lincoln freed the colored
people,” Mr. Cobb says early on, “but it didn’t amount to a hill of
beans.” About his white neighbors, he declares, “Any way they could
deprive a Negro was a celebration to ’em.”
The
book’s title comes from these sentences: “All God’s dangers ain’t a
white man. When the boll weevil starts in your cotton and go to
depositin’ his eggs in them squares, that’s when he’ll kill you.”
Perhaps
the best thing about “All God’s Dangers” is that it is so direct about
the injustices piled upon Mr. Cobb’s family and other blacks in Alabama,
while remaining so buoyant. Mr. Cobb had an unshakable sense of moral
justice, but he did not want his heart to curdle with bitterness. “Good
God, there wasn’t but few privileges that we was allowed,” he remarks.
Yet he always had “big eyes and high hopes.” He becomes one of the first
black farmers in Alabama to own a car.
Ned
Cobb is full of advice about how to live. Some of this advice is funny.
If you marry a sickly girl, he says, “you might just marry a doctor’s
bill.” About farming and any kind of labor, you often get your best work
done when you’re most tempted to nap. “Look out,” he advises, “for off
times and rainy days.”
The
real lessons in “All God’s Dangers” are the old, primal ones, lessons
that Mr. Cobb manages to make fresh: Stand up for what you believe in;
remain awake to experience; any job worth doing is worth doing well. Mr.
Rosengarten went on to become, in 1989, a MacArthur Fellow. His later
books include “Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter” (1986).
The
exceptional man he presents to us in “All God’s Dangers” says, “Some
folks don’t use the time God gives ’em; that’s why they’re liable to
come up defeated.”
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