My Story of a Sharecropper's Life

Willie (Caldwell) Holliday Sr., knew what he was doing when he signed the contract for sharecropping. He was fully aware as he knew it was the closest thing to his entrepreneurship of teenage carpentry experience. He also knew of the potential hardships and struggles of getting married and raising a family (as outlined in his great-granddaughter Jenn Marie's article of "How My Great-Grandfather Lived to 110+" at jennmariewrites.com). His one-sided sharecropper contract did not discourage him from moving forward as it was the only thing available. Living with grandpa at a young age, I had an opportunity to experience and address some solution to his working while sick with rheumatism, food shortage for the family, etc., and was happy to have met the white neighbors Fred Wilcox and family, a World War Two veteran with two young boys who became my friends. Fred Wilcox was a German and a Pianist from England, and a cotton sales rep when I met him. He had been wounded in the war. The kindness and gratefulness of him allowed me help my grandfather support the family with left-over food. At no time did I feel I was being treated unequally. Grandpa Willie maxed his sharecropping contract out for results, drawing from his skills as a teenage carpenter; for example, taking old bent nails out and reusing them. I came go on with memories of those types of things that grandpa did that would separate him from other sharecroppers. He was able to make do, improvise, sacrifice, and make it work. More importantly, he taught it all to his descendants, many of which inherited his trait today. Wherein the current denied "double standards" would not discourage him from succeeding if he was alive today, as it does some of us. I have been wanting to tell his story for the past twenty years to point out the missing elements of a sharecropper's life that have never been written in my opinion. The closest being what my daughter Jenn Marie wrote. Of my twenty years of attempting to write this story, I didn't run across any writers who would have an interest in writing it as it is important in my opinion that our exisiting educational system should have done a better job of bringing out these issues as I attempt to in this writing as this book is and will be available as a part of their curriculum if interested. A missing and neglected area of the sharecropper's life is the element of the family tree which is a key element of this story. I was very fortunate that my writer, Sahara Bowser, is not only a writer but a genealogist. This family tree and grandpa's history is a starting point for our current student descendants and others both black and white to know the true history and not fear or be ashamed. As grandpa would have said, "Put that in your pipe and smoke it". Love you grandpa. I know heaven is enjoying your presence. Jim McKnight