After the Emancipation Proclamation, I thought there would be something better for me, something more than this cycle. But freedom, at least for me and folks like me, came with a new cost. The land was no longer worked by enslaved hands, and people weren’t enslaved, but that didn’t mean it was worked by free men either. As a sharecropper, I was tied to this land as much as before, owing more to the white landowners with every ounce of crops that never seemed to make quite enough to pay off my debts.
        I climbed out of bed quietly, careful not to wake my wife and our children. They needed every last second of sleep they could get, especially since we all had to be out in the fields once the sun was up. The work seemed never-ending, and there was never such a thing as a day off. After quickly tugging on my worn-out clothes, I stepped outside and took a deep breath. The air was cool, but it wouldn’t stay that way for long. The Southern heat would soon settle in, and that’s when the laborious work got even harder than it already was.