The day my father was born, his father was a share cropper. Not every share cropper was black. A few feet away from me right now is the $7 Hopkins &Allen shotgun my father, as a teenager, used to get squirrels and rabbits for the table when that share cropper died.
My mother’s side took advantage of the fallow farmland the farmers couldn’t afford to plant. She snd the rest of the family and all of their neighbors planted gardens on these otherwise unused thousand acre farms.
I’m here so obviously they survived but, as a kid, I never wasted a mouthful of food.
Both mom and grandmother saved everything. Used aluminum
foil, rubber bands from newspapers, food, no matter how tiny the portion- it was saved. At the time grandmother & father and family lived on a farm in Texas with her siblings and mother. Grand dad had suffered rheumatic fever leaving him in poor health. Sadly, all have now passed, the farm house
struck by lightening and burned down. Lots of good memories
made by the visits to the homestead while growing up.