Alex Haley Read Free Page B

impossible for salaries to be paid promptly.” The state superintendent of education declared that “financial chaos . . . aptly describes our situation.” Schools depended mostly on taxes on property whose value had plummeted. In 1931 the state of Alabama was issuing warrants instead of cash to Alabama A&M, and the college was not able to pay its faculty their meager salaries for the first half of 1932. In some cases, schools issued state-backed scrip that teachers like Simon usually had to sell to speculators at deep discounts to get cash needed at the moment. 4
    The family moved into a small campus bungalow, one corner of which Simon turned over to an indigent student. “Dad would always find some way to cram somebody else in the house so they could get through school,” Palmer said. Ten-year-old Palmer and six-year-old George attended a small elementary school on the college campus. Simon relished his position as dean of agriculture. He put his students to work growing vegetables and raising livestock and poultry to feed those at the college. He taught them how to castrate male chicks and watch the capons grow to be as big as turkeys. He wanted more than anything to improve the farming practices of black sharecroppers in that part of Alabama. Simon often drove through the country, with Palmer seated beside him, visiting with local black men. “They received Dad in much the same way as Dad might have reacted if the Commissioner of Agriculture from Washington had arrived at our house.” Simon was evangelical about scientific agriculture. He preached a gospel of rotating crops, planting legumes, and applying lime to the soil, while Palmer played with the farmers’ sons. “If Dad ever so slightly suggested something,” Palmer remembered, “the response would be polite, its phrasing and tenor such that you knew good and well the farmer wasn’t going to do any such thing.” Such practices might work at the college on the hill, they finally said, because the school had lots of state money to spend on fancy farming—none of which these sharecroppers would ever have. They said to Simon, “’Fessor, that college ain’t out here trying to make no living.”
    Even so, Simon had Palmer keep a list of every farmer they visited, along with their wives’ and children’s names and their mailing addresses. After the crops were laid by in the late summer one year, he invited all the local farmers to the First Annual A&M Seminar of Farmers, a convention on the college campus, where he treated the sharecroppers as visiting dignitaries and presented demonstrations of scientific farming. At the end of the meeting, he gave each farmer a postcard to mail back, setting a time for a visit from the A&M faculty to advise him on farm problems. To Simon’s great disappointment, no postcards were returned. His next strategy was to gather the sons of farmers and have each boy ask his father for the least productive acre on his farm; Simon would then teach the boys scientific farming methods, such as gathering humus from forest floors and collecting cow manure to enrich worn-out soil. Not much came of this effort either.
    The single-crop, sharecropper existence offered almost no hope for improving material circumstances; most black farmers were trapped in a downward cycle of indebtedness and desperate poverty. Sharecropping was a cruel, hopeless system essentially immune to all efforts to improve it. 5
    â€œDad had his heart set on raising at least one of his sons to be what he called a ‘scientific farmer,’” Palmer later wrote, “and as I was the oldest I was his principal target.” Simon drove Palmer all the way to Tuskegee so that he might meet the great Dr. George Washington Carver, in the hope of encouraging his son to follow in those steps. Watching Simon’s persistence in trying to improve the farming practices of poor black farmers in the