was not uncommon. ‘Womens were different [then]. They could have kids and two days later be back in the fields. More kids you had, the more crops you could produce. Simple. And every
one of them had big families.’
The family lived and worked on what Hooker remembers as ‘a big farm, close to a hundred acres’, which would put the Hookers into whatever passed for the middle classes of the Delta.
Slightly more than half of the farms in the region were 80 acres or smaller, while 30 per cent were over 300 acres, and the very largest spread to as much as 2,000 acres. ‘It was an old
wooden house with a tin-top roof, but we was comfortable, you know, we had a lot to eat. I never been hungry a day in my life. We had cattle, horses, pigs, chickens, farmland . . . he had people
working for him. Down South there was merchant people who saw him as being in the same category. He had a few Spanish people working for him, not many, maybe a couple. Two Spanish, Mexican, my
older brothers, four or five more black people. He was a sharecropper, you know.’
The practice of sharecropping meant that the larger plantations managed to keep the majority of the black workers on the land, substituting economic ties for forced labour. A tenant farmer would
take responsibility for a certain area of land and would work it, together with their families and any sub-tenants and day labourers, with equipment and cash advances supplied by the
‘boss’. When each year’s crop was harvested, the farmer and the landlord split the proceeds, and if the farmer and his team had worked especially conscientiously, there would
indeed be a profit after the boss deducted his advances. If the crop failed, or if, for any other reason, sufficient profits did not materialise, the tenants began the following year in debt. Given
a few bad years, a sharecropper could easily fall so far in debt that it was impossible ever to break even again. Once that happened, the ’cropper would virtually be enslaved all over again,
and entirely legally. William Hooker must indeedhave been a skilled and conscientious farmer: the records of the S.N. Fewell Company, based on the Fewell plantation close to
nearby Vance (where the Hookers moved a few years after John was born) show that in 1928 ‘Will Hooker Sr and Jr’ made a profit of $28.00. By the standards of the time, this was a more
than respectable sum.
The work was back-breakingly hard, and getting it done was entirely down to the muscle-power of humans and animals. In the rural Mississippi of the ’20s and ’30s, the twentieth
century hadn’t quite arrived. Since cars and tractors were still comparatively rare, horses and mules did double duty as agricultural implements and personal transport. Country backwaters
like the Mississippi Delta weren’t yet wired up for electricity; Hooker remembers that it wasn’t until his mid-teens, when he first travelled to sophisticated, progressive Memphis, that
he saw his first electric light. (For the record, Buddy Guy – nineteen years Hooker’s junior and raised in rural Louisiana – tells substantially the same story: he, too, had to go
to Memphis as a teenager to see a lightbulb for the first time.) ‘When I was there [in the Delta],’ Hooker says of electricity, ‘it wasn’t there.’ The telephone was
another piece of hi-tech exotica: something that folks had in the city and which you could occasionally see at the movies. The phonograph in the family parlour was ‘the Victrola, the kind you
wind up’, where the energy of a weighted pulley drives the turntable and the sound is amplified acoustically through a large horn. There was also an old crystal radio, on which they would
listen to Amos And Andy , and ‘music from a radio station in Helena, Arkansas’.
‘Sacred’ music only, though. William Hooker was a part-time preacher, a pastor at a local Macedonian church, and family life revolved around farm, church and school. ‘We
had,’ says
one of them had big families.’
The family lived and worked on what Hooker remembers as ‘a big farm, close to a hundred acres’, which would put the Hookers into whatever passed for the middle classes of the Delta.
Slightly more than half of the farms in the region were 80 acres or smaller, while 30 per cent were over 300 acres, and the very largest spread to as much as 2,000 acres. ‘It was an old
wooden house with a tin-top roof, but we was comfortable, you know, we had a lot to eat. I never been hungry a day in my life. We had cattle, horses, pigs, chickens, farmland . . . he had people
working for him. Down South there was merchant people who saw him as being in the same category. He had a few Spanish people working for him, not many, maybe a couple. Two Spanish, Mexican, my
older brothers, four or five more black people. He was a sharecropper, you know.’
The practice of sharecropping meant that the larger plantations managed to keep the majority of the black workers on the land, substituting economic ties for forced labour. A tenant farmer would
take responsibility for a certain area of land and would work it, together with their families and any sub-tenants and day labourers, with equipment and cash advances supplied by the
‘boss’. When each year’s crop was harvested, the farmer and the landlord split the proceeds, and if the farmer and his team had worked especially conscientiously, there would
indeed be a profit after the boss deducted his advances. If the crop failed, or if, for any other reason, sufficient profits did not materialise, the tenants began the following year in debt. Given
a few bad years, a sharecropper could easily fall so far in debt that it was impossible ever to break even again. Once that happened, the ’cropper would virtually be enslaved all over again,
and entirely legally. William Hooker must indeedhave been a skilled and conscientious farmer: the records of the S.N. Fewell Company, based on the Fewell plantation close to
nearby Vance (where the Hookers moved a few years after John was born) show that in 1928 ‘Will Hooker Sr and Jr’ made a profit of $28.00. By the standards of the time, this was a more
than respectable sum.
The work was back-breakingly hard, and getting it done was entirely down to the muscle-power of humans and animals. In the rural Mississippi of the ’20s and ’30s, the twentieth
century hadn’t quite arrived. Since cars and tractors were still comparatively rare, horses and mules did double duty as agricultural implements and personal transport. Country backwaters
like the Mississippi Delta weren’t yet wired up for electricity; Hooker remembers that it wasn’t until his mid-teens, when he first travelled to sophisticated, progressive Memphis, that
he saw his first electric light. (For the record, Buddy Guy – nineteen years Hooker’s junior and raised in rural Louisiana – tells substantially the same story: he, too, had to go
to Memphis as a teenager to see a lightbulb for the first time.) ‘When I was there [in the Delta],’ Hooker says of electricity, ‘it wasn’t there.’ The telephone was
another piece of hi-tech exotica: something that folks had in the city and which you could occasionally see at the movies. The phonograph in the family parlour was ‘the Victrola, the kind you
wind up’, where the energy of a weighted pulley drives the turntable and the sound is amplified acoustically through a large horn. There was also an old crystal radio, on which they would
listen to Amos And Andy , and ‘music from a radio station in Helena, Arkansas’.
‘Sacred’ music only, though. William Hooker was a part-time preacher, a pastor at a local Macedonian church, and family life revolved around farm, church and school. ‘We
had,’ says
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