faster than marl or lime, of course, but for a few years, supplemented by
other manures, the residues of wood ashes helped production on the oldest
plantations and farms.^18
Yet another New South conservationist practice represented antebellum
plantation management carried over—for a while, anyway—to fragmented
sharecropper properties. This was simply that workers should feed them-
selves from garden plots worked in their own time. In the beginning, then,
croppers had their own cabins and nearby, well-maintained vegetable gar-
dens that, resonant of American Indian middens plots, became jumbled
cornucopias of intercropped comestibles. Slaves had often produced sur-
pluses from their gardens and entered local markets as sellers. Many crop-
pers with sufficient family labor doubtlessly fed themselves and others well
too.
Over time, however, especially on the largest riverside and lower Missis-
sippi delta plantations, the trend in New South planting reflected the grow-
ing power of owner-managers to reduce croppers’ independence. Eager,
too, to rationalize and to recentralize their operations, planters and their
riding bosses imposed the ‘‘through-and-through’’ system of plowing and
cultivating. Multimule teams with large plow and cultivator rigs swept over
entire plantations twice (in perpendicular directions), as though the sup-
posedly fragmented estate were one unit. Cropper families typically picked
cotton on their respective plots, but they had obviously lost much auton-
omy. This was brutally evident in the twentieth-century practice, usually
associated with through-and-through, of plowing and planting virtually to
the foundations of croppers’ cabins. So now croppers’ garden spaces were
sacrificed to increased commodity production. Of course the principal ad-
vantage to planters in this instance was forcing croppers into planters’ own
closed, high-interest markets for food. Commissary business picked up.^19
Now poor peoples’ diets, degraded by increasing dependency since the
Civil War, devolved to the pathological. From voluptuous private gardens
supplemented by fishing and hunting, croppers and others now consumed
the notorious three M’s: meat (i.e., fat pork), meal (i.e., corn), and molasses.
Thus by the s, the South was home not only to malaria, hookworm, and
pellagra but the ‘‘hypertension belt.’’ Nowadays associated with obesity,
high blood pressure was another morbid aspect of malnutrition and thin-
ness. Examine the faces and bodies Walker Evans photographed in Hale
County, Alabama, in July while he and James Agee were preparing their
remarkable documentary book,Let Us Now Praise Famous Men(). Or
study Margaret Bourke-White’s portraits in Georgia three years later, when