I. TRICKLE-DOWN ECONOMICS 
Nate Shaw was the son of a slave, and sharecropped in Alabama, just as his daddy had done after the Civil War. Shaw was illiterate, but highly intelligent, strong and active, an aficionado of mules, able to manage their sulks and extract the full measure of their plodding diligence. His wife, Hannah, was literate, and he greatly admired her for it. He made a point of bringing her with him for any complex dealing with white men. He couldn’t always avoid being cheated, but when Hannah was there, he at least knew when it happened, and how much it could cost him. Shaw was a careful, diligent farmer, who made sharecropping a profitable enterprise, putting away cash from his cotton crops—even though he was paid less for them than white sharecroppers were—and keeping his family in meat and fresh vegetables besides. He was also active in the Alabama Sharecroppers’ Union, and was imprisoned for twelve years after being involved in a shootout with whites. That was in 1932. The important event for our story, however, happened in 1926. Shaw, a black sharecropper, in Alabama, a region with the tightest of barriers against trickle-down prosperity for the lower classes, bought a brand new Ford Model T, and he paid for it with cash. That’s how far down the ladder the 1920s prosperity reached.
Here is Shaw’s account:*
I done reached out and got as high as four head of stock and a two-horse wagon and a rubber tire buggy. I was prosperin and when I married I didn’t have decent clothes to wear, had nothin. But I never did have no view ahead to cause me to work as hard as I done. I did have it in view to support my family, keep em in shoes, clothes, groceries—and to accumulate what I could accordin to what I was makin at the time. Often, somethin to buy, I’d want it if I could buy it, but I wouldn’t dote on it if I didn’t have the money. I bought a brand new Ford car when I was haulin lumber. As colored people started to buyin cars, I started right along in there not very many months behind the first colored car buyer.…
We men would stand out and huddle or set out and talk. Here’s the subject come up: we got to talkin about cars and I thought but little of that, in a way, because I knowed how the conversation would run.
I told em, “Yes, I’m thinkin of buyin me a car, get me a new Ford. Thinkin about it; I haven’t done it yet but it’s my thorough aim—my boys, anyway, they done got big enough to go and correspond with girls and I think I’ll just buy me a new Ford to please them. I can make it all right with a car and the stock I got and my rubber tire buggy. So I think I’ll get me a car.”
And our colored race is a curious race of people. Don’t want you to have nothin less’n he got it too—that’s what I call a begrudgeful heart and a heap of em is that way, So, I said, “I think I’ll get me a car, a new Ford.”
Elijah looked at me and said in the presence of them other fellows, “Yeah, all of us will know when you get a car.”
I wouldn’t say nothin out of the way to him.
“All of us will know when you get a car.”
He just thinkin I was talkin bout somethin that I was as far from, the way he expressed it to me, as the east from the west. Well, in a few days I bought a Ford car and drove it up there, drove it right across the yard… and my cousin Elijah Giddings was standin there lookin. He wouldn’t turn his head hardly.… Elijah Giddings never did lose no time with me from that day until he died.1
Two years later the boys came to Shaw and asked if the Ford could be traded in for a 1928 Chevrolet, “a little faster and a little nicer car.” It cost $650, and the difference Shaw got for the trade-in left him still paying more than he did for the Ford. Worse, it wouldn’t fit in his garage. Shaw eventually bought another 1926 Ford, but still kept the Chevy. By then the boys wanted the new “closed” Model A Ford. Shaw’s ever-sensible Hannah overheard that conversation:
”Darlin, what was Calvin nuzzlin you so close for this mornin?”
I looked around; it was her spoke, I knowed it was her. I said, “O, he just wants me to change that Ford off and get em a closed Ford with a glass department.”
She said, “Are you goin to do it?”
I said, “Yeah, I’m goin to change it for em.”
She said, “Uh-uh, you just pay attention to these boys and get em everything they want, if you can reach it. After a while we won’t have nothin here but cars.”
I said, “Them’s my boys and they’re your boys. I’m their daddy. They do whatever I tell them to do without a grumble.… Now, you got anything to do there in the house?”
She said, “Yeah, I got plenty to do in the house, and I got plenty to do out here too, watchin you and the boys full up our yard with cars.”2
Nate Shaw bought his first Ford just four years after the country recovered from the 1920–1921 economic turndown, one of the nastiest in its history, but also one of the shortest. By the mid-twenties, the sense of prosperity was taking hold. Economists often cite the credit-driven consumer product boom as one of the contributors to the crash of 1929. But Nate and Hannah Shaw did not buy on credit. The two had once borrowed to purchase a lot, but after making all payments always on time, the white lender refused to return their note until they made a number of additional payments. Fair-minded whites liked Shaw: he was the first they hired for difficult jobs, and they respected his hard-working family and the quality of his farming. Several let him know that they were upset by the extortion, but in 1920s rural Alabama few whites would stop another white from cheating a colored man. Both Nate and Hannah understood the rules that applied to colored people in the pre-Civil Rights South, most especially in the deep South cotton regions like those of Alabama. But the good times of the 1920s were such that even people on the bottom rungs of the ladder—and few were lower than black sharecroppers—could claim a modest share of the booming consumer economy.