Joe Chop's Place

Harlan: Every family has a patch of ground it thinks of as the beginning, and for this one, the beginning had a name the family used like it was a place on a map. They didn't say "the farm in West Carroll Parish." They said Joe Chop's place. Harlan: So let me tell you about Joe Chop, because he is one of those people who sit quietly at the root of a family that isn't even his own. Harlan: His name was Joseph Chop, and he was born in eighteen seventy-eight, a long way from Louisiana — in Austria-Hungary, in the heart of old Europe. In eighteen ninety-six, an eighteen-year-old, he crossed an ocean to the United States, and in nineteen twenty-one he raised his hand and became a naturalized American citizen. Think on that a moment: a boy from the Austro-Hungarian empire, who by middle age owned land in the northeastern tip of Louisiana and had farm families working it. That is a whole immigrant life we only get to glimpse — but it is the stage on which this family's story opens. Harlan: Because here is the arrangement, and it was the arrangement that governed a great many Southern lives in those years. Joe Chop owned the land. He provided the house — a small tenant home — and the mules or the tractor to break the ground, and the tools, the seed, the fertilizer. And a family, in this case the Hawthornes, provided the thing the land most needed, which was labor, sunup to sundown, a whole family's worth of it. They raised cotton and corn, the two crops that ran the economy of that country. And when the crop came in and was sold, the landowner took half. Fifty percent, right off the top, for the land and the mule and the seed. The family kept the rest, and lived on it, and started the next year over again. Harlan: We call it sharecropping, and it was a hard bargain — half your year's sweat handed across to the man who held the deed. But I'd ask you to hold two things at once, the way the truth usually requires. It was a system that kept farming families poor and tied to another man's ground. And it was also, for a particular immigrant landowner and a particular farm family, the exact arrangement under which a baby girl came into the world in January of nineteen forty-five, in that little tenant house, with a doctor called out to the place to help — a delivery that cost, all told, twenty-five dollars. Harlan: That baby would grow up to be the one who wrote all of this down, who kept the dates and the names and the deed-holder's foreign birthplace, so that her children and her children's children would know that the family didn't spring from nowhere. It came up out of somebody else's dirt, on somebody else's terms, and made a life there anyway. The cotton and the corn, the mule and the half-share, the small house at the crossroads of two parish highways — that was the ground the Hawthornes stood on when this whole story began. Harlan: Joe Chop has been gone a long time now. I don't know that anyone visits his grave. But his name is still spoken at this family's table, because a man gave them a place to stand when they had none of their own, and took his half, and in doing so became, without ever meaning to, a chapter in a family that would carry his name down the years — Joe Chop's place — long after the cotton was gone.