A Year's Wage for Three Peaches: A Black Man Tells of Exploitation in the Late 19th century South

Abstract: The harsh brutality of race relations in the late nineteenth-century South was sometimes best expressed through small incidents. For William Robinson, the story that best encapsulated his own experience growing up African-American in rural Georgia in the 1880s involved three peaches. He was interviewed by oral historian Charles Hardy in 1983 when Robinson was 103 years old. Apparently, some ninety-five years earlier when he was eight years old, three black boys sneaked into a peach orchard on the way home from church and stole some peaches, three of which they gave to young Robinson. The white orchard owner caught Robinson and threatened him with the chain gang. He forced Robinson's father to pay $21 for the three peaches--a sum that could well have been a year's cash income for a sharecropping family in this period.

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