Sampson native Leo Daughtry is the author of a new book entitled ‘Talmadge Farm.’
Photo Courtesy|Angelle Barbazon
Sharecropping focus of ‘Talmadge Farm’
It’s been 10 years in the making, but former North Carolina state Representative and Senator Leo Daughtry has released his debut novel “Talmadge Farm.”
“My first and last, probably,” Daughtry joked over the phone about his book. “It’s a lot of work.”
Daughtry is a Sampson County native now living in Smithfield. His 320-page novel is available now for purchase at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
He said last week that he’s spent years creating outlines for the book and then throwing them away before doing another one, all because they did not fit the story he wanted to tell.
“I probably started doing outlines 10 years ago. And I would do an outline, tear it up, and do another one. But I had in my head about what I wanted to do,” he said.
And that idea was to create a story based on events that he lived through growing up in Sampson County, namely sharecropping, the research into tobacco and how that affected the industry, and other societal changes taking place in the 1950s and 1960s.
“I wanted to have a book to sort of show the lives of the sharecroppers. And then show the changes that were taking place in the late 50s and 60s,” he admitted.
Daughtry went on to explain that his childhood of living in a rural town and going to a rural school where most of his classmates were the children of sharecroppers gave him the inspiration to write about their hardships and what happened to them as sharecropping started to die out.
“I went to a very rural school,” Daughtry explained of his years in the Hobbton district. “And in my class, I would say over half of the students, my classmates, were the children of sharecroppers. That was the way, in those days, that was the way farming was done.”
Making a living as a sharecropper, he said, was “a desperate and hard thing to do.” And that as the years went on, especially in the 1950s, it “became clear that sharecropping wasn’t really a good way to live.”
“Many of the children left the farm when they grew up,” Daughtry explained, “and some moved up north, particularly the African Americans. Many of them went into the army to get off the farm.”
He also mentioned woman getting clerical certificates to get an office job instead of working as a maid or in the fields, all of which were explored within the pages of “Talmadge Farm.”
But having children leave wasn’t the only change that happened to sharecropping families in this time.
Daughtry explained that the advances in technology and the growth of the farms led to sharecroppers leaving completely.
“You had the mechanization on the farms. Farms got larger, they consolidated, and so there was just no place for sharecroppers,” Daughtry said. “So, they left the farms. Some involuntary and some voluntary.”
Which then led to an influx of migrant workers, a subject that Daughtry also touched upon in his book. Other major events he talked about included segregation, the Vietnam War, and women’s rights.
And when talking about farming, Daughtry knew he would have to talk about the changes the tobacco industry and its farmers faced.
“Tobacco was king, but it was not going to be there forever. It was a contradiction. It was a way to make a living and support your family. And that’s a good thing. And then on the other hand, it was killing people who smoked and that’s a bad thing,” he explained.
Most of all, Daughtry wanted to tell a story through lenses of different characters, each with their own unique tie to the fictional Sampson County he had created in his book. They were characters, he said, that were easy to write and show the way that people in that time period could have adapted to all the changes happening around them.
“I think it was easier for the young people in the book to adapt and to change than it was for the older people. Their way of life was certainly, for the landowner, very satisfactory. They had someone going to work. They had someone looking after them. In other words, they had maids and cooks. They had a good life, and they didn’t particularly want to change,” Daughtry said about writing some of the characters.
A press release sent out by Books Forward gives “Talmadge Farm” the following synopsis:
“It’s 1957, and tobacco is king. Wealthy landowner Gordon Talmadge enjoys the lavish lifestyle he inherited but doesn’t like getting his hands dirty; he leaves that to the two sharecroppers – one white, one Black – who farm his tobacco but have bigger dreams for their own children. While Gordon takes no interest in the lives of his tenant farmers, a brutal attack between his son and the sharecropper children sets off a chain of events that leaves no one unscathed. Over the span of a decade, Gordon struggles to hold on to his family’s legacy as the old order makes way for a New South.”