Curiously, it had not occurred to us to inquire about what happened to the people who were living on the plantations before the FSA acquired them. Greenfield, on the Washington-Issaquena County line in Mississippi, had been abandoned, grown up in Johnson grass, we were told by some of the first settlers. Dyess and Jerome were basically new ground, left open after timbering. But others had been working plantations. We began looking more closely at the FSA photographs for evidence.

Except the blacksmith shop. Everyone there is black. If Sunflower were a typical plantation, it would have had wage hands, sharecroppers, and perhaps share or cash tenants.[8] Given the photographic evidence, including Mydans’ and Marion Post Wolcott’s photographs of plantations in the immediate area showing black workers in the fields, and the demographics of Sunflower and the surrounding counties, in which some 80 percent of farmers were “colored”, one would expect that the overwhelming majority of residents on the plantation were black.