Sounder

Set in the 19th century, William H. Armstrong’s novel Sounder is the story of a Black sharecropping family in the southern United States. In this work, Armstrong’s characters struggle to survive in the impoverished and discriminatory conditions that were an inherent part of the sharecropping system. This system became common on Southern farms in the years following the American Civil War. Although enslaved Black Americans were officially freed by the federal American government in 1863, many remained enslaved until the end of the war in 1865.

Over the next several years, the federal government reneged on its promise to provide farmland and other resources to formerly enslaved Black Americans. In the absence of this support, many Black families struggled to survive, as there were limited jobs for them in the cities. Lacking the necessary money to buy land for themselves, Black Americans had little choice but to labor on others’ properties and submit to the demands and conditions of those property owners. To make matters worse, formerly enslaved people were often intimidated into remaining on the same plantations on which they had been enslaved, and they risked vigilante violence from racist whites if they tried to leave.

The sharecropping system benefited plantation owners by guaranteeing them continued access to cheap labor: a deeply exploitative arrangement that they had taken for granted as enslavers.