Word: nated
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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This is Theodore Rosengarten, of Brooklyn and, more recently, Somerville, speaking in an interview. Rosengarten is a Harvard graduate student in American Civilization who has written a book about a black man from Alabama whom he calls Nate Shaw. Nate Shaw is the man Rosengarten met on the last day of his first visit to Alabama, the one who took a whole day to answer one question. Several years after they first met, Rosengarten decided to write a book about Shaw and taped, transcribed and edited the man's reminiscences of his life...
...grew out of his trust for me and his feeling of the importance of his story. His way of life was dying, and it as a human loss as well as a loss of knowledge. The people who had produced crops themselves were gone, and with them their history. Nate Shaw saw himself as the repository of that history...
Rosengarten first went to see Nate Shaw because Shaw had been a member of a short-lived Alabama labor union, the Sharecroppers' Union, and had spent 12 years in prison after a shootout with white sheriffs that stemmed from his union activities. But the book turned out to be more than just a story about a man who had joined a union and gone to jail; it is a detailed account of 85 years of Nate Shaw's life, with the union and prison experiences serving as a central balancing point...
People are supposed to have wide-ranging and specific memories of their entire lives in the time just before they die--Nate Shaw died shortly after Rosengarten finished his tapings--but even given that, Shaw's ability to remember everything that happened to him is extraordinary. He tells, often supplying exact dates, about everything from how many bales of cotton he raised in his first year of tenant farming, to how he felt when his wife died, to the relative merits of the myriad mules he plowed behind...
...Nate Shaw's day-to-day experiences were not extraordinary. But the man was a genius, an absolute genius. The book is his history of Southern life. We have to allow for the possibility that genusises or brilliant people lives out their lives as illiterates, walking behind a plow...