Interesting:

At age 14, I had an epiphany while working in Granddad’s general store. One day, a little black girl came into the store. She was around 9-10 years old, dressed in rags, leading two younger children by the hands. They were dressed each in a single old T-shirt — that’s it. I recognized them as the children of a local sharecropped who “traded” with Granddad. She had in her hand a dime. I was working behind the meat counter. She asked for “A nickel’s worth of pepper sausage and six soda crackers.” We sold crackers each. Pepper sausage was salami that came in long tubes which we sliced depending upon the order. I sliced six thin slices of salami, weighing them to ensure they came to a “nickel’s worth.” Those six slices of salami and six crackers were the only thing these three children had to eat all day. God only knows where she got the dime.

A few days later, the scene was repeated almost exactly. Only it was an 11-year-old white boy with his baby sister in tow and a dime in his hand. They purchased 10 cents worth of cheese and crackers and sat on the concrete steps in front of the store and slowly ate what to me would have been but a snack.

And suddenly it hit me: There is no difference between the poor whites and the poor blacks. They both are wretchedly poor. Both suffer from malnutrition. Both drop out of school to work fields that long ago played out from too much of the same crop. Both drag cotton sacks behind them in August, picking cotton until their fingers bleed, hoping they can get a bale an acre and pay what they owe the landowner for rent and furnish. (What is “furnish?” Here.)

To this day — I am now 66 — I marvel at the ability of the white power structure to keep poor whites and poor blacks from joining forces against them. As I grew older and continued my education I realized that the true split in the South was NOT between black and white, but between rich and poor. Elite and working class. Sartoris and Snopes.