MISSISSIPPI: Usury

Most of the cotton South’s 1,700,000 tenant farmers live by The Book, and The Book is not the Holy Bible. It is a ledger where “furnish” is entered. Furnish is credit for “side meat” (salt pork), molasses, corn meal, seed, sometimes for a mule and a plow. Landlords, or merchants dependent upon them, run The Book. Without furnish, few tenants could live through the winter, or plant in the spring.

In fall, after The Book is toted, a tenant’s crop may not be worth enough to pay for what he owes. If cotton is selling at io/ a Ib. or better, he may receive one or two hundred dollars. But he has an immense yearning for a store suit, a cotton dress for his wife, a few pretties for his children, perhaps a second-hand Chevrolet or a splendid, ancient Studebaker. So, either way he goes on living by The Book.

Chief difference between Negro Less Taylor, a tenant on the J. W. Copeland plantation in Washington County, Miss., and 200,000 other sharecroppers and renters in Mississippi, is that Less Taylor got for his lawyer old Percy Bell of Greenville, onetime chancery judge and independent as a hog on ice. Chief difference between Landlord Copeland and many another in the Yazoo Delta is that he did not get away with making a good thing of The Book. At Jackson last week, the supreme court of Mississippi reversed a Washington County Chancery judgment, declared: “According to the appellee’s [Copeland’s] own testimony, including his book account, there is no escape from the conclusion that he charged more than 20% per annum on the furnish account.” Thereby, ruled the court, Planter Copeland forfeited not only interest but principal, owes Negro Taylor $2,279.91 (equal to the full value of his cotton without deduction for furnish).

This application of the law of usury was a nasty jolt to Mississippi’s cotton planters. It meant that henceforth they cannot charge more than legal interest on furnish unless they want to run the risk of supplying it free.