The chapter opens with a Black man, John Davis, leaving the patch of cotton that he is harvesting to visit his children and his sick wife, Nora, in the fall of 1901. Blackmon briefly describes the excruciating process of picking cotton, which white men believed African Americans were better suited—and divinely required by God—to do. He also details how white Southern landowners coerced Black men to work for them when they faced worker shortages—the very situation in which Davis would find himself. Most white Southerners believed Black men must be forcibly bound to the land to generate the most wealth and thought the practice of sharecropping—in which Black workers traded portions of their crops for small parcels of white landowners’ land—was abnormal.

After Davis hopped off a train in Goodwater, Alabama, a local, white store owner approached and asked if he had any money. This was a dangerous question. If Davis said yes, he could be robbed; if he said no, he could be arrested for vagrancy and sold against his will to work for as a leased convict (i.e., slave) for a mine, farm, or labor camp. Davis refused to give any money to the man, and Francis M.