YOU HAVE SEEN THEIR FACES by...

YOU HAVE SEEN THEIR FACES by Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White (University of Georgia Press: $19.95; 54 pp.). Caldwell and Bourke-White traveled through the rural South in 1937 to document the lives of poor sharecroppers, revealing that moribund cotton plantations were supported by ill-clothed, uneducated, “malnurtured” men, women and children. Landlords preferred Afro-American laborers, who could be worked harder and who had fewer opportunities for redress, which reduced whites to scratching out a living on the most marginal land. Although sharecropping has largely disappeared in the South, in recent years it has reappeared in California.