Unnamed Yoknapatawpha Cotton Growers

Cotton is the main crop of Yoknapatawpha, and as Flags in the Dust points out, it is raised by two very different kinds of growers - planters or croppers - on two very different kinds of land: the "other planters further up the valley" from the Sartorises own the county's rich bottom land, while the "smaller croppers" have to manage "with their tilted fields among the hills" (289). The "croppers" are tenant farmers, who work land that is owned by someone else with whom they share their crop, and not all of them are in the hills: the rich land in the heart of the valley that the Sartorises own, for example, is "farmed on shares" (289).