sharecroppers people who worked land for a share of the crops, especially tenant farmers. In the South, black sharecroppers generally lived in extreme poverty and were treated as little more than slaves by white landowners.
I tried to decide just how I should respond to them. Whether I should act like the teacher that I was, or like the nigger that I was supposed to be. As revealed in a subsequent chapter, Grant's bitter remark echoes one of the "lessons" he learned from his teacher while he was a student at the plantation school.
