All God's Dangers

Nate Shaw's father was born under slavery. Nate Shaw was born into a bondage that was only a little gentler. At the age of nine, he was picking cotton for thirty-five cents an hour. At the age of forty-seven, he faced down a crowd of white deputies who had come to confiscate a neighbor's crop. His defiance cost him twelve years in prison. This triumphant autobiography, assembled from the eighty-four-year-old Shaw's oral reminiscences, is the plain-spoken story of an “over-average” man who witnessed wrenching changes in the lives of Southern black people—and whose unassuming courage helped bring those changes about.

Theodore Rosengarten is an independent historian whose work focuses on the lives of slaves and freedmen in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the author of Tombee: Portrait of a Cotton Planter and editor of A Portion of People: Three Hundred Years of Southern Jewish Life. Rosengarten teaches in the Jewish Studies Program and the Department of History at the College of Charleston. He has served as a senior research associate in documentary studies at Duke University and has taught previously at Harvard University and the University of South Carolina. He lives with his wife, Dale, and two sons in South Carolina.