Summer 1873Mrs. Frankie Dixon
Sharecropper and Cook
Keatsville, Missouri
My son, Buster, was a good boy—raw-boned and frolicsome. But when he was sixteen, he fell in with trash.
One day this white boy named Joe Sawyer, said to Buster, “I can go sell your horse over to Keatsville for good money, and we’ll both make profits.”
Buster said, “All right, you do that,” and that was the start of his tribulations.
Buster was ignorant, that was his only failing. The horse was owned by him, sure thing, but he’d borrowed the money for it from Mr. Price Jackson, the white man who owns Jackson Farms down by Shoal Creek. Buster should’ve obtained Mr. Jackson’s permission to sell that horse, but he didn’t know. So, when the white boy sell it, Mr. Jackson put up a big disturbance, and the sheriff com
