Michael Jordan_ The Life ( PDFDrive.com )_compressed (1)_compressed

Dawson Jordan also became a sharecropper, like the majority of the southern
population, the lowest on society’s totem pole for that era.
The critical element to survival on rented land was the mule. As such, the
animal carried a status, as explained by a cousin, William Henry Jordan. “When
I was a child, a mule cost more than a car, because you had to make a living with
a mule.”
As farmers in later generations would purchase farm equipment, the
sharecroppers and tenant farmers bought and rented mules from local dealers.
Maurice Eugene Jordan recalled, “You could get a mule from [the mule dealer],
but if you had a bad year, he’d come and get that mule. The seed and fertilizer
man you borrowed from would do the same. You catch a bad season and get in a
hole, it could take a year or two to get out.”
“You didn’t have a choice,” explained William Henry Jordan. “You didn’t
have anything else.”
For men like Dawson Jordan and his son, there was no escape from the
circumstances, but they somehow managed to keep themselves fed. Sometimes
they worked early mornings, milking at a nearby dairy farm, then taking the
cows out to graze. In the leanest times, a farmer might slip from tenant farming
—where he leased land and handled everything himself—back into
sharecropping. “That’s where you would furnish the labor,” William Henry
Jordan explained, “and the people who owned the farm would furnish the mule,
the seed, and the fertilizer. At the end of the season, you’d get a third to half of
what was left over. Lots of times there was nothing left over.”
That’s why many farmers looked to other sources of income—and why
moonshining became so important to so many of them. Farmers, both black and
white, of the Coastal Plain had been making their own corn liquor as far back as
the Colonial era. Most of them certainly didn’t have the money to buy it, so they
made their own. “Since way back, that’s about all it was, was corn liquor,”
explained Maurice Eugene Jordan. “So there was a lot of moonshine. They’d
have them stills everywhere, on the river, in the woods, in the swamps, wherever
the water was good.”
It’s unlikely that Dawson Jordan ever intentionally set out to be a
moonshiner, but he soon gained a reputation as a prominent figure in Pender
County’s illegal trade. Perhaps he first got into the business when he was
working logs on the river. “Those rafts might have been full of whiskey,”
Maurice Jordan said with a knowing laugh. “Nobody could tell what they were
hauling.”