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, All God's Dangers, 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.

"There are only a few American autobiographies of surpassing greatness....Now there is another one, Nate Shaw's."
– The New York Times

"Eloquent and revelatory. When, finally, this big book is put down, one feels exhilarated. This is an anthem to human endurance."
– Studs Terkel, New Republic

The first chapter of All God's Dangers begins,
My daddy had three brothers – Hubert, Bob, and Nate – and I'm named after one of em. Now, that Hubert, he was a over-average man. It didn't do no man no good to take a hold of him, so my daddy said. Uncle Hubert didn't take shit from nobody, colored or white. After my daddy got up to be a big boy he claimed to remember his brother Hubert's transactions and he even told how his brother talked: he talked in a dry, high-pitched voice. But Uncle Hubert was a grown man, he was much of a man.
So one day, Uncle Hubert went up to a white man's house. I reckon that was after the surrender; my daddy didn't tell me how old he was when Uncle Hubert done that. And that white man had a bad bulldog and Uncle Hubert knowed – my daddy said his brother Hubert knowed that that was a bad dog. God know I aint tellin no part of a lie, he said it. But used to in them days, I think a heap of this old back yonder stuff was lies, a heap of it. . . . But my daddy told this for the truth.

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