My recollection of the oral history interviews we conducted in 1979 is that at Waverly Plantation the African-American tenant farmers stated they had no privies. I looked through our report, however, and find only one mention of privies: the white sharecropper in the 1940s mentioned having one. The reference:
 
Adams, William Hampton (editor)
  1980  Waverly Plantation: Ethnoarchaeology of a Tenant Farming Community. National Technical Information Service, Washington, D.C.
 
I should note that I am preparing a new edition of this study, probably available on CD next year.
 
The oral history research was extensive, with 89 informants. The tapes and transcripts are archived at three locations: Library of Congress, Indiana University Folklore Archives, and the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.
 
Instead of using anecdotal evidence or incomplete archaeological data, perhaps one should turn to the historical record. Rural sociologists in the 1920s and 1930s recorded data on privies in their surveys of tenant farmer conditions. These data would provide important analogs for earlier tenant conditions as well. If tenant farmers did not have privies in the 1920s, what was the likelihood they had them in the 1880s? The archaeological data will always be incomplete on rural sites, even with soil chemistry survey, magnetometer, resistivity, GPR, finding a privy on a farmstead site can be difficult. Not finding a privy is not evidence of there not being one. As the Viking mission researchers commented, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
 
Check these and other sources:
 
Branson, E. C.
        1923a   Farm Tenancy in the Cotton Belt: How Farm Tenants Live. The Journal of Social Forces 1:213‹221.
 
Branson, E. C.
        1923b   Farm Tenancy in the Cotton Belt: The Social Estate of White Farm Tenants. The Journal of Social Forces 1:450‹457.
 
Cooperation, Commission on Interracial
        1937    The South's Landless Farmers. Commission on Interracial Cooperation, Atlanta, GA.
 
Maguire, Jane
        1975    On Shares: Ed Brown's Story. W. W. Norton and Company, New York, NY.
 
Rosengarten, Theodore
        1974    All God's Dangers. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, NY.
 
Thomas, Norman
        1934    The Plight of the Share‹Cropper. League for Industrial Democracy, New York, NY.
 
United States Department of Agriculture
        1939    The farm-housing survey. U.S. Department of Agriculture, Miscellaneous Publication 323.
 
Woofter, T.J., Jr., Gordon Blackwell, Harold Hoffsommer, James G.Maddox, Jean M. Massell, B.O. Williams, and Waller Wynne, Jr.
        1936    Landlord and tenant on the cotton plantation. Works Progress Administration Research Monograph 5.