My grandfather's family were tenant farmers in the areas around Fayetteville, Lumberton, and Raeford. He learned carpentry working alongside his father on those farms. He went off to the CCC's where he worked construction projects all across the Western US. Then he was drafted into the Navy for WWII. After the war, he jumped from the Navy to Army where he joined the Army Corps of Engineers and rose to the level of master carpenter and a Master Sergeant while serving in Korea. His father died sometime along the way and my grandfather never went back to farming. But, your story sounds much like the stories my grandfather told of growing up on tennant farms, with the exception that his father did manage to buy his own small farm by the end of the Great Depression.