We Are Each Other's Harvest Read online

  Photo credit: LC-USF34-044646-D. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection. Photo by Jack Delano

  Photo credit: LC-USF34-041526-E. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection. Photo by Jack Delano.

  Epigraph

  We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.

  —GWENDOLYN BROOKS

  Photo credit: LC-USF34- 009267-E. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection. Photo by Dorothea Lang.

  African-American history is not somehow separate from our larger American story, it’s not the underside of the American story, it is central to the American story. [O]ur glory derives not just from our most obvious triumphs, but how we’ve wrested triumph from tragedy, and how we’ve been able to remake ourselves, again and again and again, in accordance with our highest ideals. I, too, am America.

  —PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA AT THE DEDICATION OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY AND CULTURE, 2016

  Photo credit: LC-USF33-T01-001258-M1. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection. Photo by John Vachon.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Foreword by Natalie Baszile

  Introduction by Dr. Analena Hope Hassberg

  1. Those Winter Sundays by Robert Hayden

  2. Everyone Beneath Their Own Vine and Fig Tree: A Remembering in Seven Parts by Michael Twitty

  3. Handed the Rain by Ed Roberson

  4. Writing Queen Sugar by Natalie Baszile

  5. Excerpt from Black and White: The Way I See It by Richard Williams

  6. Resilience and Reinvention with Stanley Hughes and Linda Leach

  7. Little Farm, Big Dreams with Kamal Bell

  8. Black to the Land by Leah Penniman

  9. cutting greens by Lucille Clifton

  10. The Last Plantation: The USDA’s Racist Operating System by Pete Daniel

  11. Father and Daughter with Harper and Ashley Armstrong

  12. To the Fig Tree on 9th and Christian by Ross Gay

  13. On Top of Moon Mountain with Brenae Royal

  14. Money Talk with Clif Sutton and Dexter Faison

  15. Barking by Lenard D. Moore

  16. Dispossessed: Their Family Bought Land One Generation After Slavery. The Reels Brothers Spent Eight Years in Jail for Refusing to Leave It by Lizzie Presser

  17. Louisiana Daughters: A Conversation with Lalita Tademy and Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

  18. Queen Sugar, Chapter 10 by Natalie Baszile

  19. Frame by Robin Coste Lewis

  20. America at the Crossroads: A History of Enslavement and Land by Clyde Ford

  21. Field Day at the Hill Place with Odis Hill

  22. Equal Ground with Willie Earl Nelson Sr. and Sons

  23. Fearless by Tim Seibles

  24. Four Days in Alaskan Farm School with Melony Edwards

  25. No Better Life with the Blueforts

  26. Ancestral Vibrations Guide Our Connection to the Land by Jim Embry

  27. Remember by Joy Harjo

  28. Family Ties with Esmeralda and Antonio Sandoval

  29. How to Make Rain by Kevin Young

  30. Miss Rose’s Dirty Rice by Natalie Baszile

  31. A New Country with Dorcas Young

  32. Raised and Rooted with Deric Harper

  33. Making Space with Moretta Browne

  34. Call Me by My Name by Harryette Mullen

  35. Wheel of Fortune with Martha Calderon

  36. Exceeding the “Yes” with Marvin Frink

  37. Swarm by Tonya Foster

  38. A Brief History of Tobacco by Natalie Baszile

  39. After Tobacco with the Wrights

  40. Yellowjackets by Yusef Komunyakaa

  41. Home Games with Kellye Walker and Werten Bellamy

  42. Butter by Elizabeth Alexander

  43. A Love Letter to Future Generations by Naima Penniman

  44. Inside Queen Sugar: Jason Wilborn Reflects on His Years in the Queen Sugar Writers’ Room by Natalie Baszile

  45. The Boudin Trail by Natalie Baszile

  Black Harvest Fund

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Credits

  Contributors

  About the Author

  Also by Natalie Baszile

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Photo credit: Alison Gootee

  The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life. His is but one strand of it. Whatever he does to the web, we do to ourselves. All things are bound together. All things connect.

  —CHIEF SEATTLE

  Foreword

  By Natalie Baszile

  Drive east along Interstate 80 from San Francisco toward Sacramento, past vast acres of alfalfa, watermelon, and rice, and you’ll eventually come upon a two-story mural of a solitary figure squinting out across the land. Dressed in a plaid shirt, jeans, and work boots, a tuft of gray hair peeking out beneath a baseball cap, the figure kneels in a patch of sunflowers. With one hand, the figure cradles a husky yellow Labrador. The other hand points out to the horizon.

  The figure is a farmer.

  He is a middle-aged man . . . and he’s white.

  The artist who painted the twenty-by-twenty-foot mural titled Stewards of the Soil says that she meant to pay tribute to the farmers in her community. I don’t fault her for wanting to honor them—farming is difficult work—and I acknowledge that her mural reflects the picture most people have in mind when they envision the American farmer.

  And yet, every time I drive past it, I can’t help but think it tells only part of the story. Surely, somewhere across the thousands of acres there must be a handful of Black and brown farmers. Who are they? What stories might they tell if given a chance?

  My passion for the stories of Black farmers and my interest in the related issues of land stewardship and food justice were first sparked one morning years ago when I was a student at the University of California, Berkeley. Once a month, usually on a Saturday, I bought groceries for my paternal great-uncle Lewis Baszile. He was one of the few members of my father’s family to have migrated to California from Louisiana in the 1940s, and one of only two who’d settled in San Francisco. In his early seventies by the time I enrolled in Berkeley, Uncle Lewis looked forward to my monthly visits. He was usually standing in his doorway waiting for me when I pulled up in front of his house on Lyon Street.

  That particular Saturday, I was running late. Rather than shop for Uncle Lewis’s groceries at my local supermarket in Berkeley, I stopped at a supermarket a few blocks down Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. I was appalled by what I encountered. Worse than the dismal lighting and dingy tiled floor was the poor quality of the produce: a few limp bunches of collards and withering mustards, shrunken heads of cabbage, bushels of shriveled green beans, and apples and pears that were dented and bruised. The inequity between the two markets—this one in Oakland, and my neighborhood market in Berkeley—was glaring. I was infuriated and offended. How, I wondered, could the produce in the market near campus where all the white students shopped be so bountiful while the produce in the same supermarket chain just a few blocks away where the Black people shopped be so inferior?

  Back then, no one I knew spoke of food justice and food sovereignty. The term “food apartheid” wasn’t part of the lexicon. I had no outlet for my frustration, no place to express my outrage. But the memory of picking through those bins of substandard produce stuck with me.

&nb
sp; Years later, I learned that my maternal great-great-grandfather, Mac Hall (b. 1845), arrived on one of the last slave ships and was sold twice before landing on the Stamps Plantation in Butler County, Alabama. After Emancipation he settled in the tiny rural settlement of Long Creek, near Georgiana. He was a merchant, blacksmith, beekeeper, and farmer, and eventually owned 680 acres of land thick with peach orchards. The family homeplace was only fifty miles from the Tuskegee Institute. Five of Mac Hall’s grandsons, whom everyone referred to as the Hall Brothers, learned carpentry and brick masonry at Tuskegee. Years later, they carried those skills with them when they migrated to Detroit, Michigan, where they built two-story brick houses for themselves and their family members in Royal Oak Township. Like their grandfather, they cherished their connection to the soil and understood the value in owning and taking care of land.

  Their cousin, my grandfather Mamon, and his wife, Willa Mae, continued the same tradition of property ownership. They bought eleven lots around Royal Oak Township. After Mamon was killed in a car accident, Willa Mae sold the lots when she needed extra money. In the end, she sold all but one, which she kept for her vegetable garden. To this day, my mother, an avid gardener, grows collard greens in a corner of her backyard. “Staying connected to the soil,” she likes to say, “is in our DNA.”

  It’s no surprise, then, that years after I graduated from Berkeley, news coverage of Black farmers converging on Washington, DC, to protest against the USDA’s discriminatory practices reignited my passion for Black farmers’ stories. I followed the proceedings of the famous class-action lawsuit Pigford v. Glickman. That passion and a growing curiosity about the lives of today’s Black farmers led me to write Queen Sugar, which is set in the sugarcane belt of South Louisiana. In writing Queen Sugar, I wanted to tell the story of a Black farming family like the one from which I’d descended. The novel was my attempt to stop the clock, to remind readers that Black people have always had a deep connection to the land. I wanted to celebrate farming as a noble endeavor and encourage readers to continue to pass their families’ land down through generations. Queen Sugar is a declaration that Black land matters. It reminds us that if we can remember our history, we can reclaim the legacy that our ancestors fought and sacrificed for.

  Today, those same passions and curiosities have led me to help preserve and celebrate the voices of the Black and brown farmers and land stewards who remain. Every week, it seems, a new article hits the newsstands sounding the alarm about Black land loss and the dwindling numbers of Black farms and landowners. I believe it’s not enough to name the problem: we must solve it.

  Thankfully, hope is not lost. Black farmers continue to persevere, often in spite of the obstacles and discrimination they’ve faced. And a new generation of Black farmers and farmers of color has taken up the mantle, determined to carry us forward. They call themselves “the returning generation,” and they are fierce and unapologetic in their quest to reclaim their legacy. Like their forefathers and foremothers, they understand the value of land stewardship. They are building community and appreciate the opportunity farming provides to pursue entrepreneurship and to assert a new level of independence and sovereignty.

  This country was built on the free labor of enslaved people whom carried their agriculture expertise with them when they arrived on America’s colonial shores. Black people’s labor and knowledge of agriculture built this country. Farming is part of our national identity; it is central to America’s origin story. We Are Each Other’s Harvest is my attempt to elevate Black and brown farmers’ voices and stories; to celebrate their resilience, ingenuity, and creativity; and to honor people like George Washington Carver, Fannie Lou Hamer, Booker T. Whatley, who started the community-supported agriculture (CSA) movement, and Booker T. Washington, who understood farming and agriculture as a path to liberation.

  Plenty of Black and Indigenous people of color have devoted their lives to this movement, and they have far more experience and knowledge about farming than I do. Dozens of organizations, local and national, urban and rural, as well as activists and forward-thinking policy makers, continue to work tirelessly on behalf of Black farmers, veterans, and farmers of color.

  I have tried to gather stories from a range of people—old and young, rural and urban, southerners, westerners, and northeasterners, landowners and stewards—who encourage us to remember our roots and reclaim our legacy. I could easily spend the next five years crisscrossing this country, meeting people and chronicling their experiences. Perhaps, one day, I’ll do that.

  For now, as we find ourselves reeling with the devastating effects of climate change, wealth disparity, and global pandemics, it’s my hope that this work contributes to the ongoing conversation about farming, sustainability, food justice and food sovereignty, land stewardship, intergenerational wealth, and community. I hope it shines a light on the systems that continue to rob Black and brown people of their birthright; that it encourages people of color to reclaim our legacy and reinvigorates our commitment to self-determination; that it motivates people to devise solutions to the ongoing challenges farmers face; and that it resets the narrative around labor, inspiring communities of color to reimagine what it means to be connected to the soil.

  Photo credit: LC-USF34-044638-D. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection

  “You see?” the farm said to them. “See? See what you can do? Never mind you can’t tell one letter from another, never mind you born a slave, never mind you lose your name, never mind your daddy dead, never mind nothing. Here, this here, is what a man can do if he puts his mind to it and his back in it. Stop sniveling,” it said. “Stop picking around the edges of the world. Take advantage, and if you can’t take advantage, take disadvantage. We live here. On this planet, in this nation, in this country right here. Nowhere else! We got a home in the rock, don’t you see! Nobody starving in my home; nobody crying in my home, and if I got a home you got one too! Grab it! Grab this land! Take it, hold it, my brothers, make it, my brothers, shake it, squeeze it, turn it, twist it, beat it, kick it, kiss it, whip it, stomp it, dig it, plow it, seed it, reap it, rent it, buy it, sell it, own it, build it, multiply it, and pass it on—can you hear me? Pass it on!”

  —TONI MORRISON, SONG OF SOLOMON

  Photo credit: LC-USF34-044678-D. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, FSA/OWI Collection. Photo by Jack Delano.

  Introduction

  By Dr. Analena Hope Hassberg

  Virtually all Africans come from food-growing societies. As migrant peoples do, they brought their agricultural expertise with them across the Atlantic: heirloom seeds concealed in locks of hair through the treacherous Middle Passage, and a deep, ancestral knowledge of how to plant and cultivate yams and chiles, mustard greens and peanuts, melons, coconuts, and a host of medicinal roots and herbs. Although a centuries-long system of unprecedented brutality, bondage, and discrimination has threatened to extinguish African descendants and their foodways since 1619, they are a people of faith, resilience, poetry, and patience. Forcibly carried across oceans and seas, their spiritual connection to land endures.

  For African-descended people, particularly those who trace their ancestry back through legacies of enslavement, resistance has been constant. Their subversive acts have been as grand and visible as organized rebellions and social movements, and as humble as keeping small garden plots on cash-crop plantations. Popular reductions of Black foodways to mere scraps from a master’s table miss the fact that many enslaved Africans also grew an array of vegetables, legumes, and fruit to supplement their insufficient diets, and as a result, they often had higher vitamin, mineral, and protein levels than poor whites who also struggled to survive in the face of starvation. Food and farming have long been a form of resistance and ritual: a gift from people who believed in a hereafter that would someday know freedom from the horrors of slavery, though they themselves would never live to see it.

  The end of the Civil War brought formal em
ancipation of the enslaved, and many believed that freedom had finally come. They shouted, sobbed, and dropped to tired knees in prayer, gathered what little they had acquired, and walked off of plantations en masse. They would quickly learn, however, that their freedom was symbolic and nominal at best. Multiple laws were immediately passed to restrict Black mobility and landownership. Lynchings, beatings, and other forms of anti-Black violence escalated alongside mass incarceration as part of a wide-scale campaign to maintain the racial and economic order. Free by definition only, emancipated people were forced back into vulnerable land-tenure arrangements like sharecropping and tenant farming, which would ensure that they remained in perpetual debt to plantation owners, banks, and other outside lenders through systems of credit, mortgages, and liens on crops and property. Many returned to the same plantations they had left only days before, with no choice but to once again perform backbreaking labor on land that was not their own.

  There has been an unshakable conviction among Black people that true liberation requires landownership: a sentiment echoed by the Black ministers who advised General William T. Sherman to provide forty acres and a mule to freedmen along the South Carolina and Georgia sea coast after the Civil War. It reverberates through the teachings of Black nationalists like Malcolm X, who proclaimed land as the basis of independence, revolution, justice, and equality. The millions of formerly enslaved Africans knew they could sustain and reproduce themselves if given the chance and a parcel of earth. After all, it was their farming and agriculture skills that had built the massive wealth and global power of the United States. A testament to their skill and resilience, the number of Black family farms rose steadily until the early twentieth century, when the mass exodus of Black people from the rural South to the urban cities began.