A drop in the bucket

The 10th Annual Black Land Loss Summit convenes on Friday. We're looking forward to it with eager anticipation, my wife, my students, and I. We'll take some time off from important matters here in the MFT Department and in the Clinic and travel eastward to Whitakers and Tillery, North Carolina. People who care about land loss will travel to those rural communities for important conversations about those things that matter.

In preparation for my modest role in those meetings, I've been working with SPSS, running statistics on various aspects of information in the data base of Black farmers and family members. With their consent, information is anonymously stored there for examination.

It's all a drop in the bucket, so to speak. The data base that I have been working with contains only 45 subjects, or Black farmers and family members. There are thousands excluded from the Pigford Consent Decree. Some of them I've met, many, many more are known only by their family and friends. Some have gotten a modest settlement as part of the decree. Others are still unheard from.

Along with the numbers in the data base, I've also been re-reading transcriptions of interviews. That leads me to say to those farmers and family members, "You are not forgotten. Your story is still being told in various ways and in various places, just as we agreed." For some of you, your stories are in the archives, a place that you wished for your stories to be stored for future students and researchers to read and study. Some of you said, "Thanks, but no thanks, Dr. Hinson. You can hear my story, but I'd just as soon not have it spread out there." Those requests have been honored as well.

More than just words on a page, those are real, live images of real, live people, with legitimate claims to places and spaces. Reading the story of the farmer in his modest single-wide beneath the spreading oak tree took me back there to that morning conversation. Re-reading that interview just outside of that small southern Georgia town took me back to the conversation with the farmer now turned truck driver and his wife, and his best friend, also now turned truck driver. I can still hear the shuffle of the papers as they revealed document after document retrieved in pursuit of justice.

And, I can still hear the harmony of "Amazing Grace" between the two brothers and me in the community center there in Tillery as we began the interview.

Stories are our habituations. We live in them, so I've read. The farmers have their stories. They live in them. I've heard a few of them. Now, I live in them, insofar as a White guy from West Texas is able.