Melissa Walker's book, "Southern Farmers and Their Stories: Memory and Meaning in Oral History," is a book I keep reading and re-reading. The dominant themes relate to stories, how they're captured by the people who tell them, and how communities have memories that are community memories. She writes of the stories of transition from rural, early 1900's life on into the highly advanced, technological era in which we find ourselves.
Hidden within its pages, sometimes more obscure than I would wish, are stories and pages that relate to the black farmer. Here is one of her quotes. I hope you find it troubling, perplexing, and challenging.
"Even relatively prosperous African American farmers who avoided the trap of sharecropping blamed various forms of racial discrimination for black farmers' decisions to leave farming. Born in 1917, black Georgian James Hall grew up on a sharecropping farm in Lee County. As an adult, Hall farmed as a cash renter. He recalled that in 1939, he cleared $1,800 on his crops. With his profits, he had enough money to pay off his bills and to farm without borrowing operating cash the next year. He enjoyed another good year in 1940. Hall explained that in the spring of 1941, his landlord insisted that he agree to turn over the sale of his crop to the landlord. In other words, the landlord planned to transport the crop to market and negotiate the price, paying Hall from the proceeds. Landlords frequently used this strategy to cheat sharecroppers. Such a landlord would claim that a crop had sold for less than the actual market price, pay the cropper the smaller proceeds, and pocket the difference......Hall refused and moved to another rented farm......He continued farming his own land until 1989, and he and his wife still owned that land at the time of the interview in 1994. In spite of his success, Hall noted the difficulties that black farmers faced. He told the interviewer, 'All the Negroes now has done moved to town....They couldn't get nothing to do.' His wife added, 'The land belongs to the white people. They have the tractors and all the chemicals; they don't have to hoe their crops. Cotton pickers, peanut pickers and all that stuff....So that's what causes black folks to have to migrate to town.' Implicit in Mrs. Hall's account is an indictment of institutionalized racism that made it extremely difficult for black farmers to buy land, obtain annual operating credit, or qualify for loans to make capital investments in their operation. As Black Georgian Mary Shipp concluded, black farmers 'is almost extinct, especially in the South....It was hard to make it as a black farmer because many of the things available to white farmers were not available to black farmers.'" (pp. 160, 161)
She summarizes this particular section of her book by commenting that black farmers who left the land tell different stories than those of white farmers who left farming. Happy with the security they found through jobs in town and all, they "expressed bitterness at the forces that made it impossible for many blacks to remain on the land even as white neighbors farmed successfully." (pp. 163, 164)
Sound familiar?
