Southern Farmers and Their Stories

Here is a book that I'd recommend to those who care about farming, its history, and racial concerns. The review was written for the Red River Valley Historical Journal, and appeared in 2007, volume 5, pages 147-149. The journal is edited by Dr. Vernon Williams, Department of History, Abilene Christian University. I appreciate his offer to review this volume. It carries with it a narrative theoretical orientation and dominant themes which will be familiar to the readers of these pages.

Here's the text of that review:

Melissa Walker, associate professor of history at Converse College, takes on a monumental task in Southern Farmers and Their Stories: Memory and Meaning in Oral History. An oral historian by training and a farmer’s daughter by birth, she explains the influence of a variety of sociologists and psychologists in developing her orientation toward “communities of memory” in the sense that her study “mapped the boundaries of their community of memory by telling stories about their shared rural past.” The author uses “memory as a category of cultural and historical analysis” as a means of gathering those experiences and their descriptions. At the outset, she intends to answer three questions: 1) “What experiences molded rural southerners’ sense of shared past?” 2) “How did they remember rural transformation?” and 3) “What does the shape of their stories about change tell us about how people use memories and knowledge of the past to make sense of the world in which they live today?”

In order to answer those questions, she assumes a narrative theoretical orientation in pouring over a massive amount of archival material which included the transcripts of 475 interviews, eight of which she conducted herself, with 531 people, held for the most part from 1975 to 1995. These transcripts of conversations with rural southerners from fourteen states varied enormously in terms of their purposes, i.e., Black life in the Jim Crow South, the Civil Rights Movement, southern industrialization, and rural life. While acknowledging the challenges of reading transcripts as compared to participating in the interviews, she asserts that the complexity of the purposes, interviewers, and time frames all allow her to achieve her purposes, that of uncovering themes of rural southerners. The diversity of the interviewees provides much richness to the pursuit of answers to her questions as the interviews criss-cross such diverse populations as landowners and non-landowners, men and women from different generations, black and white, those who had to endure racial discrimination and those who did not, and those who lost land and those who persevered and still own the land.

In addition to organizing the material into common and disparate themes that ultimately answered her questions, the author carefully develops the concept of “communities of memory,” which she describes as the shared past with its multiplicity of contrasts, the sense of “us” versus “them, ” “rural” versus “non-rural” people, and the past versus the present. She also nuances the notion of “collective memory,” that which is located in and spoken by the individual, which ultimately overlaps with memories of others in tracing themes that include the past, the present, and the future.

She contributes to the discourse of rural southerners and their struggles during the transformation of the south by providing a seventeen page summary of the manner in which the crisis of economics, government policy, technology, and structural changes in the economy of agriculture impacted farming and rural life. From there, she organizes her material into five chapters. Chapter one describes the lived experiences of three southern farmers, a White woman, an African American man, and a White man who owned land. Her nuancing their common and disparate themes such as the satisfying nature of farming, continuity with the past, identity, commitment to farming, hardships, friendships, and independence is very readable material. Chapter two uses the concept of memory in an attempt to understand rural southerners via dominant themes of self sufficiency, work ethic, mutual aid, love of the land, relative economic equality, differences between town and country, and rural identity and personal character. Chapter three contains descriptions from the stories of two groups of rural southerners: the pre-war generation and their views of the changes in the south, and the post-war’s generation and common themes of “get big or get out,” and the role of the federal government and its policies. Chapter four examines the concept of memory and the meaning of change via the complexities of several variables: gender; class; landless versus landowning pre-war whites; racial discrimination, government policy and reasons for leaving the land for African Americans; and post-war whites and their reasons for leaving the land.

In chapter five the author organizes her materials around the concept of how the past and its stories are shaped by the present via sub-themes of the blessing and curse of material improvements, views of today’s young people, changes in community life, cracks in the mythology of rural community, and critiques of contemporary life. In her conclusion she provides a nice, brief summary of the common threads of the entire book.

Valuable information is offered to the reader in the appendices for either informational purposes and/or further study. Appendix One contains demographic data, gender, state, purpose of interview, decade by birth, landowning status by race, and education level by number and percentage of the interviews. Appendix Two lists alphabetically all interviewees by state, gender, year of birth, landowning status, and level of education with a lengthy list of abbreviations for help in mastering the massive amount of content. Appendix Three contains 25 pages of archival sources for all of the interviews. Dr. Walker’s bibliographic essay is especially informative as she describes her academic use of specific sources and her way of thinking about specific points of inquiry: memory, public discourse, and oral history and the relationship between history and memory. Finally, notes for both comments and bibliographical sources are organized by chapter and are exceptionally thorough.

In short, Dr. Walker’s book is well worth placing on our shelves if we are interested in narrative theory, communities of memory, the rural south, transformations in the culture of farming, gender within the rural south within the context of farming, and racism in the south and agriculture policy. Her book is readable though challenging conceptually. She goes to great lengths to answer her key questions, and she does so both efficiently and thoroughly.