Who gets to tell the stories?

Stories are our habituations; we live in them, so I've read. Family farmers across the country have their stories to tell. They are their stories. They have the right to tell them.

African American farmers across the land, also family farmers, have their stories to tell. They are their stories. They have the right to tell them.

Some of us are listeners of stories. We are gatherers of stories. We are compilers of stories. We have been afforded an amazing amount of trust as we have heard, gathered, and compiled their stories. Therein lies a sacred trust. A sacred pact exists between the story tellers and the gatherers of the stories. That sacred trust has been offered. It could not be demanded. That would have been one more violation, one more act of racism, one more act of discrimination, one more injustice.

Some of us realize that our stories co-mingle with their stories. Therein lies angst, wonderments, the necessity of meaning making. Those stories must be told as well.

Sometimes we feel inspiration and the story or the poem or the song "writes itself," words not mine, but what I've been told.

Someday soon perhaps you'll hear the story told via words like these:

"There's a storm cloud over Georgia,
There's struggle on the land.
This lynching and this stealing, Lord,
It's just too hard to understand.

In the heart of the Creator,
We are family, we are kin.
If love is still the answer,
Then where do we begin?"*

As the leader of the reconciliation conversation in Whitakers last Saturday afternoon said, "There's healing in the telling." I think she's right. She's right for farmers, spouses, and adult children of farmers. She's right about those who've heard the stories.

*Copyright Waymon R. Hinson, Ph.D.

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.