Sharecropper's Seeds

1

"I planted deep, within my heart the fear

That wind or fowl would take the grain away. 

I planted safe against this stark, lean year." —Arna Bontemps

​​The rusted scent of cigarette smoke tangled with the smell of overturned earth. My grandfather's hoe struck the ground, breaking up the soil and forcing it into neat rows. With a dirt-smudged LSU ball cap on his head, the morning sun and humidity had still managed to leave us both drenched in sweat. I ran my fingers along the threads of corn silk spilling from the husks and picked beans from their vines while my grandfather worked. His dark skin shimmered with sweat as he began sprinkling fertilizer for his newly made rows. Suddenly, he turned to me, his wireframe glasses gleaming in the sunlight. "It sure is hot out here, girl. Come on, let's get on in the house." 
My grandfather lived in Baton Rouge in a neighborhood strip next to the always busy railroad track. On his street, lines of muted pastel shotgun houses with swirling iron front doors crowded about one another beneath crisscrossing lines of power cables. A few houses down from my grandfather's house, a plot of land nestled within the urban landscape of Baton Rouge held my grandfather's garden. I watched massive stalks of okra bend with the passing trains the collision of metal and earth was normal in my grandfather's garden. 
With his tools in hand and a Rouse's shopping bag full of beans in mine, we made our way back to his house. 
"You see when you work for yourself, you can just stop whenever you want." He said with a chuckle between puffs of cigarette smoke. 
​​
​
​
As a child, I was enamored with the many gardens of my relatives. From my grandfather's urban garden scape, to my uncle's acres of farmland, the variety of gardens grown by my family is as distinct as the individuals who grow them. Every trip to Louisiana was certain to yield a car full of mustard greens, canned vegetables, beets, and preserved pears. The act of gardening has always been less of a hobby and more of a way of life. I remember standing out in those sprawling fields blessed by rolling sunlight so bright that mockingbirds seemed to ignite when they met the sky. Whispers of sugarcane stalks taller than any man rustled in the humid air while the cicadas screamed their loving into the afternoon. In my family's gardens I was one with the land that held my history, those before me who's voices are held within the sediment of that soil waiting to be tilled, unearthed for all to hear. 

​
When I was in high school, I decided to raise a community garden as my community service project. My school's location in the center of Pensacola was void of gardens, and most of my peers in school had never seen most vegetables grow. Because I grew up with gardens as not only a food source but also a location for family gatherings, I was stunned by other black students' lack of familiarity with gardens and arguably nature. While it was never stated directly, there was a surrounding attitude towards my project that questioned the necessity and rationale of owning a garden as a Black American. At the time of this encounter, I was unfamiliar with the cultural discourse of gardening as a Black American I began to question why this discourse existed due to its disharmony with what I understood to be culturally acceptable from my family's experiences. 
​​
In reference to the cultural criticism essays of the renowned bell hooks, the relationship between Black Americans and farming can be traced back to precolonial Africa.  This connection was only lost through the erasure of Black American history. Stefanie K. Dunning also draws this conclusion in her work, Black to Nature: Pastoral Return and African American Culture, and further elaborates on the normalization of agriculture, specifically in precolonial West African society, by referencing the autobiographical text of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano in which the author, Olaudah Equiano, describes the mutually respectful relationship between African farmers and the land they cultivated.  Conversely, Dunning looks to the transformation of African farming practices into forced labor through enslavement as a key point of uprooting from connecting with nature in a mutually beneficial and balanced manner.  The exploitation of Black Americans through the institution of slavery not only ripped Africans from their lands but then transplanted them into foreign soils and directly pitted the physical well-being of enslaved individuals against the land's ability to produce profit. Even with the end of slavery, the sharecropping system and other tenant farming systems were put in place by white landowners as a substitute for the power held during slavery. 
​
​
​
Within my family, the occupation of sharecropping remains commonly discussed. My grandfather's grandparents were notoriously sharecroppers well into the late 1960s. Without straying from the original site of the plantation known as El Dorado Plantation, my great-great-grandparents worked the same lands that had been worked by their parents before them to produce sugar cane, cotton, and other crops. Yet, despite the proximity in location and time to eras of enslavement and sharecropping, my family holds no shame in continuing to farm and grow gardens. Perhaps it is just as my grandfather said. The lack of fear of exploitation through working for another, specifically a landowner, leads to a renewed connection to gardening and farming when one owns the bounty of their harvest. 

​​

Gardening was less of a hobby, something posh to broadcast to friends on social media, and instead some deep calling for survival. The lines of my palms were inherited from generations of farmer who knew the sweetness and aloofness of nature through their time as helpmates to the land. They worked the earth and prayed to the land to give them enough to survive. I am a sharecropper's daughter, a title of which I am proud of because it means survival against all odds, against all brutal institutions of financial and economic oppression. As we once again face recessions and risks of another Great Depression, I remember that it was only through the knowledge and intimate relationship with the earth, a relationship that allowed them to predict her fickle moods and bend with her winds and storms, they planted and grew enough to feed our families for seasons without ever wasting. It is through this knowing, that I know I too can survive the weathers and weathering of the twenty-first century.