Woman of the Corn

(I wrote this little journal while employed in a cornfield in Oliver Springs, Tennessee 'bout 5 weeks ago. In the name of moonshine and all things sacred, I tell my tale.)

I.

There I go again! I've discovered a little patch of land I wanna bring around with me wherever I go. Where in a cat's fiddle have I bin, you ask?

I am currently employed in the most beautiful cornfield this side of the Mississippi. When you go digging around for work, you never know who you'll find.

Unfortunately, I arrived to Tennessee with what seemed to be the biggest darn hole in my pocket. I'd been working right along, scrimping and saving but somehow it all just caught up to me and I'd been nearing the end of my savings. I'm not done with this trip yet, darn it! Being the self- advocating type, I was again able to find a farmer who needed help just about the time I needed cash. Except that if NC was an organic farmer's paradise, well Tennessee is more than a stone's throw from it.

A walk through the Oak Ridge farmer's market at first made real employment seem doubtful. All family farms, good folks, but not enough money to go 'round. They've been hit real hard this year. Except for Mister Julian. "Go see that black farmer towards the end. Ask him if he can use a hand". I navigate the narrow stalls full of produce to the last truck in the lot where a small band of men gather around a heap of corn (they sell corn out of a truck bed here), looking for an African-American man. Finally I get confused and ask for my farmer by name. Seems white folks around here don't know that a whole lot of Julian's dark skin and hair reflect his Cherokee roots. I would later learn that his great grandmother was actually sent on the Trail of Tears. Julian doesn't understand either how he is called, except to say that marriage into race has a lot to do with things around here.

And so I am hired by this farmer, on account of two boys he was seeing 'bout didn't show up, another one of his farmhands has been "pissin' blood", and the like. I like Julian immediately because he's honest and straight forward. Although the other men at the farmer's market raise eyebrows at this curious woman from Maine, Julian almost treats me as any other southerner, offering Tennessee moonshine at the end of the day, and including me in his jokes.

This is another world where I have been lucky enough to sit at the table. I decide my English is far too lengthy and explanatory, and so I shorten it to meet our orders. "Corn, ma'am?" "'Bout four a dozen." I think of my Mainer father, the way the "r" in "corn" gets strangled in his mouth, making it another word altogether.

Another farmer comes up to the stall today to talk about the harvest and offers Julian some 'baccer, and another to talk about how everyone's been sellin' their family's land these days. I feel challenged as an ally when the conversation turns to hiring "the Mexicans", and I am patient with my questions. I learn that this man with whom I am working would be grateful if he could learn to read and write, let alone travel to see the world is changing. We have a lot to teach each other.

Julian has farmed corn on this land for a long time now, only recently tending it alone. He and his father pulled corn together, and even watermelons before that, until he died of a massive heart attack. I can see his Julian Sr. sitting at the stall speaking in the same honeyed drawl as his son, "Corn, ma'am? Got'em ready for you".

Now Julian Jr. often gets up at 4:30am to harvest, and works until 8:00 pm sometimes. He barely eats and takes orders over a cell phone at all hours of the day. He has employed a man who he calls "slow" and who he has known since they were boys. Bobby (they call him "Bobby Monday" after the local slum lord) lives up the road and the two spend the shift cussing each other out in a friendly spirit. There's a great but unfortunate story about Bobby being cheated out of a whole mess of money by some young guys pretending to be Julian. As Julian tells me this story, I can see how protective he is of his friend.

The cornfield is framed by glorious mountains and we pull corn until the sun sets over them. I am at peace as I learn to count 5 dozens to the bushel in the way Julian asks. I pull back the husk to taste the first fruit of my labor; the corn is sweet and its milk drips from between my teeth.

We harvest until the sun goes down and I am invited to eat cornbread and creamed corn and squash fried in cornmeal made by Julian's mother, Miss Nanna, a really small Cherokee woman who talks about how when Julian Sr. was alive he would have had nothing of this heating up cornbread and asks me all about Maine. I drive back to Knoxville with my payment of a jar of moonshine and a bag of corn. It has been an incredible day. It takes all my will power not talk to myself all the way home in my new accent.

II.

I love being in the cornfield because there is no squatting down on the haunches, everything is standing up and pulling those corns hard off the stalk and I feel powerful. I also feel powerful giving Ally, our workmule commands. She pays me no attention but I cuss her out the best I can. If you've never pulled corn like this is works just so: Ally pulls the sled down the rows of stalks while we work yanking those ears off and chuckin' 'em in the cart. I wear long sleeves and pants no matter how hot it gets because the sharp plant leaves give you little infuriating papercuts up and down the body that itch and burn like crazy. I am even wearing my bandana around my neck like a real southern cowgirl. Ally has no qualms about releasing gas every two or three rows, and we just try to stear clear of her backside when she is so inclined.

Today I work with Marshall, whom I'll be helping pull corn every morning from now on. Marshall is a disabled Vietnam Vet who traveled all around the country after the war to find himself. Found himself a whole lot of trouble with the powder, and luckily he now finds himself in the cornfield with us. Julian and Marshall cuss each other out, as is the custom. Ally, puts on her own airs.

I continue to help Julian at the farmer's market. One kind gentleman comes up and compliments Julian, "Corn's so sweet I had to take me another sugar pill." From the back of his covered Chevrolet truck I pick up all sorts of language while I'm stuffing and counting corn. I catch myself saying, "Now, go on, what time it is?" and other such things not usually in my English vocabulary. I learn how to cut words off and refamiliarize myself with "ain't" and other great words. Otherwise, folks just don't trust me.

Julian's been working this way since he was seven years old. Now that the farm is his, he still hears customers talking about how long his Daddy's corn grew to be. Every once and awhile I sneak a peak at this man who is my boss and teacher for the rest of my stay in Tennessee. I bet a lot of women loved this man hard. Strong hands, always a clean white shirt, in his early fifties but with that cinnamon-colored skin, who can tell? Then he cracks a wicked smile at me and says, "Sair-uh, ah'm gonna buy you an ice cream." And I'm not really sure who he's treating, or how old he really is.

Tennessee is like heaven back at home this night, with its summer breeze, whining cicadas and ripe tomatoes on the vine. I pick up my guitar and write a few verses of a sappy love song before I compost the last of the corn husks in the kitchen and head off to bed.

III.

It begins at dawn. Slipping into her jeans and plaid work shirt in the dark, like an embarrassed lover. Arriving at the cornfield she is covered in a wet haze, while mist hugs at slender stalks .

Parting grasses to reach for this fruit, covered in moisture, our arms, neck and the small of our backs.
The cornfield smells of sweat and ripeness, sour and salty on the tongue and inside the nostrils. Her fragrance infects the garments worn as one struggles through her, poking and scraping at tender skin.

And soon, heaviness in breath, grunting and sighing in the heat, the grabbing and thrusting noises of corn being pulled at and forced into the sled. Sweat dribbling down the bridge of his nose and over her chin, falling on the moist earth below. Struggling, pulling on arms and legs and bodies of corn and people alike.
Slender stalks pushing up, pushing at, standing stiff and grabbing at clothes.
And then- softness, a bruised and tortured retreat.
Smelling of ripeness and a penetrating sun.
Leaving a taste of corn in her bathwater.

In a fever she can't sleep, can't stop smelling in hard breaths,
Can't understand why she grabs at the sheets.
Then,
returning again..
to work in heat.



IV.

Every day I drive out to Oliver Springs to work for Julian, feeling like I came to Tennessee to enter this new, passionate time in my life. My whole body aches, especially my thumb, doubled back in pain from the pressure of pulling the corn. Marshall spends the morning cussin' out Ally, the asthmatic mule, and me. "'Git up in der" he hollers at her while throwing me a "Git yer ass up der", "if I haf tah tell you agin' i'll ride yer ass". When I start to cussin' him out I say, "Shit, Marshall, yer just sayin' it cause you're sweet on me."

When Marshall is mad at the world, he doesn't speak to anyone, and often walks off on Julian. "I'll never leave this here field", he says, "and Julian will never let me go". Sounds like job security.

One morning I join Marshall at the field and he isn't speakin' to either Julian or me. Julian told me later that a woman had brought his little girl by with the dirtiest little feet, because her mother hadn't bathed her in a week. Thinkin' on how he had treated me, Marshall had said, "all these women are the same."


When I finally leave Julian's farm to return to Maine, Marshall spends the whole mornin' treating me like the backside of the mule. In the heat we endure hours of his silence and slammin around our equipment. Julian calls him "ignorant" about a dozen times. Then in the shade of the yard after all the corn has been loaded on the truck, and we are sittin' havin' a few sips of some white lightin' moonshine he tells me, "you're not bad to look at, once you git that boy oughtta you." Then immediately he covers himself when I smile by sayin', "now don't go thinkin' anythin', you always have somethin' to say, girl." And then, with a grin, "You know why I bin ridin' your ass, don't ya? It's 'cause I like ya. But you start messin' up and I can't say nothin' 'cause if I start....But you better not be callin' me from halfway to Maine sayin' somethin's gone on an happened to you, you hear?"

Marshall couldn't stand for another woman he actually liked to let him down. He just couldn't trust me. But that didn't mean he didn't care.

V.



Another one for the ole resume- I learned to sell corn in a farmer's market in Eastern Tennessee. The demographics of the typical market consumer circle are the following: older white women over the age of sixty and stay- at- home moms in modernized versions of southern bell flair, belled skirts and cotton blouses, debutantes at tomato stalls. This is a weekly social club. And shrewd, competitive, penny-pinching bargainers. Everyone wanting to know what kind of corn, how big the kernel, when it was picked, etc, etc. Sometimes I would notice Julian gettin' tired of them, and I would put on my sugar-coated southern speech and show them what all I had learned me in Tennessee.



Whenever someone passes by our truck of corn, it is important to say, " how 'bout it?", to entice them under the sale umbrella. Usually they bite. And when they do, it's imperative to send them off with, "I 'preciate you" and "you come back". Direct and to the point. If I don't use conjuntions in my speech they honestly look past me as if they don't trust me, or I don't exist. Then I face the mockery of Julian, which is beyond okay. Every so once in awhile Julian tells his customers, "I'll tell you somethin', this girl here sure can pick corn." Which belies all the gender struggle we inevitably go through daily in the field.



One of my favorite customers is old Miss Eula, a cousin of Julian's mother. Miss Eula is a wizened little peach of an old black woman who hangs on the arm of her son, mostly to chat with Julian. She talks often of her youth of hard laboring on the farm, with her son making faces of negation behind her back. Miss Eula makes all kind of promises of blackberry pies, but all we ever do is get to talkin' and advisin' the customers.



There are all kinds of characters on the farm. One afternoon Mr. Emmett comes up the drive spittin a big wad a 'baccer and a shotgun up over his shoulder. "Shit, Emmett, what you bin shootin' at?" Emmett's wife has the cancer and to pass time between treatments he has been shootin' at a rat around the house. I tell him I think he's on a fool's errand.

Just as Julian is divvying up some fine moonshine one afternoon a chubby young police officer circles back and forth out in front of the drive. Thinkin' we might have been caught in the act, we stuff aside the moonshine, but it's Ally he wants. "That your jack?" he asks. Well, Marshall cracks right up and says, "Shit, man don't know a jack from a mule." She's no ass and neither is he.

VI.

Up the road for okry I was sent one day to Julian's relatives. I had asked for a load of okra for Josh back home to fry up. I had learnt me how to become quite a negotiator and a regular at the farmstands. I knew just 'bout everything about where to get anything but moonshine in these parts.



When I left Julian's farm, I didn't have much more money in my pocket, but I had a jar of moonshine, blackberry jam, bags of corn, and the respect of two hard-ass farmers in Eastern Tennessee.



I ponder over a line in my book, Suttree, by Cormac McCarthy, that reminds me of the farm, and keep coming back to it. Hard weather, says the old man. So may it be. Wrap me in the weathers of the earth, I will be hard and hard. My face will turn rain like the stones.

Is the world fair in Knoxville, Tennessee?

How did I get here? All of a sudden I am sitting in 90-degree heat on a field of short astroturf-like grass field (with a drain in the middle of it) on the fourth of July watching a young man repel down from the giant disco ball they call the Sunsphere. I couldn't be anywhere more American than the site of the 1982 World Fair. Ronald Reagan is speaking on TV.... and didn't they just mean to say "former" US President? I feel like I've been transported back in time or that maybe I just dove into some X- files rerun where they have successfully cloned all these little white families. Ah, but the hillbilly fiddle is addictive, and there is fried food I've never heard of, so ah guess ah'll give 'er a try.






I came to Knoxville to follow a new friend home to his wonderful h.o.m.e. and give in to a particular feeling about returning to this beautiful state. Because it is my goal to explore healing and wisdom all over the South, I was initially mystified at the possibilities I would find here, and totally unprepared for the passion I would experience in my own journey. After all, isn't Knoxville a relic of another time? In his novel Suttree Cormac McCarthy refers to it as a "city constructed on no known paradigm, a mongrel architecture reading back through the works of man in a brief delineation of the aberrant disordered and mad." And yet, a glutton for punishment, I fall in love with it all.

My first day walking my way through Knoxville, I of course sought out the homeless community and it's advocates. It was kind of hard not to notice them. Walking down Broadway into town I passed by the Salvation Army and under a bridge where the low income community has taken up daily residence. I wanted to know where people stay when the heat in this valley town creeps up beyond recognition.

I shared a conversation with Reverend Bruce, whose organization is actually similar to Preble Street's in Portland. I was amazed to find such a kindred spirit in the Reverend, a man who understands what it means to simultaneously be doing ally work and self reflection. He spoke poignantly about his "hillbilly roots" in Appalachia, and openly shared his process of constantly questioning faith within the work.
















Knoxville is populated by an old carpet and furniture industry, factory work which still draws many Latinos to the state on the whole for employment. It was once known as the "new Atlanta", boasting one of the first African-American mayors in the south.
Today, however, the city is pretty segregated and there is a count of 1800-2000 homeless folks a month, 70% of whom are chronically homeless, according to Rev. Bruce. More and more women who have chronic major mental illness inhabit these streets and it is even more and more difficult to engage people in services. We talk about the people resting under the bridge as being a symbolic stronghold of people's resistance to treatment and development and as an assertion of their rights as a community. I hear the music to Les Mis playing in my mind.





The community center has currently purchased and begun renovating an old, elaborate boarding house called Minvilla, which continues to be attraction for the alternative tourist. Decrepit, witchy remains that will someday soon provide a transition for people on the street.




We talk about the implications of doing work with the faith community. Rev. Bruce describes Knoxville as being so "haunted by religiousity" that even atheists have a church. As I walk around the neighborhood, I believe him. Jesus is around every corner. But as I have learned in my volunteer work with the homeless community in Durham, NC, in the South sometimes the more radical folks are people of faith, as opposed to state social workers.















How do they protect their "neighbors" under the bridge when it is too warm outside? When the temperature is 89 degrees or above, they raise a white flag to alert them that they can rest inside the shelter during the day. Under the umbrella of labor relations in the South, we talk about how many homeless folks continue to be exploited for dangerous day labor in Knoxville. Every day on my way to the farm, I pass the overpopulated Labor Ready and hope that people are getting enough care in this heat.

II.

I headed to the Smoky Mountains for some of my own healing. Although the Smoky Mountains are incredibly over-commercialized, to the point of nausea, I walked far enough into their woods to let the green take over. I couldn't believe how overgrown with moss and flowers, like a wooded fairyland. Getting lost once, picking up a bear trail, sharing a moment with a deer, I walked myself into the woods alone and set up camp. I was so hoping to see a black bear. I could hear them around me as I drifted off to sleep, totally confident to have my bag hung up high in the trees above me. Although I was sleeping with the bears the whole time, I never actually saw one. I awoke to have oatmeal next to the river until rangers approached with horses and I was accompanied once again.

III.

Finally, I believe I came to Knoxville to hear the wall at the US/Mexico border being played. At a local gallery downtown I finally met another traveling musician, interested in "transforming the border from a symbol of fear and loathing into an instrument capable of promoting unity". Working with various instruments and communities on both sides of the border, Glenn from Tucson, Arizona has created a symphony of the metal, helicopters, and even air around the wall to answer the question, how can sound be a bridge between people?

As I listen I am reminded of the call and response of salsa music, meditative sufi chanting, and even the southern cicadas, undulating choruses in the Tennessee heat. One of the most poignant scenes of this musical journey is at a desert altar, where he has recorded and transformed the space surrounding loss. We had an inspiring conversation about empowering ourselves to transform our instruments of oppression into instruments of sound and healing. I really liked the idea of people having access to the wall through music and I hope to incorporate this into my work someday. (Check out sonicanta.com).


On my way out of town, I pass Carletta and Missy's Quality Furniture and Antiques, cross the railroad tracks and housing projects to arrive at the mountains. In my heavier bags are two silk flowers, tokens of my time here. They represent the sweetness and the frivolity, the capacity of people in Knoxville to create beauty out of old relics and still older stories.

Life, Love, and Revolution at Thirty....

In lieu of what my Dad calls my "expository weirdness", I decided to provide some thoughts and images from my six months to describe what is currently feels like to be "southbound".


Along the path to thirty, I had younger women say to me, "it doesn't really matter", "you're making such a big deal out of being thirty". After traveling for six months, I say to you all with pride, it is a really HUGE, beautiful, BIG deal to be a thirty year old woman.

While lounging at a recent 4 hour Greyslug bus layover in Charlotte, NC, I compared notes with an 18 year old from Burlington. Raging hormones? Check. Feel you need all the space in the world because you're at the height of your power? Check. Confused at what comes next? Check. Revolution comes around again at thirty.

Why is thirty so damn special? And why is my body and heart in such revolt? Why haven't I been granted the comfy couch of my young adulthood? Movies on Friday evening with the sweetie of my dreams...Hmmm, nah. All of a sudden people talk more about what "sign" you are, and start throwing terms at you like "saturn return". I feel like I crashed into thirty and am still sorting out what hit me. I wonder, could I have prepared myself for this?



(<- Your heroine, forced to sit in the middle aisle of an Atlanta-bound Greyhound)

At the latter end of my teens, I was filled with a sense of my own freedom, yet intimidated by the change my life was in for. My body and heart were in two different places. Now is no different. Out on the farm I dream of cultivating my own family, while my heart holds on to places, people, summer nights spent dreaming, two feet stretching out alone.

Except that at thirty, and alone, I am a spiritual being, and all along this journey I bare witness to evidence of this in other women. I started my own experience of this wisdom by moving to Providence, where I sought out Mary, running her own home and business. Laurie and I created living art in her kitchen in Washington, DC. I met Siyade, from Philly, confronting racism in her work and relationships, and making sense of new growth in her approach. And finally, in Tennessee, I meet a woman like myself, with a handful of songs and a few good chords on guitar, creating projects around a new identity. And me, halfway to or from home, and I've had my hands in the dirt, trying to unearth the creator, the mother in me. There's just something so special about thirty.



My grandmother recently told my mom she had heard I was in love. My mother, of course, corrected her, stating that she thought I had not met anyone. But I am so in love, Grandma! I'm in love with this new person I see in myself, the one who lets herself see the stars, nap in the heat of the afternoon, makes really good sweet potatoes. This one who speaks so many languages and dances. This one! She is just beginning to surface. I just met another woman turning thirty that came to Knoxville to get space from the end of a relationship. She described herself to me as "ridiculously happy". (<- Knoxville nightlife)


As I travel and meet people, my idea of love only expands. What are the elements of a good love story? Passion, compassion, fury and fire, release. What am I missing?

I used to think love is like the cities I visit. Places you can get lost in and be ready to investigate or be done with. They captivate, pursue and purchase your heart and interest.
Lovers leave you wandering and wanting and exhausted, tripping home up 6 flights of stairs. Intoxicated, you breathe them in and the possibilities liberate and loosen you until they convince you that you can ride on their backs for awhile until you lose yourself in their winding streets. Looking up, the world is endless. Looking down, dirty and used. Days when you feel lost in all their scraped skies. Days with hidden treasures, like coffee in a darling bookstore and you melt into yourself. People and cities are this untouchable and this beloved.




In Durham, I learned that I had more privilege to choose.
The women I met there are having children on their own, and creating wonderful relationships around their choices. Knowing I have more ability to choose gives me more freedom to fall in love. The community I discovered felt powered by women.



Knoxville, TN has rekindled so much of my passion and ability to let go. The farmland and mountains stirred my desires in ways I thought impossible in that stagnant heat. I awoke to be surprised again and again.

I looked at a job online the other day and had the courage to not even think about applying. I know I need more of the stars and the thick heat and this revolution.

My mom and I have been talking about "home" being an acronym. I have roots so thick I feel them sprouting underneath my toenails, but sometimes the lessons are little homes too. I am living in this lesson right now. You're welcome to knock on my door and visit, but don't ask me to move...not now. This house is not on the market.


My girl Alana called it right before I left. She explained my depression as a shrinking of my world, prescribing my remedy as a need to amplify my perspective. Maybe it is a privilege to think this way, but I would not have been able to heal my depression any other way. Anything else is a load in the dryer. Spin, spin, spin.






Southbound is no longer just a geographical concept to me. I left Maine that way, but I have changed my perspective. Y'all know when we refer to our body parts "going south", but what about our hearts melting into age and time until we are perfected beings? The south warms, thickens, exposes skin. I have always gone south to feel young and liberated. At thirty, I am documenting this awakening as I am documenting so many other types of revolution. It's only fair.

I welcome many more southbound nights of melting heat and lightning bugs in my lifetime.

America's Finest

Living in the Piedmont region of North Carolina, I fell for the lush, overgrown vegetation that provided rich soil for a multitude of different crops. In the heat I sunk my hands into the organic earth, tilled and perfected into rows by the same hands that would bring it's produce weekly to the Farmer's Market. Every day I shared a meal with the farmer's family- green, earthy asparagus, ripe sungold tomatoes, a wealth of produce at my gloved

fingertips. As a farmer, I took breaks when I needed them, stopped to talk with my co-workers, and returned home to a cushiony existence in a cool house with electric fans.

The land I visited while traveling out to various migrant camps during a "Witness for Justice" program with the Farmworker Unit of Legal Aid in Raleigh, NC, spoke of a different harvest. Human beings, like produce, marketed at the lowest cost to work on monocropped land of tobacco and cotton.

Barreling down dirt pathways, barely roads, that end in uniform bunk houses in varying states of disrepair, I am reminded of my visit to the US/Mexico border in Arizona. I was there over one year ago on a rescue trip, bringing food and water to people who risked dehydration in the desert. We walked around hot land, encountering the remains of lives of survival and struggle: small, cavernous dwellings, littered by food and spoiled clothing. I wondered then at who could possibly think any human being would choose to live this way.

(picture-cotton)

Now I have the same feeling as I walk into the dark exterior of the camp houses. I see a broken pipe hanging down. The humidity traps me as I try to make space between the bed and kitchen table. The set of houses where these tobacco farmers are living is isolated and small. I am reminded of summer camp dwellings where I have stayed to "rough it" out in the woods. But this is not summer camp, and these are hardworking families. The neat rows of well-tended tobacco sit juxtaposed next to disheveled homes.

Conversing with the farmers brings the setting to life. It is dinnertime and the moment is alive with young men chiding each other, women cooking and showing off children. The family extends through each unit as a community takes form. The vibrant sounds of Mexican Spanish: words of comradery and journey. Everyone is interested in hearing how they can keep safe, greeting Omar our guide, and learning of the NC Justice Center. And then, I am reminded of how young so many of these workers are when one of the guys asks me about my nose ring. What do young people do when they must wait sometimes weeks for work?

Farmwork is the hardest sort of work to do because it requires that the human form be strong and dependable. Yet, so often migrant farmworkers are treated with little respect. Their backs bear the weight of our daily sustenance while their hearts endure our discrimination, jokes, and lack of consideration. Migration is a reality for many people all over the United States. I have met a handful of New Yorkers in North Carolina, seeking a higher quality of life. I have ventured out of Maine to touch my spirit again and improve my own living. Families change, shift and grow out of cities and towns. We cross borders, travel through mountains, carving out new paths all the time. How are some travelers beyond compassion, some borders beyond crossing?


As I farm my way across the South in the heat I feel deeply connected to the human beings whose hands touched my food. I think about how their shoulders feel at the end of a day, how the summer sun sometimes makes you feel like you can never get comfortable, how their children may have breathed in chemicals out in the filde. And I ask myself, what is the true cost of my food?

Southern Exposure

(The alternate topic under this title would have been about my southern skin infestations...)

Well, it's hot June in Carolina del Norte and I having been watching okra get ready for its season on the farm. Peaches will soon be here, and we have all been enjoying the beginnings of tomato season. Lightning bugs are out in full glory and somewhat humiliated by our voyeuristic needs to put them in jars to see their bums light up. I wear the humidity every day like a polyester suit coat and know I will be ready for whatever heatwave Maine will ever dish out. Farming is near impossible for me, and the chigger bites and poison ivy that were my hazing into the south are still making my skin crawl. I went out into my garden today on Arnette Ave. and marveled at all the creatures in our hammock. Then decided i would have nothing to do with them.

I have been in North Carolina one month longer than I had planned. I have fallen for the South because it pokes and provokes me. Durham has been a wonderful place from which to explore other areas in the South, and to come home to, dragging my tale between my legs as I evaluate everything I ever knew about people and organizing. What I have learned into my hands about the farm and the legacy of this land has been further planted in me as I share in stories of resistance and a deep, immediate kind of pain rooted here, a pain renewed by the reality of immigrants as slave labor in the South.

I wouldn't want anyone to think that I came here, found community, and lived out my days in peace. The south isn't about peace. Its dance is a furious one, fire and passion. We only sit on porches in between. The South is a train barreling through towns, lurching and sweating out fumes, screeching, "Are you ready to get on?" I can't tell yet, if I'm getting on, but I sure am doing some of the deepest analysis of power and privilege I have ever had to do.

So there are places on this trip that I don’t realize I need to be until I find myself speeding down the interstate in their direction. I want to tell you about a few of them.

I. The Highlander Center

I was pretty sure after one month in North Carolina that I was receiving a clear message to go to Florida. Every activist and labor organizer that I had spoken with agreed that there were rad happenings south of where we were. The Immokalee farmworkers have just won a fight against McDonalds and are the highlight of southern Florida activism for farmworkers.

But after a couple attempts at trying to arrange farm work and visits to the peninsula it was clear: if I wanted to do farm work in Florida I would have to haul watermelons, tomato season being over, and also I wasn’t really ready for Florida in the middle of the summer. Besides, the season was over and most of the organizers had scattered and were actually working on seasonal crops in the Carolinas. Finding anyone would be like stitching a quilt without a needle.

So five minutes after I had set my sights west on Tennessee, home to some 40 anti-immigrant proposals, I marched down Arnette Ave to my friend Tony’s place(a collective house where I am now living) and he immediately said, “you have to go to this conference at the Highlander Center.”

Who up North knows about the Highlander Center today anyway? When we think of labor organizing many of us think of local unions, protests at Wal-mart, our own local meat and seafood processing plants.

The Highlander Center is sacred space. Perched atop a hill in the valley of the great Smokies of Eastern Tennessee the spirit meets the struggle. The Highlander Center has been a nexus of popular education and labor organizing in the South since the 1940s, although many people identify it with the Civil Rights movement, because it was one of the first safe spaces for black and white laborers to organize together.

Still ringing in my ears are the songs of resistance from the Civil Rights Movement that initiated my days at the conference. "I woke up this morning with my mind, set on freedom". This has been one of the blessings of southern organizing. Every conference maintains this tradition of song. During a music circle at Highlander, I heard Guy and Candie Carawan, two seasoned musician activists tell stories of songs from the movement, from the coast of the Carolinas to Appalachia, songs like good friends carrying the load. Songs like "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize", and "We shall Overcome" that people perpetuated in frightening moments in the dark, or happily over supper. This inherited drumbeat of revolution awakened my commitment. Oh, let us always remember to sing.

The other blessing in our organizing work is the progressive language access movement in the South. I came to the Highlander to participate in a training entitled," Interpreting in the social justice movement". I have seen some of the finest activism here around organizing interpretation and been involved in bettering my skills as a simultaneous interpreter for ally work in the immigrant justice movement. I believe that if I truly want to create change I need to step back and trust in immigrant and indigenous leadership; using my language privilege for good and assuming the role of interpreter at these events may just be the most radical way of using my voice.

So I have been volunteering to interpret at many events, sometimes getting paid, and seeing some amazing discussions take place. I went to a forum on immigration in the South, a local conference for Latinos in NC, and have offered to interpret at the US social forum in Atlanta, GA. Most of these conferences work from popular education models disseminated by Highlander. More power to our peeps.
The focus of the immigration work we are doing is to frame the movement within the larger context of racist politics and apply a popular education model to create strong communities that question our basic values around immigration. We are building a "multi-racial movement".

The immigration conference I attended was at University of North Carolina, the oldest public university and perhaps the reason for NC being the more progressive southern state. One of the participants said he felt the South was unique with a more settled population of Latinos we are changing the paradigm because the minority is organizing itself, instead of being organized by others.

One of the moments I remember most is a woman from Paraguay sharing how when she came to the United States she was in four years of darkness.

Eastern TN is an amazing place. I loved resting in the mountains at a place where MLK, Paulo Friere, and other people came together to share ideas that are still seen as so radical. I took a walk down a country road at one point and decided I would come back here in July. There must be something else I need to see.

Finally, as I was sitting down at the end of the conference, waiting for my ride and watching a perfect afternoon end in the mountains, a woman I had been trying to connect with in Immokalee, FL walked up the road with her huge backpack. I also met a group of people from New Orleans who offered me a place to stay and information. A woman who talked about dead bodies in the streets and handing out respirators to clients only to see them two seconds later be rounded up by immigration, respirators on the ground. She will need someone to cook her good meals and remind her to sleep. Sometimes the less we organize something, the more available we are to receive it in gift form.


II. Greensboro, NC

One restless night a couple of weeks ago, while tossing and turning and like a bear, scratching an itchy belly full of swelling chigger bites against the sandy texture of my bedsheets, I dreamt I lived in Greensboro in the week of February 1, 1960.

Maybe I had been thinking about how to talk about race, maybe I had been troubled by the lack of struggle for immigration reform in NC in the past few weeks. I don’t know. But all of a sudden I was transported into Greensboro and was being led by a young defiant black woman into the side door of the local Woolworth building, the site of the start of the Civil Rights movement, when black university students sat down at the lunch counter and demonstrated until they won the right to equal service.

I do not remember much of this dream, but I do recall being led by the hand and while my guide sat at those same stools, I hung back at the end of the counter, observing some books on nearby shelves. I awoke with the thought, “what kind of ally will you be?”

Somehow it just felt important to me to go to Greensboro. I learned during my life in Bolivia that places of resistance can be very sacred sites. I felt that this place might inform other areas of my trip.

Greensboro is a graceful step into the past. Old tiled buildings, streets lined with antique shops promising wonders untold to window shoppers who chance into their caves of bedframes, wagon wheels, and soda fountains. I played the part of the mosaic artist, gathering tiles for a future project, peering into alleys and looking at storefronts to imagine their story. Red velvet and lemon cakes behind glass cases and milkshakes and fountains…a quaint downtown with no idea as to why I have come.

I paid homage at the Woolsworth building, which is boarded up and awaiting restoration, along with the Civil Rights Museum next door. According to the tourist center folks, the museum has already received a lot of funding, which apparently has been mismanaged. The folks at the other historical museum up the road said there had been a lot of water damage. Hmm. So I made the hard cement sidewalk outside my museum and paid tribute to this home to courage and resistance.

We are sure going to need it in New Orleans.

III.

Most recently I was at a Barnraising for a Malcolm X Radio Station in Greenville, SC, chaperoning a group from the Youth Noise Network, a radio station in Durham powered by high school youth. The term barnraising implies building something in a short amount of time. For our project, it was building the Low Power Station, WMXP,in a weekend.

The goal of this weekend was to provide Greenville with the resources to create the station and to empower attendees in general by offering technical skills in all areas of radio as media activism. They reported that African-Americans in general only own 3.4% of US radio stations. The hope was to diversify the voices. Greenville, SC was chosen because it is a very conservative southern town. A walk downtown during the "Scottish Games" (can you imagine wearing a wool kilt in a heat wave? thou shalt not kilt!) offered a reference as to who owns the streets in some of the more wealthier area. We did stop to pay tribute to a statue commemorating the students in Greenville who were a part of the movement to end segregated public spaces. But from this moment on, the struggle we witnessed was disjointed and pretty segregated.


The event we participated in offered no collective analysis and response to privilege and power and appeared at the outset to be another attempt of folks from the North, mostly white and mostly male, coming to educate folks from South to be more "progressive". In many ways, it backfired because of this. In summary, the project exploded in the end into disorganized dialogue brought forward by a committee of well-meaning folks who unfortunately created even more problematic layers.

What I have learned from the South thus far is that there is real pain here that I may never be able to understand. It is not a carnaval ride. As a Yank with white skin privilege I cannot just buy my ticket and hope on. I need to keep challenging myself, for I am an imposer as much because of my northernness, as my white skin. There is trauma here that I have not lived, not in NC, not in New Orleans, not in anywhere I have hope for. I have struggled with questions about my role as an ally, my privilege as an ally, and my own spiritual journey. I have explored questions about my travel and the impact of my presence in communities not my own. There is a responsibility to doing work in the South, to educating myself without putting that burden on people of color, to knowing the community I travel to and why I am going there. Although I always want to support all people traveling freely, esp women, the work that I will continue to do as I travel through to the border is to look at the privilege I have in being able to make this trip, and how to use that privilege to turn around racism.




Regarding New Orleans, I am taking longer to get there because I feel it an enormous responsibility. I want to know if being another white person there can be at all helpful or even more oppressive.I've been asking myself why I'm here, how I think I can be a good ally, and what are the questions I can bring home. When I get that squirming feeling in my belly (the kind that isn't left over from Bolivian chicha) I need to sit with it,figure out what feels wrong, and meet the challenge. The impact of this place is that i am just doing that naturally. Sometimes we white folk get all stressed when we don't consider something; I'm working to challenge myself despite my need to be perfect and adored. I have also been interviewing my elders here on how they approach the role of ally in this space because whatever work we're doing, we all need community.

Father's Day 2007

For M.A.A. and A.A.L.


The girl slips her hand into his
Imagining the words she will speak
In his own language
Papi, quiero pizza
Without sensing the words on his mind
Deportación, migra, que será de la reforma, m'ija?
Or even
"Illegal alien".

They walk the narrow sidewalks,
And from behind there is nothing alien
About the way her body hugs his.
She has the same gait,
Legs short and lagging in city traffic.
The soft down on her back is his,
And they raise the same thick wealth of eyebrows
At the line of cars.

Father's Day in a New York minute.

They continue past shops and greet,
Although the only Spanish she speaks is whispered at bed,
Among kicked-off covers in the lone room they share,
Her sticky little face molded into his arm.
Or upon leaving her school in the afternoon
Amidst a flurry of mothers pecking at their clothes
And herding children along while
He waits to take her hand,
His work uniform still pressed from the morning
And his black hair shining.

Still she listens to the señoras and understands
As if she were the one they were talking to.
She has no idea
That one day soon
She might need to use this language to ask
Her family
Why her father had to leave.

-Sarah L.

Got food? Thank a farmworker...

Day 1 at the farm:

When I was living back in Maine, I knew I wanted to come to the South to farm. I also knew that I was going to be involved with migrant workers in a variety of different jobs.

Once while facilitating a weekly support group for homeless Latino men, the group chose the topic of the meanings of agricultural labor in their lives. One of my elderly Mexican clients described in detail the loss he felt at not being physically able to farm, because "farming is like having money in the bank". Being able to grow food and feed your family is the greatest security a person can have.

Thinking about how to design this part of my trip, I was clear that I didn't want to play at being an immigrant farmworker so that I could experience something. Being a farmworker and an immigrant so often means being exploited or earning too little; doing solidarity work doesn't mean studying people or in any way excepting that behavior. Moreover, I'm committed to organic farming. I'd been working to create a local food co-op in Maine and learning more about our agricultural economy. And farmwork means a lot to me at this age, touching earth to get clarity, feeling connected to my own mother, who did all kinds of migrant labor, educating myself to perhaps work once again with permaculture and farming in Maine. And yes, to be in solidarity with farmworkers.

I found Harry LeBlanc and the Beausol Farm through a friend of a friend in Durham. I called Harry just after his chosen apprentice failed to show up. At the time, I thought there would be no way I could do it : I would need to bike 60 miles daily on sketchy roads to get there. I pondered this out loud one day with my friend Tennessee, who immediately suggested I take her car. Well, I'm not afraid of much in this world, but driving a stick is right up there with death. However, I really wanted to farm. So I relearned how to drive in rush hour on the 15-501 and it all worked out.

I spend my first day weeding in the swiss chard and other beds. It looks like the farm had been needing another person for awhile. Over lunch, the other worker, Jessica, and Harry's wife called me an "angel". What I had put out there, my desire to farm, had led me to Beausol just in time. I feel blessed to once again be creating something living with my hands.

Farmworkers in North Carolina: nearly 5 out of 10 farmworker households in NC cannot afford enough food for their families.

Day 2: Heat in the flower bed

What images come to mind when we think of planting flowers? I imagine my mother, down on her hands and knees with her soft hands in the moist dirt, digging amidst squirming worms, sifting out the weeds with her trowel.

This land I'm working was not made for this garden, I think on my first day. The earth is dry, crumbling orange and red rocks and dirt. We are in a bit of a drought and both the soil and I are thirsty and hardened. I pick my hoe up over my head and swing it down to till....I reach rock and the hit reverberates into my elbows. I think of the arm muscles to be acquired in this task...that is, until midday when the sun is overhead and I think about how I've actually been standing in one place all day. Today is also different than yesterday because I am working alone and feel resentful at having to work in the same hot spot until the afternoon. I try to put good thoughts into the ground as i shovel and rake and hoe and till these plot to no avail; I have no use for planting flowers right now. I mean it's April for the love of God! As much as I love this labor of recreating the land, I look longingly over at the vegetable beds and yearn for their succulent greenery. I want to plant myself in their moister wanderings and be an artist of legumes, sculpting their rows. This land is not for my imagination.

This land is your land, this land is my land...from Native families to enslaved farmhands. It is quite amazing to find myself in a place that is such a compilation of my southern studies. Farmer Harry moved to this state from Lousiana, where he was raised to farm an even hotter, humid land. He moved to North Carolina to attend school and subsequently, to practice as a scientist until he found himself drawn back into farming and supporting a large family. With the death of his first wife, he stayed home to raise their daughter and farming became a full time occupation for Harry. No he works out in the heat until dusk, wearing a long sleeve linen shirt and jeans.

But long before Harry, this land produced other stories of grief and struggle, resistance and change. Harry showed me how he has found arrowheads, while tilling the soil. Based on his knowledge of Native Americans in the Carolinas, he claims that there could have been Cherokees on this land. At some point, the land was colonized and converted to a cotton farm. We do not speak of what we are sure is true...if this land was big enough , it was probably run on slave labor. Before Harry bought the land it was a tobacco farm, so it had been converted yet again for crops that would ultimately do damage to the land that would take years to repair. Now the land is still being converted into soil that has been finally been certified organic.

Tomatoes and peppers grow well now in this southern soil. We grow greensd such as spinach, but for some it is too hot to produce a good crop and the leaves wither and yellow in the heat. I am amazed to find we will be planting okra, and that the asparagus is already up in April. And my favorite...southern spring onions are sweet and ready to barbecue. There are also herbs, artichoke, broccoli, potatoes (some varieties from Maine), a small mushroom farm in the back woods, bushes of berries and grapes and kiwi, and out in the far field- a beehive. Everything is growing and harvesting has begun while the soil in Maine is probably still unfreezing. 600 tomato plants sit in the greenhouse waiting. Many of these plants have been raised from organic seed that was produced in Maine (Fedco, Seeds of Change). Again, my worlds collide as I think of friends who able hands are sorting those seeds.

In time, I will learn what can be planted here. But today, I am sweating in the flower bed and striking rock, trying to remember that flowers bring the bees to pollinate it all.

Farmworkers in North Carolina: Agricultural work has been ranked number three of the most dangerous occupations in the US. In NC, heat stress, dehydration, falls, and pesticides are frequent health hazards.

Day 3: A day for planting flowers

Today all of the flower seedlings that have been raised in the greenhouse need to be planted in their beds by 2:00 is the afternoon. This is to be my introduction to work on a biodynamic , organic farm.

Never again when I buy products that say biodynamic on the label, or eat at my brother's fancy raw food and often biodynamic restaurant in NYC, will I take it for granted that this food is hard work! Biodynamic farming means that all planting and harvesting is organized and conceptualized by the cosmos. That is, the position of the moon and the Earth dictates when we can plant certain groups of plants. There are flower days, fruit days, root days, etc. And for some reason I don't understand, flowers always seem to have to be planted by 2:00 in the afternoon. Humph.

The day starts out easy enough. We water all the thirsty seedlings, weed a little in the greens, and start to plant the flowers in the far beds while Harry does other projects. Then, as the heat begins to climb and it turns around 11:00 am, Harry and his wife get progressively more nervous about getting all these seedlings into the ground. The seedlings are a bit overgrown and if they are not planted today, they will have to be planted next week, which would definitely stunt their growth. About around 12:00 it is announced that we will not have lunch until 2:00 when all the planting is done. Around 1:00 my back hurts and we are almost throwing seedlings into their holes, trying to get everything planted. I feel the hot breath of my co-workers stream into my sweat-drenched face as we cover the same ground in a race to get it all done. I think that if I didn't have my new friend Jessica laughing and sweating with me, I wouldn't want to be doing this at all. My body becomes a sweat-oiled machine out in the dry, red field where there is no green, no oxygen. I am a human conveyer belt, dumping seedlings into holes, patting and moving on. I have no love for them now. They are on their own. At the end of the day I go home, and fall asleep on Tennessee's couch, dehydrated and aching.

Farmworkers in North Carolina: NC has the highest production of sweet potatoes in the nation. However, farmworkers in NC earn 35 cents a bucket. They have to pick and haul 125 buckets to make $50. Sweet potatoes are heavy!

Day 4: Labor pains

I return to the farm the next day, after having tossed and turned all night on the futon couch. I have woken several times with sharp pain in my lower back. I can't believe I can get up in this southern heat with this pain in my back and work again. Today is a fruit day and we spend most of it planting peppers in rows. Thankfully, we have all day to plant them and we take frequent breaks. What makes it bearable is that I have Jessica to converse with and that I keep shifting my body to compensate for all the aches and pains. We all agree that we do not want another day like yesterday, and this day has a much nicer pace.


The pepper seedlings look good, although the ground they go into is hot and crumbly and in the middle of a drought. By the afternoon, their leaves wilt, even after watering them immediately. There are sweet peppers and hot peppers. Harry said he always plants a different variety of spicy pepper. I think about the four pepper plants I planted at my garden in Maine last summer. They blossomed in the breeze but the bugs immediately ate their stalks.


Being at the farm makes me look at motherhood differently. On a drive back from Beausol, I was pondering the implications of leaving my community at a time when many women my age are settling into families or homes of their own. I left home with much grief that this would not be my path, that I should be thrust out into the world on my own again to re-hatch myself into yet another environment. It was close to Mother's Day and I had just told my grandmother I regretted not being able to give her any great grandbabies. But had I not just given life to an acre of green goodness? Weren't they my miracle? When I feel like the cycle of life is passing me by I need only to stick my hands into the dirt and nurture the life I am creating. This cycle of life that my own momma began when she worked with her hands on someone else's land, when she got down onto her hands and knees and envisioned her own garden, when she talked softly to her child and taught me to love the green growing by the ocean's side. These are her grandchildren I tend. For now they are what I birth.

Farmworkers in NC: Although labor laws for farmwork require children to be 12 years old at least, all ages can be found in the fields. By the way, they earn 35 cents a bucket to pick peppers.

Day 5: A day for planting 600 tomato plants

I arrive early to the farm because the cosmos have predetermined that today we will plant all of the over 600 tomato plants that sit withering in the greenhouse. It's news to me that tomatoes are actually native to this area, and NC makes a huge profit annually from the tomato, which has a pretty long season.


Because it's native to this land, the chance for blight on the crops is even more significant and we spend the first part of the morning preparing the plants for the ground by suckering them, or taking the small leaves off the bottom so they get fewer problems from the ground up.

I am amazed to hear the names of the varieties that come from this area. My favorite is the Mortgage Lifters, aptly named by a NC native that used to go around selling radiators out of his truck. He developed this tomato and was able to pay off his mortgage in one year. So goes the legend.

We plant row after row of sungolds, heirlooms, tomatillos. Jessica and I raise concerns about setting up the drip tapes because these beauties will be thirsty. But there are so many to plant! We just keep going, stopping at the end to mulch them with hay and water as much as we can. Jess, a former dairy farmer, shows me how to really handle the hay. We pray for rain. It is beautiful to plant tomatoes in their native land. Their smell tickles my nose, which is sunburned and sneezy from the hay.

Farmworkers in NC: Come to the state from other migrant jobs further south for the tomato harvest.