Read Speaking Truth to Power for Free Online

only two now left, were too young at fourteen and twelve to handle the planting by themselves. By 1962, in order to keep the farm, my father had to leave the construction work and return full-time to farming.
    About the same time that my father returned to full-time farming, the market price of cotton declined. In the late 1950s and 1960s there was less and less field work outside of the family plots. By the time I was nine, and big enough to be expected to pull cotton, relatively little was planted. By that time we only worked our own fields and thus I never hired out to chop or pull cotton. Our family crop went from cotton to peanuts. But peanuts, too, had to be chopped and harvested. And harvesting peanuts can be just as backbreaking. But above all, because the peanuts grow underground, it is dirty work—done in the often muddy fields of late autumn.
    In Lone Tree during the 1950s and 1960s many of the families farmed small farms for a living, and others used their own farming to supplement jobs they held in town or hired their labor out to larger farmers. Unfortunately, even then the depression that was to hit the farm industry was being forecast, anticipated, and, in some cases, experienced. The family farm was slowly disappearing. The level of security and comfort a farm offered seemed each year to diminish. Even as late as 1960, 11 percent of the farm operators in this country were black, equal to blacks’ representation in the general population, but black farm ownership had declined even from 1920 figures. Though farm declines for whites seemed to plateau in the early 1980s, the trend in decline for black farm ownership continued. Farm displacement rates for blacks during that period were two and a half times that for whites. The dual hardships of unfavorable economic forces and racial bias in lending eventually took their toll. In1990, 62,000 (or 1.5 percent) of the 4.5 million farmers in this country were black. By the year 2000 the U.S. Civil Rights Commission predicts that black farm ownership will be altogether extinct. Our family farm was a part of this trend. We were a typical midwestern/southern farm family with one added dimension—we were a black farm family. Even today my parents, having lived through both the heyday and the demise of the black-owned, working family farm, are still farmers at heart.
    My family’s home was the center of my world. As a child, once I stepped off the orange bus that brought me home each day and headed west for the half-mile walk to the house with tar paper siding, there was little else of consequence. The only thing one could see from the house was the yard, the field, the abandoned cars, the tractor, combine, and other equipment, and the occasional cow that crossed too near the house to graze on my mother’s roses. There were no neighbors to visit with over the backyard fence; no cars to pass along the street in front of our house. There was no street, only an unpaved, rocky dirt road. And it wasn’t until 1972 that the telephone intruded on our isolation.
    At home, I came into the world surrounded by family—people of all ages—and as only a child can conceive, they all belonged to me, and I to them. And this marvelously rich world of human interaction more than made up for what we lacked in cultural experience. We did not travel, we did not take vacations or go to the movies. We were farm people. Our family outings consisted of going to church and prayer meeting, visiting nearby relatives, the yearly all-black rodeo, and the segregated, until I was six, county fair.
    My parents’ adult lives have been so consumed by family that it still takes effort to see them as independent personalities. Erma Hill, my mother, is a mixture of stern restraint and lavish generosity. Years into my adulthood I began to understand her. Underneath the crop of fine hair that has been gray or graying as long as I have known her lies a complex mind. She is never unnerved or flustered. She