My Year on the Farm

Odd, how you can take in experience and not think much of it at the time, but it comes back later to enrich and inform you. This must be one of the few positives of aging.  

On the other hand, one has to keep in the front of one's mind the reality that memory is a construct in the present and is not reality.

That said, reading "White Trash" by Nancy Isenberg has stirred memories of my year on the farm, 1977-1978 in new and instructive ways.  She is talking about the letters written between Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Adams (my next Kindle download) and their discussion of class in America.  These men were, as most Americans once were, farmers.  They had cattle, and Jefferson had cattle of the human variety, namely slaves.

They both saw the world through the eyes of men who engaged in "husbandry" i.e., breeding of animals.  

Jefferson thought that Black people would, in several generations be bred out of existence in America, and he had theories of exactly what proportion of "blood" a person had to have to cease to be Black, which sound not too dissimilar from the racial theories of Adolph Hilter's acolytes.  Of course, impregnating Sally Hemings, whose father was Jefferson's father in law and whose mother was the daughter of a Black man, Jefferson took the leap into breeding out the Black. 

As, I learned in the early 1980's, at my inner city clinic in Washington, D.C., Blacks from Georgia, the Carolinas and Mississippi did not look much like Blacks from Liberia, Nigeria and Cameroon.  The American Blacks had much lighter skin, often had light, even blue eyes, and their hair was often straight. The African Blacks were inky by comparison. (Of course, the African Blacks, apart from their striking physical differences, had never been taught they were stupid, and they were engaging, curious, funny and intelligent by whatever measure you cared to use.)

So Jefferson's husbandry theories, put into practice by his fellow slave owners, who clearly had sex with their female slaves, did result in a genetic mixing which changed the population of American Blacks. 

For some reason, reading about all this, the image of American soldiers liberating a concentration camp in Germany, looking at the tattoos on the arms of the bodies in heaps popped into mind. "Like cattle,"  one of the American soldiers says, astonished.  That people could treat other people like cattle seemed incomprehensible to this American. 

And yet, there was Jefferson, applying principles of animal husbandry to his slaves and projecting the consequences when his fellow plantation owners did the same.

After 8 years in New York City, I moved with my then girlfriend (later wife) to a farm in Southern Rhode Island. It was a potato farm, with a white farmhouse and a lovely pond in front and every morning I went for a jog down the country road, past the farm houses of my neighbors and saw them killing things. They chopped the heads off chickens, killed turkeys, and raised pigs and other animals to be sent off to slaughter.  And they branded their victims, as the concentration camp cattle were branded, not with tattoos, but with hot irons.

One day, my girlfriend flew into my office, which was in an upstairs bedroom of the farm house, and said, "There's a guy, straight out of 'Deliverance,' with leather hands, at the front door. He has a gun and you'd better go speak to him."

He wanted permission to hunt on the farm.  We rented the farm and the owner had told me men might come asking to hunt on the land and to say no.  I explained this to leather hands and he accepted the news gracefully, and got back in his pickup truck and drove off. 

That year on the farm, especially coming directly from New York City, told me that life on the land was different and the mindset of country people was very different from city dwellers. I went 8 years in New York City and never saw death outside the hospital.  But in the country, people killed things daily.  Even the turtles in our pond were trapped and eaten by our neighbors.  Birds flying over head, fish in the nearby ocean, all killed, cut open and eaten or sold. 

People were just part of the continuum of the killing, and the breeding.

And this idea of people as just another sort of animal, with qualities you want to breed in and qualities you want to breed out, was woven into the neurons of Jefferson and Adams. There were qualities of beauty and strength which were visible and attached to them, almost as if they traveled in proximity on the same chromosomes (if Jefferson had known about gene theory) were other qualities, like gentility, intelligence and sound moral character.

Even Abigail Adams spoke of people of lower classes as "rubbage."  

Once can only imagine what the unwashed poor and uneducated who roamed the countryside and inhabited the towns of 18th century America might have looked like, how they might have behaved, but the best approximation I can imagine is from the website, "Shoppers of Walmart," where the most grotesque specimens of American humanity shock the tender sensibilities of suburban white Americans.

Reading "White Trash" once again drives home the folly, the sheer lunacy really, of Justice Scalia's fantasy that he interpreted the Constitution as an originalist, trying to get into the minds of the founding fathers and cleaving to the text of the Constitution as those 18th century men meant us to see it.

Intriguingly, Jefferson saw one class of men as particularly loathsome, and it was not the slaves but their overseers, the men whose job it was to drive the slaves to work harder, produce more, the men who held the lashes, who were there to keep the slaves in line, to keep order and enforce the rules.   These men were cruel and brutal to those they had under their power, but respectful to the point of obsequiousness when they doffed their hats to their employers, the slave owners. 

This class of men were the 18th century equivalent of today's policemen, caught between the large population they are hired to control and the ruling class who pay their salaries.

Reading Jefferson struggling with ideas of breeding, class, natural rights, one marvels at where we came from and how his ideas have been taken by succeeding generations of his countrymen and molded into a new, and what for him would be an unrecognizable, new form.