photos by Lara Herscovitch

“They tell us, slow down; we tell them, catch up.” –U.S. Representative Cori Bush

Growing up in the Mississippi Delta, we didn’t know how good we had it. My family lived on the Sunflower River, in a community of Black land owners — we worked hard on our farms, growing our own food and a few commercial crops (soy beans, wheat, rye, corn and cotton). 

At an early age, I learned about farming and the taste of fresh, nutritious produce. For generations, most of the food my family ate came directly from the rich Delta soil. We often picked and ate things directly from the plants that were growing above and below the ground: vegetables, vines and bushes, fruit and nut trees. 

Our large family gardens were rich with sweet potatoes, collard greens, beans, peas, beets, squash, watermelons, peanuts, blackberries and more. In the pasture and barn area, there were pigs, cows, turkeys, chickens, and ducks. Rabbits ran freely in open fields. Earthworms lived just below the surface of the soil.

The 1930s depression arrived, including in our rural remote area of Sharkey County. My mother, Delia, would frequently say, “where there is the will, there is a way.” The land sustained us; we always had healthy food to eat.

A few years ago, I went back to visit the community where I grew up. It was mid-summer, and my visit was planned for just a few days. I was looking forward to visiting, and eating some fresh fruits — especially watermelon from the vine. 

It has changed, a lot. The once-organic soil is now full of pesticides, including those sprayed onto industrial crops from airplanes. There were no rabbits running in the fields; no earthworms just below the surface. The soil is dying.

Because of the toxins, people living in the area are no longer able to grow vegetables in their gardens. I stopped by the home of one of my elementary school teachers, Mrs. Whippet. She lived down the road from my cousin’s house. When I visited her, she said she deeply missed growing and eating fresh vegetables, as other families in the area did too.

I believe that each of us is significant. I know that I am one piece in the complex puzzle of life. But at that moment, I felt lost and lonely, sad, just sick to my stomach’s core. This rich place, my childhood world that I took for granted, now felt placeless. Where I lived and grew, does not exist. 

I wish I had more control. I wish that the families living on the land had more control.

All these decades later, I still grow food. I’ve had a community garden space in Edgerton Park for a decade. I love gardening, and I love the community space — it has about 100 gardens in it. 

It’s a fun place, an interesting place, relaxing, beautiful, and one that you have to really commit to. It is full of surprises — inviting so much. Gardening is much like farming; the work is hard and often. Without the work, you don’t grow much. Some days, I walk around looking at all the plants. Other days, I work on my own garden. Everyone helps to maintain the shared spaces, working in small groups on projects. 

Each year is different. Something always changes or re-arranges: weather patterns, the rain (too much, too late, not enough), temperature fluctuations, soil composition, too many insects that love vegetables… 

The gardening is always an invitation and opportunity to think, feel, work, relax, renew. We never know the outcome; we plant seeds and return in a few days or a week to (hopefully!) see the plants emerging out of the soil. I always assume it will be 100% abundance. I let go, allow, and support the process. I tend to the soil, seeds, and plants.

I grow herbs, a variety of vegetables (cabbage, beets, chard, beans, okra, onions, garlic, kale and lettuce), and flowers (daisies, peonies and roses).

The rose bush, of course, has thorns. I don’t blame the roses for having thorns. What I want to do is see the thorns clearly so that I can navigate my options: leave them alone, go around them, etc. My desire is to accept the rose bush, not to change it — I just don’t want it to rip me apart.

I am a middle child of nine, with 6 sisters and 2 brothers. While they were raising us, my parents — Delia and J.D. — also had us involved in many aspects of community life. Our family attended the Locust Grove Missionary Baptist Church on Sunday, and attended community and church meetings a few times a week. We farmed, went to school (depending on the season of the year), and dropped in to check-on our neighbors. Everyone knew everyone.

There were frequent conversations in our home about the current topics on the 6:00 news. We talked about issues that affected community life locally, and not so locally. Family — and sometimes friends — would sit and talk in the living room, around the dining table, under a large shade tree near the house, or on the long, winding dirt roads while traveling.

In the late 1950s, many adults in our all-Black community of farmers became active in the civil rights movement to support our right to vote. Voting was not allowed by law: no “colored people” in our county could register.

By the early 1960s, voting rights was a hot topic in our small farming community. Some adults became active in the Mississippi Freedom Party because they believed that they — and their children — should have the right to register and vote in elections held in their County. 

(As I wrote about in Part 1, in Mississippi after the Civil War, some ‘colored’ men could vote; but that right was taken away, and they couldn’t vote again until the mid-1960s.) 

The early 1960s was a time of heightened tension, anxiety and uncertainty. There were more and more reports and whisperings among adults about increased KKK activity and meetings. Cross-burning through the area was fairly frequent. I remember one hot summer night in particular, when a cross was burned by the KKK right around the corner from our home.

Most of the voting rights weekly meetings were held just off State Highway 14, in a church located along the side of the road toward the city of Belzoni. One dark summer night in 1963, the church was “mysteriously” burned to the ground, leaving only smoke and hot smoldering wood ashes in the morning. 

The event was not reported to the County Sheriff. No one in our community ever called the Sheriff or police for anything. The standard was to take care of “it” among community members. Even when someone died, only the undertaker at the Black funeral home was called. 

In late spring of 1965, my mother Delia traveled to Washington D.C. with a group of delegates to offer testimony before the 89th United States Congress to support the passage of Voting Rights. That summer, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. led a peaceful civil rights march in Selma, Alabama and President Johnson declared: “It is wrong, deadly wrong to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote…”  

President Johnson announced his intention to pass a federal Voting Rights Act, to ensure that no government — federal, state or local — could impede citizens from voting in any way. The Voting Rights Bill was signed into law, and my mother shared stories detailing her and others’ involvement in the movement’s collective actions. My mother would repeatedly tell each of us to always vote, and never to take voting for granted.  

As I wrote in Part 1, in the last year, more than 440 bills in 49 states were introduced that would strip away at our voting rights. The bills would impose harsher voter ID requirements, limit the number of drop boxes for mail-in-ballots, and make it easier for people to be purged from the rolls.

The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act was introduced in 2021 to strengthen voting access. It had 223 co-sponsors, was passed in the U.S. House by a vote of 219 to 212. All House Democrats voted for it, all House Republicans voted against it. In response to the failure of the Senate to pass legislation to support human rights and subsequently, the Voting Rights Act, Rep. Cori Bush said: “They tell us, slow down; we tell them, catch up.”      

Like most fights in history, the voting ballot and voting rights legislation is — in essence — about power.

Nations keep their shape by controlling national memory; by shaping their citizens’ understanding of the past. American history tends to reinforce the “exceptional” nature of our country, and puts forth a very narrow patriotic narrative that downplays racism and inequality. The narrative emphasizes a unity predicated on seeing slavery, segregation and ongoing racial injustice and human rights violations as aberrations in a fundamentally just and exceptionally free nation.

All of the generations of my family have lived through the need to repair racial injury, injustice and trauma. I yearn for the repair — and for the time where it is not required. I yearn for the repair of four hundred years of injustice that haunts all of us still to this day. I yearn for the time in which we honestly confront our past so that we can understand what is needed to achieve healthy communities. I yearn for the time when unfairly excluded and targeted people receive justice.

What does this country need? What are we missing? How do we assist ourselves and help others feel safe, help others be safe? 

Do we have the capacity to move beyond where we’ve been? How do we make space to see things differently for our collective being?

The questions are deeply personal.

I tell myself to be gentle and allow change to untangle the patterns of knotted strings tightly tied in our nation’s fabric. I know that our mental energy and action should be directed to the direction we wish to move in, towards the nation we wish to create. But the problem is we don’t all wish to create the same nation. While I work to be hopeful, assuming the plants will grow to 100% abundance, I still feel the resentment and displeasure within some others that I exist.

Will we transform our inner beliefs and release the past negative programming, allowing us to explore and shape societal structures? Will we boldly walk from an ordinary to an extraordinary collective and inclusive future?

I will continue to tend to the soil, seeds, and plants.

To reach Esther directly: sunflowerlvx@comcast.net

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