‘Feeling Like a Slave’...in the Moments
of a Garden Pedagogy
Pancho McFarland, Ph.D.
September 5, 2011. Roseland Community Peace Garden.
“I feel like a slave,” Amina exhaled loudly.
I responded, “It’s hot, right?”
The high humidity and 90 degree temperature at 10am made work difficult. Amina and a few other students affirmed that and the weeding and seeding of a large raised bed made them feel “how slaves must have felt on Southern plantations.”
After a brief discussion, the crowd began to develop a consensus that the hot humid air and hard work were unbearable even as they smiled and joked. I took this opportunity to suggest that this work and slavery were, in fact, the exact opposites. “This work is the exact opposite of slavery. The collectively-worked community garden can provide true freedom. Know what I mean?”
When no one responded affirmatively, I continued. “What made slavery horrible was not the agricultural work but the relations of production. In fact, the work that slaves and migrant farmworkers do today is some of the most dignified, noble and important work that can be done. We are fed from their labor.”
The small crowd of students in the conversation grew as their attention was piqued by this line of argument regarding slavery. Their understanding of the slave and sharecropping eras was that manual agricultural labor itself was one of the central horrors of slavery. Repositioning agricultural work as a highly dignified, yet denigrated, craft was something that most in the discussion were willing to explore.
I continued with the impromptu lecture on dignified versus alienated labor, slavery, racism and liberation: “The problem with slavery was two-fold: First, a human owning another human is obviously wrong. Second, is the super-exploitation of a body. Their work and bodies, which we know are dignified, become degraded as the products of their labor are claimed by the owner for self-enrichment. The owner now owns the amazing, wonderful product made with the blood, sweat, and tears of another’s labor. In essence, the owner steals the product of slave labor. If the slaves owned the products of their labor it, first, would not be slavery nor would the labor seem undignified and horrendous.”
“As we have been learning in class, we have very little control over the products we consume, especially food. What we eat and how it is produced are determined by others. Having no self-determination is the very definition of slavery. Ya see? Then, without the ability to determine what and how you eat (remember food sovereignty?) your health and, by extension, your life and that of your family and community is controlled by someone else. Their concerns for profit will always determine what they provide. Your health goes unconsidered.”
Connecting the dots, Amina responds, “That’s like when we did our community maps. We found that there were no good stores in Roseland. But, in the place where the better-off live, they got rich white people there, they have that store with the health food and organic.”
Deuce adds, “That’s because they don’t care about Black people. All they care about is making money.”
“Right!,” I interjected.
“So, how can community gardens and a local food economy solve the crises of food access (all the junk food and lack of access to real food in the hood) and food sovereignty (community determination regarding the production, distribution and consumption of our food and the ecological impacts of our decisions)? How can the work we do in the gardens help us achieve greater freedom? Remember when we all stood around and discussed what we wanted to plant in the four new beds we had just weeded? The students nodded. “How did we decide?”
Brian said, “We talked about the food we liked and about what would grow this late since its late in the summer.”
“That was a collective, community process!! We decided. We are growing it. Not wage slaves on a corporate plantation. We had control over our labor and the decisions about what we will eat. Freedom.”
The conversation continued in this vein for a few more minutes until it was time to resume our weeding and harvesting mustard and turnip greens.
Those who took some vegetables home also took a new way of seeing the much-maligned greens that generations ago helped Black people survive the atrocities of slavery, sharecropping, and lives of limited opportunity and structural violence under Jim Crow segregation.
Often, middle-class and aspiring middle class Black students run from the culinary and other traditions of their recent ancestors. They connect these foods and labor activities with the hard life in the South.
Another oft-heard remark in the community garden and food justice classroom is a variant of the following: “My grandma left the South to get away from this.”
Berdie added to the line of critique one day saying, “She said the White man worked them like slaves and sometimes they had their way with the women. You couldn’t even walk down the streets because if a white person walked on the sidewalks you had to move into the street.”
A chorus of students chimed in telling stories that elders in their family had told them about the South. What became evident during this conversation was that none of the complaints about the South during the early 20th century had anything to do directly with agriculture and rural life itself but with the racist apartheid system that controlled Black people’s right to move and degraded or dismissed their skilled artisan or farm labors.
I seized upon this as an opportunity to share an alterNative history, geography, and political economy with the young people I work with in the garden.
Continuing with the lesson: “People’s experience with nature and their surroundings is determined, in good part, by how their political economic and social systems are structured. It’s important to differentiate between the factors that made rural and agricultural life for Blacks intolerable and those factors that didn’t necessarily cause them anguish…When we watched the movie about Immokalee, remember? We talked about questions of labor and food justice. The migrant farmworkers, Mexican and Haitian, provide the tomatos that we eat in our tacos from Taco Bell. Everyone benefits except for the workers. It’s the structure of labor that people hate not necessarily the labor itself. For example, the pace of work in these sweatshops in the field is inhumanely high since the workers’ wages are determined by a piece-rate system that pays them mere cents for a 50 pound bucket of tomatos. If workers controlled the pace, product and other factors of their labor, then it wouldn’t be so awful. If they owned their labor and the products of their labor, like we own this garden, they may not have developed the same feelings regarding agricultural labor.”
The young gardeners all nodded in agreement and Amina smiled, a knowing smile that came from this new found sense of the dignity and skill of her own work in the Roseland community garden and that of her ancestors from the South.
A major obstacle to community participation in the community garden and larger food justice movement is this type of initial visceral response that many have to seeing young people of color engage in agricultural labor. The relations and organizational forms of production are rarely analyzed. Instead, the type of labor and the wages earned through it become the basis upon which work is evaluated and judged. Agricultural labor in community gardens is thus miscast as akin to agricultural labor under slavery, sharecropping, or migrant worker-dependent agribusiness factories in the fields.
Capitalist relations of production, and the centrality of private property as the central category for determining control of the means of production, are deeply ingrained in our legal, moral, and ethical systems. As Hardt and Negri have argued: The USA is a Republic of Property; it does not just live by the rule of law, it abides by the rule of [private] property.
Given this context, it is difficult for many to imagine a society free of capitalist production relations and individualist ethics. The idea that the workers can own the products of their own labor and that a collective could own a productive enterprise often creates misunderstandings about the community garden and the nature of self-determining and unalienated labor in the garden. It is a central goal of garden pedagogy to overcome these barriers to food sovereignty and community self-determination.
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