Sherry Chandler

Via Have Coffee Will Write, the Dixie Chicks were not the only folk to win Grammies last night. President Jimmy Carter got one too.

the poetryman of A Poetic Justice has put together a really excellent collection of opposition filmmaking at Poetryman Productions and Other People’s Videos.

Charlie Hughes has done a thing that needed doing and put together an online Kentucky Literary Directory.

Here awhile back, a friend thrust into my hands a copy of the Utne Reader for July/August 2004. S/he wanted me to see a little fluff piece by Andrew Hudgins called “About a Dog.” The two of us had bonded during a week-long workshop with Mr. Hudgins and she thought I’d find it of interest.

I did. I read the article and then put the magazine down on my table, with the vague notion that I’d see what else it had to offer before giving it back. You know, of course, what happened. The poor little Utne Reader promptly got buried under my ever-growing stack to-be-read.

I picked it up again last week in a fit of tidying. Time to get rid of a few old magazines. But it’s hard for me to throw out any kind of reading material and I decided to leaf through it first. And there where I certainly should not have missed it if I’d been paying any attention at all was an article by Barbara Kingsolver called The Good Farmer. It is an excerpt from a University Press of Kentucky anothology entitled The Essential Agrarian Reader: The Future of Culture, Community, and the Land.

I was not many paragraphs into this article when I found this very eloquent expression of what many of us around here feel about tobacco farming.

Once in the early 1980s, when cigarette smoking had newly and drastically fallen from fashion, I stood in someone’s kitchen at a party and listened to something like a Greek chorus chanting out the reasons why tobacco should be eliminated from the face of the earth, like smallpox. Some wild tug on my heart made me blurt out, “But what about the tobacco farmers?”

“Why,” someone asked, glaring, “should I care about tobacco farmers?”

I was dumbstruck. I couldn’t form the words to answer: Yes, it is carcinogenic, and generally grown with too many inputs, but tobacco is the last big commodity in America that’s still mostly grown on family farms, in an economy that won’t let these farmers shift to another crop. If it goes extinct, so do they.

I couldn’t speak because my mind was flooded with memory, pictures, scents, secret thrills. Childhood afternoons spent reading Louisa May Alcott in a barn loft suffused with the sweet smell of aged burley. The bright, warm days in late spring and early fall when school was functionally closed because whole extended families were drafted to the cooperative work of setting, cutting, stripping, or hanging tobacco. The incalculable fellowship measured out in funerals, family reunions, even bad storms or late-night calvings. The hard-muscled pride of showing I could finally throw a bale of hay onto the truck bed myself. (The year before, when I was 11, I’d had the less honorable job of driving the truck.) The satisfaction of walking across the stage at high school graduation in a county where my name and my relationship to the land were both common knowledge.

But when I was pressed, that evening in the kitchen, I didn’t try to defend the poor tobacco farmer. As if the deck were not already stacked against his little family enterprise, he was now tarred with the brush of evil along with the companies that bought his product, amplified its toxicity, and attempted to sell it to children. In most cases it’s just the more ordinary difficulty of the small family enterprise failing to measure up to the requisite standards of profitability and efficiency. And in every case the rational arguments I might frame in its favor will carry no weight without the attendant silk purse full of memories and sighs and songs of what family farming is worth. Those values are an old currency now, accepted as legal tender almost nowhere.

I think most of my readers share rural roots with Kingsolver, though perhaps only a few local ones can understand about the tobacco culture. I’m way late stumbling on this article but it is well worth the reading. She is particularly biting on the Red State/Blue State dichotomy that is one of my personal pet peeves.