A Swept Dirt Yard Manifesto
Towards a New Southern Agrarianism
I cannot imagine that either the title or subtitle of this piece—and yes manifesto is a bit tongue-in-cheek, the odds that any masses are going to be roused to a new political banner hereby are slim to nothing—are especially intuitive to most readers, and that’s a good part of why I’m writing it. First, the phrase “Southern agrarianism” has generally been one associated with a particular brand of white Southern conservatism, and a very literary and largely theoretical one at that; while there have been many radical agrarian movements and tendencies within the South over the last two centuries they have tended to be connected with and identified as part of other movements and ideological strains. What I am aiming at here is something akin to those radical agrarian movements of the late nineteenth into twentieth centuries here and abroad, with the important caveat that the South is no longer an agrarian society in the sense that many people make a living from farming—like the rest of the US, the number of people whose main income derives from agriculture is miniscule. Instead, this is an aspirational agrarianism, and a capacious one, encompassing our relation to our uncultivated lands, our “wild” spaces, as well as “marginal” cultivation and tending, from the humblest container garden to fire managed entire landscapes.
As for the swept dirt yard, well—let me put it this way. The Southern agrarian past from which we ought to draw our inspiration—and to defend in those places it has survived or is being reborn—is not that of the sprawling plantation with its ruthless chattel slavery and massive monocrop cultivation for global markets, though we have to remember all of that and recognize the part these things have played in shaping us and the land itself. While it would be unfair to the Southern Agrarians of the twentieth century to reduce them to nothing but defenders of plantation slavery, their central fatal flaw was an inability, or refusal, to recognize the role of slavery and race, and to erase the vast if so often—deliberately and often violently—submerged role of black Southerners, to the point of eliding them out of Southern identity entirely.
No, the Southern agrarian spirit I am trying to conjure is much more one of the marginal and marginalized places and traditions of cultivation and use and tending of these Southern lands, wild and cultivated. It’s found in the slave gardens that grew as little beds of autonomy and dignity, in the flowers and vegetable rows of the former sharecropper, in the cabin-dotted hollows of the mountains, the chestnut groves and the pawpaw flats, the harvests of the wild and the hardscrabble fields and plots, sites of love and freedom and hard sweaty work. It is in the now barely remembered traditions of “poor folks” in relation to the land, some borrowed or appropriated from the big landowners and the imports of the capitalist economy, others spun up from other sources, other continents. The swept dirt yard—a custom that was still alive, if barely, in my lifetime—is one of these. Instead of grass, people would keep a packed earthen yard in front of their houses and adjacent to their flower and home vegetable gardens. Perhaps this custom was translated from Africa, perhaps it simply emerged as a way to keep grass and other weeds out of garden beds. The custom flourished for a long time, particularly among black Southerners but among many white families as well. After the Second World War the conventional grass lawn slowly but surely replaced the swept dirt yard, and with it much else of Southern agrarian traditions from below.
The practiced idioms of a new Southern agrarianism will reflect what is distinctive and what is shared across our various communities, the products of centuries of intertwined existence, the mutual constitution of peoples centered on this Southern land, running from the hemlock-lined hollows and spruce and fir capped summits of the Appalachians down to the tidal marshes and live oak flecked barrier islands of the Atlantic and the Gulf. There is no hard boundary, no indisputable definition of either a cultural or ecological nature, the South “proper” bounded by broad ecotones to the north and west. Like so much else of an emergent nature, it’s hard to fully express at an abstract distance, but easy enough to recognize when you’re in the middle of it.
In many cases the first line of work will be one of recovery and of grounded creativity, for all of us whether our ancestors arrived (voluntarily or involuntarily) four thousand, four hundred, or forty years ago. The agrarian traditions that our ancestors developed, so often at great cost and struggle, have largely been lost, eroded by, among other things, the infrastructural and industrial projects of the post-war world and the massive explosion of fossil fuel energy in industrial modernity. The agrarian traditions of the first Southerners, the native peoples of this land whose histories stretch back beyond the beginnings of agriculture, are perhaps the hardest to recover, swept away in the waves of ethnic cleansing that “opened” so much of the South for settlement by others in the 1830s. For black Southerners the sources and modes of dispossession have been much greater, starting with slavery and the dashed dreams of land redistribution after the end of (formal at least) slavery, and continuing with many other forms of dispossession and alienation, much of it racially rooted, some of it part of the common trend of industrialized capitalism.
Other histories of loss, dispossession, cultural erosion, and more can be traced for other communities and groups and sub-regions of the South, and new chapters in the story sadly are being written even now. Our new—and some now not-so-new—neighbors from further south represent the global dynamics of agrarian injustice and land loss, a history of peasant reduction and dispossession that began with the Iberian Conquest in the sixteenth century, even if the drivers and agents have changed or shifted since then.
Not only have small scale farmers been lost—casting a wider net to all forms of tending the land, from activities like subsistence hunting and fishing to planting fruit orchards to growing a backyard garden—the post-War world saw a steady erosion in all these agrarian traditions in the South, among all groups. Edward H. Davis and John Morgan, two historians of Southern foodways, a few years ago carried out a survey of eleven thousand college students in the South and found that fifty-two percent of them reported having grandparents who kept a home garden, but only ten percent said the same for their own parents. In my own family the tradition of vegetable and flower gardening never died out, though it was diminished relative to previous generations. I’d like to think my generation and those younger are beginning to reverse this dynamic, and there is some evidence to suggest as much—and obviously the sort of agrarianism I am advocating would depend upon buy-in from all generations, but especially the young.
In short, we should understand the South, and especially the agrarian South, to be the cultural (including agricultural) work of formerly disparate peoples drawn together by historical circumstances—some for which we white Southerners have been historically culpable, others of which stand far outside our control or the control of anyone really—into this corner of North America, pulled from the northwestern corner of Europe, from the vast lands of West Africa, and from the hills and mountains of Central America, meeting peoples (now vastly diminished or outright removed) whose ancestors first came here many millennia ago. The dialect of the South is woven from Creek and Choctaw and Cherokee, English and Spanish and French, from K’iche’ and Mam and Mixtec, Wolof and Fulani and Mande. We are almost all by origin, past and recent, fundamentally agrarian peoples, our ancestors slaves and sharecroppers and smallholders and hunters and fishers, working the land and living off of it, if rarely owning it or controlling the products of their labor. An emergent Southern ethic of land and agriculture will draw on those heritages, old and new, and trace them in our contemporary relation to the land—no small task or one with simple prescriptions, to be sure.
So. A new Southern agrarianism will be conservative in the sense that it looks back to the lifeways of our ancestors and to the long history of humans on this land and seeks to preserve and to nurture back into life that which has been lost but which should be revived. There is much to be recovered, much to be remembered—and we will find that there is much that we will wish we had asked our grandparents and great grandparents before it was too late.
A new Southern agrarianism will be radical in that it takes honest and serious stock of all those multiple histories of dispossession, of injustice, segregation, racial violence, expulsion, and the ecological deprivation and devastation visited from without and within. It will not let any of us off the hook, even as we recognize the ways in which the South has been used and exploited for nationalism and capitalism and industrialism, down to today. A new Southern agrarianism will be at one level distinctively localist, attentive to the needs and the histories and the possibilities of each unique place and community emergent around that place, while also looking to the agrarian struggles of peoples around the world, learning from other peoples and standing in solidarity with them.
Instead of some blood right to this soil, our new Southern agrarianism will insist upon our collective and individual responsibility towards it, our need to cultivate ourselves as we tend these Southern lands and waters and nurture them for the good of humans and non-human organisms in mutual interplay. The agrarianism I am summoning is one for all manner of cultivators and participants in the land, from the wildest reaches of the South to our cities and suburbs, worn-down and affluent alike. If on the one hand we reject a triumphant urbanism that mandates the city as the only true preserve of human flourishing, the alternative is a view of the world in which rural life is of equal value alongside the city and the suburb, mutually constituted and cultivated along a continuum of people, organisms, and energy flows.
While we must develop agrarian practices and local cultures that fit the affordances and histories and needs of particular places within the South, we can also say that historically and in the present we are culturally, geographically, and ecologically oriented towards the “global South,” the lands of Africa and Latin America. Migration has linked Southern ecosystems with lands to the south and the north for a very long time indeed, ebbing and flowing over the millennia with changes in climate and contintental configuration. The northward march of the humble armadillo is a fine instance of this immemorial connectivity; similarly crops have moved along the same routes for thousands of years. For humans to traverse the same pathways is hardly surprising, even where there no global economic and political forces pushing populations north. The joining of the South and of Africa, by contrast, was historically particular and carried out with massive violence and deliberate and emergent coordination, though neither erased the traces of Africa in the Southern cultures that would grow out of that vast historical trauma and dislocation.
Our new Southern agrarianism must fundamentally be one of solidarity, not of segregation. It must be one rooted in humility and repentance, remembering our sins against one another and our abuses of the land itself, things that have long been tied together and mutually constitutive and reinforcing. Like Southern American identity more broadly, the agrarianism I am envisioning here will no doubt continue to have particular expressions and contours based in our constitutive communities and groups, but in a relation of solidarity, mutual support, and guided by a sense of a shared land, ecology, and ultimately historical destiny. And as we reshape our relation to the land and to one another, new forms of internal diversity will doubtlessly emerge, drawing upon the cultural heritages and memories that accompany us and which we work to recover. Maybe we’ll replace our lawns with a bit of swept dirt yard, some meadow here, an herb garden there, a polyculture of past and present and future.
It is in relation to the land that the great divisions have so often been been erected and injustices perpetuated, and it is in relation to the land that we must realize a deeper justice and restoration than has henceforth occurred, and we must do so in the face of emerging political, climatic, economic, and other challenges and dangers.
It is not hatred of others, or rejection of other ways of life, that are fundamental. It is love that must shape and guide us, love of this fraught and beautiful and tragic and holy land inherited from all our ancestors, and which, God willing, we will pass down to our own descendants.