![]() I had met my new friend serendipitously: one of several new friends I met because I was weary of farming and discovered that a close friend’s band was playing in Grand Rapids. But for repaired relationships to occur, people of European descent must see that the only repair that needs to occur is the repairing of our own souls. Reparations of any sort show intent to recognize the trillions of dollars of financial benefits received from slavery and Jim Crow policies, prison labor, and forced segregation. The whole family resented the fact-and it wasn’t really talked about with us kids. That landowner was just too much for my mama and daddy to live with. In Tennessee, if you owned the land, you believed you still owned people’s bodies. After a while, it was clear that Great-Gran’ma and Gran’ma was forced by the owner of the land.” She looked at her impeccably dressed and remarkably put-together grandmother and said: You see Gran’ma is lighter-skinned my mama is darker. “Finally,” she said, “it got too hard on us to stay there. My friend stated that her parents were sharecroppers on the same land for quite some time. The matter-of-fact response cut me to the quick. ![]() “Was it your parents’ land, or were they sharecroppers?” I asked. She never liked the city.” I asked what kind of farming her parents did in Tennessee. “Gran’ma and Mama miss Tennessee, but Mama mostly misses farming. “We moved up from Tennessee when Daddy bought some land in Michigan outside of South Haven,” she continued. The family had a wealth of recipes that could make use of every part of a hog: parts of the hog that as people of privilege, my family had never tasted or bothered to do anything with, other than throw into the bone pile at the back of the Sandhill acreage. ![]() She was very excited to come to the farm.” My friend, her mother, and the family matriarch all came to my farm, Sandhill, for Hog Day. “Mama and Daddy were farmers in Tennessee,” my friend shared, as she watched her mother wash out the makings for chitlins.
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