Black Farming and Worriation

This encounter lingers still. It is like a mist that never goes away, or a haze that stays longer than necessary. It was an odd meeting. It revealed less than most interviews but it has had a profound influence on me.

It was the fall of 2005. I was in the area of southeast Georgia to interview black farmers who had been engaged in fighting the USDA because of a wide range of acts of discrimination including delayed loans, lack of expert consulting in the field, loans arriving too little and too late, lack of notification of disaster relief funds at low interest rates after drought or torrential rain events, and the list could go on and on.

Mr. Mays was my point of contact. Dr. Muhammad had handed me off to him, so to speak. Mr. Mays had gotten me in touch with several more farmers. It was a rich week for interviews.

There we sat in the public library, Mr. Mays, Mr. Williams, Mrs. Williams, and me.  Mr. Williams was a man of few words.  Mrs. Williams frequently covered for him with explanations or details. He was thin, frail, looking older than his years. He had cancer and his health was hanging in the balance.

We talked in a variety of ways about the price of farming while black. They outlined the ways in which white farmers were treated better by the USDA and at the cotton gin by the local family that owned the gin and the feed store where they purchased their seeds. Sounded like tenant farming revisited to me.

He had cancer. His opinion is that farming and using pesticides had given him cancer. We didn’t go into the details of what kind of cancer and what kind of treatment, and those fancy notions of diagnosis and prognosis and where he went for treatment. My sense was that it was not going to end well.

He used another word that explained the cost of farming while black. I had never heard it before but I generally knew what he was talking about. When the USDA may seize your house and your property. When you don’t get good support or assistance from the local USDA office, when the note is coming due soon and the bank account is low because the crop didn’t produce because you could not afford better seeds or more land or more help. And you got too little too late to put insecticides on the field and the weeds are more plentiful that the cotton crop. Then you fret, you worry, you stay up late at night. You obsess and ponder. It never goes away.

Then, there is the word. The big word. WORRIATION. The USDA brought upon him “worriation.” You can google about and find it. One source has it like this:  “an exceedinly amount of worries that are now worsened because you are in a situation that is only getting worse than it originally was because you failed to let a grudge of some kind go. ‘i began to understand how important the now is for me to get it right this time around so i wouldn’t have that burden or worriation on my shoulders if something were to happen to my mom’.”

He was worn out. His wife was taking care of him. He had given his life for the cause, a cause bigger than him. His body was declining. Everyone knew it. Cancer was having its way with him.

And worriation was gnawing at his soul 

An interview I shall never forget. I'll never forget Dawson, Georgia and that afternoon in the library. This farmer couple. This word. Farming while black. Worriation.