What makes land sweet?
Thoughts for the change of seasons
There’s a reason that mimosa tree is down there. I’ll get to it in a minute, but first … a story.
Lee Moss is kind of a prophet in the chronicle of my Old Edgefield District kin. He was my mom’s first cousin, and his house was an easy halfway point from our home in Charleston to mom’s in Ninety Six, so I grew up seeing him
almost on a monthly basis and calling him uncle. Of course, he wasn’t an uncle— he was much more than that, but I have to step back in time to explain why.
Imagine three men riding up out of the Edgefield District just three years after Sherman’s March. Born enslaved, but now free and young and vigorous, they’ve heard there’s a woman near the Godsey train stop who’ll sell land to Negroes and they have two years’ wages burning in their pockets. The men were my great-grandfather, Fellie, about age 19; his baby brother John; and their best friend, George, about 17 or 18 . My “Uncle Lee” was George’s grandson, born in 1915 and growing up across the road and within sight and memory of three family patriarchs who had survived slavery, survived a for-sure-God Klan massacre, thrived despite Jim Crow to become property owners and patriarchs. Lee was blind, but revered in the family for his “sight”—and his vision of the land “down home” growing up amid the many children and grandchildren of Fellie and John and George was that it was “the sweetest land there ever was.”
I last saw Lee Moss at a family reunion in the aughts and he joined the ancestors not long afterwards. Sometimes, I wish I could ask him: Uncle Lee, what makes land sweet? Just to hear him tell it. He was a raconteur, a true Southern storyteller, he was.
I don’t know if you all do this, but it was taught to me by my Gullah Geechee aunties that the garden is the place to pray. It’s the place where you plant intentions along with seeds and have conversations with the dead. So yeah, yesterday, on the solstice, I was having a long heartfelt heart to heart with Uncle Lee…
What makes land sweet? Is it this feeling that I have when I make my morning pass and note the many flying beetles and crawling bugs in jeweled colors of rose and polished bronze and green. And of course, so many bees. Fat and smooth-bellied. Cobalt blue. Or black and yellow and furred.
What makes land sweet? Is it the fact that these simple flowers and fruit trees and the insects that complete their life cycle also connect me to Pawpaw Fellie and the fruit trees he planted down home that I used to absolutely ransack with my cousins?
What makes land sweet? Or is it the memory of the woman who taught me to have a feeling for the land. Fellie’s daughter-in-law, my grandmother, Alice.
Alice was a Butler from Saluda County, fair and small and very pretty. But though she had the look of a doll woman who might decide it should be her destiny to ”sit on the porch,” looks were deceiving. Because Alice loved nothing more than being outside and working in the earth. An exemplary housewife and mother to seven children, she had a ginormous vegetable garden, a groaning smokehouse, and a root cellar packed with jars of of veg and fruit. Despite her many virtues, she was regarded by my grandfather’s snotty brothers as an embarrassment. She picked cotton “like a man” and lavished too-passionate attention on her flowers. I don’t remember the snotty great-uncles at all, but my memory of the farm is that the front yard was filled with flowers. Zinnias. Black-eyed Susans. Purple coneflowers. Along with the focal point of the front yard, the pink slipper tree, which you may have grown up calling the mimosa.
Every time I see a mimosa, I think of Alice Hill. So this time of year, I think about her a lot.
In a time before fertilizers and the garden center at Lowe’s, she was a plantswoman of amazing skill. She propagated from seed and cuttings, and canned so prodigiously that even in winter, my mother claimed, there were always two vegetables and a fruit with every meal. Was this an exaggeration? Probably not by much—because each of her daughters inherited those skills, though they didn’t necessarily choose to exercise them.
One of my favorite stories that’s told about her is that she had a special aptitude with soils. The Hills had cows aplenty, but my grandmother had identified a special stratum of soil in the Moss’s cow pasture that she returned to again and again to amend her flower and vegetable beds. That’s what made them grow with such abandon. But though her yard was one of the showiest in the whole of Godsey, the Hill men mocked her mercilessly because she enjoyed working the soil with her own hands.
The cousin who told me the story didn’t have to explain why—I got it. This, after all, was “n— work” and they were class-proud black men with sharecroppers of their own. Moreover, in this harshest of patriarchies, a woman who fussed over flowers was one thing—a woman who could farm as well as the men could was about as welcome as one who could preach.
Alice Hill knew what made land sweet—knowledge she shared with the Mosses and I imagine with Fellie Hill as well, given the stories I’ve heard about his passion for growing… So disappointing the Hill men wouldn’t listen, that the turning away from the soil was well under way even back then.
Loving land someone else owns has never not been a path to heartbreak—I’ve learned that to my cost—so I imagine Alice’s heart broke a little when my grandfather died and she was forced to move to town. I know she missed the farm the rest of her days, though she was a good woman in the ancient style. She never complained.
Anyway, the mimosa is in honor of Miss Alice. Happy birthday and Happy Solstice. Indeed, Happy Solstice to you all. I hope in these hot times you have memories that make the land sweet to you—and worth defending.
You do look like your grandmother!! I thought that even before I read the paragraph!