The red clay welcomes me home, like a tired old dog greeting
a long lost owner. Red is the color of
the Deep South -- A pink, rosy undertone
that colors the people and the land. Crossing
over from North Carolina to South Carolina, I am always amazed at the
change. Yellow undertones give way to
red, a legacy of farming and cotton. The
spirits of topsoil, long since washed away, haunt the land and sing of an old
time, a now ancient time. “This is home,” I say, each year ever more forlornly.
Each year, I come home to find myself a little more out of place. Ironic, as my heart perpetually yearns for the strangeness that
is Georgia, its people, and its land.
I am caught between two worlds, trying to find my
place. I suppose as we all grow older, we
come to a place when our worlds are torn.
Our hearts seeking home in new lands, while yearning for the places of
our birth, the places that formed and shaped us. However, this is not a story so much about
me, as it is a story told through my eyes about red clay and the people it creates,
the people of King Cotton, Coca-Cola, MLK, and Jimmy Carter – the strange mix
of people, which constitute the fairytales of Faulkner. And so we begin with how the “dust of the
ground” breathed life into the Georgia people.
Red clay does not escape any child of the South. Our parents cursed it if their car tires got
caught in it, and our parents cursed it still when it stained our white
t-shirts. It tested the sanity of many
mothers, and was the source of joy for many toddlers. However, I often wonder what this land was
like before there was red clay, just as I wonder what the sunsets were like
before air pollution. The way we
perceive the world, and the very world itself in which we live, is strangely
shaped by our hands, and the hands of the men before us. There are few acres of the world now,
untouched by us.
However, before I indulge my ponderings of red clay, I want
to point out how few of us still play in the dirt today as adults - without
cursing it. For many of us, somewhere
between the ages of 11 and 15, an unspoken rule of adulthood told us that we
could no longer play in the dirt. For
some of us, who played collegiate sports, we got a “pass” to play outside in
the dirt until we graduated college.
However, there are, what I consider the “lucky ones,” the people who get
a “lifetime pass” to play in the dirt, the farmers and researchers. When you consider the numbers, 2% of the U.S.
population are farmers.[1] If you add a few percentage points for
researchers, we are looking at roughly about 5% of the U.S. population still
plays in the dirt for a living.
So, I ask to the small number of people in the U.S. who
study dirt for a living, what was my Georgia like before red clay? How would my identity as a Southerner be
different?
In the beginning God did NOT say, “Let there be red
clay.” Rather he likely said, “Let there
be topsoil.” Yes, there has always been
red clay. However, red clay’s original
home is as a subsoil, not a topsoil. So
before there was the red clay as we know it today, there was topsoil, lots of
it. According to Stanley Trimble, an
expert on the subject of soil erosion in the Southeast, at the original onset
of European settlement the topsoils of the Southeastern Piedmont likely consisted
of dark mature bottomland soils[2]. Of course, this made the mouths of colonial
farmers water, and it was not long before the Southeastern Piedmont soil was
met with plow. And so the erosion began,
and the red clay beast that lay beneath would soon, over the course of the next
200 years, begin revealing itself to the people above.
From the colonial era to 1970, average soil loss in the
Southeastern Piedmont was as follows:
Alabama – 7 inches, Georgia – 7.5 inches, South Carolina- 9.5 inches,
North Carolina - 5.5 inches, and Virginia - 5.5 inches. Although a matter of inches may seem
negligible to most, farmers everywhere know that is A LOT of lost topsoil. To give some context, root zones of many
herbaceous plants and crops extend approximately 6 inches or more beneath the
ground. Therefore, to lose 7.5 inches of
topsoil has critical implications for crop production. Furthermore, losing 7.5 inches, depending on
the depth of existing topsoil on site, may very well mean losing ALL your
topsoil. Furthermore, Trimble’s research
revealed that the rate of soil erosion occurred most drastically with row crops
of cotton, which further explains why Georgia and South Carolina experienced
some of the largest losses of topsoil.
This phenomenon also explains why there is such a drastic change when
crossing over from North Carolina to South Carolina, an almost immediate
transition into red clay territory. Trimble’s figure below, which I overlayed
with the route of I-85 may help you see what I see on my route home from
Hillsborough to Atlanta.
 |
| Red Clay Highway (AKA I-85) |
According to Trimble, the tragic loss of topsoil in the
Southeast has slowed in the last few years as a result of a decline in
agriculture, the transition of former farmland to forestland and pasture, and
strong soil conservation measures.
However, Trimble’s research, originally published in 1974, falls short
of taking into account the booming population growth of the last few decades
and its effect on land use. Development
of farmland for residential, business, or industrial use has now become one of
the urgent matters of our time with regard to soil management. However, I
promised you a story about red clay, so let me focus.
Now I have explained why we have red clay, but how has red
clay affected our identity as Southerners and Georgians? Of course, I cannot speak for all of you, and
I may make some leaps here, but please bear with me.
Red clay signifies two fundamental realities of the
Southerner: a strong agricultural legacy and an intensive use and abuse of the
land. The agricultural reality of our
nature explains the Southerners’ love of country music and tractor
references. It explains Jimmy Carter, a peanut
farmer from South Georgia, and it also explains Martin Luther King Jr, the
grandson of a sharecropper, who lived and is buried a few miles from my
childhood home in Stockbridge, GA.
Now let’s briefly take a strange jump here and talk about
what country music concerts say about identity with regards to our agricultural
past. Again please bear with me.
Country music concerts provide an intriguing and
entertaining look into southern culture.
Concert-goers dress in cowboy boots, flannel, and jorts. The trucks in the parking lot are often
spotless, and Budweiser is the obvious, and possibly, only beer of choice. Furthermore, almost every other song at a
country music concert is loaded with farming references. At a recent concert, I looked out on the crowd
of jorts and Budweiser cans and asked myself, “How many of these people are
actually farmers, or children of farmers?”
Knowing fully well that only about 2% of the population are farmers, I
deduced my answer: not many. So why the fascination with country music and
tractor references? It is not because
many of us are farmers, it’s because
the generations before us were
farmers. The South has historically been
an agricultural economy, and it will hold on to that identity I imagine for
years to come. Of course to identify as a farmer is not a
terrible thing, in fact it is a very good thing. We need to hold up our farmers more! However, it’s how we identify with our
agricultural past that can be very good or very bad. Let me explain.
The abuse of the land – the second reality that red clay
signifies for the Southerner. Just as
MLK Jr, can be linked in his past to agriculture, he can also be linked in his
past to abuse in agriculture. In
Trimble’s research, I want to highlight two points that led to the erosion of
Southeastern Piedmont: cheap land and cheap labor. Land was cheap when colonists first settled
the area, so rather than staying on one parcel of land for years on end,
farmers often used up a parcel of land until the soil was exhausted and moved
to the next. This phenomenon had severe
implications for the erosion of topsoil of the Piedmont. However, this problem was likely confounded
when cheap labor entered the picture.
Trimble also found that higher soil erosion was correlated with slavery
and plantation economies. To conclude,
it seems as though abuse of people and
land resulted in the worst kind of abuse on the soil.
As a Southerner and an environmentalist, I have tried to
more profoundly understand why the South, and Georgia, exists as it does
today. Because although the Civil Rights
Movement and other great social movements have taken place here, the South
still seems to remain stuck in its ways, maybe stuck in place by the very red
clay that constitutes its being. When I
enter into Georgia and see that red clay, I am overcome with nostalgia, but I
am also overcome with a sadness for what could be. The South continues to have some of the most
regressive social and environmental policies to date. Many of the southern states have laws that
very strictly limit unions, and its agricultural economy relies heavily on
migrant labor, a term often considered slavery by another name. A map of the U.S. will reveal the least
number of environmental regulations in the South. It will also reveal high poverty rates, as
well as obesity rates.
No I cannot directly link red clay to all of these realities
I mention above, but I cannot help but think that the historical abuse of the
land and its people has something to do with where we are today. How would it have been different, if in the
colonial period we had placed a higher value on our land for all its
preciousness? Would we have the problems we have today? There is no denying
it. Red clay is our identity, but it
does not have to continue to be an oppressive one: one heavy with the sins of
our past. We, as a Southern people, have
the ability to move beyond this past. I do not call on you to denounce red
clay. In fact, I call on you to embrace
it. Because it is only by embracing our
hurt that we can heal. I ask you to
please heal with me.
Healing will be a long process, but not impossible. I propose a few solutions below. First, it is important to note that the
healing has already begun. Soil
conservation policies over the last few decades have helped to slow erosion of
our farmland soils. However, the
challenge now is, as farmers to embrace new practices, such as no-till, to
continue to rebuild the soil of our making.
We are only as strong as the soil beneath our feet - the Dust Bowl is
evidence of this truth. By embracing
practices that build our soil, we build ourselves up. As small homeowners, we can do this too. Put down compost and mulch in your yard. Plant flowers. Please, play in the dirt again! The only way we can heal is if more of us go
back to playing in the dirt. In our
past, as many as 72% of us were farmers.1 We are people of this earth, let us go back
to it, or, at the very least learn to respect it again. Southern policy makers, please limit
development on prime farmland. According
to the American Farmland Trust and the NRCS National Resource Inventory Report
of 2010, we are losing more than 1 acre of farmland a minute to development,
and we need this land for the future of food production.[3] Please fight for innovative ways to increase
revenue that does not depend on the property taxes collected from the
development of new property on farmland areas.
If we keep developing on farmland, I suppose one day there will be no
farmers and no country music. Maybe this
is what Southern policy-makers want, but I don’t – and I imagine a lot of
Southerners would be enraged without their country music and tractor references.
The population of this world is not getting smaller, and we need to feed more
people every day. Please save our farmland.
So I ask you to please heal with me. As Southerners we can be a fiercely prideful
people. However, let us renew our pride
by very literally going back to our roots and our soil. Working together we can rejuvenate our soil
and our people.
As for now, I will continue along my red clay
highway.
Georgia red clay carry me home.
