Black Earth and Ivory Tower
by Zachary Michael Jack, University of South Carolina Press, 2005. 312 pages.
reviewed by Kathleen D. Kelsey
Reading Black Earth and Ivory Tower reminds me of why I’m an academic and a hobby gardener and not a full-time farmer. In-between reading the 32 expertly written short essays, I pluck redbud seedlings out of my herb beds. As an academic I love to read, ponder, and write. As a farmer’s daughter, I also love to dig my hands into the soil, to move the earth and watch the earthworms escape my capture, occasionally finding a baby snake under a rock. Having agreed to complete a book review, I discipline myself to read yet another essay before wondering into the garden, where I would rather be on this lazy Sunday afternoon. Such are the tensions and passions present in Black Earth and Ivory Tower.
Many of the essays contain the high pitch of nostalgia for days gone by on the farm when woman, man, and child worked at the noble vocation of food and fiber production in a holistic and value-conscious sub-culture. The essays also pay tribute to the mean reality of living at the whim of nature–which provides little time for children to engage in the arts and literature.
Each essay is written by an academic who left the family farm for very practical reasons, yet, reconciles with his or her parents and past though literature to construct a memory worth sharing. The essays are bittersweet auto-ethnographies that emanate a love of the land that is clearly articulated and nuanced with the harshness of the changing landscape of production agriculture in the 20th century. As a farmer’s daughter, I was not invited to stay on the farm, nor did I long to. It was damned hard work and I preferred a 40-hour work week in an air-conditioned building to the 100-hour weeks my father spent tending to his orchards in the unbearably hot San Joaquin Valley. There was no time or permission to linger on the porch reading books and drinking iced tea.
Like the authors of this text, I also look over my shoulder at what-if scenarios had I stayed on the farm versus the choices that landed me as an academic with a back-yard herb garden. In reading the essays, I’m moved by the loss of family farms across America, yet reminded of the reasons for their demise. Tempted to romanticize about a lost way of life, one is kept honest by the facts and reminded of the meager existence of farm and ranch life. The world welcomed the industrial revolution and the labor-saving machinery that served to shift the American demographic from 35 percent farmers a century ago to less than two percent today. This is progress. Collectively, we are freed from the work of riding the fences in North Dakota on a January night looking for laboring cows so that we can indulge in the pleasures of scholarship: reading, writing, tinkering, and teaching.
As many agricultural college faculty also engage in production agriculture after hours, perhaps we are not as free as we could have been had we not been born to people who tend the soil. Tempted to keep one foot on the land and one in the Ivory tower, faculty will surely enjoy reading this text for the quality of the writing as well as the subject matter. However, the task of a book reviewer is to analyze the book for potential usefulness to educators in colleges of agriculture.
On this point, I shift from Sunday afternoon pleasure reader to teacher. This text offers fine examples of auto-ethnographies penned by the children of farmers and ranchers across America (I suspect that farmers themselves had little time to tell their own narratives). It offers the millennial generation a glimpse into the past and could be of value in courses teaching social constructions of an agrarian lifestyle. Many of the essays weave nostalgia and a romanticized notion of the family farm with the harshness of the farm as a failed business venture. This text will give younger students a finer distinction of farm life from a sociological perspective than less personal accounts. Perhaps, the text would be more at home across campus in the college of arts and science in a sociology course. I cannot imagine how an animal or plant science professor would integrate this text into his or her courses-except as suggested reading on a lazy Sunday afternoon as students break from learning nutrition formulas and soil types.
First published by the North American Colleges and Teachers of Agriculture December 2006.
