Two contrasting images

 

The couple above were living in their home on the Bayou Bourbeaux Plantation in Natchitoches Parish, Louisiana in 1940 when this photograph was taken. The plantation was then operated by the Bayou Bourbeaux farmstead association, a semi-cooperative established through the auspices of the Farm Security Administration. The photograph was taken by Marion Post Wolcott for the Farm Security Administration. Zoom in a little on the photograph and you will see that these are hard working people and that the man has a half-smile and that the woman and the child have that apprehensive look of people who are not used to being photographed. The child appears to be playing, or they are not working.

Natchitoches Parish has a history of free people of color, Creole, and mixed-race settlement. It is set in the historic Black Belt.

The photograph immediately above was taken in Greene County, Georgia and is also a Depression-era photograph. I do not remember who the photographer was, but I'm certain that this was also a Farm Security Administration photograph. I remember reading that this man was a plantation owner and this his operation had been in his family for many generations and that his property was heavily mortgaged at the time that this photograph was taken. He stood to lose everything that he had, I suppose.

I don't know much about Greene County, and the histories of working-class people, African Americans and Natives Americans there have not been recorded. I believe that the county has seen a loss of its Black population in recent decades.     

What stands out for me here are the different experiences and legacies captured in these two photographs. Those plantations were on stolen land. There remain the legacies of forced colonialism, slavery, the Civil War and Reconstruction, the changes that took place in the southern agricultural economies that increased production and caused dispossession of so many people, and the Great Depression. But the couple in the photograph have something to smile about and just a bit of security while the plantation owner who is facing the loss of ill-gotten generational wealth and public humiliation is clearly worried, and perhaps angry as well. The couple and their child do not stand in for all Black people, and neither does this worried and angry man stand in for all whites. The four of them are victims of a system, but they were experiencing their lives quite differently at the moments when these photographs were taken.

Semi-cooperative and cooperative agriculture would not solve every problem faced by farmers and tenant farmers. It will not, by itself, take up the questions of the theft of land and the genocide of Native American and Indigenous peoples. Restructured semi-capitalist or non-capitalist forms of agricultural production will not guarantee equality or security. No one said that they would. But I can't help but think that the plantation economy was bound to fail, and should have done so, and that semi-cooperative and cooperative government-sponsored agricultural programs had a necessary role in building up alternatives to the old ways. And within those alternatives greater possibilities were presented and made possible.

The tragedies that attended these programs were that they were not carried out to in greater scale and did not last longer and prevail against the old political and social systems. We are still fighting the hold-overs and hold-outs of the old planter aristocracy, and the threat of civil war is once again in the air. It is to our lasting shame that we have not yet found the ways to bring poor and working-class people of color and poor and working-class whites together in one mass movement to create good and lasting change.

Would you rather be the hopeful family with a chance at doing better with and within your community or the lone worried and angry man in the rocking chair?