“ Around the growing of yam, of food for survival, [enslaved Africans] created on the plot a folk culture — the basis of a social order — in three hundred years…The plantation was the superstructure of civilization; and the plot was the roots of culture.”
— Sylvia Wynter, “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation”
I’ve been thinking a lot about provision grounds, the plots of land where enslaved Black Caribbeans grew food for sustenance and trade. Often located on poor quality soil or in hilly areas, provision grounds were most often planted with starchy root vegetables that nourished communities through continual exploitation and occasional famine. Vegetables like dasheen, yam, and cassava are still known as provisions or “hard food,” the essentials at the heart of a meal that keep you alive. The so-called root vegetables that traveled from West Africa along the Middle Passage and throughout the Black diaspora carry their fugitivity in their name: they grow underground, away from sight, storing energy in root containers below the soil. Unlike the plantation sugarcane that powered the industrial world, root vegetables do their most important growing below the surface. A crop for those accustomed to surviving off forgotten land, evading the gaze of empire, conducting their business after hours under the hum of the everyday.
Learning about provision grounds makes me think of the long legacies of kitchen gardens, rural yards, small plots—often tended by Black women—that are directly responsible for my survival and that of generations of displaced Black people throughout the world. A few weeks ago, I saw a quote from late Brazilian land defender Chico Mendes being shared widely on social media: “Environmentalism without class struggle is just gardening.” I mean, I get the sentiment. Throughout colonial history gardens have famously been wasteful, extractive, and symbolically violent. But the more I learn about the history of provision grounds and of Black women’s gardens, the more I see the ways revolution and class struggle have always been embedded in Black women’s small-scale and domestic growing practices. In landscapes dominated by plantation monoculture, these pockets of “waste land,” rocky yard, and abandoned lot have kept families and communities1 alive. In addition to the economic and nutritive sustenance created by Black women’s gardens/plots/yards, there is also the fact that the soil carries truths which would otherwise be obscured and unseen. The land itself is a living archive of climate shifts, botanical history, agricultural practices, uprisings, losses, and ancestry.2 To work with the soil, to grow things from the land, is to face these intimate truths and transform them into the material of survival.
Photo: Ebony G. Patterson, “. . . . they stood in a time of unknowing . . . for those who bear/bare witness,” 2018.
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By which I mean parents and kids, houses of friends, elders and caretakers, groups of lovers many times entangled, young people taking care of each other, the households of the sidechick, the madwoman, the runaway. The words “family” and “community” are of course burdened by the weight of white colonial relational standards but that is not what I am referring to when I use them.
In her poem Brief Lives, Jamaican poet Olive Senior writes about how the soil of a kitchen garden holds stories about conflict and violence:
“Gardening in the Tropics, you never know
what you’ll turn up. Quite often, bones.
[…]
Mine is only
a kitchen garden so I unearth just
occasional skeletons. The latest
was of a young man from the country who
lost his way and crossed the invisible
boundary into rival political territory.
I buried him again so he can carry on
growing.”