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8 Of the Quest of the Golden Leaf Black Farmers and Bright Tobacco in the Piedmont South Evan P. Bennett In the early autumn of 1939, photographer Marion Post and sociologist Margaret Jarman Hagood, rambling around the back roads of Orange County, North Carolina, stopped to talk to black farmers in Cedar Grove Township, northwest of Chapel Hill. No record of the conversation exists, but the farmers allowed Post to photograph their farms and even posed for a few shots. The meeting no doubt was steeped in the complex racial mores of the day. The presence of two unaccompanied white women on their property could cause Burrie C. “Doc” Corbett, his cousin Wesley Crisp, and their neighbors no small amount of trouble if misinterpreted in the Jim Crow South. Risking offense by turning them away perhaps presented hazards, too, however, especially once Post, in the employ of the Photographic Division of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), revealed her position as an agent of the state. What of the inevitable questions about their everyday lives almost certainly asked by Hagood, author of the then soon-to-be-released (and now classic) study of white tenant farm women, Mothers of the South (1939)? The questions of strangers—Do you own or rent this farm? How many acres do you own? How many of your children are in school?—test the limits of hospitality enough; how much more when the questions cross the era’s ever-present gendered color line? And what of Post’s requests to photograph their farmsteads? Prosperous black farmers sometimes found themselves the target of white farmers’ anger and therefore often acted with discretion. The extent to which the farmers Post and Hagood met were willing to open their lives to outsiders’ eyes suggests much about both the farmers 180 · Evan P. Bennett and the larger black community of Cedar Grove. A significant number of black landowners called the township home. In 1930 at least forty-seven black farm families, or roughly 35 percent of black families living on farms, owned the land on which they lived. By 1939 the number of black owneroperators had increased by nearly a fifth countywide, so the number of black landowning farm families in Cedar Grove had also likely grown by the time the women landed at Doc Corbett’s doorstep.1 Sixty-year-old Corbett , the son of former slaves, owned more than six hundred acres of land in a county where the average farm measured just over eighty-six acres. He was a prosperous farmer and local community leader. Just two years before Post and Hagood’s visit, Governor Clyde Hoey had chosen Corbett to represent North Carolina at the meeting of the National Federation of Colored Farmers. His parents, Richard and Teash Corbett, had also been landowners before their deaths (in 1914 and 1924, respectively), as had his brother, Charlie, who died in 1923. Another brother, forty-five-year-old Bennie, owned his own land just up the road. Richard and Teash bought their farm in the first decade of the twentieth century; all of the Corbett brothers purchased their first farmlands in the boom years of World War I. Nearly a generation younger than Doc Corbett, thirty-nine-year-old Wesley Crisp, also the child of parents born in slavery, owned 165 acres in the same neighborhood (figure 8.1). Like the Corbett brothers, he also had a landowning brother, Eddie, who also lived just up the road. Unlike the Corbetts , however, Wesley and Eddie were first generation landowners. Both began buying land in the 1920s.2 What she saw in Cedar Grove piqued Post’s interest. “[W]e came across a very interesting settlement of negro owners with well equipped large farms, some of the ‘grown’ children going to college, etc.,” she wrote to Roy Stryker, her boss at the FSA. “We want to do much more photography around there. . . . At least spend a good deal more time & make a more thorough study of that situation.” Familiar with shooting the South’s deepest pockets of rural poverty—indeed, charged by Stryker to seek them out in defense of the FSA—Post knew that the prosperous black farm community of Cedar Grove, where even many of the sharecroppers worked for black landowners, was unique. Sociologist Howard Odum’s wonder at what Post and Hagood reported validated her surprise. The famed scholar, then leading the charge to study and correct the South’s endemic poverty from his post at the University...

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