Tobacco Harvest: An Elegy

Tobacco Harvest: An Elegy is in most senses a coffee table book. The text covers only nineteen pages; it has more photographs than text pages; it is wider than it is long. It is a great book to flip through when whiling away your time. But, as with all things Wendell Berry, this simple book is much more than it seems. In fact, simplicity is the medium for its complexity.

An elegy is “a mournful poem,” or, more broadly, any creative piece that mourns. Such works are premised on the assumptions that that which has passed is worth mourning and that others share the elegist’s grief. To mourn the passing of the traditional tobacco farm and the folklife that it generated might, thus, appear odd. Truly a curse for many people, tobacco is more demonized than praised today. However, precisely because of the cultural discourse it evokes, Tobacco Harvest is instructive, and not only for folklorists. Environmentalists, rural sociologists, and cultural researchers should examine this book and take it to heart. In the context of the family-farm movement, about which Berry has written extensively, this work provokes reflection on the creation of social and cultural meaning and continuity.

Wendell Berry is a regional writer, focusing on the traditional way of life in Kentucky’s rural areas. He has written at least ten books of fiction, thirteen books of essays, and well over a dozen books of poetry. Although he does write with a rural Kentucky focus, his work has been enormously influential across the United States among environmentalists and especially among the family-farm movement. He is as well known in South Dakota as in Kentucky, among Sierra Club devotees as among bluegrass literati. He has created in his body of fiction a Faulkneresque town he calls Port William, complete with neighboring communities. The message in his fiction is that the human condition, in its positive and negative aspects, emerges fully in simple rural communities. It is a Jeffersonian view, with warts. Berry emphasizes the rural complex: the space of community where people are tied together through experience, culture, society, and the land itself. Importantly, the interweaving of these strands actually creates the fabric of each person’s character. People maintain mutualistic relationships with one another, which create their society and culture, and mold their character; here, the land itself is as important as the people. We as humans, in any region, are native to our place and must come to understand ourselves through our relationship to the land. In this book, Berry mourns the passing of the traditional family farm, in which the family and the community would come together to work the land and harvest the crop; in so doing, he mourns the loss of our sense of humanity and our sense of ourselves. Poignantly positioning the traditional family-farm culture between the antebellum slave culture and today’s migrant-worker culture, Berry writes, “The people who work the land should own it” (p. 3).

James Baker Hall, the book’s photographer, is also a writer. In fact, he is the former poet laureate of Kentucky, but he writes not a word in this book. His pictures express his poetry. He and Berry have known each other for over thirty years, and it was thirty-one years prior to the publication of this book that Hall shot these pictures. The tobacco harvest being documented happened in 1973 on a farm in Henry County, Kentucky, where neighbors came out to help Owen Flood and his wife Loyce harvest their crop. Among the twelve neighbors were Wendell Berry, his son Den, and his daughter Mary. Tobacco Harvest is a personal elegy as much as a cultural one, because Berry and Hall mourn the passing of friends (for six of the crew have since died), the passing of the farm itself, and the passing of the communal spirit residing in the land. Both the photographs and the essay document the entire process of the harvest with a reflexively ethnographic thoroughness.

The Berry reader would perhaps recognize in Owen Flood the model for Athey Chatham, the traditional, environmentally conscientious farmer from Berry’s 2000 novel, Jayber Crow (Counterpoint, 2000). Athey represents the consummate farmer, one who respects both the land and his community because they fulfill his humanity. The land itself, the flora and fauna, and the rural human society— the “Membership,” as he calls it, of a community—all intertwine into one entity, an entity that is consonant with the full fostering of the potential of its human inhabitants. To amputate one from the rest is to maim our humanity. For Berry, the harvest itself as a fully human, enriching engagement transcends the issue of how tobacco is used. The farmer’s harvest represents a fully reciprocating humanity, where neighbor helps neighbor, where people nurture the land, where the land provides for the people, and where the flora nurtures both the people and the land. The elegy invoked in Tobacco Harvest, then, is a celebration of that human ecological spirit that Berry has witnessed eroding over the decades.

I recommend reading Jayber Crow at the same time as Tobacco Harvest, because absorbing the synaesthesia of Harvest while inhabiting the lives of the farmers and townspeople of Crow will enrich both works for any reader, while making the world seem, at least for a moment, comprehensible.