She Stakes Her Claim: A New American Dream Stirs on a Georgia Homestead

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On a cold February morning in 2017, a half dozen or so women and several men gathered in the yard of a suburban home outside of Athens, Georgia, to learn how to kill and butcher a hog. The mood was both anxious and somber. Eventually, they would have hams and bacon, ribs and chops. But for now, the 350-pound black-and-white-spotted sow was still rooting around out back.

The students stood under a tree in sweatshirts and jeans. The instructors wore long beards and leather aprons. Across the street sat rows of tract homes, another incursion into old farmland as the suburbs of Athens crept inexorably toward those of Atlanta. The instructors explained that one of them would shoot the sow in the head with a small-gauge shotgun. The shot meant instant death, and a second man would come swiftly behind to slit its throat. They warned about death throes. For many of the women, this was the first time they would see an animal die.

The women felt that witnessing this act would help them regain something that had been lost, a visceral connection to the food that sustains them and, more fundamentally, greater control over their family's nourishment. Not so long ago, households throughout Georgia had killed hogs and put away pork chops. But now these women couldn't find someone local to teach them how to slaughter a hog; the instructors had to be flown in from Ohio. And even they were largely self-taught, having pieced together their skills through a combination of, as they put it, "trial and error and terrible YouTube videos."

When the instructors were done explaining how the hog would die, they passed out shots of whiskey. As a benediction, one of them read from Wendell Berry's poem "For the Hog Killing":

        let this day begin again the change            of hogs into people, not the                other way around,    for today we celebrate again our lives'        wedding with the world,for by our hunger, by this provisioning, we  renew the bond.

There was palpable relief once the sow was dispatched and hoisted for scalding. As the women milled about, some laughing and joking nervously, one looked on with a calm sense of satisfaction. Her name was Cyndi Ball. She was in her midfifties, with short gray hair and bright blue eyes. Cyndi had been working much of her life to be present for a moment like this, gathered with her community as a sow's carcass that would nourish them all hung from a tree limb.

A member of Ball's organization, the National Ladies Homestead Gathering (NLHG), had organized the training. For decades, she and the women who joined her that day had felt increasingly adrift in a society that had little interest in recognizing or supporting them outside the context of what brand of pork chop they might buy at the grocery store, or which politician they might support. In their lifetimes, women had broken free of the stereotypical homemaker role and become judges, senators, surgeons, professional athletes. They had witnessed a seemingly endless stream of new conveniences—affordable air travel and microwave ovens, cell phones and on-demand everything—each one celebrated as another glorious thread in the tapestry of eternal progress that had always defined the American Experiment.

Yet for many, all that progress had failed to deliver on its promise of a secure and meaningful life. On the contrary, each year brought new uncertainties, new fears—financial, cultural, environmental. Day-to-day life felt precarious, with ruin just one unlucky break away—a lost job, an illness, an accident. At the same time, the burden for everything, from saving for retirement to figuring out what news and information to trust, was falling increasingly on the individual, with little help from employers or the government. It was hard to escape...