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Life on Easy Street Rachel LaCour Niesen, 1999 SAF intern With his deep, sandblasted voice, Robert Lee Faison tells me about his life on Easy Street, just between Dunn and Newton Grove, North Carolina. Robert, a sixty-five-year-old African American farmworker, bears the physical memories of a life of labor—a slouched, contorted spine from years of bending low in green-yellow leaves, cavernous grooves around the eyes, gifts of squinting and sun, one lost pinkie finger, and a toothless smile that reveals contagious contentment and graceful strength. Robert Lee Faison was born in 1933 in Dunn and moved to a house off Easy Street when he was five years old. He still lives on the same plot of land, the land on which his mother’s house was built, on which he, his brothers and sisters were born, on which he raised his own family, and on which he has worked since he was twelve years old. Today, the family is gone and the old home has gone through various stages of identity. Now he lives in a labor camp, only ten feet from the old home, with Mexican H-2A guestworkers. As distinct as the weather-worn eyes and protruding lower lip, Robert’s life is one of monumental routine—the monumental in the mundane. His roots run deep, and he is the only member of his family remaining on the land. Surrounded by tobacco fields and the voices of 88 The Human Cost of Food another language, Robert works hard in the only life he has ever known: tobacco farming. He is an ironic mix of rooted routine and willing adaptability. He has lived on the same land for over sixty years but is learning Spanish from the Mexican workers he lives and labors with. ‘‘I know everything there is to know ‘bout ‘bacca.’’ Robert’s molasses-slow slang sticks in my ears for ten minutes after he completes a sentence. That’s his life too—slow and steady, a cycle of planting, priming, worming, cropping , harvesting, sorting, hauling, barning, and curing tobacco. He is a breathing history book of tobacco farming in North Carolina. Now, too old to do the work he once did, Robert drives a tractor during harvest month, hauling flatbed loads of cut tobacco leaves picked by migrant workers who live with him at the camp. He remembers the days when all the farmworkers were African American and the plows were horse-drawn. He is a man of stories and life-learned wisdom who has spent his life working in the fields of North Carolina. In many ways, Robert is a forgotten hero. He moves quietly, lives simply, and does his work with incredible dignity. He is a constant in the changing equation of American agriculture. ...

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