Dear Reader,
I wonder what’s happening in your world right now. My favorite weeping beech tree has fully leafed out. Doesn’t it look like it’s wearing a ball gown? Maybe a Victorian model with a bustle.
It’s an extravagant time of year, and a good moment at which consider the the bounty provided by our farmers and our heartland.
Review
American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland
Marie Mutsuki Mockett
Graywolf Press, 2020
396 pages
$28.00
Bread. The pandemic bread baking started in earnest in March 2020, and was paused only during the hottest months. I dusted off the sturdy New York Times no-knead recipe, and dedicated my brown dutch oven to the task. And then after Labor Day, I remembered about One Mighty Mill. Jon Olinto and Tony Rosenfeld started up an artisanal flour mill in Lynn, Massachusetts, about half an hour down the road from my home. They identified a wheat farm in Maine that was transitioning to organic methods. Then they located the one man in America who is still building traditional wheat mills with stone grinding wheels, and they got one. I ordered some of their whole wheat flour online, and the results have been habit-formingly scrumptious. I now use a mixture of two of their flours: ⅔ bread flour and ⅓ all-purpose flour. We enjoy the flavor and texture so much that I rarely use traditional white flour any longer.
Toast. For the past year I have relied on toast: toast with coffee in the morning, toast with tea in the afternoon. Toast with butter and toast with honey. Toast has never let me down. Clinging to my crispy, buttery brown life raft, I have gotten through the plague year. And it was for this reason, as well as others we shall get to in a moment, that I was especially eager to read American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland, by Marie Mutsuki Mockett. I care a lot more than I used to about wheat. Bread as “the staff of life” has taken on new meaning.
Mockett, an American writer whose mother is Japanese, inherited a share in her father’s family’s Nebraska wheat farm. In 2015 she published a thoughtful, tender, and intriguing book called Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye: A Journey. In it she describes a pilgrimage she made with her young son throughout Japan, in the wake of the triple disaster of March 11, 2011. Her mother’s family operates a Buddhist temple in the Tōhoku region where the disaster occured. Throughout the journey, she mourns the loss of her father and grandparents. And she seeks to form an understanding of death and grief within Buddhist and traditional Japanese practices, and also from those she meets along the way. Mockett depicts mourning and remembrance in Japan as both intensely individual and profoundly communal. She possesses a searching intelligence, and she avoids the stereotypes and clichés that often proliferate when Westerners attempt to write about Japanese culture.
American Harvest is Mockett’s American pilgrimage. In the wake of Donald Trump’s election in 2016, she was invited by independent harvester Eric Wolgemuth to travel with him, his wife Emily, and their crew through seven states—moving north from Texas through the Wheat Belt and all the way to Idaho. Wolgemuth cuts the wheat each year on Mockett’s family land. He and his family and crew are Mennonite Anabaptists. In accepting Eric’s invitation, Mockett hoped to explore “The Divide” in American society and politics through the intersection of farming and Christianity. “Eric told me he wanted to share his America because he feared how little we have come to understand each other. The divide between city and country, once just a crack in the dirt, was now a chasm into which objects, people, grace, and love all fell and disappeared.”
I was also interested to read this book because I myself spent the year 2018 traveling around America, producing a podcast about the congressional midterm elections. With my partner Heather Atwood, I met and interviewed hundreds of ordinary Americans—in parking lots, Paneras, and church basements, as well as outside North Dakota’s only abortion clinic. Along the way, we met many Americans whose sincere and deeply held conservative religious beliefs lie at the core of their social and political identity.
The Trump Country/Flyover Country Travelogue has become a busy genre in narrative non-fiction. Sarah Kendzior’s work in The View from Flyover Country described the background that gave rise to Trumpism. I have also learned much from Spying on the South by the late Tony Horwitz, who in 2016, during Trump’s unexpected ascendancy, retraced Frederic Law Olmsted’s route through the South in the 1850s. Olmsted reported on that era’s divisions as an anonymous correspondent for the New York Times. Many writers have lately been coming at this question of “The Divide,” and in we do need these books.
One thing that makes American Harvest such a challenging project is that unlike Horwitz or Olmsted, the author isn’t simply a coastal liberal on the move, meeting Americans along the way and recording anecdotes and observations. She is instead embedded as a participant-observer, in a complex family-owned enterprise traveling by convoy, hauling millions of dollars worth of heavy equipment that can be dangerous to operate and repair. She aspires to tell the history of her own family, to explain wheat farming, to describe the Wolgemuths’ operation, and to engage the crew in dialogue about their Christian faith. She also attends a series of churches and speaks with a number of other Christians whom she encounters during her travels.
This is all a lot to take on, and, for me, gaps do emerge. Mockett does not engage with or report on progressive Christian communities, nor does she examine the role of the Black church in the heartland. Instead she generalizes about Christians’ beliefs, but from an extremely small sample size and in ways that are not always convincing to this reader. The following, for example, is very far from my personal understanding of the ministry of Jesus, in particular the Sermon on the Mount. “If we are all the same, as Christ said, then no one is special. To accept Christ, therefore means that one does not embrace the victim mentality or emphasize the parts of one’s personal history that are unpleasant. One should simply have faith.” Very few Christians I know would say that “no one is special” is a tenet of Christianity.
As the team travels onward, Mockett increasingly engages as a person of color with landscapes and communities, weaving yet more threads into this complicated narrative. She delves into the tragic histories and complex present-day lived realities of the Native Americans she encounters, as well as the crimes of land-taking, dispossession, and persecution that haunt our landscape and culture.
Mockett is an accomplished prose stylist. She offers up precise and limpid descriptions of the land and the weather. She relates in wonderful fashion the changes in the land and the farming conditions as the crew moves north. Here she is on the transition from Texas to Oklahoma:
What does the difference look like? Here in Oklahoma, I wade out into the wheat and it rises to my hip; it is so thick. I have to move slowly, as if I am walking through stiff whipped cream. There are no weeds and there is no rye. Each head of wheat is swollen with beads, and the beards—the spiky part of the wheat—stand out sharply, almost proudly it seems, doing what the head of the wheat was designed to do: protect the flesh inside. It is the most beautiful, clean field of wheat I have ever seen. I am grateful. The men will have work. The machines will have work. The farmer will have his crop.
There is also a moving sequence about the team’s viewing, in Idaho, of the great solar eclipse of 2017.
Mockett brings her powers of description not only to the physical realm, but also to the moral and psychological aspects of the team. Eric Wolgemuth is a model of Christian virtue: his personal dedication to following the example of Jesus inspires him to many acts of caring. Mockett also forges a strong bond with Eric’s son Juston, a college student who has abandoned his path to the ministry amid rising doubts about some of the tenets of evangelical faith—including hell, damnation, and the coming of the Apocalypse. But other young men on the crew seem to tire of Mockett’s questions, and the in-depth discussions regarding Christian belief. They apparently suspect her of undermining Juston’s faith, and they seem to resent her for her inability to contribute more to the work of the harvest. Upon her return from a two-week break, she senses a change.
Eric and Emily greet me warmly, as does Michael, but Juston seems somber. I feel as though there is a pane of glass separating me from everyone. It is as if I’m in one of those science fiction movies in an air lock, pounding on the window and asking to be let in where the oxygen is. I want to say: But I just defended Christianity and your way of life and the guns and everything from those liberals back east!
Her presence has driven a wedge between members of the crew, and the story of that division is at the painful heart of this book.
I came away from American Harvest with great admiration for the endeavor. Yet I can’t help wishing that Mockett had pared the story down, and devoted greater attention to the erosion of trust within the crew. We never quite hear what things felt like among the more conservative members of the group. Thus we don’t truly learn the full story of how this attempt to bridge The Divide, begun by good people and with the very best of intentions, broke down. Her journey does bring Mockett to a series of understandings about white supremacy and its relationship to her reading of conservative Christianity. “The architecture of this world feels to me like a psychological prison.”
There is a different story I found myself wanting to hear more about from Mockett: the coming impact of climate change on farmers and farming in the United States. Mockett structures a number of her conversations with farmers around paired ironies: the Christians who do not believe in evolution yet use GMO technologies to enhance their yields, and the technocratic hipsters who decry “frankenfoods” and buy organic, but often without actually understanding what that term means. But we don’t hear much about climate.
I found myself wanting to ask Eric Wolgemuth what he believes about climate science, and what changes he has or has not witnessed over his decades of harvest experience. I wonder how the rising frequency of severe weather might affect our harvests and alter the dynamics of The Divide. Perhaps Mockett’s ongoing connection to her land in Nebraska and to the Wolgemuths will provide her with the opportunity for further explorations—possibly, for example, of the “Creation Care” evangelical movement, whose adherents accept climate science and are moved by faith to take action.
Our daily bread has become more precious during the pandemic, and those who make it possible have become more appreciated. Perhaps the work of caring for a damaged and threatened planet together might serve us as a bridge, to a future in which we bake and break bread together in greater harmony.
Other Voices, Other Forms
I’ve recently been looking at the paintings of Joe Jones (1909-1963). Jones was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and he depicted the rural Midwest extensively. The image below is a 1939 study for a mural titled “Men and Wheat.” He created it for the post office in Seneca, Kansas, as part of a New Deal program to commission public art during the Depression. Jones was a man of radical politics, who documented the experience of working people and the poor. His work fell out of favor for decades after his death, and has only recently been championed once again. Look at those storm clouds. Will the farmers get safely back to the barn before the thunder and lightning begin? Will the remaining crop be damaged?
Poem
Here is a poem about wheat by Helen Hunt Jackson, who advocated for Native American rights in her book A Century of Dishonor (1881). She was a dear friend of Emily Dickinson.
For Your Reading Radar
The U.S. edition of Diary of a Young Naturalist is now available for pre-order in advance of its early June release. There will be more on this book in a future issue. It has deservedly won a string of prestigious awards in the UK. Author Dara Macanulty is a teenage naturalist from Northern Ireland who is autistic. The book relates a year in his life, as he shares the joys of his adventures, the stresses of his family’s move and his fears of bullying in school, and his personal growth as an advocate and climate activist. Macanulty is genuinely gifted, and this book might be a wonderful graduation present for a young writer in your life.
For Your Calendar
Jane Goodall will be joining Peter Wohlleben to discuss his new book, The Heartbeat of Trees, via Harvard Bookstore. The event is tomorrow, Sunday May 16th at 1 PM Eastern.
Bookstore of the Week
Since Marie Mockett’s family farm is in Nebraska, our indie bookstore of the week is Francie & Fitch in Lincoln, Nebraska. This store has an excellent website, an art gallery, and a busy events calendar.
Wishing you joy this weekend.
xo Nicie