There’s a wonderful book by Arlie Russell Hochschild, “Strangers in their Own Land” (2016). It’s an account of her journey into Louisiana’s Tea Party bayou country to get to know folks on the opposite side of the political divide. She made the trip wanting to understand the Right, and made lifetime friends there despite her home on the Left.
One thing she discovered about the people she met was that they are “rememberers.” They aren’t just remembering “the good old days,” she wrote. They are remembering “against the great forgetting of industry and state government,” which had completely destroyed the bayou environment of their youths: fish, frogs, birds, trees, water, land—everything polluted, killed off. Gone was the environment from which they took their Cajun identities, their food, their entire livelihoods. They are “strangers in their own land,” she wrote, not because they’d left. Their land had left them.
As she described it, the term “rememberers” fits beautifully one of the things I appreciate about many of my farmer friends here. It’s one of the “native values of rural life” I began writing about last month. This kind of remembering keeps people grounded to the ordinary acts of making a living in a place; it’s also an appropriate defense against threats to their existence. It’s an act of resistance by rural people who are invisible to the modern world, an anchor for rural people as well as a resource for the floating restlessness of our entire society.
There’s a song called “Exile” by Ann Zimmerman that always makes me cry because it portrays the transition from “rememberer” to “forgetter.” The song is about a young man, a Midwestern farm boy, who has given up farming to go work in the city. The choke point is in the song’s bridge: “But he knows now he can’t make a living / at doing this work that he loves; / so he tossed all those dreams in the rummage / with his grandfather’s old leather gloves.” It’s the gloves that make me cry, and the fact that where this young man is going, remembering his grandfather may hurt, not help.
Remembering is what I love about Alpaugh and Allensworth, those two communities of people I wrote on behalf of last week. I went to Alpaugh last Monday for the irrigation district’s board meeting, where Jack Mitchell is the board’s chair. Jack, of course, if you don’t remember all the times he’s cropped up in this column, is also the head of Deer Creek Storm Water District, the guy who was out all night on St. Patrick’s Day in 2023 who, with Deer Creek at flood stage and rising, found the cut in the Deer Creek levee that was sending a sheet of water toward the two towns. Jack’s the guy who called Kayode Kadara in Allensworth at 2:30 a.m. to warn them, then spent most of March 18 commandeering the closing of the levee’s breach. Jack’s the guy who was threatened by phone calls from Boswell and the Kings County Board of Supervisors that if he cut into the Homeland Canal to carry the water to the lakebed, the normal procedure, he’d be arrested. Jack’s the guy who said (according to Lois Henry’s fine reporting) “What am I supposed to do? Let two towns flood to keep water off the lake bed?” Jack’s the guy who found an alternate place to cut, temporarily taking the pressure off the levee so it could be repaired.
I went to the Alpaugh Irrigation District board meeting to tell Jack Mitchell that I remember what he did and that I will be celebrating this March 17-18 as the third anniversary of Alpaugh and Allensworth not being flooded. Later in the week I called Tekoah Kadara from Allensworth and asked if he remembered that we’re coming upon that anniversary, and he said “Yes! And we need to celebrate Jack!”
The people in Allensworth are rememberers, too, remembering the dedication of Col. Allensworth in acquiring land for a free black community. They haven’t forgotten, either, how the promise of water was lost for that land. Because they remember, they likely will have the power to stand up against the “big dogs,” as Jack calls them.
Being a rememberer is a powerful thing.
Trudy Wischemann is a reformed rememberer who writes. You can send her your rememberings c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247. This column is not a news article but the opinion of the writer and does not reflect the views of the Mid Valley Times newspaper.
