Let the Resistance Bloom
Putting the Petals to the Metal
I give my grandparents a lot of credit for helping me become a writer. My grandmother was the most voracious reader I’ll ever know. She read two or three books every week for over eighty years. My grandfather was the consummate storyteller. He could spin a yard long enough to knit an elephant’s pajamas. They impressed upon me the value of a well-chosen word. Eventually, their stories became my stories; and I am honored to share some of them with you.
Sometimes I feel their presence in unexpected ways. In the past, I have written about their connection to the soil. They were farmers. Because of this they understood things about the Earth, its seasons and meter in ways I never will, but on a very small scale, I still try.
I grew up in my grandfather’s vast vegetable garden. It was a far cry from the row crops of his youth. Still, it gave forth a bounty of tomatoes, corn, beans, peas, peppers, okra, and other things. I spent many a day with a grocery sack of purple-hulled peas and a big bowl. I had to strip away the pod, letting the peas fall into the bowl. At the end of it, your hands were purple and your fingers tired. It bears mention that I did not then and do not now care for purple-hulled peas. After my grandmother passed away, at the end of 2024, my folks cleaned out her freezer. Half the world’s supply of purple-hulled peas were still in their icy bags. Having endured the Great Depression and the travails to follow, one never wants to be caught without a backup plan.
Plants like these also help form my enduring memory of my great-grandmother, Maggie Bryant. Everybody called her “Big Momma,” a quintessentially Southern endearment. She always had something rooting, blooming, or growing. She’s been gone a long time. I was still a kid when she passed, but even today, I can’t see flowers, especially zinnias, that I don’t think of her.
Zinnias remind me of Big Momma because of a story, her son, my grandfather used to tell. They were sharecroppers in southeast Arkansas. That life came with all the want, insecurity, and oppression that you might imagine. Even so, they were diligent in their saving, thrifty in their consumption, and managed to make a pretty good future.
If you don’t know what sharecropping was, here’s a brief explanation: Sharecropping was a form of debt bondage where a tenant farmer would rent a piece of farmland from a landowner. The landowner would provide the seed, the fertilizer, chemicals, and other materials needed to farm the land. The tenant would supply all the labor, often the equipment, and draft animals (typically mules). If they were really lucky, they owned a tractor or two.
Then as now, cotton was a staple crop in this area. While mechanized farming was becoming established, the landowners didn’t permit their tenants to use motorized pickers “because they didn’t pick clean enough.” My grandmother, mentioned above, hand-picked cotton until 1960.
Let that sink in a minute. The greed of the landowners was so enduring that a technology available for decades was prohibited because expendable humans were more plentiful. As such, plowing, planting, and harvesting took the work of many hands.
Sharecroppers were paid in a couple of ways. At the harvest, the landowner would take half the value of your crop — leaving you with a “share” of the profit. Of course, your harvest was usually weighed on a scale the landowner controlled and ginned by a gin they owned. Infer as you will. Then there was the commissary — a store owned by the landowner that had all the staples for householding, basic clothing, and small things one might want for a very simple life. The sharecropper would be allowed credit (against their projected share of the harvest) to purchase these things. If your potential harvest didn’t please the landowner, you might not receive all of your groceries.
Sharecropping was often done under the watchful eye of a “riding boss,” an employee of the landowner who functioned in much the same way as a slave driver would have before the Civil War. As Divid Griscom writing for The Real News Network states, “This system was ruled jointly by debt and by the gun.”
My grandfather related another story about the person from whom they rented land. During World War II, the US government sent supplies to rural Americans. These supplies were designed to help poor, hand-to-mouth farmers get through the deprivations of war. The government appointed my grandparents’ landowner as the person to distribute this food and other housewares in their area of the state. In the 1960s, when the landowner died, the people cleaning out his house found vast stores of all these canned and boxed supplies — that he chose to hoard for himself instead of giving to the people who were owed them. Of course he never used them. He just made certain no one he controlled got to either. This forms the basis for my view of the current one percent. They’re happy to let you die if it ensures their comfort.
As bad as white sharecroppers, like my family had it, being black added another layer of systematic oppression and violence. The mass murder of black tenant farmers in Elaine, AR is a particularly ergregious example of this disparity. Francine Uenua writing for the Smithsonian Magazine observes, “Out of this tragedy, known as the Elaine massacre, and its subsequent prosecution, would come a Supreme Court decision that would upend years of court-sanctioned injustice against African-Americans and would secure the right of due process for defendants placed in impossible circumstances.”
Despite these draconian conditions, my great-grandmother, Big Momma, had a deeply engrained aesthetic sense. Just because a thing was utilitarian, didn’t mean it had to be ugly. Take for example, one of her metal clamshell chairs that my mother now owns. This chair probably has twenty coats of paint on it, layered like tree rings, each year a different brilliant color.
Big Momma’s aesthetic manifested in other ways. For instance, when my grandfather was a boy, he was instructed to plant zinnia seeds at the end of each cotton row. There in the monochrome sea of endless green cotton plants were flowers of every hue. As the story goes, folks from counties all around would come to see the zinnias.
Big Momma must have known that life is best when we step outside the expected, when we dare to color outside the lines. I can’t be sure if she intend it as such, but in some ways the zinnias were a deeply subversive act. Despite a social and economic condition just a step away from outright slavery, she didn’t just plant flowers. She planted hope. Even though she and most of my ancestors in the area were sentenced to a life of unyielding hardness, those flowers told the world she was not broken. She still had spirit. She still had courage, and some rich man in a big house wasn’t going to steal her joy.
As I think about the struggles that surely lie in front of us with the madness and chaos of the Trump dictatorship, the zinnias have become more important to me. I think about my family’s oppression at the hands of wealthy landowners. I think about the legions of immigrant farm workers now being purged from our country by the racist monsters of the Trump Cult. They know all-too-well how hard this labor is. Good luck finding replacements, and good luck to the rest of us paying the tariffs on everything.
Each spring I plant zinnias. Some I plant in a large concrete urn that was Big Momma’s. When I plant them, I think of her. I also think about the symbol. I’m not just planting flowers. I’m planting symbols of resistance. You can turn everything in this country upside down, but as long as I have a small patch of sunny dirt, a zinnia will emerge, boldly defiant, colorful, tall and proud. Passersby may just see the flowers, but I know better.
I also want to suggest this to you, dear reader. Get yourself a two dollar packet of zinnia seeds, any variety you like. Find a patch of sunny ground or a container placed in a sunny spot. Plant those seeds and nurture them. Watch them bloom and remember the cotton rows. Remember the people who would not be defeated by greed. Remember the people who died in the name of a fair wage. Remember the struggle we all now face. Let this simple hardy flower be your symbol of the fight. Stick that flower in their rifle barrel and never let the bastards win.
Note: Parts of this essay were previously published.
