Oral history project focuses on WNC’s Black and Indigenous growers

After a midsummer morning rain at Southside Community Farm, Synai Ferrell is carefully observing farm manager Chloe Moore climb into the thick, fruiting branches of an apple tree with a trimming tool in hand.

“Follow and watch,” instructs Bonnetta Adeeb, who has left her seat in the shelter of the farm’s covered pavilion to facilitate this impromptu learning experience. “It’s so tricky pruning, because you have to know just which branches to cut.”

Ferrell, a native of Maryland and rising junior at Princeton University, has been visiting Western North Carolina throughout the summer for an internship. But despite appearances, the program isn’t aimed at teaching farming techniques to budding growers. Ferrell — along with fellow Princeton student Charlotte Defriez and Spelman College student Nia Flood — has been traveling to Asheville to gather stories.

The three are among a dozen students from Spelman, Princeton, Tuskegee University and The College of New Jersey who are participating in the Heirloom Gardens Oral History Project (HGOHP), a collaboration of Princeton, Spelman and the Maryland-based Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance, of which Adeeb is founder and co-director. Now in its second and final year funded by Princeton’s Alliance for Collaborative Research and Innovation, the project’s goal is to collect and archive the seed-saving wisdom and foodways of Black and Indigenous residents of the Southeastern U.S. and Appalachia through audio interviews. 

This summer and last, HGOHP placed interns in Alabama, Virginia, Kentucky, Maryland, Georgia and Eastern North Carolina. The addition of this year’s base in WNC emerged through the program’s partnership with the Asheville-based nonprofit The Utopian Seed Project (TUSP). 

Saving seeds

Through its work trialing seed varieties to support crop diversity in the Southeast, TUSP Executive Director Chris Smith has engaged in various ways with the Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance since 2021 and works with Princeton on okra seed oil studies. These connections led to a request for Smith to help make Asheville a host site for this summer’s HGOHP work. 

“Our primary role has been to connect and introduce interns to communities and potential interviews,” Smith explains. “When they first arrived, we helped coordinate a North Carolina road trip that took everyone out to Eastern North Carolina and back again, visiting Cherokee, a community in Farmville, North Carolina, the Lumbee [Indigenous community] in Eastern North Carolina and the Catawba Nation in Rock Hill, South Carolina.”

Smith has also supported the project through shooting video footage at certain sites to complement the audio interviews and transcripts in the archive, he adds. And TUSP farm assistant LuAnna Nesbitt has helped the interns with logistics, transportation and transcribing interviews. While Smith points out that TUSP’s mission doesn’t specifically include oral history gathering, he sees his work with HGOHP as an appropriate collaboration. 

“We think a lot about seeds being saved from the past so that we can feed the future,” he says. “Stories are very similar, and like seeds, they need to be [shared].”

The idea for the initiative originated with Ujamaa, which is focused on supporting the preservation and celebration of seeds and foodways that are culturally meaningful for Black, Indigenous and other communities of color, says Hanna Garth, an assistant professor of anthropology at Princeton and one of HGOHP’s three principal investigators.

“They felt like they needed more information about what various communities understood as culturally meaningful foods,” Garth explains.

Adeeb, who was visiting Southside Community Farm from her base in Washington, D.C., to see the HGOHP interns in action, says there’s currently a strong movement among communities of color in the U.S. to engage in agriculture and gardening, “but they don’t know how to do it because they’re two or three generations separated from the land.” 

She hopes that gathering and archiving the memories of farmers and gardeners of color will not only help resurrect culturally significant heirloom crops but also unearth forgotten old-fashioned growing methods that don’t require expensive machinery and massive tracts of land — assets that are often unavailable to communities of color. This knowledge, she says, can be the key to creating more resilient, food-secure and self-sufficient communities. 

“It’s a how-to lesson,” says Adeeb. “[We’re] interviewing elders and asking, ‘What was in your grandmother’s garden? What did they use with this or that?’ And once we identify what those crops are, we can seek to provide those to the communities.” 

She mentions collards, introduced to North America by enslaved Africans. “The collards your grandfather or your mother grew in their garden, when they saved the seeds over generations, it wasn’t something people talked about, they just did it,” she says, noting a practice shared by an elderly farmer interviewed in Farmville. 

“Sometimes she took the last collard [plants] left in the field, and she just laid them over [on the ground], didn’t harvest them,” Adeeb continues. “And, you know, those seeds will find a way to produce hundreds from one plant, hundreds of new starts you can give away to all your neighbors, and everybody can have collard greens. So we’re uncovering those stories and making that knowledge available, and making it seem that it’s doable, that the reclaiming of the heritage is not that difficult.”

Boots on the ground

To prepare for the program, the interns met in early summer at Spelman College in Atlanta for an “oral history boot camp” with the historically Black school’s official historian, Gloria Wade Gayles, Garth explains. They also received training on how to use the audio recording equipment, upload files to the archiving platform and other nuts-and-bolts tasks. 

From there, the students traveled in teams of at least three to their assigned locations where site coordinators like Smith began introducing them to community members and helping them identify and connect with potential interview subjects.

“Ujamaa’s desire is to work with people who are committed to saving or maintaining Black and Indigenous cultural foodways and seeds, so that might mean interviewing a farmer or it might be a gardener,” says Garth. “It could even be someone that doesn’t actually farm or garden anymore, but they just keep seeds, or they’re really passionate about sharing stories about seeds. It could be people who run farmers markets or people who have stores — just anyone who is related to this kind of food production and seed-saving work.”

Ferrell, an African American studies and journalism major, was out among the lush, dripping rows and raised beds at Southside Community Farm in the rain that morning pulling weeds and learning how to prune fruit trees because the project employs a boots-on-the-ground, hands-on method of partnering directly with individuals within their own spaces to collect the oral histories. The process, she explains, is aimed at avoiding extractive, transactional approaches to story gathering that have historically been exploitative of vulnerable communities. 

The farm’s manager, Moore, was one of the HGOHP’s oral history interviewees, so Ferrell’s workday at Southside Community Farm was an effort to make the story-sharing experience more reciprocal. “We want to be able to build relationships by actually doing the work,” says Ferrell. “We go in and do a lot of field site work by gardening with them and learning different techniques, pulling a lot of weeds and planting plants. And so through that, we’re able to talk to people and learn their stories.”

While Ferrell’s team connected with Black and Indigenous residents from Cherokee and other areas of WNC, their Asheville interviews are primarily with people living and working in the city’s historically Black neighborhoods of Southside and Shiloh, including Moore plus Shiloh natives and community garden caretakers Shaniqua Simuel and Kevin Conley, among others, many of whom are elders.

Depending on the interviewee, says Ferrell, the questions they ask center on everything from childhood memories of family, food and cooking to topics around the interviewees’ chosen career paths and the passions that drive them. Sometimes, the questions lead to spiritual topics, because many Black and Indigenous growers honor their ancestors and seek to preserve their legacies through their gardens. 

“It’s a way of connecting to people who they’ve lost over time,” she says. “And then we’ll ask, ‘How does working with food and herbs create a sense of healing for you?’ Because based on all the things their family has experienced and they’re currently experiencing, you have to kind of find a way to cope, and gardening has been a way to do that.”

‘Sense of healing’

Often, too, the historical narrative and current issues of an interviewee’s community are central to the conversations. Ferrell’s work in Shiloh, for example, has helped her understand that neighborhood’s complex history of integration and gentrification and the central role its community garden plays in healing and maintaining identity.

Capturing voices from the Southside neighborhood was of particular interest to her team, she says, because its Community Farm — that neighborhood’s sole communal growing space and fresh-food source — has been targeted for closure at the end of this growing season by its property owners, the Housing Authority of the City of Asheville. 

“They’re at risk of losing their land, and that space is a place for them to connect and have access to food, but they would also be losing a sense of healing, because of how that community overall has been gentrified,” says Ferrell. “More and more Black people are losing authority in that area, so it’s important to prioritize their voices.”

Ferrell says that while she’s aware of her inherent privilege in being able to visit then leave WNC to return to school — “a lot of these people don’t have that privilege to come and go,” she notes — spending time working alongside WNC’s Black and Indigenous community members, listening to their stories and seeing the region from their perspectives has made a huge impact.

“For a long time, I felt like you could only have a relationship with land and agriculture if you held [the title of gardener or farmer],” she says. “But I’m learning from the people we interview that land is very ancestral, and understanding my own history doesn’t necessarily negate my personal relationship with claiming that. You don’t necessarily have to own land in order to feel like you can have agency over it.”

As a future journalist, Ferrell also found great value in learning to avoid extractive storytelling by putting in the work to forge strong relationships with community members, literally from the ground up. “In order to tell someone’s story, especially from an honest perspective, it’s important to integrate steps before asking for an interview in order to really establish trust,” she says.”And I think what I’ve learned from this oral history project is that if both parties don’t have trust, you’re not going to get a very good understanding of what their story is.”

Though the HGOHP’s current grant from Princeton ends this summer, Ujamaa is seeking additional funding sources to continue the project, says Garth, and she and her Princeton colleagues hope to be involved if it carries forward. She estimates that about 45 stories have so far been collected and archived through the Atlanta University Center Robert W. Woodruff Library, and several dozen are still waiting to be processed and uploaded, including those gathered this summer.

The archive is designed as a community resource, and as more stories are added, Garth’s team plans to begin spreading the word. “We know that people will want to do research with it,” she says. “But we also hope that people who are interested in farming or seed-saving or getting back to their agricultural roots will go and access the archive and think about the different kinds of cultural foodways they are a part of and maybe build that stuff out and continue those traditions.”

Visit the Heirloom Gardens Oral History Project archive at avl.mx/e01. For more information about the project, visit avl.mx/e02.