“Mama Learned Us to Work”: An Oral History of Virgie St. John Redmond

Abstract

In the past half century, American farmers have lived through one of the most profound transformations in the nation's history: the number offarmers has fallen precipitously, capital investment has soared as machinery and chemicals replaced draft animals and human labor, government policy makers increasingly control farm decisions, and survival has come to rest on cash flow. The changes have been general and widespread. Their particular form, timing, and extent have varied widely by region, however, and the way farmers have actually experienced them has varied, additionally, according to class, race, and gender. In the fall of 1986, the Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources at the National Museum of American History began documenting these changes from the point of view of older farmers in the South. An Oral History of Southern Agriculture has now created an archive of some 180 interviews with men and women who came of age with the New Deal and participated in the region's transition to modern capitalist agriculture.1 As project researchers, Curator Pete Daniel and I sought to reflect diversity by organizing field trips according to major commodity areas as well as by interviewing a cross-section offarmers: men and women, black and white, landowners and former plantation overseers, wage hands and sharecroppers. Narrators described changes in work associated with cotton, tobacco, rice, sugar, peanuts, dairying and poultry.