Living off the land: the new sisterhood of Black female homesteaders
The car made its way along a tree-lined gravel road. The sky was clear, and as the car drove by, the trees swayed from side to side, almost like a sign of welcome. The road opened up into a large pasture. In the middle of the pasture was a wooden pergola with grapes growing on it and a circular garden surrounding it. Tiny houses dotted the pasture, as brown children played merrily in the mud. In the center of all of this, planting in the circular garden like she was Mother Earth herself, was a Black woman.
For Chantel Johnson, this scene was “heaven”. It was actually Bear Creek, North Carolina, in May 2016, but more importantly, it was Johnson’s first glimpse into homesteading, and she was hooked at first sight.
Johnson, an African American woman in her late 20s at the time, made her way up the gravel road that day with her boyfriend, whom she’d met a few months prior on OkCupid. Johnson was attracted to his profile picture: a shot of him standing with goats. She recalls thinking to herself: “Are those goats? I want to meet those goats!”
Johnson was grieving and depressed. It had been less than a year since her younger brother, who had been shot and paralyzed on the South Side of Chicago in 2014, succumbed to his injuries and passed away, in August 2015.
She carried that grief with her up the gravel road that day to visit her boyfriend’s friends, an interracial couple – Black wife and white husband, with kids – who owned a 30-acre homestead in Bear Creek. When the friends offered Johnson and her beau the opportunity to live with them on the homestead and help out, Johnson jumped at the chance. If this was heaven, then perhaps she could find the antidote for her grief here.
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One of the first official uses of the term “homesteading” was in 1862, with the passing of the Homestead Act, signed by Abraham Lincoln to encourage western expansion and US agricultural development. But the act of homesteading – a focus on self-sufficiency dependent on the land, with an emphasis on subsistence agriculture – predates the Homestead Act, especially for Black Americans.
Homesteading knowledge and skills allowed slaves to create a modicum of a life for themselves by growing their own supplemental food, raising small livestock and making needed tools and home goods. This same knowledge sustained Black families during the Reconstruction era and beyond. While there have been several resurgences of the self-sufficient homesteading mindset in the United States, the face of these movements has been overwhelmingly white.
Meanwhile, Black people, and Black women in particular, have become the poster children for the antithesis of the values homesteading espouses. In contrast to self-sufficiency and hard work, Black women are stereotyped as dependent, disproportionately reliant on public assistance, and unwilling to work, perhaps most famously by Ronald Reagan’s racialized “welfare queen” remarks.
Black women also bear the brunt of many of our nation’s worst health outcomes, including high rates of obesity, high mortality from heart disease and breast cancer, and some of the worst maternal health outcomes and infant mortality rates. Only recently has the medical field started to acknowledge the role of trauma in facilitating these disparities.
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Johnson recalls several layers of trauma from her childhood and young adult years. As a young girl growing up on the South-East Side of Chicago, she remembers moments of joy and abundance contrasting starkly with moments of anger and scarcity, which flowed lockstep with the dwindling of the family’s financial resources from the first to the end of the month.
Then, as an undergraduate student at a predominantly white university in the midwest, she recalls being shunned by white and more affluent Black classmates alike, because she didn’t speak or behave the way they felt someone in that space should. She quickly learned to code-switch, alternating between ways of speaking and behaving based on her surroundings. It’s a practice that many Black people are all too familiar with, in their efforts to live, work and study in predominantly white environments.
She also struggled initially with coursework, attempting to translate her Chicago secondary education, where she graduated as salutatorian, to the rigors of university work. Johnson has conflicting feelings about the costs and benefits of her undergraduate education: “I was so fortunate to be at that school, where an institution had time to nurture me, but at the same time I was being traumatized and I was being changed. And that was a very difficult thing.”
Between 2012 and 2014, her middle brother and younger brother were each shot several times, but survived. The ultimate trauma was her younger brother’s untimely death, 15 months after he was shot in 2014.
Johnson received her bachelor’s degree, graduating cum laude, later earned a master’s degree and obtained a research job in North Carolina. But the impact of the trauma remained. Taken together, these experiences created a rage against “the system” in Johnson. She was angry about systemic racism and poverty and the laws, policies and institutions that uphold it.
“I’ve done everything right – star child, went to college, went to Africa for a few months, did AmeriCorps, I volunteered, I got this job, and I don’t understand why this isn’t enough and my brothers are being shot,” she says.
This revelation, four months before discovering Bear Creek, marked the beginning of Johnson’s homesteading journey. In her mind, self-sufficiency was the only option, because the system wasn’t going to take care of her. It was rigged.
Consequently, by the time she got her first glimpse of heaven, she was already intent on giving up her spacious two-bedroom townhouse in Durham, North Carolina – in exchange for less than 300 sq ft of shared living space, with no electricity or plumbing, and an outside toilet. She was ready to gradually transition from her research job, where she was miserable, in exchange for hard labor cultivating, raising animals and living off the land.
The transition came with other challenges as well. Johnson recalls initially being scared of the chickens she was tasked with putting back into their coops every night, having to rely on the assistance of a five-year-old on the homestead for help. Also, after she moved to Bear Creek permanently, two of the first homesteading tasks Johnson learned were chopping wood and lighting the wood-burning stove for cooking and heat. Two months later, Johnson found herself in the dead of winter, cold in the tiny house. Everyone else was away; she was alone and crying because she couldn’t light the wood-burning stove.
“That’s when I started to regret my decision,” Johnson remembers. But thankfully her cellphone still worked, so she found a YouTube video that walked her through lighting such a stove. Figuring out how to do it convinced her that maybe she could make it in this way of life. That she could bet on herself to succeed in spite of the odds.
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While Johnson didn’t grow up with examples of homesteading around her