D2_Agraria_Journal_21_OPT

18 AGRARIA JOURNAL 2021 An edited version of this article appeared in the Black Farming Newsletter Kenisha Robinson and Caressa Brown are childhood friends who joined forces in 2019 to address the food desert crisis in the West Dayton and Trotwood, Ohio, communities. Kenisha is a “surprise” third generation farmer. Though she grew up on her family farm in Trotwood, she did not intend to become a farmer. Her parents grew up in the south, in Georgia and Alabama, and were just one generation away from the sharecropping era. For her grandparents and great grandparents, farming to feed their family was a necessity, not an option. Both of her parents’ families moved north to pursue better opportunities; they wanted more out of life for their future generations. Kenisha’s paternal grandfather owned horses, raised chickens, and grew produce on his farm in New Lebanon, Ohio, and her father raised pigs and hogs and grew an array of vegetables and fruits around their farm while also working a full-time job as a mail-carrier. Kenisha’s parents encouraged her to take a different path, toward higher education and a career they thought would provide a more stable and lucrative life. She set her sights on college and the big city lights, graduated from Wright State University with a degree in public administration, and eventually moved to Chicago, where she worked for the Greater Chicago Food Depository, the food bank for Cook County. Caressa, is the youngest child of a Jim Crow-era sharecropper from Alabama. Her grandfather found himself stuck in a cycle of debt to a white farmer in a part of Alabama that did not allow Black kids to receive an education. He, his wife, and their nine young children had to work off their debt in the farmer’s field during Alabama’s long growing season. When winter months came around and there was no work for Black people, Caressa’s grandfather had to ask for a cash advance from the white family to feed his family. The cycle continued for almost a decade until one night, her grandfather had enough. He wanted better for his children. The growing season was over, and as usual he had requested an advance from the white family that he and his family were essentially enslaved to. Only this time, he had no intention of having his family work it off during the next growing season. Instead, he packed up his wife and kids and fled, in the middle of the night, risking their lives. He moved them to town in Texas where he heard there was a school that taught Black kids in K-4th grades, then to another Texas town where there was school that taught Black kids 4th-8th grades, and then once again to another town in Texas that taught Black kids in 9th-12th grades. Caressa’s father migrated to Dayton, Ohio, after serving in the U.S. Marine Corps, and relocated back to Texas, after she graduated from high school. He had always kept a garden, BY KENISHA ROBINSON & CARESSA BROWN Coming Back to the Land REVIVING A MULTIGENERATIONAL LEGACY Kinesha Robinson and Caressa Brown