Chapter 6
"Farmer"

When I first heard about Rosalie Williams -- one of the few black female organic dairy farmers in the country -- I hoped that she would talk to me about race and the politics of land ownership, especially in the wake of the monumental 1997 civil rights case of Pigford v. Veneman. In this landmark case, the USDA agreed to compensate black farmers for billions of dollars in lost acreage, after the government admitted to willfully and systematically denying African Americans crop loans over a period of at least fifteen years. Despite the settlement, the USDA has so far denied payments to 86 percent of claimants.

I had hoped that Rosalie would talk to me about cancer among African Americans, and the links between such illnesses and our diets. I wondered if she might even know something about recent attempts by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to pawn inflict unlabeled milk and meat containing hormone additives on shoppers and to add cloned-animal products, including milk, to our grocer's shelves as well.

I wondered if she would be as outraged by these efforts as I was.

But Rosalie Williams didn't quite fit into my plans in the way I expected.

In fact, she wasn't at all conscious about racial politics. She wasn't like black farmers at say, Austin Farmers Market near Chicago, who sell organic greens, turnips, and okra and consider eating "a political act." And she wasn't like the hip-hop People's Grocery in Oakland, California, with its purple and orange solar-powered van, spreading the word about nutrition to urban neighborhoods. In fact, when I told her that I wrote for Essence magazine, it was her husband Clifford who had to explain what the publication was.

I soon discovered that even asking Rosalie about her racial background sent her into flurries of embarrassment and disclaimers. She wasn't sure if she should be described in that way, she told me during our first phone conversation, before I had any inkling that she was fair-skinned. She certainly didn't look white to me, but then again, she had never used words like "African American" to describe herself either. Both her mother and father were white, she explained, as were her paternal grandparents who raised her from the time she was a baby, and her Aunt Leona, who became her legal guardian after their deaths. She never knew her mother's parents but from pictures she thought her grandmother looked "like Sitting Bull," as she put it. On rare occasions when the subject of race had been raised in Bakersfield, a population that is 97.86 percent white according to the 2000 Census, Rosalie had referred to herself only reluctantly, as "dark."

"I don't really see color," she told me in our initial conversations. "I grew up here and I've always just been . . ." Here she paused for a moment, adding, "Accepted, if that's even the word."

Eventually however, a more complicated story would find its way to the surface, with details emerging only gradually and painfully. Though she was indeed a farmer through and through, I soon realized that Rosalie's spiritual vocation was something altogether different. Rosalie had lessons to offer her community that went beyond the confines of her small barn and thirty Holstein cows; lessons about race, forgiveness, and the awesome task of nurturing youth. At its core, hers was a story about feeding and faith. Hers was also a story about the giving and taking of life itself.

***

The following information has never been fully reported by any mainstream United States media outlet.

In November of 2003, ten members of the FDA's Veterinary Medicine Advisory Committee gathered in a ballroom of the Rockville, Maryland Double Tree Hotel to consider whether or not the government should declare cloned animal milk and meat safe for human consumption. It was a strange meeting to be having on a Tuesday, given that the FDA had already announced its approval in newspaper headlines the previous Friday....