It's 6 a.m., and the farmer is ambling over to his dusty blue pickup. The morning Virginia light is gauzy and soft. He has knee problems and a sore back and blood pressure ailments. Four hours ago, he returned from New Jersey, where he'd gone with his son, hauling trees and shrubbery -- a little sideline gig to make extra cash. "It's war, man, trying to keep going like we do," he says.
He's got fields to check on now and fertilizer to lay down. He's got a couple of boiled eggs in his belly and a styrofoam cup of coffee in his hands -- and he's praying harder for his skeleton crew to show up on time than he is for rain.
Ricky Haynie's home overlooks the fields where his ancestors once worked as slaves.
(Roland L. Freeman)
|
|
His wife wonders how he does it: the constant going, the lack of sleep. He fell from the tractor two months ago. Lay in the field like a lamb, twisting around in the high weeds, unable to move for a couple of hours. He was lucky: It was only cracked ribs. In the emergency room, he was bandaged and told to get some rest. He was sofa-bound all of one day. Then Ricky Haynie hobbled back into the fields his family has been farming since Emancipation.
He's only 50, yet it's been years since he was king of Northumberland County, leasing thousands of acres of land and planting them with soybeans, corn, wheat and barley. He was the most ambitious black farmer Virginia's Northern Neck had ever seen. Now he's broke and in a torturous legal battle with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a fate shared by thousands of other black farmers around the country.
Many have been victims of what the USDA itself describes as "indifference and blatant discrimination" against blacks in federal lending practices and programs from 1981 to 1996. When the USDA settled a class-action discrimination lawsuit five years ago, the agreement was hailed as a civil rights landmark that could reap more than $2 billion in damages for beleaguered black farmers. But most of the money didn't come, and this summer the Environmental Working Group, which conducted a two-year probe of the settlement and its aftermath with the help of the National Black Farmers Association, issued a scathing report charging that the USDA had paid $12 million in legal fees to thwart giving thousands of black farmers their settlement money. "Instead of processing claims as promised," the report states, "USDA used the full weight of the federal government against African American farmers it had already discriminated against."
Just last month, another class-action lawsuit was filed against the USDA on behalf of blacks who farmed between 1997 and 2004. It charges that the USDA continues to discriminate against black farmers and has retaliated against those who collected payments from the 1999 settlement.
None of this surprises Ricky Haynie. "Those black farmers who agreed to that [1999] settlement," he says, "were being led down a terrible road."
Haynie opted out of the class-action suit; in 2000, he filed his own $12 million lawsuit against the USDA, charging that the agency cut off his access to federal loans because he was black, which made it impossible for him to get his crops planted on time and operate profitably. Haynie is more than $3.6 million in debt and hoping for a decision soon. "I just wanna be free," he says.
It's now hours beyond morning, and he's gearing up to spray pesticide across a field. On paper at least, Haynie still owns 125 acres of land, though the USDA has liens against it. He makes ends meet by helping his son P.J. Haynie, who leases and farms 1,800 acres of rich Virginia soil.
"I've survived by the grace of God," Haynie says, a black man in a green field with the bright sun on his face. "By now, I should have been gone."
THE FARMER -- HAZEL EYES, THICK BUILD, MEDIUM HEIGHT, MELODIOUS SOUTHERN VOICE -- doesn't sit for an interview. You have to hop in the pickup with him early in the morning. He's got acres to check, more fertilizer to put down, workers to check on. He's in Heathsville right now, rumbling along.
"This was my great-grandfather's land," Haynie says, pointing to a field he owns. "This was the first piece of property a black man owned in this whole county."
His great-grandfather Robert Haynie was born a slave in 1823 on Virginia's Northern Neck, where the land is sandwiched between the Chesapeake Bay and Rappahannock River. He got his freedom after Emancipation, then scrounged and saved enough to buy 60 acres in Northumberland. He farmed and preached -- and built the Macedonia Baptist Church, which still stands today -- and thus he believed in two things: the land and his Bible. "For we are but of yesterday," he was fond of saying, quoting Job in alluding to the family's precious heritage.
Haynie pauses at the edge of the field his great-grandfather farmed, then shifts the pickup into gear and says, "It's amazing how close we are to slavery." Soon he's rolling down another road, history on his mind. "I remember going to the doctor with my grandparents, seeing signs, 'Colored,' 'White.' Remember it like it was yesterday."
Ricky Haynie was born in the spring of 1954, the year the Supreme Court declared school segregation unconstitutional. His given name was Philip, but everyone called him Ricky to separate him from his father.
The first seven years of his life he lived with his grandparents. His grandfather Harvey J. Haynie had a big white horse, called Pat, and Ricky sometimes still sees the two of them in his dreams, out there in the fields, a man and his mount blending with the land like wedded partners in a slow dance. Little Ricky looked at the horse with awe, his granddaddy atop it, the land spreading out from them. The life lessons began early, he says: "My grandfather taught me how to count money by selling watermelons and cantaloupes outside, on the roadside."
When Haynie was in eighth grade and back living with his parents, their house in Reedville burned down because of an electrical mishap. He was in school at the time. "All you had was the clothes on your back," he says of the aftermath. The family rented a home while they rebuilt. Everyone did something to pitch in. After school, Ricky -- the oldest of four children -- would go down to the fish market and work, cleaning fish, rubbing elbows with older black men. He put the dollar bills he earned into the family kitty to buy bricks and mortar.
"I'd go to school smelling like fish," he says. "Kids would laugh at me. It didn't matter. I knew what I had to do."
It took four years to get another house built. Ricky's mother, Gladys, taught grade school. Ricky's father, Phil, farmed with joy in his eyes. And on those occasions when the Haynies would be together in the fields -- grandfather, father, grandson -- Ricky felt like a prized pupil, learning from his elders. "When I was growing up in the '50s," he says, "I saw proud black men. They had a little land, a little of this and a little of that. Proud black men who stood for something."
In 1972, Haynie enrolled at what is now Virginia State University in Petersburg, 100 miles from home. But he never spent one weekend on campus because he always returned home to farm. He and his father had begun a pig operation.
"We'd raise pigs, up to 40 pounds, then sell 'em," he recalls, Virginia wind in his face, his left arm hanging lazily out the truck window. "Once a month, I'd get up at 2 in the morning, load my pigs, drive to Petersburg to the livestock market, unload my pigs, drive back to the dorm and take a shower -- then go to class." There was never an ounce of sympathy from his father, Haynie says. "My father knew it was hard on me, but farming all around is hard."
He majored in animal science and was accepted to Tuskegee Institute's School of Veterinary Medicine. But he'd see his father in the fields, back bent, the years taking their toll. "I looked at my father and the situation he was in and said to myself, If I go to Tuskegee, that would be the end of Haynie farming. I chose family over money."
His family farmed 70 acres and owned 40 brood sows, an average-size pig operation. But Ricky Haynie wanted more. He wanted to extend the reach of Haynie land. At night, after he had climbed down off the tractor, he'd devour farm magazines. The stories about big farms fascinated him -- how families acquired those farms, held onto them, expanded them. He would read until he dozed off, and in the fields the next morning, he would still be thinking about what he had learned. He saw land spread out like vistas; he wanted to be able to ride down county roads and look to the left and see land that was his, then look to the right and see more land that was his.
In 1979, he found an old dairy farm, shuttered, in Reedville. He and his father drove out to look the place over. They stood staring at the land and the big house on it. This wasn't a little piece of land; a little of this and a little of that. This was vista-like: 180 acres.
"You'll be doing something great by acquiring this piece of property," Phil Haynie said to his son, "because at one time your ancestors were slaves on it."
Ricky went to the USDA and secured a $350,000 starter loan. "There was a key to my getting that early loan," Haynie says. "Out of the three committee members who had to approve me for loan eligibility, two were black. So I was blessed." He got himself a farm and new farm equipment. At age 25, he was on his way.
RICKY HAYNIE WAS MARRIED BY THEN. He had met Judith Scott at Virginia State his freshman year. They bumped into each other in the agriculture building. She was a junior majoring in microbiology; her dad farmed vegetables.
Her future husband, Judith Haynie says, "was not into any sports or Greek organizations. But he could tell you where every tractor-trailer dealer or farm appliance dealer was."
His work ethic astounded her. Their outings often began in his pickup truck. "A couple of our dates ended up being us taking pigs to the market, and I'd ride with him," she says. "One morning, 4 in the morning, he got some pigs to take to the market. He sold all the pigs except one. It was too small. So we ride back to campus. He left the one pig in the back of the pickup truck. Well, the pig got out and was running around campus. Some of my girlfriends said to me: 'Hey Judy, isn't that your pig? Isn't your boyfriend the pig farmer?' "
She was crazy about the pig farmer.
They married in 1975, on the lawn of her mother's home in Suffolk. Judith had asked Ricky what he wanted for a wedding gift. He had said a cow would be nice. She thought he was kidding, but he was not. And on their wedding day there he was, smiling at her, looking at the calf she had gotten for him. The newlyweds tromped around in the soft earth after their ceremony, putting up a fence for the gangly thing.
The Haynies had six children: Phil Jr., whom everyone calls P.J., Merthia, Jennifer, Harvey, Kimberly and Roslyn. By the time their youngest was born in 1986, Ricky's farming ambitions were in freefall. And so was his family.
