HAYNIE'S HOME ON WHAYS CREEK ROAD IN REEDVILLE looks like something sprung from the mind of Margaret Mitchell. There are big white pillars, a lovely wide porch, a long gravel driveway. Haynie aims to plant trees to line the driveway.
"I always tell people life is good on the plantation," he says, pausing for effect, "if you own the plantation."
Ricky Haynie's home overlooks the fields where his ancestors once worked as slaves.
(Roland L. Freeman)
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His office is less than 40 yards behind the home in an old weathered house, where there are mounds of paper on wooden desks and maps on the wall that show the location of Haynie's fields. There's rusted farm equipment outside -- huge tractors, trucks, truck parts, reminders of the days when things were better. Haynie pops into the office, takes a couple of phone calls -- one about an unpaid bill -- then lurches for the door. Back to work.
"When I get on my feet, man, I'm gonna get some of this stuff out of here," he says, surveying the rusted tools and equipment that look like museum pieces, stepping around them, angling for his truck.
Later in the day, he'll be taking one of his flatbed trailers to Montross, where it will be loaded with cargo trailers, which he also transports. Two nights ago, he hauled some lumber over to Delaware. He's a man with two lives -- one at night, earning money that helps keep him afloat; one during the day, doing what he feels he was born to do: farm. Now, he's in a field atop a tractor, back and forth, up and down the rows, skipping lunch, not caring about lunch, disappearing into the sunlight.
IN THE BEGINNING, RICKY HAYNIE LOOKED UNSTOPPABLE. After he acquired the dairy farm in 1979, his father asked a friend, Gene Daniel, who worked as a cooperative extension agent for a program based at Virginia Tech, to talk to his son, impart whatever wisdom about farming he could.
Haynie was a man seized with passion, Daniel says: "He was always looking for a bigger and better way of doing things. He had zero fear about getting in over his head."
By 1980, he was leasing 400 acres of land in addition to the 180 acres he'd purchased. A farmer got big by growing; it took money, loans, to keep growing.
Haynie talked to his father often, but more and more he began to corral Daniel. Daniel had research papers, data, knowledge about what the future might hold for a farmer. "He'd ask for an appointment with me," Daniel says. "And he'd leave word for me to meet him in some field, seven miles west of some road. At 3:15. Well, he'd be right there, at 3:15. He'd say, 'Gene, I got four minutes. Now, I'm thinking of renting this land over here, and I need to know what do you think?' I'd tell him, and then he'd drive off."
There were more than 40 black farmers in the area then, according to Daniel. Some of them knew Haynie's father, some knew his grandfather. But he was going to be different. He was going to be bigger.
From 1980 to 1982, Ricky borrowed money and gobbled up land to lease. By the summer of 1981, the USDA had lent him and his wife more than $1 million, much of it through the Farmers Home Administration, or FmHA, which was created to provide federal loans to low-income farmers.
"I'm doing well," Haynie recalls of that time. "I'm getting loans, harvesting in the fall and paying my loans back."
But other farmers -- white farmers -- started murmuring about Haynie's relentless hunger to lease more land, says Daniel, himself white. "There was, at that time, lingering overtones of racism in the area," Daniel says. "Large white family farmers weren't used to seeing aggressive black farmers. They were used to seeing passive black farmers who were just holding on."
Haynie leased 600 acres, then 1,000. Soon he was up to 2,000 acres. One morning in 1981, Haynie noticed holes on the side of his tractors. Bullet holes. He and Judith called the police. An investigation yielded nothing, but the incident unsettled the Haynies.
Later that year someone set a fire on their property in the middle of the night. It would be followed 20 months later by another mysterious fire. In the first fire, Haynie's hog barn and 950 pigs were burned alive. In the second fire, he lost thousands of dollars worth of farm equipment. Insurance didn't fully cover the cost of replacing the pigs and the equipment, Haynie says.
Investigations into the fires yielded no arrests. "At the time," Haynie says, "I feared for the safety of my wife and children."
The tension grew worse when white farmers circulated a petition alleging that Haynie was exaggerating his need for loans. "They were saying that I was outbidding them on land, that I was paying more than they were able to pay," Haynie says.
Some of the land was rented to him by Walter Goodman, a large white landowner. Goodman says he was astonished by the petition and the animosity toward Haynie. "You have to realize," says Goodman, now 82, "that the Northern Neck is a very strange location. It was about 40 to 50 years behind the civil rights movement. And Ricky just wasn't what whites expected: He was well-educated and ambitious. They accused him of incompetence, which was just not so."
The charges made by the other farmers wound up in the hands of the USDA, where they were investigated. Nothing came of them.
"There was never that one moment when you could put your fingers on a conspiracy against him," Goodman says. "But he just never got the cooperation [from the USDA] other farmers got. The kid really worked his heart out, but he didn't have a chance."
Despite everything happening around him, Haynie kept leasing more land and planting more crops. Eventually, he was up to 3,000 acres. "I was determined not to be run out," he says.
Daniel watched in amazement as Haynie kept growing. "He said to me: 'I'm going to be the biggest farmer in the area.' And that's pretty much what happened," Daniel says. "He was so passionate. Sometimes it scared me."
TOWARD THE END OF 1982, a strange thing happened to Haynie. The government refused to lend him any more money. "They said I had maxed out my loan eligibility," Haynie says. "They said I had outgrown a family farm."
Haynie traces much of this to the arrival of a white man, John Slusser, as the USDA's district director for the Northern Neck. Slusser replaced a black man, Barry Wright, who had approved previous loans to the Haynies, according to Haynie's lawsuit.
Slusser seemed to have no interest in helping Haynie expand, Haynie says. "Slusser," he recalls, "once said to me, 'Boy, the best thing you can do is file bankruptcy and get out of farming because you're not gonna make it.' "
The term "boy" can be construed as a epithet in the South when uttered by a white man. Slusser denies saying that to Haynie and remembers their encounters far differently.
"I think he was treated fairly in terms of everyone else, black or white," says Slusser, now town manager for Warsaw, Va. "I will say that Mr. Haynie's situation was probably not helped by the office workload -- by what the staff at that time could handle -- and by its inability to spend more time with him.
"Was it harder for Ricky than anybody else?" Slusser says. "I suppose it was harder for him, but I don't know if it was all due to race. I do know he took on more than the average farmer did. Look, I want to be candid. It was a difficult situation Ricky found himself in. And I don't think the fault was all Ricky's. I think the FmHA failed a lot of people. Some of the loans they gave out, well, it was like sugarcoated poison. A farmer would run into problems year to year and find himself with all kinds of debt from earlier loans."
Slusser doesn't believe Haynie was a victim of discrimination. "I don't think I ever witnessed any overt discrimination," he says. "But just as with anybody, there probably was a percentage of people -- black and white -- who were gonna be jealous of him."
Without access to USDA loans, Haynie had to obtain commercial loans at exorbitant interest rates just to cover the planting season, he says. "Instead of paying 3 percent interest, I was suddenly paying 24 percent. I had to go get outside monies. It was like cutting a man's hands off and telling him to swim the English Channel."
Like many other farmers, Haynie depended on credit every year to buy the seed, fertilizer and equipment needed to plant and tend his crops. Any difficulty or delay in getting loans at the beginning of planting season was disastrous. "By getting loans late," he explains, "it means you have to plant late. Once you plant late, you reduce your yield. They make you late so you won't be profitable."
As Haynie's debts ballooned, the USDA put a lien on his holdings -- his land, his farm equipment and other assets. Haynie eventually complained to the USDA in Washington, alleging discrimination in being denied loans. But by then its civil rights division, under the Reagan administration, had been closed.
