He used to count several dozen black farmers in the area. "I don't think there's more than two or three black farmers around here anymore," he says.
"Here in Gloucester?" his wife says, in a startled voice. "We don't have any."
Ricky Haynie's home overlooks the fields where his ancestors once worked as slaves.
(Roland L. Freeman)
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"Oh, no? None? George Davenport?" he wonders.
"He's gone," she says.
"Oh, that's right, he is gone. And my son-in-law, Charlie Carter, he even stopped farming," he says.
Haynie has cupped his face in the palm of his hand at the other end of the dining table, silently listening. He visits the Joneses a few times a year, helping them plant their meager crops. The scene -- the old man atop his tractor, his sightless wife at the window -- fairly breaks his heart.
Of the life Jones has lived, he wonders how much might be left. "If I stay here till October 12," he says, "I'll be 99. Never knew the Lord would keep me on this road this long. You never know what's on your road." Geneva Jones smiles, nodding her head ever so slightly.
Husband and wife stand at the back door to say goodbye to Haynie. They seem as connected as tree and shade.
Haynie heads home in his pickup. "Man, I just cry every time I come down here," he says. He's quiet for a while. Then, "The vultures are on the fence, waiting on him to -- " He can't finish the sentence. Another spell of silence, then, "The question I keep asking myself is, How am I gonna not end up like Reverend Jones?"
AS PLAIN AND SIMPLE AS THE WORD MIGHT SEEM -- farming -- it has never been so for the black farmer.
After the Civil War, blacks were under the impression that land confiscated from Confederate plantation owners would go to them. It didn't happen. Lincoln's dictum -- 40 acres and a mule -- also failed to materialize. Instead, many blacks became sharecroppers, tenant farmers who forked over a portion of their crops to their mostly white landlords in lieu of rent. Sharecropping was hardly a basis on which to build black land ownership.
Even when black farmers managed to buy their own land, they had trouble getting the credit they needed to make ends meet. And they faced the same problems that plague all small farmers and drive many out of business: drought, floods and other weather-related disasters; sudden plunges in crop prices; increased competition from abroad; difficulty finding help at harvest time, and the relentless corporatization of farming. As a result, the number of black farmers in the United States has plummeted from almost 1 million in the 1920s to fewer than 30,000 today.
Black farmers say they always knew the deck was stacked against them at the USDA. They've never forgotten the crude racial joke uttered by then-Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz in 1976. "Do you know what a black man wants?" Butz asked, and, answering his own question, here sanitized, said, "Loose shoes, [good sex] and a warm place to [defecate]."
When the remark became public, Butz was forced to resign. But the department he ran remains a bastion of racism, black farmers and their advocates say. "That's the culture that existed, and still does," says Lloyd Wright, who served as director of civil rights for the USDA from 1997 to 1998. "It hasn't changed."
"The civil rights changes and processes we instituted in headquarters had little impact on employees or county commissioners out in the field who approved loans," says Rosalind Gray. "Most of these county commissioners are white, and the commissions are locally controlled. It is business as usual out there."
Ed Loyd, a spokesman for the USDA, disagrees with that assertion. He points to a recently begun program where the department immediately notifies minority farmers of programs they may be eligible to participate in. "Historically, the claim has been that the department didn't notify minority farmers of certain programs," Loyd says. "What USDA has been focused on is exploring any avenue to provide opportunities to the small and minority farmer. We want to see every farmer successful."
In 1997, a group of black farmers banded together and filed their lawsuit against the USDA, long derided by blacks as "the last plantation." At the time, Haynie was serving as vice president of the National Black Farmers Association, which organized protests outside the USDA's imposing fortress on Independence Avenue in Southwest Washington. Haynie would show up at the protests with a mule named Struggles, a living symbol of the frustrations of black farmers.
In 1999 -- under intense political pressure -- the USDA agreed to a settle the suit. Black farmers who qualified for settlement money were put on two tracks. Track A was for small farmers like Nathaniel Jones, who had minimal paperwork documenting loan discrimination. Those farmers were eligible for $50,000 and debt forgiveness. Track B was reserved for bigger farmers who'd had more extensive dealings with the USDA and were potentially eligible for hundreds of thousands of dollars in settlement money.
It was expected that the court settlement would yield more than $2 billion for black farmers. However, only $650 million has been paid out to them. "Three out of four dollars expected was never received," says Arianne Callender, author of the Environmental Working Group report.
Callender says black farmers, especially those choosing Track B, found themselves in a strange predicament when it came to documenting discrimination. "The farmers found out they had to ask the local USDA to help provide them with proof of discrimination . . . So a farmer had to go to the very people who discriminated against them 20 years ago. They essentially had to say: 'Please help me provide my case against you.' " Only 18 of the 173 farmers who pursued compensation under Track B have won compensation, the study found.
Neither track appealed to Ricky Haynie. "He had a lot more at stake," says Ellen Steury, one of his attorneys at the Washington firm of Steptoe & Johnson. "He believes he's the minority farmer with the largest debt in the whole country."
Haynie filed his own lawsuit four years ago, demanding $12 million and the forgiveness of his entire debt.
"The government says even without discrimination, he was a failed farmer," says Steven Davidson, another of Haynie's attorneys. "Well, he was the most successful African American farmer in the Northern Neck -- maybe all of Virginia. But for discrimination, he would have continued like the white farmers and become quite successful.
"He had gotten 'too big,' " Davidson says, "which is just a code word for discrimination."
The USDA cannot comment specifically about Haynie's case "because of pending litigation," says Ed Loyd. "Each case is looked at based upon its own merit as to something that should be settled or litigated."
Gray, the former USDA civil rights official who got to know Haynie during her investigations of his complaints, believes he would have been successful if he hadn't taken government loans. "He was competent and intelligent," she says. "His interactions with USDA resulted in a loss of his land. I think the worst thing that ever happened to him was that he interacted with USDA on those business loans. I hope he has the fortitude to survive the damage."
SOMETIMES IT SEEMS AS IF HAYNIE IS FARMING as much for the dead -- his mother, the baby Harvey, his grandparents -- as he is for the living. "It's everything my father, grandfather and great-grandfather stood for," he says of his passion for the land. "Their whole life is wrapped up in all of this."
In 1993, Haynie married again. Gail Walker worked for the Virginia Cooperative Extension -- an arm of the USDA -- in Heathsville, teaching local farmers about personal finance. She had heard of Ricky Haynie before she laid eyes on him. She and one of her co-workers assumed that he was white. "It was because he was such a big farmer," Gail Haynie says now. "Most black farmers didn't have a whole lot."
His financial entanglements didn't deter Gail from marrying him. Beside her on her wedding day stood a man who could get no more loans, a man rising in the mornings looking for justice. "I didn't know how bad it really was," she says. "He was just such a good person. I didn't ask a lot of questions."
They wed at Macedonia Baptist Church, the church founded and built by Haynie's great-grandfather. They were, in some ways, a peculiar couple: She was working for the USDA, the very agency her husband loathed, the very agency he would go to Washington to protest against with other black farmers. "Initially," she says, "I was very embarrassed. I didn't want to be part of that. I was thinking of my job status with my agency."
She would ride by on her lunch break and see him out in the fields. He was too busy to stop and have lunch with her. As if the land might vanish if he hopped down off the tractor. "He wants to sustain the land," she says. "He wants a portion of this to go to the next generation. He doesn't want to be the one who lost it."
Two years after their marriage, Gail Haynie came up with an idea to start a business of her own, a grain and fertilizer company. But in 1996, with his financial situation getting even more desperate, Ricky Haynie filed for bankruptcy. The trustee dragged his wife's business interests into the case. Gail Haynie soon found herself in a legal nightmare and determined that her only way out was to file bankruptcy herself.
