"The trustees for the case seemed relentless in making sure they got all they could," Gail Haynie says. "They just kept coming." Three years ago, she went to her lawyer's office to discuss the case, feeling as if her own life were now unraveling. Her blood pressure began to rise during the visit, her doctors told her later.
When she returned to work that day, "I said to myself, 'Something is not quite right with this eye.' " She left work and went to the eye doctor, who told her to get to the hospital. She had no vision in her right eye. Gail Haynie had had a stroke in her lawyer's office. She remains blind in one eye. "I don't know," she says, slowly "It wasn't supposed to be like this."
Ricky Haynie's home overlooks the fields where his ancestors once worked as slaves.
(Roland L. Freeman)
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The Haynies' lawsuit against the government might reach court by early next year. "It's unreal," Gail Haynie says. "I think the government is planning to wait us out. They've paid a lot of black farmers $50,000, and they've gone on their way. Fifty-thousand hardly buys a tractor."
RICKY HAYNIE RUMBLES ALONG IN HIS PICKUP, carrying a load of fertilizer that smells something awful.
"You know what my gravest fear for black people is?" he asks. "That we'll end up on reservations. That we won't own any land." His face has gone slack. "We're consumers, not producers." He's heading north in the pickup now. "We've been brainwashed," he says, "about farming as a race of people: 'It's hard, it's dirty.' "
He can sound weary when talking about race, as if the world has gone deaf on the issue. "There are some good white farmers who've helped me over the years," he says. "Don't get me wrong. But most now are waiting for me to go under. So they can rent my land."
He pulls up to a field in Horse Head. His 27-year-old son, P.J., hops down from a tractor. He looks like his father -- the hazel eyes, the chestnut-brown skin, the thick build. Father and son engage in some shoptalk: A part is needed for a tractor; a check has to be deposited in the bank. A bug lands on the father's earlobe, and the son picks it off with the tenderest of motions.
When Ricky and Judith Haynie divorced, P.J. chose to live with his father. In grade school, P.J. would sit by the window and identify for classmates all the tractors that rolled by. It got so disruptive that the teacher had to move him away from the window.
"My wife," recalls Daniel, the extension agent, "would always be worried about little P.J. driving the tractor. He was 9, 10 years old!"
P.J. studied agricultural economics at Virginia Tech. Before graduating, he had an internship at a commodities firm in Nebraska. One day, when P.J. was talking to his father on the phone, Ricky made a comment about his farming woes, how it all seemed so uphill. Next morning, when Haynie walked out into the fields, there was P.J. He had driven all night from Nebraska, shucked his suit and put on his farm clothes.
"I was an assistant commodities trader," P.J. recalls now. "That little internship, in the end, didn't mean pipsqueak. We had so many folks with hopes riding on the farm. I knew if the farm didn't stay afloat, a lot of people would be affected. Not just me, but my siblings, too." He talks with the same focused intensity as his father. "I had to leave an air-conditioned building and come out here in the heat and work 90 hours a week in the field. But I had to do it."
It was P.J. Haynie who successfully challenged the USDA. "I found discrimination in his case," says Gray, who investigated P.J.'s complaint and recommended a settlement. "He had been denied loans, and he was farming and eligible. The agents alleged he was fronting for his father, but he met all the requirements for the loans." She says the agents had a simple way of dismissing P.J.: "They would just tell him there was no loan money."
The Haynies' strangest encounter with the USDA occurred in 1998, when father and son paid a visit to an agent in the district office. The conversation seemed to be going along fine until the agent opened a drawer and calmly pulled out a gun. He looked at the elder Haynie, Ricky recalls. "Now, Mr. Haynie, you got any more questions?" he asked.
After Haynie complained, the USDA suspended the agent for three days. "The guy admitted he had the gun," says Lloyd Wright, the former USDA civil rights official who investigated the incident. The agent insisted he hadn't pulled out the gun to intimidate Ricky Haynie. "He said he was showing the gun to Haynie after their conversation was over." Wright says. "They were miles from being friends, so why would he be showing Ricky Haynie a gun?"
Ricky and P.J. haven't allowed their battles with the USDA to beat them down. Come midnight, father and son will be on the road together, hauling materials to New Jersey. There's large stenciled lettering on the back of their truck: "By God's Grace & Mercy."
AT 22, JENNIFER HAYNIE HAS JUST GRADUATED FROM HAMPTON UNIVERSITY with a degree in molecular biology. She seems mature beyond her years. She was 3 when the U-Haul pulled up to the house, and her parents separated. Of the Haynie children, she voices the deepest regrets about her father's farming life.
"Our father was always working," she says, sitting on a park bench, peeling chilled shrimp, looking out over an inlet of water.
When the Haynies divorced, Judith and the children moved to Portsmouth for a while. Jennifer hated it. "It was horrible. We were from 'the country.' All the kids were city kids." She and her siblings missed Reedville, the open land. They eventually returned and moved back into the farmhouse; Ricky moved into another house in Heathsville. "The farm is the only home I had ever known."
There were times, growing up, when she wondered if her father's dream was really worth it. "I feel cheated, kind of. He puts more into the farm than he gets out of it."
When her father went to Washington to protest the plight of black farmers, she went along. She was in junior high school. "I was, like, I don't want to go and hold no stupid sign. Then, after I got there and saw all the other farmers, I felt anger at the USDA."
Early in the legal proceedings, the government liquidated some of the Haynie family assets, including her college savings account. She made up some of that lost money by joining ROTC. Now she's afraid she might have to go to Iraq.
Even so, when Jennifer graduated in May, her father was in the audience, beaming. "At my graduation, the president [of Hampton University] said, 'I want all of y'all to buy land,' "Jennifer says. "My father kept saying: 'You see what he said? See how important land is!' "
RICKY HAYNIE WAITS IN FRONT OF THE COUNTY COURTHOUSE IN LAWRENCEVILLE -- 163 miles southeast of Reedville -- alongside Linwood Brown, a black farmer and longtime friend. It's a lovely red brick courthouse, with white pillars rising in front of it. There is a notice pinned behind a glass window announcing the auction of 20 acres that Brown owns in Brunswick County.
Brown, 63, was among those who sued the Agriculture Department for discrimination. He'd been, at one time, a large landowner and won a $400,000 settlement in 1999. Afterward, Brown felt flush. He embarked on some ill-advised spending sprees and stock market investments. He went broke, then borrowed some money from another farmer and couldn't pay it back. The farmer's only recourse was to seek Brown's last bit of land as payment.
By 10 a.m., a crowd of a dozen men -- all white -- have formed a half-circle, facing the auctioneer, Rawleigh Clary. He has white hair, a sonorous voice and a piece of flimsy paper in his hands -- the trustee's sale notice for Brown's land. And here he goes:
"Who will give me an opening bid of $20,000. $20,000? Will you go to $22,000. Will you go to $27,000? . . . I got $27,000. Then will you go to $28,000? I got $28,000. Who'll go to $32,000? I got $32,000. $34,000? Who'll go to $34,000? $33,000 then. Who'll go to $33,000? Yes, here. $33,000. $33,000 going once, $33,000 going twice. Sold! Right here. $33,000."
Ricky Haynie has just bought the land on behalf of P.J., who told his father to bid if it looked wise to do so. Like father -- figuring, calculating, dreaming -- like son. The fact that the land has gone to a Haynie somehow seems to have lightened Brown's despairing mood.
Afterwards, Brown and Haynie eat lunch at Mortay's Restaurant, two blocks from the courthouse. Cabbage, fried chicken, iced tea, sweet potato pie. The bottom half of Brown's mouth has begun to tremble. Maybe from everything that has just unfolded. A farming life come to an end.
They finish lunch and wave goodbye, Haynie folding the paperwork of the land sale into his back hip pocket. A little more than two hours later, he arrives back home and drives straight to some fields he works in Burgess to check on their progress. He wades out into the rows of wheat. "Don't know how much damage these insects might be doing," he says, squinting and studying the edges of plants.
Seated, left, P.J. Haynie holds daughter Colette, and his father, Ricky, holds grandson Philip IV; standing, from left, are Ricky's daughters, Merthia, Roslyn and Jennifer Haynie. (Ronald L. Freeman)
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Next Haynie swings by an auto parts place to pick up something for his truck. Then he sweeps back into Reedville to check on his cornfields. He stands at the edge of one of those fields, musing, a blade of grass between his teeth. "I love to get in the field and smell the earth," Haynie says. "I love watching stuff grow. You go out and spray a field. Then you lay back and just look at it. It's like looking at a fine piece of art."
He climbs back into his truck and heads home for dinner as darkness finds him and his fields. "I can still see my granddaddy in the fields," he says, "in the heat of the day." A small smile creases his face.
The lights are glowing from the windows of Haynie's house. He walks inside, where Gail and his three youngest daughters are waiting. Dinner is on the table. Haynie washes his hands, sits down and leads the family in prayer. "Amen," the farmer says, raising his head at the end of the blessing, with dark against the windows and light in his eyes.
Wil Haygood is a staff writer for The Post's Style section. He will be fielding questions and comments about this article Monday at 1 p.m. at washingtonpost.com/liveonline.
