Friday from the Archives: “The Way It Was, the Way It Still Is: Documenting My Own Life in a Tenant Farmer’s Family” essay by Linda Flowers from NCLR 1 (1992)
By Vicki Maas, Intern
North Carolina: an agricultural powerhouse as well as home to many strong writers. Where do these two connect? With Linda Flowers in her essay about growing up as a tenant farmer in Eastern North Carolina.
Linda Flowers (1944-2000) wrote several pieces for NCLR‘s early issues. She was a Faison, NC native and at the time of publishing, a professor of English at North Carolina Wesleyan College. She received her undergraduate degree from UNC Greensboro and two post-graduate degrees out of state. While at North Carolina Wesleyan, she served as English Department Chair, as well as Faculty Chair, and was on the executive committee of North Carolina Humanities. Her book, Throwed Away: Failures of Progress in Eastern North Carolina, published by the University of Tennessee Press in 1992, discusses the changes industrialization brought to Eastern North Carolina during the time when she was out of the state getting her post-graduate degrees.
Similar to the topic of her book, in our first issue in 1992, Flowers discusses what it was like, in her and her family’s eyes, to grow up and live in Eastern North Carolina. As someone who had grown up and lived there all her life, at first she didn’t understand what it meant to describe growing up in rural Eastern North Carolina, which is something that I, too, have struggled with as somebody who grew up in Bailey, NC. That’s why her piece stuck out so much to me, because rarely do I see anyone talking about what it was like to grow up in the region that I did and especially as a farming family. Flowers gives a great example of what it feels like to interact with others after growing up in the rural South:
“Even as a daughter of the region and a product of its schools, however, having this natural advantage as an insider, the more formal interviews I did proved treacherous – sometimes because being from the area, I was not taken as seriously by professional people as an outsider might have been.”
Through authentic prose, Flowers covers a topic not talked much about: growing up in Eastern North Carolina as a farming family and how things have changed in just a couple decades. Now, more than ever, it feels like these experiences are invaluable reads which we’ll continue to talk about as our region continues to change and adapt to modern times.
