The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food (5 page)

WHEN I GREW UP
in the 1960s and 1970s among south Georgia’s flat gray fields, which spun waist-high tobacco and battalions of cornstalks out of thin dirt, our culture was agrarian. Seeds were currency, seeds were gifts, seeds were steaming bowls of the future.

My grandmother Beulah held stock in this economy. She loved plants and all that they produced. She had an ingenious and fascinating greenhouse—a pit house, dug into a red clay bank beside the dirt road. From the outside, the house looked about four feet high and was covered in plastic sheeting. When you pulled open its little door, concrete block steps led three feet down to a small earth room with a dirt floor and damp clay walls, ferny and mossy, a basement without a house. The pit house was steamy and hot and smelled like geraniums. The air was algaeic, it was so green.

We grandchildren had to ask permission to go into the pit house. A child had to move carefully there. She could not knock off blooms or break stems. She had to watch for snakes. She had to care about what she was seeing.

In a greenhouse, transformation is possible, because the lead tendril of the Willow-leaf Running Butter bean searches for your soul. A garden is the same. The Sunrise Serenade morning glory vine binds you. Maybe transformation is possible anywhere there are profusions of plants.

After my grandmother was too old to care for it, the greenhouse was dismantled and the pit filled with clay. But not yet. For a while I could learn my grandmother’s wisdom. I could observe her movements among African violets, her hands among links of Thanksgiving cactus. I could watch the clear water gushing from the hose.

My heart first opened to gardens in the time of cowpeas. I remember one specific day. It happened before my mother stopped wearing pants, before she adopted a religion that forbade them. On this day she wore dark blue pedal pushers because she had come to her mother’s garden, since she herself did not have one; she had a junkyard, what she and my father called a wrecking yard. She had come to help my grandmother put up peas—field peas, not garden peas.

My skinny, gentle sister was wearing pants with little flowers printed on them and flat-bottom sneakers of light blue. She was six, holding my hand. I was two. My mother was picking, hoping my baby brother back at the house with Grandmama would stay asleep long enough for her to fill her pails. With this many children, three so far, how to even find time to put food by? My uncle was also in the pea-patch with my mother, helping harvest the peas that Mama and Grandmama would shell back on the porch. My sister walked me toward the edge of the garden. The peas had grown out of their lines and tangled together. They made an undulating sea that threatened to wash over us.

“Sis, watch out for snakes,” my uncle called to my sister. All the females in my mother’s family get called “Sis.” “Maybe y’all best go back to the house. I’d hate to see a snake bite you.” The vines smelled like thunder.

I didn’t think there were snakes beneath the big leaves. I stepped into them. I tripped and fell. My uncle looked up but didn’t say anything. I got up, brushed my palms together. My sister grasped my hand again. She listened better than I did. I pulled away. I reached for a long thin fruit. I think it was born in me to eat the fruit—I knew not to eat the leaf or the vine.

My mother was picking, picking. She couldn’t pick one lime-green bean pod and sit down among the upright leaves and begin to chew on it, as I could. Its taste was strange. I arrived at a moist round pea. Its taste was stranger. I chewed it with my new teeth.

“Mama,” my sister yelled. “She’s eating the peas.”

My mother turned her heart-shaped face toward me. It was often turned elsewhere. “You’re going to get a bellyache,” she said.

I was glad she didn’t tell us to go back to the house. I looked at her and smiled and kept chewing. I was so fat my face unfolded when I smiled. I didn’t know how to say what I was feeling. The peas did not need to be cooked.

“I don’t guess they’ll hurt her,” my mother said to herself as much as to my uncle or my sister. She was filling an enamel milk bucket. We would spend the afternoon taking these peas from their shells and tossing
the empty pods into bushel baskets. I would try to play in the pods.

I knew my mother was tired. I knew she needed more sleep. But she was young, she was still in love with my father. She would always be in love with him. She had found her calling. I stood unsteadily among the tripping vines, clutching the fat pods with my fat hands.

“Peas,” my mother said. “Can you say that?” I looked at her figure, tall and thin against a blinding sun. I squinted, then grinned the fat grin.

“Pees,” I said.

The only gardening mentor I had was not saving seed because she understood genetic erosion. She was saving seed because she had learned how to do it when she was young, because she had always done it, and because it was the natural thing to do. She moved about her kitchen with her graying hair clipped short, baking lemon cakes and filling her pantry with pear chutney.

I was young in her kitchen when I saw my grandmother scraping squash pulp to dry on paper napkins smoothed on a foil pie plate.

“What are those, Grandmama?” I asked, making my voice small. I knew to be polite. I knew to ask only crucial questions, those to make adults feel important.

“Cushaw,” she said, proudly.

“Cushaw.” A funny word. Like a sneeze. “What is that?”

“Oh, a kind of pumpkin.”

“Do you eat the seeds?”

“No, child, you plant them,” she said. “To grow more cushaws.” She looked at me with a mixture of love and pity. “We’ll dry them and plant them in the garden next year and more pumpkins will grow.”

“Oh.”

After supper, I knew, my grandmother would go out to rock and watch the hummingbirds in the impatiens lining the screened porch, and she would let me climb up onto her lap. My grandmother had a soft bosom. Her housedress felt electric against my cheek. She smelled like the talcum powder in the round container on her dresser.

“Grandmama, will you show me how to grow cushaws?” I asked.

She laughed. “I will,” she said. “But I don’t know how much growing you’ll be able to do, with you starting school this year.”

I am immensely grateful for everything Beulah taught me. Without her, where would I be? “The branches grow because of the tree,” says a native Hawaiian proverb. We are here because of our ancestors.

Later, a ubiquitous first-grade experiment in germination—bean-growing in a milk carton on a classroom windowsill—affected me deeply. A kid has no power, everybody knows that, and yet when I planted a hard little round rock in a handful of soil, after a week or two something started to wend up out of the dirt. Two pages of a green book opened and rose skyward on one slender green leg. Days passed, more leaves opened, and the thing kept growing. I wanted to run and shout the news. Wizardry had happened, all because of me.

How could something so small shape-shift into something so big? Because seeds contain more than they are, life’s design held in a speck of germplasm. They are the source of all life, miracles in tiny packages. Magic. Just add water.

I am crazy about seeds in part because they are metaphors for so much: innovation, potential, multiplication, plenty, the future. I am also crazy about the literalness of seeds, the bundles of energy that have propagated plant life since flowering plants first appeared on the earth.

As a child who grew up isolated, without television, I sank deeply into stories. My father, a junkman, brought home loads of miscellany that sometimes included boxes of books. In one such outfit arrived a discarded collection of stories, a literature textbook for elementary school students. I read this book over and over. In the stories, someone’s very life was always at stake (just as it is in real life, now). A servant would be beheaded if he didn’t invent a new dessert to please a young spoiled prince, who wanted something both hot and cold (voil
à
! the ice-cream sundae). In another, a boy tried to take off his hat to honor the king, except a new hat kept replacing the one he took off. The hats became more and more elaborate. The boy was climbing the stairs of the death tower when the thousandth hat, the last and most magnificent one of all, appeared on his head. When the boy removed this crowning glory, finally his head was bare, and now he could bow down properly to the king. The king was so taken with the bejeweled, beplumed hat that he forgave the boy’s impertinence, spared his life, and made him a prince.

My favorite story was of a pioneer family who lived in a log cabin in the West, eking out crops. One evening, looking in his mother’s sewing basket for a button, the hero of the story found a single seed. Excited, he showed his family, who encouraged him to plant it. When spring arrived, he did exactly that; the seed germinated, and it grew into a pumpkin vine. The boy’s family was able to eat pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving.

I have never forgotten the story of the wealth in a single seed.

Some years later my grandmother gave me the first heirloom seeds I ever began to save, although neither I nor she knew the terms
heirloom
or
vintage
at the time. I was spending Saturday with Grandmama. By the time my sister, brothers, and I had trooped through the front door that morning, she had picked a hamper of Zipper Cream peas and we spent the morning helping to shell them. At lunch I noticed a handful of strange seeds in a cut-glass bowl on a buffet in the dining room.

I waited until Grandmama finished cooking. I waited until after lunch. I waited until my sister and I washed all the dishes in the low sink, the one built for a woman who was barely five feet tall.

“Grandmama, what are these?” I asked. The beans were large as eyeballs; they looked like eyes, white with dark irises.

“Sis, Ermalou gave me those. She called them Jack beans.”

“Can you eat them?”

“Ermalou said she thought you couldn’t. I don’t think I’d attempt it.”

At home, I’d claimed a section of a flower bed for my own garden. I wanted one of these eyeball seeds to plant in it. To steal one would be a sin. I needed to word my questions carefully.

“Are you going to plant them?”

“I did already.”

“Are these extra?”

“You might say that.”

“I’d like to try planting one.”

“Well, honey, help yourself.”

That was all I needed. The seeds felt like oblong marbles in my hand. “Why are they called Jack beans?” I asked.

“After Jack and the beanstalk, I reckon.”

“They grow very high?”

Grandmama laughed, “You’ll have to plant them and see.”

“Thank you, Grandmama.” Then I asked her if she knew what was orange and half a mile tall.

She didn’t.

“The Empire State Carrot,” I said.

She laughed. “I hope you get a Jack bean that high.”

“The Empire State Bean.”

Within a couple of years I’d set a brush fire clearing land for my second garden. It was a patch of ground about as big as an American bathroom at the periphery of the junkyard. I was twelve and went around talking about George Washington Carver, one of my heroes—a man who healed sick plants, painted with clay and pokeberry, and invented peanut butter. His influence would lead me to find amity and lasting friendship in the company of botanists and seedspeople.

Burning the weeds would be easier than digging them out, I thought. I found a pack of matches and touched a small flame to one corner of the patch. The fire leapt across dry broomsage, out of my plot, underneath a defunct moving truck in our backyard, and into the junkyard. I had no water to fight it, only a rake. My yells roused my family, and my mother and brothers came running. The only damage was that for a few weeks I suffered repeated lectures on fire safety, complete with narratives of explosions, burn victims, and homeless families. I had to clear the little garden by hand.

No one in my nuclear family gardened, so I sought and received guidance from my grandparents. The Jack beans grew terrifically skyward, producing large, floppy leaves and foot-long pods that dried and rattled and, when I shelled them out, amazed everybody. Okra poked its pods into my hands. The yellow squash bore fruit. I came to feel almost drunk with gardening.

I got crazy about seeds because I was crazy about plants because long ago I realized that the safest place I could be was in the plant kingdom—where things made sense, where the malice we have to contend with in the animal world was absent, where nothing was going to eat you, really.

I remember the relationship I as a child had with plants. They were the things that came closest to my body, so that I was intimate with them—with trees, with wax myrtle, with daylilies—in a way that I was not intimate with anything else. The transplanting of Johnny-jump-ups or the picking of roses was extremely personal. In place of boyfriends, I had honeysuckle from the vine, radishes from the ground, asters from the ditch. To touch something is to develop a relationship that is sensory, one that is personal and thus private. This is not the language of botany, but of friendship. I made friends with the flora.

One spring, in science class, I had to construct a poster of seeds, and so I went willy-nilly about the house and junkyard—a little Bartram, full of ingenuity and enthusiasm, collecting. Wasn’t even a grain of rice a seed? I glued corn kernels and red fleshy magnolia seeds and orange pits and watermelon spits to my poster board. My display was heavy with acorns, airy with white wisps of dog fennel. It earned an A.

An entrepreneurial child, I wrote to the American Seed Company in Lancaster, Pennsylvania: “Please send me your BIG Prize Book and one order of 45 packets of American Seeds. I will sell them at 40¢ a pack, send you the money, and choose my prize, or I may keep one-third of the money instead of a prize.”

Every year, through the mesmerizing and tumultuous narrative of my childhood, I planted, I watched, I learned, and sometimes I harvested. I was still sowing that garden the year I was a senior in high school, newly eighteen, when my friends were dating and drinking and going to movies, and I was most definitely not, because my parents strictly did not allow such carrying-on.