Farmers' Day Off

“When I improvise on my flute for the Haitians they look at each other and nod, saying the Creole words for ‘bird spirit.’ They know that the voice that was singing through the empty tube of the flute was not my person, but the spirit voice that sang through an empty self, my ego temporarily suspended, my shell possessed by a lesser god”—poet and singer Berrien Thorn (1980s)

The migrant farmworkers that Berrien Thorn encountered were defined in terms of work: their travel to New York state, usually paid according to the volume they harvested, and fed enough food to keep working the next day. If it rained and they couldn’t work, they weren’t paid. Besides needful labor in the field and perhaps washing clothes, there was little interest in the rest of their lives. As Thorn eloquently puts it, “Brutal work stooping to pull potatoes from the muck is the bottom of this odd context. Going upright into the trees for fruit is the top” (162). Where then did the spirit travel outside of this narrow range?

Efforts to foster or even document the full lives of migrant workers have been rare; besides the Geneseo Migrant Center, antecedents like the United Farm Workers Union (during the 1950s-60s) or various programs during the 1930s Works Progress Administration stand as exceptions. There is even less known about the lives of 19^th-century hired hands, perhaps because farmers themselves maintained a puritanical attitude toward work. One lamented that “Our seasons are so short, help so scarce, and there is so much to do, that it is almost impossible to find time to attend to mental improvement, and the cultivation of social feelings.” The solution? Visit neighbors during the off-season and “Talk over your agricultural plans and prospects” (“Farmers”). Another farmer named Izaak Huff argued that “plain, hard-working men require plain, hard-working wives; not fine, fashionable young ladies, who will despise their husbands because they drive the plow or wield an axe, and labor for the better support of their families.” Embroidering, “rattling the keys of the piano,” dancing, reading—these and other pursuits would “uneducate them for the station of life which God destined them to fill” (130).