Carrots in My Mama’s Garden (Another Post that began Its Life in my Journal)

Digging carrots is my favorite chore. In late October the ground is cold, dark and already barren. It looks like there may be nothing there, perhaps a stalk, withered, emerges here and there. But we know from experience that there is a wealth underground. In the deep, dark, cold chambers that they have created for themselves, the carrots are waiting. Because my mama never really thins her carrots, they are intertwined and twisted, growing together and shaping each other.

Your fingers are cold, and the ground is hard. The carrots want to stay hidden, their sweet goldenness hidden from your soup pot and eager mouth. I like to dig carrots with my bare hands, loosening the soil, exploring the dark, my own pale fingers mirroring the carrots themselves. Sometimes you can only dig two up together they have grown together so, and seeing their intertwining makes you feel like you have uncovered a dirty secret, a carrot sex scandal. It is a slow chore, pulling together details until you have a bushel of them and all their connections and intertwinings, their hidden twisted shapes, are revealed. This digging up of roots, this slow chore on the cusp of winter exemplifies the kind of radical I want to be.

We are on the cusp of a winter. The ground can feel pretty barren. It is hard to have conversations about the sexism, racism, heterosexism, and fear that grow tangled under the surface of our society. To say that they are there is easy; to admit that at times they ‘intersect’ is simple – and inherently insufficient. Intersection, a mere crossing of paths, fails as a description and analytical tool. Race and gender do not intersect, they have been growing around each other in the fertile ground beneath our feet for a very long time. To explore them is to sit, getting dirty, getting cold, loosening soil and gathering details. Digging through our lives and common history we find a stray news clipping, from last week or the last century that tells the same story. We add this to our basket. Digging carrots takes a skill and patience. As a child eager to collect and gather, I would break them, leaving their deeply buried, probing tips still in the earth. I do not want to make this mistake with my radicalism. You have to loosen the soil fully, wiggling the carrot you can see to create space to find the other half, or its still hidden partner.

In this world our ideologies have grown thickly and without tending. Once dug, you can take carrots that grew together, separate and put them back together, matching their cleanest, softest sides to each other. These are their repulsive, gleaming bellies, where they grew together, rubbing, untouched by dirt. These are the vulnerable spots of our ideologies. It is in the intertwining that they reveal their true oppressive capacity. When shown the belly of our oppressive techniques we recognize their true gruesomeness and are more willing to fight their continuing dominance.

Once dug I want to place details side by side, showing the way in which they fit together. There is value in realigning the carelessly planted bed, tracking history and current alliances. Surely in knowing both the true power and the true geography of our ideologies they become more vulnerable to our desires to rework them in a revolutionary way. The formerly smooth barren ground will be rutted, it’s secrets exposed,

It is lonely. In high school I was blessed by the fact that we were not wealthy enough for me to have access to a car and I spent most of my time declining the few invitations I got, saying that I couldn’t come. Secretly, for in adolescence so many things must be secrets, I was glad for the chance to spend time by myself or in the company of my mother. There are things you learn in the loneliness. Songs that you can sing yourself and stories you tell about why you like being alone. There are ways to glorify it to friends and family. And there are ways to truly enjoy it. Annie Dillard once wrote that writing a book was not an act of creation, but more akin to sitting up with a sick friend. Such is my relationship with these harvested details. I have stayed up with my mother past midnight canning vegetables, at time raucous and at times in reverie at our task. Now, I want to explore so many questions following their twists and turns toward unexpected connections. I want to steep and distill my findings. Scattering them across a table, with a pot of tea holding their corners together, rearranging them, like a quilter.

I feel an urgency about this project, I hope I'm starting it here, the carrots are continuing to grow and in that growth getting woody and bitter. Resistance, possible anywhere there is power and room to move, is the work of digging carrots, the push against the hardened frozen ground.