Over the past two weeks, the world celebrated the storied life of President Jimmy Carter. As a Southerner and someone who spent several years in Georgia, I’ve always admired President and Mrs. Carter. I was lucky enough to briefly work with both of them in the early 1990s. It remains one of my proudest professional accomplishments.
In the early 1990s, I was a graduate student in landscape architecture at the University of Georgia. I had done well in the program and was offered an internship with the National Park Service. It proved to be the opportunity of a lifetime.
My adviser, a legendary landscape architect, Darrel Morrison, and I traveled down to Plains, Ga., where I was introduced to Bonnie Blaford, an NPS supervisory park ranger for the Jimmy Carter National Historic Site. Bonnie was my guide and the person who made my entre into the world of the Carter family possible. She introduced me to dozens of people in Plains and nearby Americus, Ga. Without Bonnie things would have been much harder.
I really liked spending time in south Georgia, in part because it reminded me of places like Altheimer and Sherrill, Ark., where my mother’s family is from. I also enjoyed being there because every single person I met was friendly. They knew I was there to help tell part of the president’s story and by extension, theirs. Everyone I met was as polite and helpful as the best Southerners always are.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
The president’s boyhood home was a farmstead located a few miles southwest of Plains in a little township called Archery. It contained all the things typical of a 1930s Southern farm. There was the main house, a barn, a privy, places for equipment and acre upon acre of surrounding row crops.
The farm also featured some things that serve as indicator of the Carter family’s relative affluence. Earl Carter, the president’s father, owned enough land that he rented to sharecroppers. There are the remains of the sharecroppers’ houses on the site. The farm also had a large pecan orchard, and most memorably, a tennis court. The thing though that sticks out in my mind is the presence of a commissary.
If you don’t know much about sharecropping, a brief explanation is in order. Sharecropping was an economic (and arguably social) relationship in which a landowner would “rent” the sharecropper (also called a tenant farmer) a parcel of land in exchange for a portion of the harvest, often half or more. In exchange, the sharecropper got a meager house, the seed, the equipment and basic provisions for survival. The commissary was a kind of store run by the landowner where the sharecropper could buy food and household goods with credit against the projected harvest. If you have reasoned that this arrangement was amenable to exploitation, you are correct. It often resulted in an economic slavery that bound the sharecropper to the landowner for decades.
The president’s cousin, Hugh Carter, author of “Cousin Beedie” and “Cousin Hot,” said this, “I remember the world into which Jimmy was born in 1924. The world of his farm. The world of one hundred blacks (the residents of Archery) whose lives revolved around the family because they worked on the farm and they bought groceries at the commissary run by his father.”
As above, my own family were sharecroppers in southeast Arkansas. My grandmother who passed just last year, hand-picked cotton until the early 1960s. The man from whom they rented was an abominable human who embodied the worst features of the Old South. My grandfather and his nephew scraped and saved for a used cotton harvester. The old man wouldn’t let them use it because “hands pick cleaner.”
When this miser finally died, the people clearing out his house found that he had stolen and hoarded a huge lot of canned food and other supplies the government had given him to distribute to his tenants during World War II. It had been there for decades. So much for the benevolent master narrative.
History would like to record Mr. Earl, as he was called, as a successful businessman and community leader. The facts are that he was a virulent racist and did what most landowners of the era did to become successful. This fact makes Jimmy Carter’s personal story all the more remarkable.
The president’s mother, Lilian Carter, was much more progressive than Mr. Earl. She was trained as a nurse and is known for her decades of global humanitarian work. As her National Park Service bio reads, “She used her nursing skills to help her husband’s employees and tended both black and white neighbors who needed medical care. She didn’t see ‘color’ but rather saw humanity and refused to allow race to be a determining factor in how she treated people.”
Her profound influence is reflected in many details of the president’s life. He often spoke fondly of a pair of black tenants, Jack and Rachel Clark. He called Rachel “his second mother.”
The young Jimmy Carter spent countless hours under their care. He went fishing with Rachel and hunting with Jack. His best friends were the sons of Archery founder, Lee Raven. Along with brothers Milton and Johnnie Raven, Jimmy Carter, “(R)an, swam, rode horses, drove wagons and floated on rafts together. We misbehaved together and shared the same punishment. But we never went to the same church or school. Our social life and our church life were strictly separate. We did not sit together… on the train… There was a scrupulous compliance with these unwritten and unspoken rules.”
Fast forward a few decades later when an NPS ranger is assigned to drag a college student from UGA around to meet all the important folks. I had an ever-present notepad, camera and perpetually astonished countenance at the wonders before me. I led briefings for the former first lady while at the Carter Center in Atlanta. I ate barbecue and played softball with the people of Plains against the Secret Service. I went to Sunday School where the president led class. Everything about this experience was indelible.
But of all the things I remember, one of the most poignant took place at the community barbecue. I was on one end of a picnic table, the president at the other with townsfolk between us. They were all chatting as folks do, but no one from Plains ever said “Mr. President.” The great man in their midst was always called and always answered to just “Jimmy.” That tells you pretty much everything you need to know about him, always the humble servant. Rest in Peace Mr. President.
Matthew Pate has a doctorate in criminal justice, is a lecturer at the University at Albany and the author of three books on crime and public policy. He lives in Pine Bluff.