Route 1, Box 80. There, in Eastern North Carolina, a three-bedroom home provided shelter and solace for about two dozen members of my Ammons family at one time or another. The Bests were up the road to the left, and the Roses to the right, just before the “dangerous curve” that left many folks in the trees after a few cold ones following a long day in the tobacco and cucumber fields. Granddaddy Rasper and Grandma Adell were the heads of our humble space and the Ammons dirt-path dynasty.

Whatever late-night laughter, hardships, or hangovers from the evening before that my aunts and uncles experienced, the morning always awakened them to the monotony of field work. My sister, cousins, and I joined them during the summers when school let out. Kids of immigrant families beat us to the fields a couple weeks prior, unable to complete the school year. Just as constant as our summers in the fields was our full smokehouse and pantry with preserved tomatoes and pickled beets and cucumbers.

When COVID-19 first hit, there were murmurs around the idea of a “new normal”—that the shared lessons we learn during this time of the coronavirus, now coupled with more police brutality, would lead us to care for and prioritize the needs of one another in new ways, especially of “the least of these.” But for many of us, this “new normal” feels more like a glitch in the matrix—a memory of a previous existence—or nothing new at all. Millions of working poor, homeless, undocumented, and chronically ill people live in crisis-mode daily, just as many of us from urban industrial or rural working families were reared under a constant cloud of looming economic or weather- and health-related despair.

Read more at: https://www.southerncultures.org/article/food-sovereignty/