In Brea Baker’s “Rooted,” the history of Black land loss is personal

After the death of her grandfather, writer Brea Baker went looking to understand him and, through him, her lineage. In rebuilding and reckoning with her family tree, which has its deep roots in the American South, she pieced together a family story that reflected the greater history of Black America. In “Rooted: The American Legacy of Land Theft and the Modern Movement for Black Land Ownership,” she clearly maps out this country’s history of slavery, Emancipation and Black land acquisition — followed by a pattern of violent land theft and devastating loss.

She tells the story of how her grandfather found his way back to Southern land ownership, and how she has as well, making clear that they are the exception, not the rule. She and her grandfather are an example of a possible path forward for generational healing, but one that must be paired with broader justice and reparations. FoodPrint’s Jerusha Klemperer talked to Baker about the book.

How was your grandfather your path into this subject of not just land theft, but the relationship of Black Americans to land?

I love getting to invoke my grandfather’s name, and it feels like a form of ancestral veneration to be able to do so through the book. I just don’t remember a childhood memory where I didn’t associate my grandfather with land. I’m a granddaughter of the Great Migration. So my grandfather was born in North Carolina, moved up north to New Jersey, and then retired back in North Carolina and died there where he wanted to be. When I was a young child, North Carolina was always the place he was trying to get back to. It was where we’d vacation, where we’d do family reunions, where we’d go to bury people. And sometimes just because, and it was always at grandpa’s behest.

And I think that’s what made me really feel like land has to be that vehicle for me to understand him and know him in his absence. Through the research I was doing of him, interviewing people about him, I came to understand why it was more than a vehicle for building economic wealth. It was more than “I love land because it is going to make us rich.” And even though I really champion land ownership as a bridge of racial wealth divides, I don’t think for my grandfather that would have been top of mind at all. It was the love of grass between your toes and fresh air and watching a bunch of kids running around and knowing that, you know, kind of like “The Lion King”, everything the light touches is yours. And that’s a hard thing to provide for a Black child. That sense of security and safety and ownership and deservedness and just like all of those feelings that were very normal for me, that when I went to schools like Yale, I didn’t really feel “less than” until one or two years in because I was too busy feeling as good about myself as my grandfather had worked so hard to do. And land was a big part of that.

You open the book talking about your own reverse migration — your own move to the land and to the South. I thought “Oh, this isn’t a regular history book, this is so personal.” I was just drawn right in. How can a personal story tell us things that a regular, “impersonal” history cannot?

I really tried to not make it dry, even though I nerd out over things that sometimes can feel boring to others. I’ve always been someone who’s been drawn to memoirs. Um, whenever I get fascinated by a time in history, I prefer to learn about it from people They woke up on a Tuesday and that was their life, right? I wanted to use the introduction to show that you didn’t have to be someone who actively thinks about land all day to care about land and to care about who owns land and what they do with the land that they own. Um, and I think that that’s hard to do when you use abstracts.

I wanted people to be reminded that land is something they can be a part of reclaiming. And even if they don’t want to be a farmer in overalls and live 24/7 on rural land, that there is still an entry point for them into this fight because we all need food. We all need air. We all need water. And we all depend on what other people do with food, air, and water.

What really becomes clear in your book is that a lot of the history doesn’t always get recorded. What does it look like to tell this story when so much of that history is not found in the traditional places, because it’s been erased?

That’s where decolonizing the archives came in for me. I knew that there were certain records I was going to need and certain details that were going to need to be corroborated in order for the book to be seen as legitimate. I’m really grateful that I’m with a publisher as amazing as One World that when I wasn’t able to corroborate certain things, it didn’t mean that I needed to completely exclude that narrative. I often just wrote directly into the page, you know, this is the story that’s been passed down in this family across generations. And while there are no written records to confirm it, here is what we can use to confirm it.

So, for example, in Wilmington, the written record says that there was no land theft. But all of the survivor stories that have been documented, both in audio recordings and in written transcriptions, will say that deeds were being burned, that families, Black families, were being held at gunpoint and told to leave homes and flee. And when they returned, there was nowhere for them to go. They were made homeless. People were exiled and they left, but they owned property before; someone owns that property now.

And so I think sometimes it gets into this technicality standpoint, which I hate that white supremacy does, where we’re so often like, “theft is technically this” and “well, no one really stole it. It just was vacant, and then they moved in.” If Black communities are violently pushed out of their homes and white communities move in, that is land theft. And I don’t care if they did it by force or intimidation or indirectly, or waiting for other people to intimidate and then fled. Those homes in those neighborhoods were historically Black and they’re now not. And someone is responsible for that violence and for that demographic shift. And there needs to be some ownership of that.

So, you know, I really tried my best there. But again, I also think there’s such a beautiful “informal” history and genealogical work that Black families and faith spaces have done, and so Black churches are a really great source for me. Black family reunion books — my family has reunion books that record our family’s oral history — but then there are also points where they say “if you want to look up the deed record for this, you go to this address and it’s on this page of this book number.” And when I then went to do that research, I was able to find those deeds. And a lot of Black museums and Black cultural archives are only in existence because families and local libraries and local churches and mosques and other faith spaces insisted upon recording these histories and then donated those records.

In the Library of Congress, there are interviews that were done with formerly enslaved people that I was able to lean on. And so even if I couldn’t tell you what my great, great, great grandfather was doing in Warren County, North Carolina. I could tell you about a Black person in that county at that time, and I can make inferences that, typically speaking, those who were in close proximity did live very similar lives. And I think it’s a beautiful way to retrace history as opposed to settling for the more bare bones version that a deed will give you.

A deed record will tell me that my great grandfather lost 250-something acres of land over a $10 debt that he couldn’t repay, but family lore and history and oral tradition will tell me that it was a predatory loan with interest rates that were impossible to pay back. And that the company that got the land is a company that got a lot of Black families’ land. And then I’m able to corroborate things from that. I do think it starts with talking to our elders and trusting what they’ve said and doing our best. to find records that will prove what they said is valid.

One of the threads that really came through in your book was how collective ownership, cooperative economics, and mutual aid were such a part of Black communities’ resilience, and that it also sometimes functioned to actually stand in the way of white land grabbing.

He just said “this community could use a beautiful church and this church will do a lot of good with it. And I want to be a part of using some of my private money and pooling it together with other people to do something good.” You know, Emancipation Park in Houston is a product of a Juneteenth celebration where Black people pooled their money and said, this community really deserves a beautiful park, you know, and I think that that’s an important thing to remember.

Because right now there’s this obsession with Black billionaires and Black celebrities and that being enough. And it’s like, well, if your wealth is only going to be used in service of you and your family, that’s not really enough. But the stories of Black landowners, like those in Tennessee like Shepard Towles who established a tent city for sharecroppers who were registering to vote and were being evicted and fired from their jobs. And he said, you have a job and a home here. That is powerful to me. And I don’t want us to confuse one with the other: Black excellence is having and using that in service of your community and it would be such a disservice if we got reparations tomorrow and used it in very individualistic and capitalistic ways as opposed to deciding to lean on each other.

You talk about how replicating the individualistic capitalistic model of very extractive wealth building would be a mistake. What happens when rely on an extractive relationship with the land and with nature? What gets lost? And how is it connected then to environmental injustice?

Let’s say if we look all around us, how hot it is, how natural disasters are hitting us, how our infrastructure is crumbling. That’s what happens when we lean into this extractive mindset, because that’s the way that we’ve invested our time and our energy.

You know, the most sustainable that agriculture has ever been in the U. S. was when European settlers were not here, when Indigenous people were stewards of the land, the land was in equilibrium and there was reciprocity and it was you give as much as you take. Under slavery, it was this process of taking as much from both people and land as you could. And then even after slavery, it’s like, okay, well, now we have to replace this free labor source. And in some places that looks like convict leasing and other places that looks like sharecropping and other places that began to look like industrialization.

And this idea of “well, if we have to pay people, let’s actually figure out a way to not have to pay people. Let’s use machines and tractors and chemicals to have to avoid having to use human labor,” and that continued this extractive mindset that even when it wasn’t chattel slavery, it was still taking and taking and taking and not really thinking of how you’re leaving the soil.

And so now we have wildfires all over California. We have hurricanes that are reaching much further inland than they ever have. Land that used to be marshes and swamps are now golf courses and resorts. And so they’re not helping to protect areas of the United States, the way that they were before. And we’re seeing the impacts on the quality of our food. On so many things.

And I think that we also see what happens when Indigenous people and Black people and Chicano people in the U.S. are able to engage in those ancestral practices, like controlled burning so that we don’t have wildfires that consume the entire coast, like crop rotation and cover crops, and native species instead of manicured golf courses and lawns and things of that nature.

We have to lean into this wisdom to be able to save what we do have. So that’s also why  I don’t lean into this like agro or eco-pessimism, because I think that’s also a white supremacist thing. And yes, if we continue this extractive nature, yes, things will continue to be bad. But if we lean on what Indigenous and African diasporic people have done, we continue, we can reverse a lot of things. And we’ve seen that Indigenous nations worldwide are at the forefront of reforestation and not using any Silicon Valley tech, not using any billion dollar startup money. Just using practices passed down from the great grandparents and their great grandparents. And that really is not possible when we are not owners and stewards of land.

In the book, you don’t shy away from speaking of the connections in Black history and Indigenous history in this country. You say: Who owns what on stolen land? We can’t look ahead to Land Back or reparations without acknowledging that these things have to happen together because the land was stolen twice.

You know, I think that that tension is something that makes people afraid of even having the conversation. This idea of, well, where would we even begin? Because there are so many claims to land, and now there are new citizens living on that land.

And for me, I think, number one, that Black and Indigenous people need to be having this conversation with one another as opposed to a predominantly white male Senate being the mediator of whether reparations are needed, whether Land Back is needed, and, and how to make both happen.

Number one, I’m reminded that when we lean on ancestral wisdom, we know that there’s an abundance of land. And that scarcity mindset is something that colonizers brought forward, but there’s always been enough to share, especially when we lean into more collectivist models.

For example, my grandmother, you know, most recently was the owner on record of the 90 something acres that we have in North Carolina. And I remember one time visiting and seeing that there were, neighbors who were hunting on the land. And I was like “Oh, did you give them like a license? Did they pay you?”

I would say that just in my own personal journey, there were so many parts of me that grew up thinking that certain activities, certain jobs, certain parts of the country, often activities, jobs, and parts of the country that were more marked by the natural environment were white people’s stuff.

And not realizing that that was intentionally designed choice because how, as the descendant of forced laborers, am I so disconnected from what it means to grow food, what it means to be outdoors, what it means to be in water? And I think it’s an important thing for people to recognize that there are so many daily decisions that we make, and we think they are choices we’re making alone. And there’s so much nuance and context that enters the room with us when we’re making those decisions. The decision whether to live in a city, a suburb or rural environment, to live in the South versus the North versus the West.

We believe things about ourselves. And I had no idea how much shame I’d been carrying about what it meant to be connected to the South, to have Southern eating habits, to come from a family that eats fried chitlins and a grandfather that hunts and that spends our summers in North Carolina versus on a beach or out of the country.

But now I just feel really proud to have that history. And I think the reframe is knowing the history, is knowing the legacy, is knowing where I come from. It doesn’t mean that you have to be a farmer, but I think that making the choice truly from an informed place is a really different thing. And, and now knowing that you can do both, that I can have chickens and want to go to the Bahamas and want to visit my family in Long Island and want to occasionally be in a pool. Like they’re all things for us. And, being able to embrace nature and the outdoors as a birthright is a beautiful, beautiful thing. And I hope is something that we are investing in as we fight for reparations, because if we only fight for one time individual payments, we are doing a disservice to the real scope and breadth of the problem, in my opinion. And I, I just think of what our ancestors wildest dreams were, and I think it was to labor on their own time, to enjoy the outdoors without being forced to be outside and, and to just be able to enjoy the outside as a place of leisure and not just work.

And that is something that I’ve been leaning into as my birthright. It doesn’t have to be that every day is a sweaty day, but also a sweaty day that’s in service of something you’re building for your family is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

Top photos all family photos.