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By Root 849 0

about rural politics is that they tend to break on the line of “insider” vs. “outsider.” When my country neighbors sit down with a new social group, the first question they ask one another is not “What do you do?” but rather, “Who are your people?” Commonly we will spend more than the first ten minutes of a new acquaintance tracing how our families might be related. If not by blood, then by marriage. Failing that, by identifying someone significant we have known in common. Only after this ritual of familial placing does the conversation comfortably move on to other subjects. I am blessed with an ancestor who was the physician in this county from about 1910 into the 1940s. From older people I’ll often hear of some memorably dire birth or farm accident to which my great-uncle was called; lucky for me he was skilled and Hippocratic. But even a criminal ancestor will get you insider status, among the forgiving. Not so lucky are those who move here with no identifiable family ties. Such a dark horse is likely to remain “the new fellow” for the rest of his natural life, even if he arrived in his prime and lives to be a hundred.

The country tradition of mistrusting outsiders may be unfairly applied, but it’s not hard to understand. For much of U.S. history, rural regions have been treated essentially as colonial property of the cities. The carpetbaggers of the reconstruction era were not the first or the last opportunists to capitalize on an extractive economy. When urban-headquartered companies come to the country with a big plan—whether their game is coal, timber, or industrial agriculture—the plan is to take out the good stuff, ship it to the population centers, make a fortune, and leave behind a mess.

Given this history, one might expect the so-called Red States to vote consistently for candidates supporting working-class values. In fact, our nation in almost every region is divided in a near dead heat between two parties that apparently don’t distinguish themselves clearly along class lines. If every state were visually represented with the exact blend of red and blue it earned in recent elections, we’d have ourselves a big purple country. The tidy divide is a media just-so story.

Our uneasy relationship between heartland and coasts, farm and factory, country and town, is certainly real. But it is both more rudimentary and more subtle than most political analysts make it out to be. It’s about loyalties, perceived communities, and the things each side understands to be important because of the ground, literally, upon which we stand. Wendell Berry summed it up much better than “blue and red” in one line of dialogue from his novel Jayber Crow, which is peopled by farmers struggling to survive on what the modern, mostly urban market will pay for food. After watching nearly all the farms in the county go bankrupt, one of these men comments: “I’ve wished sometimes that the sons of bitches would starve. And now I’m getting afraid they actually will.”

In high summer, about the time I was seeing red in my kitchen, the same thing was happening to some of our county’s tomato farmers. They had learned organic methods, put away the chemicals, and done everything right to grow a product consumers claimed to want. They’d waited the three years for certification. They’d watered, weeded, and picked, they’d sorted the round from the misshapen, producing the perfect organic tomatoes ordered by grocery chains. And then suddenly, when the farmers were finally bringing in these tomatoes by the truckload and hoping for a decent payout, some grocery buyers backtracked. “Not this week,” one store offered without warning, and then another. Not the next week either, nor the next. A tomato is not a thing that can be put on hold. Mountains of ripe fruits piled up behind the packing house and turned to orange sludge, swarming with clouds of fruit flies.

These tomatoes were perfect, and buyers were hungry. Agreements had been made. But pallets of organic tomatoes from California had begun coming in just a few dollars cheaper. It’s hard to believe,