MARIE MUTSUKI MOCKETT. American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland. Minneapolis, MN: Graywolf Press, 2020. Pp. 396. $28.00 (U.S.)
In the late nineteenth century, both Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s paternal great-grandfathers moved from the East Coast to the High Plains, in large part for reasons of health. Melvin Markley became the town dentist in Kimball, Nebraska, and Percy Mockett became the town’s doctor. In 1895, Markley staked a claim to 160 acres under the Timber Culture Act of 1873, which at the time required the recipient to grow trees on at least 40 acres.
Over generations, even through a number of moves to the West Coast and back, Melvin Markley’s initial land purchase grew over time, and land remained in the family. Today, Mockett’s cousin owns some of the land, and she owns some herself, despite the fact that her father had said he “wouldn’t leave her the farm.” Many of the operations, such as planting, have been performed by three generations of a neighboring farm family, the Knowellses, who would likely be considered the “farm operators” by the Agricultural Census. Yet over the years the Mockett family has maintained close ties to the operation, with a tradition of returning to their land every year at harvest. The Mocketts, too, appear to play some role in decision making. In the 1990s, Mockett’s father became a passionate advocate of no-till farming, and their fields were the first in Kimball County to use this practice.
For decades, the wheat on the Mockett farm has been cut by Wolgemuth Custom Harvesters, of Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania. Eric Wolgemuth and his crew have been custom cutting from Texas north and west to Idaho for well over 30 years. In Kimball, Wolgemuth now has purchased some of the Mockett land, further complicating the rich web of relationships behind farming there. Mockett first met Wolgemuth in her 20s, but did not really get to know him and his family until she was in her late 30s. This was after her father died and she returned to the family tradition of going back to Kimball for harvest. Now she has visited Eric, Emily, and family in Pennsylvania, and they, too, have seen her on her turf in at least one visit to New York City. On this visit, Eric broached the possibility of Marie’s accompanying the crew for the entire wheat harvest so she might better understand “the divide”—between city and country, but perhaps a symbol of much more. In 2017, she did exactly that. American Harvest is an impressionistic recounting of that journey, but even more it is a meditation on identity, self-discovery, communication, and polarization.
Eric Wolgemuth is my third cousin. I know his parents, Earl and Joan, much better than I do Eric. My mother grew up on a wheat farm in Saskatchewan, and for three years in high school I spent summers working on a mixed farm in Kansas where wheat was an important crop. For 13 years, I worked as an economist for the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), so I could expand at length on American Harvest’s stories of the Turkey Red land race so important in the early history of wheat in the U.S., or of Daruma, the dwarf Japanese land race and progenitor of Norin 10, the short Japanese variety brought to the U.S. after World War II. Norin 10 contributed some of the extremely important dwarfing genes now present in much of the world’s wheat. Since retiring from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, I have volunteered at a food pantry in Harrisonburg, Virginia. One of my colleagues, Daryl Peifer, was formerly CEO of Hoober, Inc., a Mid-Atlantic farm equipment dealership. Hoober sells much of the farm equipment used by Wolgemuth Bros., including the combines they use for their custom cutting on the Great Plains.
So I have many personal connections to this story. But in many ways, I am on Marie Mockett’s side of the divide. I am not very handy, and, like her, I would worry about the best way to drive a truck into a field being harvested. When I read accounts of some of her interchanges with Eric or other members of his crew, I am reminded of Earl, Eric’s father, cocking his head slightly with a bit of a bemused expression as we discussed agriculture, as if to say “so, with all your book learning, what do you really know about farming?”
Mockett’s eye and pen are novelistic. The basic chronology follows the harvest route but there are numerous passages reaching back in time. Many readers of this journal will be interested in the discussions of faith between the author, Eric, Emily, and very often their son Juston, who is the author’s most eloquent interlocutor. Often attending Sunday worship services with the family and the crew, Mockett finds some styles of worship appealing, and others off-putting. Other readers will appreciate her work to learn more about agriculture, and the economic and environmental forces that shape it.
But half-concealed threads of identity and history give American Harvest greater intricacy. Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s mother was born in Japan. In coastal cities where she has spent much of her adult life, her appearance as the child of a Japanese mother and American father does not draw a second glance. But in the mostly white town in California where she grew up, in Japan when she visits her mother’s family, and on the Great Plains harvest route, she is aware of being perceived as the “other.” Nonetheless, along the harvest route at times people think she might have Native American ancestry.
Very subtly, American Harvest explores the second founding sin of the United States—the displacement and killing of the original occupants of the land. Visits to museums on days the crew is unable to cut, stories of Native American converts to Christianity, and a stay at a hotel at a casino in Idaho lead to conversations that touch on our own responsibilities to the land and its original people. The first climax of the book comes when Mockett attends a Sun Dance after a woman at the hotel desk tells her it is “all right” if she goes. At the dance, she buys a bottle of water before returning to the fasting dancers. Two men intercept her and ask, angrily, how she can drink water in front of the suffering dancers.
Exploring this experience with Eric and Emily, Marie is taken aback by Emily’s question about how long we should “feel responsible” for the suffering of Black or Native Americans. Mockett thinks it is the wrong question to ask, and, painfully aware of the connotations, seeks clarification from a Black friend who texts, “People are not asking you to show some emotion. What they are asking is that thought be given to their identity, which means coming to terms with their history and treatment in this society” (310).
The second quest, understanding the “divide” in American life—reaches an equally ambiguous climax. Over the course of the trip, Mockett becomes increasingly aware of a “divide” in the members of the harvest crew. Juston and his friend Michael are on one side, the other crew members are on the other. Mockett surmises, correctly, that the rift is related to her presence. Two of the young men have a confrontation, with one saying “I hope she tells the truth” (361) and the other asking how she is supposed to tell the truth if the crew isn’t willing to talk to her.
American Harvest ends more as a chronicle of personal discovery than as a dissection of the various fissures—city/country, educated/practical, political—that might divide us. It is a meditation both on Mockett’s deeper discovery of the ugliness of which human beings are capable, and of Jesus’ message of love. Silently, too, the book demonstrates how many of us, thinking we are completely on one side of a divide, have tendrils connecting us to the other. The question remains hanging: what good-faith measures of communication are still possible?