Ep. 4: Rufus and Demalda Newsome and Newsome Community Farms, Greenville, MS

In this fourth episode, we talk with Chris’s parents Rufus and Demalda Newsome of Newsome Community Farms in Greenville, Mississippi at Christmas. While Rufus pulls seeds from cotton he talks about growing up at ten years old working in the cotton fields as a weed chopper, a hoe filer, and a water boy. While Demalda chops vegetables for the Christmas meal, she describes growing up harvesting fruits from neighborhood trees and beans from an overturned bean truck, and getting watermelons from the watermelon man. While she and Chris make tamales, we talk about how they’d always eat them with hot donuts in the Delta at Christmas, which brings us to talking about segregation and desegregation. She describes her advocacy and food sovereignty work with Newsome Community Farms, Community Food Security Coalition, and Food First. There’s a hidden track at the very end where Rufus opens his very first moringa pods (see the videos here) and the grandkids get to taste the seeds and the way they transform water, and we discuss seed maturity and storage, and the importance of eating good bacteria. 

SEED AND FOOD STORIES TOLD IN THIS EPISODE:

• Cotton
• Mustard and Turnip Greens
• Tamales
• Moringa 

MORE INFO FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Newsome Community Farms, by WhyHunger
• Demalda Newsome, Food First
• Food First
• An Introduction: Hot Tamales and the Mississippi Delta, Southern Foodways Alliance.
• The brutal murder of Emmett Till in Money, Mississippi, by the History Channel.
• Fannie Lou Hamer founds the Freedom Farm Cooperative in the Mississippi Delta, by SNCC. 

 

ABOUT:

Seeds And Their People is a radio show where we feature seed stories told by the people who truly love them. Hosted by Owen Taylor of Truelove Seeds and Chris Bolden-Newsome of Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram’s Garden.

trueloveseeds.com/blogs/satpradio

 

FIND OWEN HERE:

Truelove Seeds

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FIND CHRIS HERE:

Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram’s Garden

 

THANKS TO:

• Rufus Newsome and Demalda Bolden Newsome
• Aunt Veronica
• Jala, Jacob, Amareion
• Sara Taylor

 

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT:

Rufus Newsome

Rufus Newsome:

Years ago as a boy. Um, the field wasn't very far away from where we live. We lived in Mississippi, Greenville Mississippi. We lived on white people's land. They were called the Dominic's. They were pretty decent folks also. But we went to other people fields to pick and chop cotton. I can remember as a small child smelling that fresh cotton smell and I crave the smell now. But this cotton doesn't smell the same way it did 50 years ago. It's different. Doesn't have a smell at all. But, progress goes on.

Owen Taylor:

Do you remember the first times you smelled cotton and what was that like and where were you? What were you doing?

Rufus Newsome:

I was in the fields when I was about 10 years old. At that time I was chopping because I think people had stopped picking cotton. That was combines picking cotton then, but we still needed to chop the weeds between the rows and there weren't a lot of herbicides used on that