_You can learn a lot about a community from their yard compost. On one of the last cool Saturdays of spring, a friend and I spent the morning in a neighborhood called East Tarboro with a group called Freedom Org, shoveling piles of the dirt, while excavating the recent history of the larger town of Tarboro, North Carolina. In addition to old tire pieces and rope and plastic of every kind, there were shoe parts, candy wrappers, whole pairs of gardening gloves, the unmistakable beige pipes of Black & Milds. I learned that this is the kind of place where people pass a lot of quality time out in the yard.

These are folk who you might find growing their summer tomatoes and black-eyed Susans; fixing their cars hoisted on concrete blocks; burning trash out back; spending pretty, music-filled nights smoking on the porch or in the car; popping out of their shoes on sunny grass; throwing somethin’ on the grill on birthdays, major holidays, or any suitable day; and maybe swinging on tires suspended from big trees. It’s a place not unlike my place, an hour and a half west in Durham, where those ways were the proper ways growing up, but have faded as we moved from tobacco to biotech, from hosiery mills to bearded bro breweries. 

On that Saturday, we removed all of the non-organic artifacts from the compost to make way for new life for that soil, for a new chapter on Black land bought out by the Town of Tarboro via FEMA after Hurricane Matthew in 2016. That year, the heavy rains once again pushed the Tar River from its banks, sending it flowing over the earthen levee initially built to protect Black folks living in Princeville, the further east cousin of East Tarboro. Both East Tarboro and Princeville were submerged, flooding houses, and breaking the final straw for many families, like those who fled the now-vacant land where we worked that Saturday. The eventual buyouts were no panacea for those families. In addition to the loss of community, the funds offered were often insufficient for the cost of living in an equivalent space elsewhere.

When I first saw this land, it looked like a burial plot without a headstone. Grassy, vacant, but gaping, an unmarked presence. The folks at Freedom Org saw a chance to feed their community. The community development corporation was founded in 2019 by Marquetta Dickens, a native of Princeville and a college basketball coach most recently at William Peace University in Raleigh; Kendrick Ransome, owner of Golden Organic Farm in another Black community called Pinetops; and Turcois Ominek, the chief operating officer and historian for Freedom Org from Philadelphia. Freedom Org focuses on local food systems as part of its larger vision to ensure the future of historic Black places like Princeville and East Tarboro in greater Edgecombe County. In 2023, I joined a group of my colleagues at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) to partner with Freedom Org on the planning and opening of a demonstration garden project on the buyout lands in East Tarboro. 

“It just kind of resonated, like there’s options to start growing our own food and having that staple within the community, connected to food sovereignty,” says Ransome, who is Freedom Org’s agriculture director. “How can we hold space and also teach others how to grow their own food, and how can they see their food being grown, riding through the neighborhood, and be like ‘Hey, we get our food from here, versus going to grocery stores all the way on the other side of town’? So just really shortening that distance from the community to their food source, but also having the support and assistance to help the community bridge those gaps in communication, transportation, access to tools, and access to farmers and gardeners and just the different types of perspectives that comes around building the food system.” 

To understand why food sovereignty is a top priority in a region built on agriculture, it’s important to know something about the history of Edgecombe County, Tarboro, and Princeville. Founded in 1760, Tarboro was one of the river port towns used to import enslaved people to North Carolina, at a place called Shiloh Landing. Until the post-Reconstruction era, the town and larger region were among the wealthiest in the state, thriving from tar, turpentine, tobacco, and cotton. Though the enslaved always created provision grounds and possessed general knowledge about wild foods to supplement their diets, land was prioritized for profits, not as much for sustaining local food systems. The plantation system only expanded post-Emancipation, eventually as a phenomenon extending far past the “New World” in the West.

Edgecombe County now ranks as the most economically distressed county in North Carolina. And despite devoting nearly forty percent of its acreage to agriculture as of 2012, many of the county’s residents experience food insecurity, as much of the land is devoted to cash crops like cotton, and other industrial farming endeavors, like chicken broilers. These endeavors are often troublesome for local economies, due to the lack of living-wage jobs and profits that accrue to multinational corporations like Tyson Foods.

Princeville, commonly known as the first municipality incorporated by Black people in the country (though Zora Neale Hurston’s Eatonville, Florida, might object), started as a refuge for enslaved runaways at the end of the Civil War, and is in a floodplain, which the planter class considered wasteland. The town was established both as a site of Black self-determination (originally named Freedom Hill, then renamed upon incorporation for one of the town’s most prominent leaders,Turner Prince) and as a conceit for white folks, particularly in Tarboro, who wanted to retain local Black labor post-Emancipation. 

The cost of freedom, as Princevillians know well, was and is both the burden of economic extraction by places like Tarboro, and the cyclical challenge of resurrection after devastating floods. Since 1867, two years after Freedom Hill was established, Princeville has experienced at least nine major flood events, the latest being Hurricane Matthew in 2016. The earthen river levee constructed in 1965 was supposed to hold the water at bay, making way for the long-awaited development then-mayor Ray Matthewson had hoped for in Princeville. He lamented that year that the town hadn’t “had success about industries yet.”

“What happened was that when Princeville used to flood a lot, a lot of those folks worked in Tarboro and they then moved over to East Tarboro to be able to get to work, but that [East Tarboro] was also previous plantation land in a low-lying area,” says Marquetta Dickens, Princeville native and executive director of Freedom Org. “I think the irony of it is when the levee was built, it pushed more water to East Tarboro. And so, either way, Black folks was getting this water no matter what.” 

Except for a few waves of small business development beginning in the early twentieth century, Princeville has never enjoyed the kind of economic growth that its residents were integral to building in white towns like Tarboro. The flooding was a big problem, but so too was the fact that Princeville, despite its legal status as a municipality, was treated for most of its history as a Black extension of Tarboro. It wasn’t allowed to annex new land or raise taxes like other towns. When it was incorporated, the NC state legislature made Princeville subject to most of Tarboro’s laws, with few exceptions. Princeville has endured multiple battles to preserve its integrity as an independent town, including a fight against annexation into Tarboro in 1903, and another fight to build its own infrastructure in the mid-1970s. The town’s population never exceeded three thousand residents, and today, eight years after Hurricane Matthew, is just over twelve hundred people. 

What Princevillians could control was how their community functioned, through mutual aid and collectivism. They built churches and schools, and maintained hyperlocal food systems. Documentaries about the town made in 2006 and 2022 attest to collaborative land stewardship and food cultivation in Princeville, including community hog and poultry shares, vegetable raising, and communal support to prepare food stores for winter months.

Dickens recalls remnants of those practices growing up in the 1990s. “Everybody used to have a community garden. In Princeville there were random wild plum trees, you know, lots of fruit trees in the backyards. And so, these things naturally thrive and grow in places like East Tarboro and Princeville,” she said. “When I grew up, we literally couldn’t wait to get out of school just to get us some plums from the plum factory. We were coming out with grocery bags of plums. There were all types of fruit trees in Princeville. And it would be amazing to see those things come back in a place that is known for agriculture but there’s a lack of fresh foods.” 

The buyout lands in East Tarboro make it possible for Freedom Org to try reviving these historic foodways. They’ve secured a ten-year lease from the Town of Tarboro to cultivate demonstration gardens for education, cultural events, and food sharing. But despite paying nominal rent, the potential costs are steep, especially as climate change will likely cause more flooding in the neighborhood. 

Working with Freedom Org’s intrepid agriculture program coordinator, Aerhealle Chace, and Brittany Clark, a hydrologist trained at NC State University, our team at UNC witnessed the unfolding of a plan to live with the water, instead of fighting it. The thing about the Tar River, like any other water body, is that, as Toni Morrison said, it “has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.” Better to let the water come and nourish the soil, as it always does in floodplains, than to waste your time fighting god. 

“It’s an exciting opportunity,” Chace said. “After reading more about the floodplain plans and the FEMA buyout lands and what other uses they were recommended for, community gardens was always the number one recommendation. And then, as far as the way the water runs, making sure that the paths of the rows are running in a way that will help capture water instead of making it easier for it to create runoff—just really trying to be mindful of the way that we design even the walkways to capture water and let it flow naturally versus just shooting across and washing everything away. We get to do something that has been done in other places, but it’s never quite done the same. And so we’re still doing a little bit of trial and error.” 

Living with water is of course, nothing new, especially for places outside of the United States—consider the Nile River in Egypt and Wafaa El-Nil, their annual August celebration of the floodwaters that made agriculture possible in the region. But over here in manifest destiny-land, we love nothing more than draining a swamp, reversing a river, flooding whole Indigenous and Black places for a white playtime lake. Nevertheless, the water always had other plans for us, and has so upended regular life for people across the country, and particularly the South, that some of us started paying attention. Like in New Orleans, where “living with water” has become a catchphrase for climate adaptation and is a registered trademark of a design firm called Waggonner & Ball, which works on major infrastructural redevelopment projects in flood prone regions like the Gulf Coast. 

Those large scale projects certainly have their place. But much like the everyday New Orleanians who are transforming their yards and common areas into sponges for floodwaters using various trees and grasses and flowers, Freedom Org is finding decentralized, non-commodified methods of co-existing symbiotically with the land and water. 

“[The community garden] is just a great example of everyday folks actually practicing climate action and not even knowing it,” Dickens said. “Fruit trees require a lot of water. We can bring that environment back, it’s going to soak up water but it’s also going to be able to provide a food source.” 

But first, the soil. Which is why we were all outside shoveling tons of compost on the last cool Saturday of spring. Chace says that though the Tar River nourishes the land, the post-buyout process does not. After the houses were removed from the land, the town dug up a bunch of the soil along with the infrastructure, added more topsoil and bulldozed it flat. 

“And so even though the base layer might still be like that super fertile soil, we’re still kind of working off a completely fresh start, we’re trying to add more organic matter, trying to add more things that are going to help with drainage, more compost and things like that,” she said. 

If the floodwaters come, as they anticipate, the Freedom Org team ultimately feels that it’s well worth the cost of practicing a different relationship with the land, worth the challenge of building a more enduring, mutualistic existence in the place where their ancestors sought freedom. 

“As Black people, we’ve never got the best land,” Ransome said. “Even if it do flood, you know, there’s still opportunity, you know, we can get a good season and make a little bit. Let’s get what we have access to, let’s make it happen, while we are developing something that is more sustainable, more concrete. After that ten-year mark, we can have our track record laid out for us and can extend it even longer if that’s something we want to do. And also, to just really create, like, a blueprint for other small communities and urban communities.”

This series was published with support from The Julia Child Foundation for Gastronomy and the Culinary Arts.