Poached Peaches

Excerpt from her memoir, Loving My Hateful Ancestors: A Public Witness

Ellen Morris Prewitt

Poached Peaches

This much is true. My family’s ancestral LaGrange plantation had a hell of a lot of peach trees. The pre-Civil War peach farm clung to the rolling hills and deep ravines of Warren County, Mississippi. About ten miles to the west, the Mississippi River flowed past the town of Vicksburg, famous for the forty-day siege that gave control of the river to General Ulysses S. Grant and turned the Civl War toward a United States victory. Decades before that, in 1834, the first Mississippi Hebron came down from Virginia and bought an already-established plantation and renamed it “LaGrange.” The white man I imaginatively call “the Peach Farmer” added to this initial acreage and, twenty years later, owned 1200 acres and 117,000 fruit trees.

Read that number again: 117,000 trees. According to my uncle the history professor, seventeen thousand of the trees were in the orchard for bearing fruit; 100,000 were seedlings in the nursery for sale to customers. The inventory included peach, pear, and apple trees, which John Hebron advertised constantly. Gawkers traveled like the Magi to gaze upon the fruit operation. One visitor boasted the pear orchard was the largest in the world. Doubtful, but still huge. An online article quotes a note in The Papers of Jefferson Davis, Vol. 2, pegging the Peach Farmer as the largest commercial fruit grower in the lower Mississippi Valley.

My historian uncle’s description of LaGrange implies the trees did not require much tending. That I don’t believe. I’ve tromped through scrub pastures in central Mississippi, I’ve stood on the lip of quarries in north Mississippi, and I’ve watched dogwoods bloom in southwest Mississippi. I know the shoreline of the Gulf and the red clay hills where Mississippi cuddles up to Alabama. I’ve seen pear trees. Fig trees. Plum trees. Mulberry trees. Pecan trees. Orange trees, though those are usually the late-ripening Satsumas that grow on the Gulf Coast, and grapefruit trees, also on the Coast. The mouth-puckering persimmon grows everywhere, as do crabapples with their hard, tart apples.. Horse apples on bodock trees, too, though those apples aren’t fit for human consumption. I’ve never seen a peach tree growing in the wild.

Raising the LaGrange peach trees required a particular, high level of skill. The trees weren’t just planted and—voila!—peaches. They were grafted. Hybridized. Transplanted. Staked, mulched, pruned, fertilized, and—finally—picked. My ancestor was not the one laboring over the trees. In fact, the Peach Farmer had no intention of ever growing fruit trees.

At this point, you might be asking yourself, Wait a minute. What was a dude in Mississippi, a state notoriously slutty for cotton, doing raising peach trees? To answer that question, you need to understand the nefarious origins of LaGrange.

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POACHED PEACHES

INGREDIENTS

6 generations of LaGrange peaches, peeled

Vanilla, concentrated

2 cups of water

1 kernel of truth

Cane sugar, white

CUT peaches in half and discard telltale pits

MIX water and sugar in large sauce pan and bring to BOIL

ADD peaches and return to boil until poached

Using slotted spoon, REMOVE peaches

ADD vanilla and kernel of truth to remaining syrup

Cover and SIMMER for 150 years until truth is reduced to a wisp

SMOTHER peaches with poaching syrup

SERVE the HOT mess

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Many years ago—I mean years—my Uncle Hebron gave me a pamphlet about the peach farm. The pamphlet was written by my historian uncle, John Hebron Moore. (These names, I know: My Uncle Hebron was my dad’s brother; Moore was my dad’s cousin who was raised as a brother.) John Hebron Moore was chair of the history department at both Ole Miss and Florida State University. His 1984 journal entry, “John Hebron of LaGrange Plantation: Commercial Fruit Grower of the Old South,” in The Journal of Mississippi History, is about our ancestor.

Did I not read the pamphlet when I received it? Or did its recitation of facts make my eyes glaze over? Maybe I was at a point where family history didn’t interest me from an ancestor-pride point of view and not yet at the place where I was parsing that history. The point is, when I returned to the pamphlet, there, hiding in plain sight, was the wormy truth of the LaGrange peach plantation.

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As I mentioned, my ancestor Peach Farmer came to Mississippi by way of Virginia. He took his wife’s money and about thirty enslaved people she “inherited” from her dad and pointed everyone south toward Mississippi. Maybe the couple employed a slavedriver to make the shackled men, women, and children walk the hundreds of miles to the Deep South. Maybe they all came in wagons. I cannot say who got left behind, what friends and family were never seen again. All I know is the people who created the peach farm were Virginians.

Here’s the point: Before leaving Virginia, the enslaved men and women gathered peach pits and other fruit seeds and slid them into their pockets. Perhaps this was a continuation of what they had learned from their ancestors who, before being forced into the slave trade’s Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas, tucked away okra seeds and black-eyed pea seeds and other plants they knew. However inspired, the Virginians brought with them on the thousand mile trip to the New South the physical embodiment of the future.

Once in Mississippi, the enslaved Virginians planted the seeds and tended the trees as they had back home. Except for casual snacking and hog feeding, the not-yet-Peach Farmer ignored the peach-growing. Then, in the late 1830s, an unnamed free Black man arrived on the place asking to buy barrels of peaches to sell in New Orleans. When the Peach Farmer learned how much money the man had made on the resale, he stole the man’s idea. But in order to go all in with fruit, the Peach Farmer needed capital. For this, he turned to the people he enslaved. He secured a $7901.33 loan for the new enterprise, putting up as collateral the very people whose knowledge was enabling the peach operation.

(At this point, I have to stop and draw a breath. People who were skilled fruit farmers, yet the law was willing to classify them as property that could be collateralized. I’m not sure the United States can ever live down this sin.)

The enslaved fruit farmers cultivated the trees, tended the crop, and eventually created a burgeoning nursery business to go along with the fruit-selling business. They produced the varietals of fruit on which the Peach Farmer filed patents. They harvested the fruit and packed it into boxes made from logs they milled on the place. They pressed juice from the fruits and created fruit preserves and jellies. They bottled peach brandy and served the brandy at parties so the Peach Farmer could impress his neighbors and secure his place in society. Did those with the foresight, knowledge, skill, and labor receive anything for their talent? They didn’t even get to be in charge. Hebron hired a white man as superintendent of the nursery and orchards. The creators of the LaGrange empire received no historical acknowledgment.

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When I talk about my ancestors’ sins, the first comments I get from white folks invariably spin around responsibility. Some want to argue we aren’t accountable for the acts of our ancestors. Others preemptively rebut that argument. Either way, it’s the go-to conversation. So much fear in that. I get it. A couple of years ago, when I believed I had found a man whose ancestors were among the enslaved Virginians who brought peach pits to LaGrange, I hesitated before sending him my uncle’s pamphlet. Once theft is revealed, mustn’t restitution follow? And what on earth would that mean?

I asked my husband for his advice. He said, “Why wouldn’t you send it to him?” I was too embarrassed to say, “Because I’m afraid I might be held accountable,” and I sent the pamphlet. The man and I conversed. Over time, he concluded that, although his family had lived on LaGrange, they did not come from Virginia. He and I stay in conversation, and I hope one day we will meet in person, maybe when the process is underway to reconstitute the history of the largest fruit farm in the Southeast.

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Why does it matter? Why even tell these stories from almost two hundred years ago? Because carefully selected parts of our individual stories are snipped away, and the remaining patches are sewn together to create the quilted myth of a South that never was. We lay that myth across our national history and teach it to our children and, before you know it, classrooms are claiming slavery was good for happy, kidnapped Africans because it taught them valuable skills. How many other instances are there where we white folks have assumed our ancestors were the creative entrepreneurs and teachers when, in fact, they were the rotten exploiters? We will never know if we don’t start talking, which I am only able to do because my historian uncle laid down the actual facts straight as a line of perfectly furrowed peach trees.

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And what happened to the peach trees? A myth squirting through the internet has the peach farm destroyed during the Civil War when General Ulysses S. Grants’ troops occupied LaGrange and marched among the rows of trees. Mean ol’ troops, killing the lovely peach trees, blowing the beautiful plantation into the wind. It’s not true. The soldiers did use the trees for firewood as was the practice at the time, but the peach farmer’s son operated the nursery for years after the war.

Guess what? You know who “Grant’s troops” were? United States Colored Troops. Four months after the fall of Vicksburg, in November of 1863, Grant mustered Battery C, 2nd US Colored Light Artillery 1st Louisiana Battery (African descent) on LaGrange, which was sometimes called Camp Hebron. The African American troops performing maneuvers among the LaGrange peach trees included in their number those whom the Hebrons had held against their will on the farm.

Not only that, those serving in the USCT stationed at Vicksburg included Black folks with the last name of Hebron. According to historian Dr. Beth Kruse, whose specialty is reclaiming the Black story in Reconstruction, multiple African Americans named Hebron served in the 3rd US Colored Cavalry of Buffalo Soldiers. Dr. Kruse has little doubt these Black Hebrons came from LaGrange.

When peering into the past, I get to fill in the interstitial spaces between known facts with my own educated guesses. Honestly, prestigious historians have gotten these stories so wrong, how much worse can my suppositions be? Given that, my guess is the troops marching between the peach trees at LaGrange included the men who came down from Virginia with the peach pits in their pockets. They were the sons of the skilled fruit farmers, the grandsons of the women who secreted the fruit seeds. The peach trees were their creations. Love the trees, hate the trees—the troops who were fighting to free themselves from the past could do whatever they wanted to with the trees that began life as their belief in the future.

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POACHED PEACHES, RECONSTITUTED

SET burner on 180 degree-turn

MEASURE consecrated oil to coat bottom of iron skillet and set aside

REMOVE 1 moldy peach from bin

SCRAPE off rotted flesh and white lesions of supremacy to expose pit

Use a ricer to SHRED the softened pit until it resembles small grains of truth

SOAK grains in warm water to release husk of appropriation

DRAIN and add mother’s milk of kindness

HAND SHAPE tender grains into small cakes and FRY in heated oil

SERVE at communion table with side dish of recompense and repair