I been farming three turns around the sun now. Way I like to do it is live where I’m working. On the farm. Not everyone likes to do it that way but I do. Easiest thing to get in exchange for working the land is room and board, they got websites for it, y’all know the ones, probably met a someone in a hostel or have a cousin did a worktrade on a farm somewhere. Thing is, you are, indisputably, working, and if you take the time to look up the law it don’t really make too much sense how they can get away with you working for no pay. 

I mean, they can’t, I don’t think, but they do. People take it.

Some of ’em calculate it for you: well, the room’d cost this much if I charged you for’t and if you were still city living you’d be paying suchandsuch for groceries so really if you think about it you’re making fifteen-hundred bucks a month.

I didn’t go to school for calculations but that don’t add up too much for me, fifteen-hundred equalling zero.

Sometimes the room is a room. Here and there it’s a cabin. Might be a parking space for your truck provided you got one, might be a tent. A trailer is common. Some of the trailers even work, some have running water and electricity. Some.

Thing I learned is I’d rather take the imaginary paycheck over going back to four walls and a ceiling.

Worked my way to fifty bucks a week in 2020, in 2020 dollars. I milked the goats, made the cheese and yogurt. Made the soap, me and lye and palm oil and coconut oil and essential oils in that little room. After a spell they offered me three hundred dollars a month to stick around, keep running the dairy. Were spitting mad when I declined and shuffled on.

Up there in Washington I learned the 1% of the 1% of the 1% will pay you minimum wage, charge you rent, and call it education. That’s something, ain’t it? I really think that’s something.

I don’t cotton too much after the afterlife, but sometimes I wish there was something after this. Something that turned all the corrosion into evidence against them.

I’ve had it good, far as these things go. Nobody ever hit me. Blows of tongues, not whips. Treated enough like shit and jerked around more’n I wanted but nothing I couldn’t take, nothing worse than the backhands in the lives I lived before. Truth is I have brought myself from a mighty long way, ain’t no going back now.

Just kinda funny, ain’t it? Kinda funny, America. Ain’t it? Still not paying people to grow things. After all this time.

I chose it, though. I choose it, and I’d choose it again, shoot, really I would. But wasn’t they ’posed to make it some choices you couldn’t choose anymore?

There’s freedom in people thinking you don’t have a mind for nothing but filling feed buckets. Me myself I like them not really seeing me. Safe. Safer. They can’t see the parts of you that matter, they can’t break ’em. Sticks, stones and all that, you know? Sticks and stones I been taking since my birth day. Can’t do too much more to me now. Black folk leastways know how to conjure up soul. I’ll find a way to singing, living in a cold box behind milking parlour and pissing outside under the full moon be damned.