STORIES from the EARTH


There’s history in these grapes: At New Ground, Connie tends a muscadine vine grown from seeds that originated on the homestead of Henry Berry Lowry, a 19th-century Lumbee folk hero.


It’s about preserving


a way of life, ancestral wisdom, and the crops that sprang from it.


a tomato for shelf life. I raise it for taste and flavor. You take our heirloom tomatoes — man, you bet- ter eat that thing in three to four days, or it’ll be spoiled on you.” The Locklears grow a cornucopia of tomatoes,


including yellow Lemon Boys, Green Zebras that they like to use for frying, Cherokee Purples, Black Krims, and Yellow Brandywines. They raise a white corn that Connie’s family handed down called Silver Queen, oblong Black Beauty eggplants, and a whole host of plants that “self-proclaimed herb- alist” Connie uses to make tinctures and medi- cines. Some of their crop goes to UNC-Pembroke, originally founded exclusively for “the Indians of Robeson County.” Most of it sells to wholesalers, often ending up in restaurant kitchens.


MILLARD NO LONGER WORKS AT NEW GROUND FARM full-time — last year, he took a job as the manager of the Lumbee Tribe’s newly formed Agriculture &


Natural Resources Department. There, he’s tasked with everything from addressing pollution in the Lumbee River to developing a farmers co-op. He dreams of a pop-up market, incubator farms, and other methods of teaching younger generations to care for the land. Students often tour their farm, and Connie —


who shares “the urge to keep doing this and pass it on to the next generation” — says that the kids, ranging from pre-K to college age, love it. Her own children don’t always understand why their parents took up farming as a retirement plan. She and Millard are getting to be old enough that some physical aspects of the job, such as hand-harvesting okra, don’t come as easily. Yet the couple is unfazed. “A lot of people retire and they’re trying to figure


out what they’re going to do, sitting in their house, looking at the walls,” Millard says. “Ain’t nothing happy about that.” In contrast, his grandfather, whom he tries to


emulate, died on his feet, standing down a row of his apple trees, right here in Pembroke. “He was happy as a bedbug,” Millard says. “That’s peace in life.”


Eric Ginsburg is a freelance writer based in Raleigh.


232 OUR STATE | NOVEMBER 2023


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