This small field seems bigger than the sky.
—Thylias Moss, “Sweet Enough Ocean, Cotton”
The land is quiet, recumbent, as I turn in to Beulah Herring Lane. The little pink house is set back from the road, a bright patch of color beneath the tall summer sky. Its centennial is closing in. Yet it stands undaunted, as proud as the day it was built. Midnight, Elsie’s black Labrador, greets me in the driveway. He’s a handsome animal, but intimidating. I can see why Elsie favors him. She shoos him away and invites me onto the porch. The living area is still a work zone, she says with regret, still under repair after the flooding from Hurricane Florence.
She takes a seat on one of the rocking chairs and I do the same. I have heard so much about her, seen clips of her in newsreels and documentaries, read about her in magazine articles and in the pages of books. But this is the first time I have met her. Her manner is unhurried, her voice relaxed yet firm. She wears the world lightly, her words uncalloused. Her tone is warm and approachable. She is happy to talk.
I start with an apology. She has told her story so many times before. It must be wearisome to tell it again. She shakes her head, her smile subtle but untroubled. She doesn’t mind at all. Her story isn’t over. Others have caught glimpses of it. But no one has captured the full sweep.
We rock lazily, nothing but time on our hands, as the breeze washes over us, whisking away the worst of the heat. The air is fresh today; the hog farmer hasn’t been spraying. As the minutes pass, she tells me about her family, about her mother, Beulah, and her brother, Jesse; her daddy, Abram, and her Uncle Perl; her grandfather Immanuel and Miss Emily Teachey, the white woman who raised him. She tells me the story of the land, the eighty acres Immanuel acquired before the nineteenth century turned and Miss Emily passed on. She tells me how those eighty acres have been whittled down to thirty-five, according to the Duplin land records office. But that is a mistake, another wrong she needs to correct. She would love nothing more than to reassemble the broken pieces of her grandfather’s estate before she dies.
She loves this land more than the world itself.
I ask her about the hog farm. It is invisible now, separated from her home by a thick buffer of trees. The industry planted them before her mother passed away. When the trees grew to their mature height, they blocked the pitter-patter of hog rain, but they didn’t stop the odor. The sprayfield is still there, just beyond the buffer. Over the years, the hog farmer has adapted his irrigation techniques, retiring the big gun in favor of sprinklers and locating them as far away from her property line as possible. But these efforts have been only palliative, not a cure. The problem is the proximity of the hog factory to her home. The solution, as Tom Butler told all five juries, is to cover the lagoons and treat the waste as the hogs excrete it. Only then will the air be cleansed.
Elsie tells me about her activism, about Rick Dove and Don Webb, ARSI and REACH, about the hope they cultivated over so many years that a lawsuit might bring about change. Her eyes dance as she talks about Mona Wallace and Mike Kaeske. She knows how hard they have fought for her and the other neighbors. She loves them for it, and every member of their team. She is so proud of what they have accomplished, of the concessions they have elicited from Smithfield. But the battle against the hog barons isn’t over, not for Elsie Herring. She wants the industry to honor the spirit of the Smithfield Agreement, to dispense with the lagoons and sprayfields once and for all. She wants final justice for the land. The end of the litigation is not the resolution of Elsie’s story. She is not going to rest until that justice is served.
We talk about other things, too, as the afternoon melts away and the sky softens in anticipation of evening. I ask her if she ever gets lonely, living by herself. Sometimes she feels the void, she says, but her mother and brother are always close. Their memory keeps her company, as does Midnight, and her family and friends. She tells me that she visits the graves of Beulah and Jesse as often as she can. “I go on Mama’s birthday,” she says. “I go on Jesse’s birthday. I go on Mother’s Day. I go on Christmas. I take flowers. If I can get the flowers that I prefer, I always love to take my mother roses. I like to take my brother white flowers.”
I ask her what will happen to her land when she passes, since she has no children. She says she thinks about it all the time. “I’m watching the young ladies and young men,” she explains, “watching to see who shows responsibility, who shows a real understanding of what is important in life.” She wants to leave the land in worthy hands.
But her heart is still young. She has a lot of living left to do before God calls her on. And living means working, volunteering, supporting her community. Elsie never stops. Her life is a testament to her mother, Beulah Stallings Herring.
It is Beulah’s legacy that Elsie wishes to honor.
Hallsville Road, Beulaville, North Carolina
The heat is blistering, the humidity a wet blanket draped over the land, when I pull into Woodell McGowan’s drive. His porch is spare, smaller than Elsie’s, and spotlighted by the sun. He invites me into his living room and takes a seat across from me. He is a man of few words. That’s the way God made him. But he’s not as taciturn as he was when Daniel Wallace first met him back in 2014. I have heard the stories from many people now, the way Woodell has come to life again, the way he has embraced the neighborhood in a new way, taking on the role of community elder and keeping the Hall family spirit alive. But I want to hear the story from him.
It takes a while to get him talking, but eventually he picks up steam. He tells me what this place was like when he was a boy, the hundred acres that his mother owned with his aunt and uncle. He tells me of his peregrinations in the forest beyond the old homeplace, the camp he built in the meadow with the tent that shaded him from the sun, the way he swam in Limestone Creek and stalked every inch of ground until he could walk it blindfolded. As in his youth, he is alone again now, his wife having passed on. But he has found a remedy for loneliness.
He has taken up caring for his neighbors.
The change came over him in the most unusual way. Before the fifth trial, Mike and Lisa brought in a consultant trained in the techniques of psychodrama to help prepare the neighbors for the pressure cooker of the trial. For two days, the plaintiffs sat in a room inside one of the local churches with Mike and Lisa, Mona and Sophie, saying nothing at all about the lawsuit or Joey Carter’s hogs. They talked about their families, their community, the way it was back in the old days, and the way it became after the hog farms sprouted up and the odor came.
They stepped into each other’s shoes in role-playing exercises. They surprised each other with spontaneous displays of emotion. People who had once been close but had drifted away bonded again. In the midst of all this, Woodell had an epiphany. He saw the way he had let his friends down. “I’m sorry I haven’t been around,” he said. “I am going to make a commitment to all of you that I’m going to be a better neighbor.” Since that day, he has been living out that promise, paying people visits and calling them on the phone.
It helps that Smithfield’s hogs are gone, that Joey Carter’s six barns haven’t seen another animal since September 2018. The company depopulated the Greenwood facilities and the Sholar farm, too, after the verdicts, like it did Billy Kinlaw’s farm. Woodell tells me what a relief it is not to worry about the odor, to go outside and breathe fresh air.
The forge of the trial aided the neighborhood bonding process, allowed the relational glue to set. I ask him what it was like to wait three days for the verdict. He smiles slightly, his face crinkling. The garrulousness of his response takes me by surprise.
“It was hard on all of us. But I’m the type of person that when I believe something, I just believe it. Every day, I would tell them, ‘You know that you told the truth. You know you didn’t get up there and lie. That’s what matters. The truth will come out. The truth will win.’ ”
I tell him I met with Lendora, that I sat with her on her parents’ porch and walked the length of the property by her side. I listened to her story of the past, of Linnill, the barber, and Georgia, the quilter, and the petition Lendora helped her father draft when Joey Carter showed up with his construction plans. Linnill is sick now, battling cancer. But Lendora is hoping he will improve enough that she can bring him home. When that happens, she is going to throw a party for the community in her parents’ yard, the way they used to do before the hog waste drove them inside. She can do it now that the hogs are gone, now that the sprayfields are fallow and the air is clean again. I mention this to Woodell and he smiles with delight.
“That would be nice,” he says. “All of us would go.”
Woodell opens up about the verdict itself, what it means to the community. He tells me he’s been poor his whole life. All of his neighbors have. They have gotten by like everyone else, but it hasn’t been easy. When he thinks about the money the jury awarded, he feels satisfaction. But he didn’t file suit to cash in. Neither did anyone else. He talked about it with his neighbors, and all were in agreement. “Money can’t buy you clean air,” he tells me. “Money can’t buy not having to smell all the hog trucks in and out. Money can’t buy that.” The verdict was a sign that the jury believed them. That’s what means the most to Woodell now.
That the jury believed.
Piney Woods Road, Willard, North Carolina
I drive down from Beulaville to Pender County on back roads, windows cracked to let in the scent of the sky. Around every country bend, the land reveals a fresh face, a novel interplay of light and shadow. Yet every scene is a variation on a common theme—fields of sandy soil, row crops in divergent stages of growth, tangled thickets of pine forest, ramparts of longleaf pine and crenellations of loblolly, and beneath them streambeds scoring the land like the forked lines on a weathered hand. In the solitude of these open spaces, beneath the gaze of the sun, time seems to lose its texture. Suddenly, the past feels close, almost close enough to touch. And I begin to understand.
Years ago, I would have used a different palette of words to describe this place. I would have called it blighted, forgotten, a blank page between the rolling hills of the Carolina Piedmont and the glittering beaches of the coast. I would have missed the truth because I would not have had eyes to see it. What makes a land beautiful isn’t just the grace of its form, the bloom of its colors, or the fecundity of its ecological life. That kind of beauty lives only on the surface of things. Beneath it, there is a deeper appeal, a pearl inside the shell.
Every place is lovely if it is loved.
It is this love that I see in the countenance of Joyce Messick when she welcomes me into her home. Everyone told me I needed to meet her. It isn’t long before I realize why. Like Elsie and Woodell, she is a witness to history and a keeper of her family’s light.
We sit at the table in her dining room, the television on in the background, her nephew and mother nearby. I ask her about the past, and she tells me about her parents, her daddy whose land this once was, and her grandmother who owned it before him. She tells me that there’s a Messick Road nearby, somewhere up in the woods. That’s where her daddy’s family is from.
She is a soft-spoken woman. She takes time with her answers. But she is free with them, trusting. She tells me about her two brothers—James, whom she called “Red,” and Willie, both of whom served in the army before coming home to Pender County. Her eyes grow moist when she mentions Red. He’s gone now, but she loved him deeply. And he loved her back. He taught her so many things—how to swim and fish, how to throw daggers and ride horses. “I was always wanting to do whatever he did,” she tells me. “I was outside with them all the time.”
I ask her about her work, her hospice clients, the caretaking she does at home. I sense the weariness beneath her words. At first, her smiles are fleeting things, like rays of sunshine grappling with a thick curtain of cloud. But her voice is resonant, her memories felt.
She tells me about her neighbors, so many of whom are kin. She tells me what the land was like when she was a girl, back when Red and Willie rode their horses for miles through the woods—the train trestles where they used to camp, the Sand Hole where they swam, the gardens her mother tended in the backyard. We talk for a while about the hog farms that Paul Stanley built with support from Pete and Wendell Murphy, two of which Dean Hilton now owns. She is candid about the stink, about the toll it has taken on her life, her church, her home.
We talk about the case, about the experience of testifying, and the world-altering moment when the Artis jury returned its verdict. She brightens at the recollection. She calls out to her brother, Willie, who is outside on the porch, and he joins her at the table. They tell the story in stereo, the narrative pouring out of them as if it happened yesterday. They talk about the jurors with affection. Their happiness is uncomplicated. It is as if the burden of the years has slipped from their shoulders, as if the only truth that matters now is the mercy of that day.
And then they tell me about the aftermath, the depopulation of the barns. “After about a couple of months, we started to get some fresh air,” Joyce says. “You can’t imagine.”
She’s right. I can’t imagine it, not completely. But I do my best to try.
When the time comes, I thank her for the stories and bid her and Willie goodbye. I pull out onto Piney Woods Road, the crowns of the loblollies and longleaf pines glistening in the last light of day, and stare down the bone-straight stretch of road toward the now-defunct hog farms. I roll my windows down all the way, smell the loamy fragrance of pine, and marvel at the blessedness of clean air. It is a gift I have taken for granted my entire life.
I marvel also at the irony. The one outcome that Joyce and Willie never asked for—the shuttering of the Greenwood farms—is what they have received. They never wished to end the industry, only to transform it, to redeem it from its excesses. They harbor no ill will toward the Murphy men. Their desire today is the same as it was in the beginning—to restore the sanctity of their ancestral land and to pass it along to generations yet to come.
As I drive away down the long line of pines, out toward the interstate and the wider world, I ponder the work that remains to be done, the stories yet to be told. The redemption of the land is not complete. Hog country may have had its reckoning and the industry may have vowed to change its ways. But most of the plaintiffs are not like Joyce and Willie. Most have yet to see the change, to fill their lungs with liberated air, to stand upon emancipated ground. The dollar is still the lodestar of Smithfield Foods, and the legislature is still its domain. Neighbors like Elsie understand this, as do folks like Tom Butler and Rick Dove, and the lawyers at Wallace & Graham. They won’t relent until every commitment the industry made is realized, every promise fulfilled. Only then will the seeds of hope that the neighbors planted in the soil so long ago spread their leaves upward toward the sun.