Living off the fat of the land with a new twist

Sherri Stephenson (far right) with family members (who are identified below).

Sherri Stephenson

My story begins on my grand aunt’s land in Crewe, next to nowhere in Virginia.

It continues with my parents and six older siblings crammed into a two-bedroom apartment in a public housing project in Newport News, VA.  

And it ends on spacious property that will soon be marked by a land-rooted ritual that will grow for generations. The ritual is the “new twist.”

And take your father and your households, and come unto me: and I will give you the good of the land of Egypt, and ye shall eat the fat of the land.  — Genesis 45:18, King James Bible

The “fat of the land” refers to the story of Joseph in the Old Testament. After Joseph was sold into slavery into Egypt by his jealous brothers, he rose to a position of authority, second only to the pharaoh. When  famine struck Canaan, Joseph's brothers came to Egypt seeking food, not recognizing Joseph in his exalted position. After revealing his identity and testing their remorse, Joseph forgave his brothers. He invited them, along with their father Jacob and their households, to settle in Egypt and “eat the fat of land,” symbolized in the above depiction, by the grain stalks in his hand.   (Ecollective graphic)

I’d heard “living off the fat of the land” meant but didn’t know what it really meant until I looked it up while writing this article. I learned that it was a combination of the biblical verse above and the popular expression, “living off the land.” And my mother, her aunt, my paternal grandmother, and my husband’s grandmother did just that.

Mama was born Mary Richardson in 1929. Mary’s mother died when she was eight and her dad was absent, so Mary was raised by her Aunt Gentsy and her grandmother.

Mama told me that stores were few in Crewe in the 1930s and ‘40s.  And even when they did have money, the only way they could get to the general store was when Aunt Gentsy’s boyfriend, “Mr. Jim,” a mechanic, would take them in his old pickup truck. Growing their own food was how Mama and Aurt Gentsy survived.

Modern view of Crewe VA.   ( Idawriter CC BY-SA 3.0. Wikimedia commons)

There are no photographs of Mama as a child because her folks had no camera or money for going to a photography studio in some town. So she grew up entirely as a “child of nature.” 

Growing enough of your own food to survive, was hard but among her grower chores, Mary discovered the wonder of watching tiny seedlings grow. 

Caring for the seedlings was like playing with dolls because she had no dolls or real toys. So she raised her  lil’ plant “babies” into collards, cabbages, lima beans, corn, squash, tomatoes, and watermelons and cantaloupes. Her nurturing instinct would eventually lead to having ten children in a city where birth contraception was easily had and abortions could be arranged before they became legal.  

Mary learned from her Grandma and Aunt Gentsy how to can and store their harvest so they had enough to last until the first crops ripened in late spring. 

Going to the store and Sunday dinner were Grandma and Aunt Gentsy’s "good times." ​​They hosted Sunday feasts where kinfolks, friends and neighbors laughed, told stories and played cards. They were so deep in the country that there was no preacher denouncing the “evil” of playing cards on “the Lord’s Day.”  Nature was a kind of “church” for country folks who learned lessons directly from life.

Photo on left: Sherri Stephenson’s grandmother and Aunt Gentsy are commemorated in this collage containing a photograph of Stephenson’s daughter, Earashea (AKA Shea) Stephenson Bellamy. Shea wears her hair much like a creative, black country woman before the pervasive hot comb. Here she has braided her thick natural hair into three thick plaits in the front that sweep to the left and three plaits in the back. She  is surrounded by swatches of gingham fabric that country women in the 1930s could have worn.  The scattered, pressed-like-souvenir daisies remind us of the beauty and cheer of naturalness and simplicity. Photo on right: partial back view of Shea’s hair style.

From spacious land to cramped public housing

When Mama was an adult living in public housing, she dreamed of owning her own home and land. My parents and six older siblings were crammed into the two-bedroom apartment of Lassiter Courts in Newport News VA.  

Buying their dream house would be a big accomplishment for Mama with an eighth grade education and Daddy who had to drop out after the fifth grade.

Mama worked to realize her dream, bit by bit, year by year, with her wages from cleaning hospital rooms.  I’ll jump ahead in my story to show how determined she was. One evening, she came home from work and told me and my siblings something we will never forget:  “I clean bed pans so you won’t have to!”

My Daddy, Christopher Knight, knew how to hustle too. He had mechanical skills and went through the junkyards, removing parts of cars to be re-sold. At one point, he co-owned a convenience store. The low rent of public housing helped my parents save money to buy their home.

The opportunity to move came when Jeffrey was a baby and our older siblings Sarah, Chris, William, Alfred and Robert had left or were leaving home.

While driving around the neighboring city of Hampton in 1961, Mama noticed a house in the middle of a block on Quincy Street. The three-bedroom, brick rancher had a beautiful front yard with rose bushes.  In the backyard, there was an apple and a pecan tree, and blackberry bushes and ample space for kids to play. 

The youngest of the 10 Knight children – Curtis,  Sherri (me), Barbara and Keisha – were born after we moved to the house and the older children were moving out or had moved out on their own. 

Chris had already moved out by this time. When Chris passed suddenly at age 63, the car horn blew. My husband Willie dashed out of the house, turned off the horn and when he returned, I got the phone call that Chris had died. 

Like Mr. Jim and Daddy, Willie has a mechanical mind, but unlike them, Willie is a licensed contractor.  He knows how a car horn works and didn’t think the sudden horn blowing was something mechanical gone awry.  We both felt that it was an audible sign from Chris.  Now my brother who’d been packed like a sardine in the tiny public housing apartment, was on his way to the most spacious home ever.

When I was growing up on Quincy Street, home vegetable gardens were becoming a thing of the past in cities. The only gardeners in the neighborhood were Mr. Jones who lived on the cul de sac at the end of the street; Mr. Penney who bought the lot directly behind us, and Daddy’s mother, Morn, who lived nearby on Ellington Street.  

“Morn” was a nickname from her grandkids who couldn’t pronounce her other nickname “Munn.”  Born and raised in Edgecomb, North Carolina, Morn had learned to farm by her mother who was one half Cherokee. 

Morn liked to walk around the garden in her bare feet   (Ecollective)

Morn would call me and my younger siblings over to help in the garden. She walked around the garden in her bare feet. After helping her pick the vegetables came the fun part for me: cleaning the veggies. I loved to play in water, make it splash, and I even liked washing dishes!  And Morn taught us how to pickle and can cucumbers and watermelon rinds. 

Mama didn’t start a garden on Quincy Street because she was working so hard. In addition to the hospital, she also worked the cash register at Brewster’s lounge and bar. But she still cooked meals from scratch and taught me how to make the best beef vegetable soup using the veggies from Grandma Morn’s garden. Everyone always wanted more. The soup recipe with lima beans, okra, tomatoes and potatoes would be passed down to our children. She never left out the main ingredient (love). 

Top photo; Sherri Stephenson’s mother, Mary Richardson Knight, at her retirement party.
Bottom photo: Mary Knight shown here with a halo and seedings to symbolize her earth angel spirit. She worked hard and lived selflessly to make a better life for her 10 children. She carefully nurtured her children like the seedlings she grew back home in Crewe VA.  The difference is that the seedlings shown here are store bought and Mary grew her plant “babies” from seeds.

The next generations

Sherri Stephenson and daughter, Earashea (AKA Shea).

Willie Stephenson and daughter, Earashea (AKA Shea), Christmas 1982.

In spring 2023, I watched my husband, Willie, carefully till and fertilize the soil with horse manure just like he had learned from his grandparents who owned and farmed land in Murfreesboro, North Carolina. They grew corn, string beans, collards, peas, cabbage, watermelons, cantaloupes, squash and okra. 

Willie told me that, as a young boy, he played with the chickens and pigs, and that the same chicken he played with was served for dinner.  For this reason, he did not eat chicken or eggs or even fish until he was a grown man. The process of killing a chicken made him sick to his stomach. He liked to eat pork because hog killing time in the country is in November and he was back home in Newport News by then.  

Willie with giant cucumbers from the first garden he raised in our yard, several years ago.

Willie cultivates​​ the loose soil, tenderly handles the seedlings and almost obsessively pulls weeds, to ensure that the plants reach their maximum potential. I noticed how these simple tasks brought him so much peace – a stillness that I seldom get to see in my husband because he’s a Jack of many trades and always in motion.  Now that he’s retired after 40 plus years of working, it’s nice to see him enjoying the quiet pastime of gardening. 

Our garden experience culminated this year (2023) because Willie had more time for the plots this spring and summer.  This was his first full year of gardening after retiring from the long hours of his job as a supervisor for a construction company.

Our garden yielded the most beautiful and bountiful vegetables and herbs that we’ve had in 15 years of gardening: plenty of tomatoes, cabbage, squash, peas, string beans, and, in addition to the basil, parsley, rosemary, cilantro, and other herbs. The basil grew into literal bushes!  We had enough produce to share with many relatives, neighbors and friends. 

This article was written in fall 2023, after the summer garden had faded.

But we were able to find one view of the summer garden: a shot that Willie took for himself.

We also found the cabbage photo below.

Cabbage never tasted so good!

The snap peas were so tasty we ate them raw in salads.  I made a homemade tomato sauce from the tomatoes I grew.  Our daughter, Shea, made pesto from the basil.  She also dried some of the herbs to use in the natural hair care products that she makes as part of her natural products line. Shea is “Miss Natural” to the max. And for some time her husband, Fred, has envisioned buying five acres of land in his future. 

Willie Stephenson near his beloved water. 

Our home in Hampton is on the waterfront of the Chesapeake Bay and Willie likes to chill and clear his head by gazing out at the water.  When a neighbor built a privacy wall shielding his view of the bay, Willie built a deck higher than the wall to get his view back.

Living close to the earth and the bay has brought us much peace and joy. Willie loves landscaping and has planted perennial flowers in front and back of our house, around a utility pole in the front, and along the walkway to our front door.

At age 40, our daughter Shea planned the birth of her second child at our home with a midwife. Several days past the calculated delivery date, the baby girl finally arrived just as the seeds were starting to push up though the soil in the garden. Baby Amayah (Hebrew name meaning “close to God”) arrived three days into spring: March 24, 2023.

Sherri Stephenson (far right) with granddaughter, Alivia; daughter Earashea (Shea) Bellamy holding baby Amayah, and son-in-law Fred Bellamy.

Amayah’s placenta is now in a storage bag in our refrigerator freezer.  Shea and Fred plan to plant a fruit tree in our yard and bury the placenta at the base of the tree. Amayah will watch the young tree grow as she grows. They will also plant a tree for Shea’s first child and Fred’s beloved stepchild, Alivia. The whole family will participate in a planting ritual in the hope that Amayah and Alivia will always feel a spiritual connection to our home and our land. 

Sherri Stephenson is an aspiring writer who is working on a memoir based on some surprising information that she learned about her family a few years ago.

Postscript: Birds stage wondrous show on Stephenson lawn

One day, an astonishing scene was staged by thousands of birds on the Stephenson’s family’s lawn.  Masses of small birds (sparrows or starlings) had landed on the lawn before the video starts and other birds join them.  The swarm suddenly flies off, swerves back around to land again on the lawn before taking off for a second time.  The take offs occur at 00:22 and at 2:15 into this video.