This local grassroots effort puts food from a MS farm into the hands of hungry students
6:30 a.m.: Sunrise at the Dahmer family farm
On a recent Thursday morning, the sun rose in an overcast sky and cast a weak gray light over the rows of okra Dennis Dahmer had planted in March at his family farm near Hattiesburg.
Almost as soon as the sun was up, the volunteers arrived and headed for the okra plants, 7 or 8 feet tall this late in the growing season. They crouched down and they craned their necks, seeking each and every green bulb.
Tyneshia Mosley, a sophomore studying kinesiology at the University of Southern Mississippi, twisted a bulb from the stalk. To check that it wasn’t too hard to eat, she broke off the very tip of the bulb and listened for a crisp cracking sound. The good okra went into a bucket on the ground, and Mosley kept moving down the row. The harvest, she said, was “like a scavenger hunt.”
The okra are precious gifts in a perilous moment. After harvest, half of them will make their way to the University of Southern Mississippi, where they will be delivered to international students who have been hit hard by the economic turmoil that has come with the pandemic. When the university closed in March, they lost their on-campus jobs, and their visas do not allow them to work off campus.
The volunteers like Mosley are part of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Mutual Aid Network, organized by the Mississippi Rising Coalition. The goal is to pool resources—like Dahmer’s okra crops and volunteers’ time in the fields—to help meet critical needs, including growing food insecurity. Mississippi has had one of the country’s highest food insecurity rates for years, and the pandemic could leave as many as 24% of Mississippians unable to buy enough food.
Mutual aid networks have flourished nationwide since the coronavirus pandemic began. Unlike charity as it’s usually practiced, the assistance they provide is meant to be reciprocal and sustained: a member may volunteer time one day and request free groceries the next. In Astoria, Queens, volunteers delivered food to elderly neighbors. In Ypsilanti, Michigan, parents pulled together to find child care after schools closed in March. In Birmingham, Alabama, people created a Google spreadsheet to share requests and offers of help.
The networks are a newly-widespread effort to care for people during a time of crisis that has cast into stark relief the limits of government’s ability, or willingness, to help. James Skinner, a PhD student in history at USM and Mississippi Rising board member, helped launch the network in the spring.
In the coming weeks, the group will harvest other crops at Dahmer’s farm, including cucumbers, peas, squash, greens, and, at the end of November, watermelon. They also plan to resume distributing produce from the Indian Springs Farming Association in Petal, which donated hundreds of boxes of food weekly to needy families across Mississippi, including on the Gulf Coast, earlier in the summer. The group is trying to raise $20,000 to buy trucks to help with distribution.
Skinner hopes the mutual aid group will outlast the pandemic.
“You had people in need before the pandemic,” he said. “We’re really trying to give people food through the worst of the pandemic. That is our main goal. But our long term goal is to keep this infrastructure in place after the pandemic so people can still have resources if they need to.”
Local resources, local needs
Mutual aid groups are more common in coastal cities, especially New York and the Bay Area, than in rural areas and southern states. But there are plenty around the South, too, including a project in Tupelo and one in Oxford.
And in some southern communities, the spirit of mutual aid, if not the label, is a tradition. For generations, Dahmer’s family has used their land to fill local needs.
Across the road from the rows of okra stands a marker erected by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History in 2004, honoring Vernon F. Dahmer, Sr., Dennis Dahmer’s father. “Vernon Dahmer (1908-1966), a farmer, businessman and Civil Rights leader widely known for his belief that ‘if you don’t vote, you don’t count; was killed here defending his home and family from a gunfire and firebomb attack on January 10, 1966… The Ku Klux Klan had targeted Dahmer… for his support for voting rights for African Americans.”
Before Vernon Dahmer was killed, he opened his home to Hollis Watkins and Curtis Hayes, young workers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee who were trying to encourage Hattiesburg’s Black residents to try to register to vote. When Watkins and Hayes needed extra money, Vernon Dahmer paid them to help out on his 200-acre cotton farm.
Dahmer also grew some produce, Dennis recalled, and was not particularly concerned about making a profit from that part of his business.
“Some of the produce, he sold through a country store he had,” Dennis Dahmer said. “He sold some of it there. He gave a lot of it away, just gave it away to people who didn’t have the means to buy it.”
7:30 a.m.: ‘We sustained’
After an hour or so, the dozen volunteers had harvested most of the okra. They gathered at a table across the street and divided it into halves: half for Dahmer, and half for the group to distribute.
For much of the summer, the volunteers have worked the Dahmer farm, showing up every two or three days to harvest. After Vernon Dahmer died, the family stopped growing cotton. Dennis Dahmer began growing produce a few years ago, a practice he calls “nostalgia farming” because the scale is relatively small and his methods are time-tested.
Dahmer said participating in the group was “a win-win” for him and the volunteers..
“We remove one of the biggest obstacles I have in doing this kind of farming, which is harvesting, the biggest problem for me,” he said. “And then it provided James and his group an opportunity to fulfill one of their missions: providing food to underserved populations.”
Standing around the table, the volunteers examined the harvest. Hattiesburg activist and creative Imani Steven, who got her bachelor’s degree in biological science at USM, picked up a piece of okra, curved into itself almost in a spiral shape.
Steven pointed out the gash where an ant had bitten the okra, destroying some of its cells. The okra curved around the gash and kept growing.
“As long as it has sunlight, a source of nutrients, a source of water, it still grows,” she said.
The Dahmers’ cat, Fannie Lou, named for the Mississippi Civil Rights organizer Fannie Lou Hamer, peered at the volunteers. Near the sign explaining how Vernon Dahmer was murdered by the Klan, an American flag flew from a tool shed.
Steven reflected on the history of the land and everything that the Dahmer family and Black Mississippians had endured.
“We sustained just like doggone okra,” Steven said.
9 a.m.: Weathering the storm together
By 9 a.m., Reverend Eric Davis and associate minister Albert Williams were standing sentry at the door to the Wesley Foundation, the Methodist center at USM.
Since the pandemic began, Davis had seen need rising all over campus, but especially among international students. Over the summer, the Wesley had distributed boxes of food provided by the USDA. One apartment Davis delivered to was home to two students from Nepal. Within a few weeks, five of their friends had moved in to save money on rent.
Davis said that the pandemic had reinforced his understanding of the Wesley as not only a center for religious life, but also a resource for community members in need.
“We’re all in the storm together, but we’re all in different boats, and all our boats have different support systems,” he said. “How can the Wesley tether our boat to another student’s boat to another student’s boat to weather this storm together?”
At 9:31 am, Mississippi Rising Coalition board members Lea Campbell and Morris Mock, who had helped at the harvest, arrived with a garbage bag full of okra. The group spread the okra out on a plastic table and started dividing it into plastic sandwich bags.
“So is this a huge field of okra?” Davis asked, looking at the abundant pile of green. Davis and Williams had never been to the Dahmer farm: their role is distribution.
“Not a huge field,” Campbell said. “Maybe eight rows? Half a football field?”
It looked like it had to be more, everyone agreed.
When they were finished, the okra filled 48 small plastic bags, four for each recipient.
10:21 a.m.: Plans for okra curry
Just after 10 am, Williams left the Wesley to make a delivery, a task that has become part of his routine over the last few months. He put eight bags of okra and two address cards for the recipients in the backseat of his car.
At 10:21, he arrived at the apartment of Priyanka Nehete, a 24-year-old studying for her master’s in public health.
Nehete came to Hattiesburg from her home near Mumbai, India in January to start courses in epidemiology and biostatistics. She covered nearly all of her expenses through an on-campus job and had plans to visit cousins living in Boston and Oregon over the summer.
In March, everything changed.
“We had our lectures and all until the middle of March, and then slowly, slowly we got emails from the university saying the pandemic is approaching, and suddenly one day we were told, everything is going to run online,” she said. “We had to leave our campus employment jobs.”
Nehete’s parents in India were able to wire her money, but other international students weren’t so lucky. Some of them thought about trying to seek work off campus, even though their visas don’t allow it, because they were so desperate for money to cover rent and food. The food deliveries had helped everyone make ends meet over the summer.
Nehete was attending her data management class online when Williams arrived. He handed over four bags of okra and headed back to the Wesley, to work for a few hours before making afternoon deliveries.
Nehete would turn the okra into four meals. For each dish, she would cut 12 or 13 okra, “from tail to tip,” into 10 slices each. She’d fry the okra in a tablespoon of oil, with half an onion, two green chilies and a little salt, and eat it with rice.
She didn’t know who Dennis Dahmer or his family were, or precisely what path the okra had taken to her kitchen. What she knew was that the community, that vague and usually disconnected constellation of individuals and organizations, had done what it could.
This story was originally published October 1, 2020 at 6:00 AM.
