Vegetables for a Dead President

“We were often unaware of the ghosts working the land beside us.”

“Are you a slave?” the tourists often asked me as I knelt in the vegetable garden, digging up weeds, cutting back the tarragon, staking tomatoes, or pulling beets. I never answered them because it was not in my job description to deal with idiots, but when you work at the historic home of one of the founding fathers, you encounter a fair number of them. They flocked to the house and grounds in their Winnebagos. They took shuttles up to the top of the mountain where the house was, then lumbered through the gardens, eating potato chips and throwing trash where slaves had once forged nails by hand.

For obvious reasons, my life in the garden was much better than that of the slaves. One less obvious reason was that I didn’t have to grow poison ivy as an ornamental plant. There were things to admire about the dead president for whom I gardened, but the fact that he forced people to cultivate poison ivy was not one of them. I often wondered how exactly the slaves had managed the task. Did they use jewelweed to soothe their rashes? Did they wash with soap in the river? It was one of the many topics not addressed by the whitewashed tours or interpretive displays, which instead focused on the former president’s device to make carbon copies, his clock that counted days as well as hours, and the architectural peculiarities of his house. Even the garden tour spoke primarily of his interest in plant propagation instead of the labor that had brought all of his food forth from the soil.

Before I applied to work in the gardens, I’d never visited. I’d worked on small organic farms and in the historic garden associated with my college in Massachusetts. I dreamed of having my own garden or farm one day, and I spent hours looking through books on the subject. When I saw a photo of the president’s vegetable gardens, I knew I wanted to work there. I’m certain I got the job because the director of the gardens felt sorry for me, not because I was outstandingly qualified. I drove twelve hours in the snow in a $125 car to get to my interview. I broke down in Pennsylvania, and a family-owned campground let me stay for free while a nearby mechanic fixed my car. I arrived in Virginia rumpled and late, but the harrowing part was in the journey, not the work.

The worst I had to endure at the job was chiggers, heat, a finger badly cut after it was mistaken for a grapevine, and the itch of peach fuzz on my skin when I had to go down to the orchard to help the orchardist thin the fruit. I often found one of the groundsmen there, napping under a tree, an empty Coke can beside him in the grass. The orchardist had a similar work ethic. He liked to cruise around the hummocky orchard in the “gator,” a small vehicle with giant tires, a loud motor, and a square compartment in the back for tools and equipment. I never understood his love for the gator until I drove one myself, stepping on the uncooperative gas pedal until the motor roared. It was a feeling of true power and freedom. It made me want to hoot and throw my straw hat in the air.

“Let’s see how fast we can make this thing go!” The orchardist grinned at me, eyes hidden by his sunglasses and large straw hat, his wild, red hair blowing around his face.

“Shouldn’t we get to work?” I shouted.

“We’ll get there.”

At last, after traversing the orchard several times, he parked the gator under one of the peach trees. “Here’s what we’re gonna do. See this branch? It’s getting heavy. We want to get it down to about half what’s here. That way, the ones that are left will get more food, and they’ll grow bigger. You climb up. I’ll work from down here.”

I scrambled up into the branches. The green fruits were hard and velvety, weighing the boughs down. I began to pull fruits off and toss them into the gator below. Thump, thump. The work was rhythmic and methodical.

“You’re looking good from down here!” the orchardist drawled.

From someone else, this kind of comment would have been considered harassment, but he talked to everyone the same way. When we caught sight of the other vegetable gardener one day, he said, “She does it for you, too, huh?” because gender really was not a factor in whether or not he appreciated how someone looked, and he expected everyone else to be the same. He flirted with the security guards, the admins, and even the groundsmen without ever managing to seem creepy.

“I love sweaty sex!” the orchardist announced to the break room at lunch one day during a particularly hot week.

Years ago, the break room had been the site of an escapade by a groundsman we called the Sex Machine. He’d been caught doing someone (I never learned who) on the lunch table. Instead of being fired, he was reprimanded and denied a raise. “I had syphilis twice, I had syphilis twice,” he liked to say (he said everything twice, which is probably how he got syphilis twice). He’d also had crabs, and he told us that the best way to get rid of them was to back your butt up to a mirror to make the crabs think there was another person to jump onto. A staff photo showed him in his younger days, in black and white, arms crossed over his chest, staring moodily at the camera.

Something about the place made everyone zany. Maybe it was our way of not thinking about the history of where we worked. We were often unaware of the ghosts working the land beside us. They looked out and saw only forest, where we saw a city. They harvested cotton and tobacco, which we did not have to do, even though we grew both for display. They battled different weeds because global trade hadn’t yet brought some plants, like kudzu, to America. The tourists saw only the beauty and almost none of the exploitative history. It was very nearly true of us, too. But I felt all the past labor in the land every time I dug down into the soil and it wasn’t hard Virginia clay, every time I looked out on the trees that take years to bear first fruit. It was like receiving an inheritance.

The many gardeners before me had amended the soil until it was rich and dark and easy to dig. Occasionally, we got giant loads of compost from the city compost facility, which meant that in addition to broken-down leaves and twigs, we got Barbies, Pez dispensers, Hot Wheels cars, plastic forks, and other random objects that people threw in with their yard waste. Because of the soil and the all-day sun, the garden was amazingly productive. Kale grew up to my waist, and turnips were the size of softballs. Corn towered above the tallest of us. We got to take everything home, which meant I ate whatever was harvested and bought nothing but flour, butter, sugar, and milk at the grocery store. The other vegetable gardener canned everything. I don’t think she even bought vegetables in winter.

Our boss had grown up in Europe during World War II. He liked to look at the weeds and say, “We used to eat those. We cooked them with olive oil.” The early hardship of his life gave him a sense of equanimity about the world and the people in it. His kindly, lined face took in all the living beings around him, observing how they were getting along. Winter and summer, he wore plaid shirts and holey, wool v-neck sweaters, as if neither heat nor cold affected him. I often found him in the cluttered greenhouse, working. “Do you want to transplant lettuce?” he would ask me, as if offering me the option to do something else. When teaching me how to transplant, he said, “Press the soil around the roots; the plant likes to feel supported.” For him, plants and people were not much different: Every plant had a use, just as every person had a place in the world. His way of thinking has become a permanent part of me. He was more of a mentor than a boss.

Our real bosses were the weather and the seasons; they told us what to do: when to plant the bulbs in the flower garden, when to harvest seeds, when to plant the chicory. My favorite time in the garden was March through May, when it was still cool and the paths weren’t swarming with tourists. The peas grew up their trellises, the brilliantly-colored spotted Aleppo and rouge d’hiver lettuces popped up, and the orchard trees flowered. At sunset, golden light covered everything. We had a number of dogs who patrolled the gardens each night to keep the deer away. When I released them at dusk, they barked happily, galloping through the tall grass among the apple trees and the grapevines.

By July, the grass between the garden beds had been trod into nonexistence. Wilted children moped behind their parents, forced to visit Places of Interest on their family vacations. The grapes began to mature in the vineyard. We went out with yards and yards of net to cover the vines. The net billowed around us as we worked under the blazing sky to protect the fruit from birds. In August, at dusk, sphinx moths hovered at flowers, almost identical to hummingbirds with their rapidly beating wings. In autumn, we harvested vegetables, collected seeds, pulled up summer plants like tomatoes, and transplanted cold weather crops like kale. In winter, we started plants in the greenhouse and cleaned seeds to use the following year or to sell in the gift shop.

I got paid to pick cherries that I took home to make cherry pies. I ate my first peaches right off the tree, juicy and hot from the sun. Day in and day out, I worked with people who entertained me. The orchardist married one of the other gardeners. I found a partner there, too. It was a place that could have existed without me, but I would not be who I am without it. It gave me a lifelong love of unusual vegetables and the belief that I should grow everything I eat. It was a place ruled by seasons, ruled by history, created by hardship and exploitation, maintained by biophilia. It’s a place that wouldn’t exist if not for slaves. Hundreds of years later, I benefited from their labor, from all the work they’d done to clear the land, to terrace the garden, to plant the trees, to amend the soil. These things weave together forever in my memory, blood and beauty.