Fruit of Labor
A look at the Pearson family peach farm in Georgia, and the labor issues the farm faces every season when it needs workers:
“The man’s Spanish is limited, but it doesn’t matter. Many of these men were here last summer, and the summer before, and the summer before. A few have made the thirty-six-hour bus ride from Mexico every year for a decade. All of them are part of the federal H-2A agricultural guest worker program. One hundred men on a six-and-a-half-month work visa, hand-picked through interviews and background checks, a costly bureaucratic headache for the farm owners to ensure their crops are picked.”
Wreckage
After their teenage daughter is killed in a tragic accident, two grieving parents grapple with the events leading up to her death:
“Inside, Jason realizes he’s been thrown into the backseat. He looks up at Taylor still strapped into the front, hair and shorts splashed with blood. Dustin is still buckled in the backseat.
“The girls are missing.
“Neighbors rush to the wreck as the boys climb out of the Blazer. Dustin starts breaking bottles, mumbling about getting in trouble, before eventually running off. Jason and Taylor find Jamie lying on the ground beneath the U-Haul, groaning.
“One of the witnesses tries to reassure them: ‘The four of you are okay.’
“‘No,’ says Taylor. ‘We had five.'”
This Land Is My Land
The story of a property-line feud between two families in North Georgia:
“The main bridge between the families was the fast friendship of Jewell Crane’s father and Lewis Dempsey’s father. The old men agreed that neighbors should talk and cooperate. Thus, when it came time in the early 1980s to fence off the southern part of Lot 784 to contain Dempsey’s cattle, all four men walked over the area as the posts were planted and the hog wire run.
“The first real friction between the two families had nothing to do with land. One day Dempsey spotted his father drinking a jar of whiskey. And since it was white mash in Lumpkin County, Dempsey didn’t have to ask where it had come from. Never much of a drinker himself, and worried that the alcohol would react with medication his father was taking for lung cancer, Dempsey threatened to turn Crane in if it ever happened again. Dempsey recalls that about two weeks later, he heard that Crane had gotten hassled by police for moonshining. Dempsey sought out his neighbor to assure Crane that he had not reported him (a denial Dempsey maintains to this day). But for weeks thereafter, when Dempsey met Crane on the road or drove past his house, the bootlegger refused to wave.”
