A HISTORIAN'S 



COAST 



To hold on to the land, Goshen's citizens 

 also held jobs away from the farm. The men 

 traveled to distant sawmills and logging jobs. 

 The women and children picked tobacco on 

 farms owned by white families. In spring, they 

 harvested strawberries a hundred miles away 

 and rushed home on weekends to tend their 

 own farms. 



Holding a family together was a feat. For 

 years after their father died, Hattie Brown and 

 her sister Minzelle Dillahunt ran the Loftin 

 farm by themselves. They plowed fields and 

 fought off merchants who tried to take 

 advantage of two women doing "men's 

 work." Their brothers, Lucius Jr. and William, 

 staved off foreclosure by sending military 

 paychecks home. Sister Leora Murray, a 

 Philadelphia nurse, helped out when she 

 could. 



Black-owned farmland dwindled away 

 elsewhere in Jones County, and indeed 

 throughout the coastal plain. When blacktop 

 replaced the Indian trail in 1952, Goshen's 

 citizens began to commute to domestic and 

 factory jobs in other counties; Jones County 

 itself never offered more than farm work, 

 except for little cut-and-sew factories that went 



in and out of business every few years. Hattie 

 Brown's cousin Julia was like many. For 

 decades, she cooked for a white family in 

 Kinston, 20 miles away. She came home only 

 on weekends, but she kept her land in Goshen 

 nonetheless. 



Then the drowning of Minzelle' s young 

 son in 1956, followed by a great flood in 1957. 

 nearly shattered the community. 



Yet Goshen has somehow survived. 

 Today, African Americans comprise 43 

 percent of Jones County's population, yet they 

 own less than 3 percent of the land. More than 

 half the county's farmers — landowners, 

 tenants, and sharecroppers — were African 

 Americans two generations ago. Now, only a 

 handful of black farmers till the land, and most 

 only raise a few hogs or tend a few acres. 



In Jones County, as in many parts of 

 eastern North Carolina, landlessness has led to 

 widespread poverty and hopelessness. Hordes 

 of other black farm people have moved to 

 cities. In the old days, they moved to 

 Brooklyn, New Jersey and Baltimore. 

 Nowadays, they usually do not have to go as 

 far to find opportunity, but the result is the 

 same back home: rural churches with 



dwindling congregations, elderly people 

 living alone, high rates of alcohol and drug 

 abuse. 



But in Goshen, land ownership has 

 meant independence, strong roots, and an 

 enduring closeness to the soil. Hattie Brown 

 can look out her home's windows across 

 cornfields and col lard patches that have been 

 in her family for generations. She can see the 

 homes of nieces and nephews, brothers and 

 cousins on the far side of those fields. And 

 thanks to Goshen's deep roots, the children 

 who leave home often do well. Goshen 

 boasts teachers, lawyers, engineers, and 

 scientists among its children. One of Hattie 

 Brown's nieces I later met is Professor Elvira 

 Williams, who teaches at North Carolina 

 Agricultural and Technical State University 

 in Greensboro. Professor Williams was one 

 of the first African American physicists in 

 the country. 



All of this made me ponder the 

 meaning of history and what merits historic 

 recognition. As I got to know Goshen the 

 day when Hattie Brown and I strolled 

 through the cemetery and during later visits, I 

 noticed that young Goshenites have been 

 coming home more often recently. They 

 have returned to join the struggle to save the 

 community and preserve its cemetery and 

 farmland. None of the old homes and local 

 landmarks in Goshen are the sort that will be 

 given protected status by the National 

 Register for Historic Places, like the E. E. 

 Bell farm up the road and the old Foscue 

 Plantation house across the Trent River. 



These young people in Goshen seem to 

 know — or at least to intuit, as I did that 

 autumn afternoon in Goshen's cemetery — 

 that the real meaning of history has little to 

 do with antique chandeliers and Doric 

 columns. Hattie Brown and her neighbors 

 taught me that other things are far more 

 important: the collective experiences of a 

 community and the stories passed from 

 generation to generation by women like 

 Luvenia Loftin and Hattie Brown. □ 



Included in A Historian's Coast: 

 Adventures into the Tidewater Past, by 

 David Cecelski; John F. Blair, publisher. 



COASTWATCH 29 



