by Jason Brown
But my grandfather was a farmer. He’d stared down droughts and floods, and he wasn’t about to be frightened off by men in sheets. After the local president stepped down, Jasper volunteered to lead the NAACP—and the charge for desegregation.
From that moment on, his farm was under siege.
My dad, Lunsford Bernard Brown, was just about twelve at the time. He and his older brother, Nathan, started working in the fields armed—carrying a shotgun and a .22 rifle, just in case of trouble. One day, Dad woke up and saw that someone had hung a noose in a tree right outside their farm. Everyone knew that noose was for Jasper Brown.
Late one night, my dad and Nathan were cleaning their guns when they saw sparks in the woods around the farm, flickering like a massive candle, sending shadows billowing around the trees like ghosts. They didn’t think much about it at first, my father tells me, but the light kept getting closer. So they pointed their guns right at the sparks and fired.
“Drop it, man!” they heard someone shout from the trees. “Drop it! Run!”
Boom!
Nathan and Lunsford were almost knocked backward from the sound of the explosion. The sparks were coming from a lit stick of dynamite. To this day, even after nearly sixty years, there’s a crater on my grandfather’s old property where the dynamite landed.
The dynamiters were never caught, but we knew they’d planned to blow up my grandfather’s house and everyone in it: my grandpa, grandma, father, uncle, and aunts. If those dynamiters had succeeded, I wouldn’t be here.
But none of that deterred my grandfather. He kept pushing, kept crusading, kept applying for transfers to send his children to Bartlett Yancey, the all-white school located just two blocks from the all-black Caswell County Training School. Finally, on January 22, 1963, Jasper dropped his children—including my father—off at Bartlett Yancey. It should’ve been a day for celebration. Instead, my grandfather feared for his life. And he had reason to.
The rest of that day is a pretty involved story—one that my mom, Deborah, actually wrote about in her own book, Dead-End Road. But in short, here’s what happened.
Everyone figured my grandfather might be a target that day, but he couldn’t just barricade himself at the farm. Shortly after he dropped his children off at school, he drove to the dry cleaner to pick up his shirts. The gentleman behind the counter gave Jasper a bag holding Jasper’s fresh laundry.
“Hold it from the bottom,” the gentleman told him. “The clothes are heavy.”
Well, Jasper didn’t think much of that curious comment—at least that’s how my family tells it. He just took the bag of laundry out to his car and started heading back to his farm.
Out of nowhere—as Jasper was driving the normally empty narrow road back to the farm—two cars appeared, chasing him and eventually pulling even with him and forcing his car off the road. Several young white men piled out of the cars. Many of them were holding baseball bats and clubs. All of them were shouting obscenities.
“Nigger, we’re gonna kill you!” they said, getting out of their cars and running toward my grandfather’s. One of the men swung his baseball bat, like he was going for a home run, and smashed the driver’s-side window, sending sharp shards of glass flying—over the seat, over the dashboard, over my grandfather.
“We’re gonna kill you, nigger,” the man with the bat repeated as he reached through the broken glass to unlock the door, and he meant it. Those men were going to beat my grandfather half to death before hanging him. Jasper couldn’t run, as his car was surrounded by now. He couldn’t beg for mercy—not from these shouting, screaming men. He wanted to give his children a better education, and with it, opportunities that he’d never had. Now it looked as though that gift might cost Jasper everything.
But Jasper was a God-fearing man, a great man of faith. He was a praying man. And so, in that moment, as one of the white men opened the car door, he did the only thing he could: he grabbed the steering wheel so hard that his knuckles turned white, put his head down, and started praying.
The white man reached in. Jasper’s eyes were shut, his hands clenched around the wheel, his mind grasping for the God of salvation.
And then God answered Jasper in his prayer.
Hold it from the bottom, he remembered the dry cleaner telling him. The clothes are heavy.
Jasper reached over to the bag of clothes and found, in the bottom of the bag, a fully loaded .38 revolver.
He pulled out the gun just before one of the men grabbed his shoulder to drag him out of the car. He pointed the .38 and pulled the trigger, the crack of the shot snapping across the North Carolina sky. A bullet tore through the shoulder of one man, pushing him back.
My grandfather pulled the trigger again. Bam! This time the slug grazed someone’s temple. The rest of them were more than scared; they were astounded. Before the attack, before my grandfather went to the cleaner’s, he’d been stopped by the local police and frisked—just to make sure, I think, he didn’t have any weapons. My grandfather’s attackers were shocked he had a gun. “This nigger’s got a gun in there!” one said. “How’d he get it?”
The assailants ran away, and—thanks to a neighbor and some pretty clever subterfuge—my grandfather successfully went into hiding that day and night, until he could manage safe passage home. He couldn’t go to the police, because he feared that they would’ve just turned him over to the KKK. And he was probably right: his attackers never stood trial, but Jasper did. He was given a ninety-day prison sentence for possession of a deadly weapon. He was ordered to pay court costs, too, plus $244 to pay the medical bills for the people he’d shot. The court deferred the sentence long enough for him to have enough time to harvest his crops.
But the courts, as far as some folks in Caswell County were concerned, didn’t settle anything. In their eyes, my grandfather was guilty—guilty of being black and insisting on desegregation, if nothing else. White buyers wouldn’t do business with him anymore. The family wasn’t safe. The KKK was still out for blood, and it seemed it was just a matter of time before the Browns were attacked again. And this time, no hidden .38 would save them.
On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. While everyone in the county was mourning and distracted, the Browns—my grandmother and her four children, since Jasper was still serving out his sentence—loaded up everything in their farm truck and got out of town. They didn’t turn back and went all the way to Washington, DC. Efforts to fully desegregate the area’s schools left with them: Caswell County’s schools were among the last in the country to complete the process, something that didn’t happen until 1969.
It was over. After generations of Browns had lived and farmed in North Carolina, our roots had been yanked out of the earth. They’d been chased away—maybe gone, they thought, for good.
But North Carolina, for all its difficult history, was home to us. Its earth gets in your veins. And God had other plans.
Daddy Issues
The District of Columbia was home for the Browns for a while after that. My dad spent his teen years there and met my mom there, too, even though she’d also grown up on a North Carolina farm. They were married in DC. My sister and older brother were born there. My dad worked for the city government there, eventually becoming Washington’s chief landscaping architect. Looking back, it must’ve been a pretty good job.
But making a living is different from making a life. And for all its monuments and museums and beautiful buildings, DC was a hard place to live back in the early 1980s, when I was about to come along. Gangs were fighting over blocks of land. Crack cocaine had become an epidemic. The whole city was turning really, really bad. And my mother didn’t want her children in that sort of environment. She didn’t think DC was anyplace to raise a family. So she took us kids and moved to be near her own family back in North Carolina. She moved down to a little town called Henderson, j
ust about forty minutes northeast of Durham and close to the Virginia border.
I was born there on May 5, 1983, back in the state my family had called home for so long. I grew up and graduated in Henderson, and I had a pretty decent childhood.
But I was missing one important thing in my life: my daddy.
When the rest of the family moved down to Henderson, my father stayed behind in Washington. There weren’t many great jobs in Henderson, not ones that paid as well as the one my father had, at any rate. While we lived in North Carolina, he worked up north, and not just for the government. He was a freelance landscaper too. My dad would work farmer’s hours, from dawn to dark, planting and pruning and cutting grass. And everything he made—practically every penny—he’d send back home.
My father has always had an amazing work ethic, and he’s always fought for our family, trying to do what’s best for us, just like his daddy did. Working in Washington (and living away from us) was what my father thought he had to do.
But while that might’ve been fine for the bottom line, most families don’t work well that way. The Browns’ bank account was doing just fine, but the Browns were not.
My mom might’ve had it the worst of all of us. It’s hard enough to raise a family when there are two parents in the home. As every single parent knows, it’s so much harder, exponentially harder, to handle everything with one. With my father essentially out of the picture, my mother had to pick up the slack. She almost needed a split personality: one minute, she had to put on her maternal face, loving and comforting her three children and encouraging us as best she could; and then, another minute, when we needed correction, she had to step into the role of a father figure. It definitely wasn’t easy for her.
But it wasn’t easy on us kids, either. And as someone who was pretty much raised, practically speaking, in that single-parent household and whose dad was working more than two hundred miles away, I felt unsettled much of the time.
My father would spend two weekends a month at the house in Henderson, and when I was younger, that’s all the time I got with him: four days out of every thirty. I never knew a time as a child when my father was really around. And when he was around, I didn’t know how to respond to him. It was different for my brother, Ducie, and my sister, Dana. They were older than I was. They remembered when our father was a consistent presence in the house. So, when he’d come back to Henderson and walk through our front door, they’d run to him. “Daddy! Daddy!” they’d squeal. But to me, in those early formative years of mine, “Daddy” was more or less a stranger to me. I didn’t know how to act around him. I didn’t know how to be.
My parents weren’t divorced. They weren’t even legally separated. They lived apart, but they were still very much married. And as I grew a little older and watched my friends playing with their own fathers, it was a hard thing to explain to people, especially kids my own age.
“Jason, where’s your daddy?” people would ask me.
“He’s in Washington, DC,” I’d always say.
“Oh, so your parents are divorced?”
“No, they’re not divorced,” I’d snap.
“Yeah, but he ain’t never around. He don’t even live nowhere near here.”
They were right. And even though I knew why he wasn’t around, those questions still hurt. Every single time someone asked, it was like a knife to the gut. Jason, where’s your daddy?
I started asking that same question. Where is my daddy? I didn’t know why he had to spend so much time away from us. Even going into my teenage years, I didn’t completely understand the separation. It seemed like every time he’d come to North Carolina, I’d ask him when he was staying for good.
“Daddy, when are you coming home?” I’d ask. “When are you going to be able to retire?”
He said that the government wouldn’t let him retire just yet. I didn’t understand what it meant to have a pension or a retirement account. I didn’t know what adults needed to do to make a living and provide for their families. All I knew was that I wanted a daddy.
My father was working hard for us, and I realized that. But it didn’t help, any more than knowing how you broke a bone makes it feel better. My dad might’ve been working hard there, but I needed him here. It would’ve been nice to have him around to help with my homework or take me fishing or play catch with me. I didn’t care that my father was putting food on the table. I wanted my daddy at that table—even with less food, even in a smaller house, even without some of the good things that he’d provided for us. I didn’t care if we had a table at all.
I think I carried that hurt for a long time.
I was sixteen when my dad finally retired and came back home to Henderson. My brother and sister were out of the house, so it was just my mom and me. I’m sure Mom was thrilled to have him back, but for me it was strange to have him around after he’d been gone from my day-to-day life for so long. I’d taken on a lot of responsibilities in his absence. I’d grown up, in many ways, without him. So when my dad came back, I felt like he was out of place. I’m the man of the house, I thought. Who are you?
But even when my dad was away, he was teaching me something: that being a father is more than being just a provider. And on those nights when I was sad and lonely and angry with my father for not being there, I promised myself something: I swore that I would never do that to my family. Never.
I don’t care what kind of job it is, I told myself. I don’t care what kind of benefits it has. I will never put a job in front of my family. I will always be there for them, no matter when or where. I will always be there.
But that wasn’t the only thing my dad was teaching me.
Green Thumb
My brother and I spent many of our summers in Washington, DC, helping our dad. I saw his work ethic for myself—how he’d wake up for work every day by six. While Ducie and I just stayed at the house all morning, eating cereal and watching cartoons, he’d be out working on the city’s trees and lawns and flower beds for his day job. Then, as the clock rolled closer to midafternoon, we’d start listening for his truck and get ready for our own workday. We knew that as soon as he pulled up, our dad would be ready to hook up the trailer and start job number two—his freelance landscaping business—and Ducie and I were his best (and only) employees.
Man, did my dad get his money’s worth. We worked hard those afternoons, sweating like crazy in those sweltering DC summers. We mowed lawns. We designed flower beds and planted shrubs and trees. Over those summers, I learned how to make things beautiful. I learned how to landscape and garden on a small scale. I didn’t know at the time that God was doing His own gardening in me—planting a seed or two that would only start to really grow ten or fifteen years later. All I knew then was that working the land was hard work, but rewarding work. As much as I might’ve preferred staying inside and watching cartoons all day, I enjoyed the smell of freshly cut grass, the feel of the dirt in my hands, and the pride that comes with taking a plot of raggedy land and, through hard work and planning, making it into something better.
And although my father might not have been with us much in North Carolina, a piece of him was. We could look out the window and see it.
When my mom decided that she wanted to go back to North Carolina to raise their family, she and my dad decided to do it right. Since they were both farm kids at heart, home just didn’t feel like home without a little land attached. They invested in about a forty-acre spread—not really a farm, but just a little homestead that they could work and enjoy. And my dad, when they first bought the place and on his visits home, would putter around back there, improving it a little at a time.
He planted trees in our backyard: pear trees and nut trees and, especially, apple trees. Every year, I watched them come into bloom and blossom, covering the branches with their fragrant flowers. The flowers didn’t last long, but a
nother sort of beauty would follow right on their heels: they’d start growing fruits. Most children today don’t get a chance to see something like that—to truly watch trees shed their flowery springtime beauty and grow those tasty little miracles. But I did. I would see those tiny apples grow and grow, each day looking a little bigger, a little sweeter. I saw the miracle of food right in our backyard.
Maybe those two elements were the beginning of my future career: learning how rewarding working with the land can be and seeing the fruits of your labor grow right before your eyes.
Sometimes as I was growing up, I’d ask my mom for some money or to buy me a toy or something, like every kid does. And, like every mother does, my mom would say, “Do you think money grows on trees?”
“No,” I admitted one day, “but food does.”
She glared at me and told me to stop being smart. But you know what? It was true. Food does grow on trees. And food has value—not just value in keeping us alive and healthy, but monetary value. The green apples, I knew already, were something of value that grow on trees. Something you can not only see and smell and feel but also taste. And cook. And sell.
Even back then, when farming was about the last thing I ever thought I’d be doing with my life, I understood the miracle behind it. I understood how beautifully God designed the world—how He gave us everything we’d need in the soil and seeds if we just learned how to grow it and get it.
Again, “by the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19), God told Adam and Eve that terrible day in Eden when the two walked out of the garden for good. We call it the Fall—the day when God and men were separated by sin, Eden was closed to us, and the seeds for suffering and misery and disaster were sown in the world.