A study compiled by Innerbody.com shows Memphis has the highest reported STD rate of any city in the United States. Memphis’ rates have overtaken those of Jackson, Mississippi, which had previously been reported as number one.
The report also showed that cities located in the South have reported the highest numbers out of the 100 cities ranked.
The information was compiled from data by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The report showed Memphis reported 1,460 STD cases per 100,000 people, with a total of five HIV cases, 4,772 gonorrhea cases, 9,681 chlamydia cases, and 605 syphilis cases.
While the data showed the numbers have worsened over the year, “the STD burden is not equal within our cities. … While we witness increases in STD infection across many groups, the STD burden continued to hit minority racial and ethnic groups the hardest,” the report said.
This report comes months after the state of Tennessee announced it would be cutting funding for programs “that are not affiliated with metro health departments as of May 31st.”
Krista Wright Thayer serves as the director of outreach and prevention for The Haven, a resource located at 622 Minor Road that “strives to promote the physical, mental and social well-being of everyone impacted by — or potentially impacted by — HIV, stigma or lack of support.”
Thayer said, speaking for an organization that will be affected by these funds being cut, the people Governor Bill Lee hopes to prioritize are “percentage-wise, not nearly at high risk for HIV infection” as marginalized communities.
Thayer said many believe the disease predominantly affects African-Americans because of behavior, but that it’s primarily due to poverty levels. “Those who are in high poverty areas don’t have access to care as much; they also can’t prioritize care as much as they would like to, because if you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, you’re not going to prioritize HIV prevention.”
Thayer said people who know about underserved communities know they have lack of access to care, meaning they are the people who need to be prioritized.
“Those are the ones where you have to bring the care to them, and that’s the work we do. That’s our outreach work,” Thayer said. “I can’t for the life of me understand why the governor would want to prioritize mother-to-baby HIV infections, when that’s not really a thing anymore with the advanced medicines that we have.”
According to HIVInfo, “the use of HIV medicines and other strategies have helped lower the rate of perinatal transmission of HIV to 1 percent or less in the United States and Europe.”
Thayer said the governor wants to prioritize first responders and EMT workers, despite HIV infections “being very very low” as a result of post exposure prophylaxis (PEP.)
While there are efforts being made that will affect the way people are able to access HIV prevention services and testing, Thayer explained there are also stigmas that stand in the way of this.
One of the best ways, according to the CDC, to prevent the spread of HIV is by being on PrEP (pre-exposure prophylaxis), Thayer said. “When I talk to some clients, some of them don’t want to be associated with taking a medicine every day. A lot of people think that people who are on PrEP are promiscuous, and they don’t want to be seen as just having a lot of casual sex, because that’s stigmatizing.”
Thayer said The Haven has money and grants they will be using sparingly, to not only host events, but to provide HIV testing and reduce stigma.
“We really have to work on how we see people living with HIV,” she said. “It’s easier to treat than diabetes, and the way our culture sees people living with HIV is not in a bright light.”
Bricks have become symbolic for the LGBTQ+ community. However, Hunny Blunt, a 27-year-old local drag performer in Memphis, tells the Flyer that it isn’t a violent symbol, but rather one that bears meaning and is representative of an ongoing struggle present in the community.
Blunt explains that the brick symbolism dates back to the Stonewall riots in New York City in 1969, a pivotal moment in LGBTQ history. “When we hold a brick in the air, we’re not necessarily threatening violence or inciting any sort of damage,” Blunt explains. “What we are doing is really paying homage to the fact that we were so repressed that we literally had to fight back with bricks.”
Hunny Blunt, like many others in the LGBTQ+ community, has been fighting back in a number of ways over the past few months. Most recently Governor Bill Lee signed legislation that will negatively impact members of the LGBTQ+ community. Some of these bills include Senate Bill 3 and Senate Bill 1.
Opponents of the legislation say it serves as an attempt to erase LGBTQ+ culture from Tennessee.
“You read the wording of some of these bills and it’s so hateful. I can’t believe nobody said ‘This is a little too much,’” said Jenna Lee Dunn. Dunn serves as the trans services specialist for OUTMemphis, and recently started Jenna On Fire Productions, LLC. “There is no line or boundary with these people. They’re just hateful. They want to get rid of us completely.”
Members of the LGBTQ+ community have decided that they will not go quietly and are planning to take an active stance against the legislation. One of these ways is through an event called “Rage On The Stage: Trans Day of Visibility, Drag Show Riot.” The event will be held on March 30th at the Hi-Tone Cafe.
The event was created by Dunn, who invited several community partners to sponsor the event.
“We need to be seen. We need to be making noise to show how big we are in number,” says Blunt. “I think we are reaching that turning point where it does feel good to see allyship from people. It does feel good to be seen and accepted.”
Blunt explains that it is important for them to stand in solidarity, as these bills impact the community as a whole, and not just drag performers and trans youth. “A lot of these drag bans really target transgendered people who really aren’t drag performers, but are everyday transgender people” she says. “We have transgendered drag performers of course, but there are transgender people that don’t necessarily do drag, but that’s how they live their life, and these laws can really prevent them from being in any kind of safe space.
The idea of not only having a safe space, but the need to be seen and heard has been a common theme amongst participants and event organizers like Dunn, who says that there are certain places, like drag shows, where people in the community feel more comfortable. She says that her love and passion for the trans community, as well as having friends that are drag performers, has amplified her drive for wanting to put on events such as this one.
“I can’t go to Nashville and force these people to not pass these bills, and to change their minds and to stop hating people,” she says, “but what I can do is create outlets for people to be able to go and enjoy themselves and try to get some of this off of their mind.”
Financial website Smart Asset has issued a new survey assessing in which American cities a $100,000 salary goes the furthest. And the winner is: Memphis, Tennessee.
From the press release: “Seen as a sign of success and financial comfort, a six-figure salary has long been an important milestone for American workers. But the times have changed and $100,000 isn’t quite what it used to be, especially as rampant inflation continues to sap the purchasing power of money and push the cost of living higher. In fact, 51% of people who earn more than $100,000 reported living paycheck to paycheck in December 2022 — 7% higher than a year earlier — according to a recent survey from PYMNTS and LendingClub.
“To see how much $100,000 is actually worth in different parts of the country, SmartAsset compared the after-tax income in 76 of the largest U.S. cities and then adjusted those figures for the cost of living in each place.
“… Key Findings:$100K goes furthest in Memphis. The city may be known as the ‘Home of the Blues,’ but Memphis’ low cost of living surely won’t make you sing them. A $100,000 salary is worth more here ($86,444) than in any other city in our study after subtracting taxes and adjusting for the cost of living.”
Posted to Instagram by
@FranklynSuperstar and
@ltgovmcnally
Memphis on the internet.
Hearts and Flames
Last week, The Tennessee Holler broke news that Lt. Governor Randy McNally (R-Oak Ridge) left several comments on steamy Instagram posts from a young, gay male named Franklyn McClur. McNally did so from his verified Insta with the username @ltgovmcnally.
McNally’s press team fired back, saying the Holler implied “something sinister or inappropriate about a great-grandfather’s use of social media.”
“Does he always use the proper emoji at the proper time?” the comms team asked. “Maybe not. But he enjoys interacting with constituents and Tennesseans of all religions, backgrounds, and orientations on social media. He has no intention of stopping.”
Salary Talk
Memphians got real about how much money they make last week on the Memphis subreddit with the “salary transparency thread.” Here’s a sample:
u/EbbFit4548: “Late 30s, 10 years teaching experience, high school social studies teacher, 3 Masters degrees, $56,000/year.”
u/angusbethune: “Just south of 40, finance director, BBA, MBA, CPA, $210,000 (salary and target bonus) plus stock incentives that vary.”
u/SkydroLnMEyeball: “FedEx aircraft mechanic, ~$145,000 before [overtime].”
u/PoppaRayngo: “Lawyer … Practicing for six years. Law degree. Early 30s, $120,272.”
Springing Spring sprung early this year no matter what your calendar says.
I’m guessing you may have missed it: the second anniversary of Rush Limbaugh’s death on February 17th. There were no parades or anything. At least, none that I heard about. His death was little noted or remembered, except for a couple shots fired on Twitter. “Try to live your life so that ‘rot in hell’ isn’t trending at the mention of your death,” posted one. Good advice, says I.
Limbaugh was widely seen as the godfather of today’s vitriolic, hyperbolic, right-wing media subculture, the life force that spawned Fox News and its host of creepy hosts, plus OAN, the Daily Caller, Breitbart, and dozens of other “news” turdlets on the web and elsewhere.
Limbaugh spewed lies by the thousands over the course of his career, taking delight in coming up with terms such as “feminazi,” and was a clear inspiration for a certain former president. The homeless were “compassion fascists,” environmentalists were “tree-huggers.” He made fun of Michael J. Fox, imitating the tremors that were a symptom of the actor’s Parkinson’s disease (Sound familiar?). Limbaugh ran a segment called “AIDS updates,” mocking the deaths of gay men by playing Dionne Warwick’s recording of the song “I’ll Never Love This Way Again.” A lifelong smoker, he told his listeners that tobacco doesn’t kill people. He died of lung cancer two years ago as karma tap-danced on his grave.
Current parallel to El Rushbo? Maybe Tucker Carlson, the guy on Fox who thinks Russia is the victim in Ukraine, and says the January 6th riots were just a bunch of peaceful tourists visiting the Capitol? This guy looked through 40,000 hours of videotape and didn’t see any real violence, or at least chose not to put any on the air in his “documentary.” That’s like showing only the starry sky in a film about man landing on the moon, and saying the film proves it never happened.
When it comes to smoking, TC actually ramps it up a notch from Rushbo, declaring not only that smoking won’t kill you, but it’s actually good for you, it’s “all-American.” And he’s a ceaseless promoter of Putin and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, so much so that clips of his shows are featured nightly on Russian television. Most troubling, perhaps, is that he is a promoter of the “great replacement theory,” warning his viewers that “If we continue on this trajectory, eventually there’ll be no more native-born Americans,” i.e. white people. Cue immigrant-bashing from the next guest. It’s hardly worth mentioning that Tucker continues to push Donald Trump’s Big Lie on the 2020 election.
The question with these kinds of propagandists is always this: Do they believe their own lies or do they just expect the idiots who make them rich to do so? The money’s good either way, but maybe the slight moral edge, if there is one, goes to the propagandist who actually believes his own drivel. We’ll never know if Limbaugh bought the garbage he spewed into America’s airways every day. But given the revelations in the ongoing Dominion lawsuit against Fox News, it is quite provable that Carlson and his employer are lying all the way to the bank.
And it’s all because ol’ Rushbo discovered America’s dirty little secret: There is a dark, racist, proudly know-nothing subset of our citizenry that only wants to have its bigotry and anger reinforced. They are like addicts who want to hear sobriety is for losers, smokers who want to believe smoking makes them healthy, ignorant mouth-breathers who want to believe their skin tone makes them superior.
The whole ecosystem needs to perish, beginning with those organizations who reap millions of dollars knowingly spreading the venal lies that are ripping this country in half. The public airways, including cable TV, need to be brought back to the pre-Limbaugh days of the Fairness Doctrine, when some semblance of truth was required of news organizations, when “equal time” on an issue was mandatory. The current Wild West of “news,” with its blend of anger-tainment, disinformation, propaganda, and profit over truth, needs to die. Karma is waiting.
Oshosi Gets His Crown, 2019 (Photo: Courtesy
Harmonia Rosales)
At a young age, Harmonia Rosales fell in love with the Renaissance masters who wove tales from Greco-Roman mythology and Christianity in their paintings. “They tell a full story, corner to corner, like a children’s book where you don’t have to really have the text,” she says. “You can almost look at the image and know this is what happened. When I was younger, though, I never looked at the image and thought, ‘Okay, this is the story of the Great Flood,’ or what have you. I would make up my own stories. It wasn’t until my daughter that I then became more aware of what was missing. When I had my daughter, it was like I was reborn almost, with these really innocent eyes. And when I took her to see these beautiful paintings that I fell in love with, she didn’t fall in love with them. … She was like, ‘They don’t look like me.’ It just hit me that I didn’t want her to feel like her hair wasn’t beautiful, her skin wasn’t beautiful.”
And so Rosales took to the canvas to give her daughter the representation she was missing in the Western Renaissance paintings that have been celebrated for centuries. As an Afro-Cuban American, she turned to the Lucumí religion of her ancestors. “These gods [of Greek and Roman mythology] are very similar to the orishas I grew up with all my life, but took for granted because I grew up with them,” she says. “There’s no real images I can find on the internet, and so I was like, ‘Let me tell a story, where it’s easy for the masses to understand, but also add in our history.’ And then when I say our history it’s from people from the African diaspora, the Atlantic slave trade, our life, and how we survived through the gods and how the gods survived.”
At first, her peers discouraged her from painting these stories centered around African and Black figures in the Renaissance style. Her advisors told her she wouldn’t be able to sell them, but Rosales didn’t care. This work made her happy. “To see us in there, our ancestors, our history in a format where it’s just as time-consuming, looks just like the Renaissance paintings — the priceless paintings, the most beautiful paintings of the world, can’t touch ’em, can’t buy ’em — I wanted to do that in order to empower us and see our history in the same light,” she says. “Inclusion, it’s all about inclusion. Seeing this is what I want for my children.”
Rosales intended these pieces to be public-facing, wanting to reach as broad of an audience as possible just as the Renaissance masters she reimagines and reinvents have achieved. And thanks to the Brooks, she is one step closer to that goal as her first solo museum exhibition, outside of her home state California, opened last week. Titled “Master Narrative,” the exhibition contains over 20 breathtaking paintings completed over the past few years. The exhibit will be on display through June 25th, with museum programming throughout its run. Learn more at brooksmuseum.org.
The matter of residency requirements for election to the office of Memphis mayor and service in that position has suddenly become enormously significant. It has, in fact, become the crux of the election matter, even as three of the most highly touted mayoral candidates have for several months already been competing and raising money feverishly for the right to serve.
Those candidates are Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner, NAACP president and former County Commissioner Van Turner, and former longtime Mayor Willie Herenton. Though each of them has lived many years in Memphis prior to this election year, each of them also has, at some point in the recent past, lived outside the city limits of Memphis and would be ineligible to serve as mayor under an 1895 city charter clause explicitly requiring mayoral candidates to have lived within the city for five years “next preceding” their election.
That charter would be amended in 1966, a year before Memphis held a city election for a newly adopted mayor-council form of government. The new charter did not use the words “next preceding” to define the terms of residential eligibility, nor did a judicial decree of 1991 regarding election criteria, nor did a subsequent 1996 voter referendum based on that decree explicitly define mayoral residency requirements in the sense of the 1895 charter.
Since then, there has remained a sense of ambiguity regarding the residency requirements for a mayoral candidacy, and an opinion last year by city council attorney Allan Wade became the de facto ruling on the matter.
Addressing queries from county Election Administrator Linda Phillips, Wade argued that the 1996 referendum — technically a home rule amendment — changed the residency requirements for city council members, eliminating any specific prior term of residency, and that the prior charter of 1966 linked the mayor’s residency requirements to those of the city council.
In another opinion made public last week, however, former Election Commission Chairman Robert Meyers, responding to city attorney Jennifer Sink, argues that voters in 1996 voted merely to change the residency requirement for city council, and were not aware that such a change would trigger the mayor’s residency requirements as well. His bottom line was that a mayoral candidate still had to abide by the need to have lived within the city for five years preceding an election.
Both opinions split more legal hairs than can be indicated in this space, but clearly the aforementioned candidates for mayor (and their opponents) have a vested interest in what a court might rule on the matter, and suits to force a definitive ruling can be expected, probably in short order.
• Partisans of the Shelby County Democratic Party will convene at First Baptist Church on Broad this Saturday to elect new members of the party’s grassroots council and its executive committee.
Those persons so elected will meet again at the same site on Saturday, April 1st, to elect a new party head to succeed current chair Gabby Salinas, who is not running for reelection.
The two known candidates for party chair are activists Jesse Huseth and Lexie Carter. They, or whoever else might seek the chairmanship, will take part in a public forum, probably on the intervening Saturday, March 25th.
With every day being declared a national day of something lately, celebration fatigue can set in, but there’s one such event that should be taken more seriously: National Women in Agriculture Day, slated for next Friday, March 24th. To find the rationale for such a recognition, one need look no further than one’s own mind. “We think of old-fashioned farming as a man’s occupation,” says one local female farmer, reflecting on the unconscious, mythic figures that populate most people’s mental landscape from the first time a child sings “Old MacDonald.” Meanwhile, the reality is considerably more complex and always evolving.
The agricultural world has been catching up to this fact for some time, most likely beginning with the formation of the group Women Involved in Farm Economics (WIFE) in Nebraska in 1976. That led to affiliated groups forming in other states, and by 1987 WIFE was suing the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) over a woman’s right to continue receiving benefits for farmland she owned even after marrying. That caused the federal agency to take women’s roles on farms more seriously, and today the USDA actively promotes that mindset with an office dedicated to the concept.
Other independent groups have organized around the principle as well, namely the National Women in Agriculture Association, with chapters in every state, not to mention countless local and regional support groups. And it would seem the recognition and organization of women are having an impact. The USDA Economic Research Service found that by 2007, women operated 14 percent of all U.S. farms, up from 5 percent in 1978. More recently, 51 percent of all farming operations in the United States had at least one woman operator, according to the 2019 Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS), and women were the “principal operator,” meaning they are primarily responsible for the day-to-day operation of the farm, on 14 percent of operations. In 37 percent of operations, women were the “secondary operators.” And the conversation continues; Successful Farming magazine now lists more than a dozen conferences on the topic of women in farming this year alone.
All of which has prompted the Memphis Flyer to see how these trends have played out closer to home. Here, then, are three examples of strong women farmers of the Mid-South who are contributing to the above trends in significant — and unexpected — ways.
Josephine Alexander (Photo: Courtesy Tubby Creek Farm)
Josephine Alexander, Tubby Creek Farm
For those who frequent the Cooper-Young Community Farmers Market, Josephine and Randy Alexander have been familiar faces since 2011, bringing a wide variety of “certified naturally grown” produce to the market, to local chefs, and to members of their Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. In some ways, the Alexanders represent how women are typically involved in the farming game, as half of a couple committed to raising a family in the countryside. Yet they buck such trends as well. Due to injuries sustained in his early 20s, Randy is a quadriplegic and relies on a wheelchair for mobility. He’s developed ingenious work-arounds, but this fact alone means the couple defies any simple gender-based conventions of farm labor.
Luckily, Josephine has risen to the occasion with a philosophical disposition that leads her to question conventional gender roles. “There’s a lot of fraught territory when you start talking about gender,” she muses. “You don’t want to make generalizations about one person’s experience.” Alexander also notes that women in farming is nothing new. “Don’t you think women were tending the vegetable gardens on the old homesteads?” she asks. “At the farmers market, I do get some of the classic ‘Did you grow all this?’ questions. I don’t know where that question’s coming from. Is it women as farmers or women as businesspeople that folks find surprising? What is it that we find unique now about women as farmers? When we think about farming as being a man’s arena, and I think we have for a long time, is it because we don’t see women as business owners and business leaders? Or is it the act of producing and driving tractors and doing all the other non-feminine things?”
In any case, Alexander doesn’t let others’ perceptions slow her down. “To say that I don’t encounter sexism in rural Mississippi would be ridiculous, but I think I get around a lot of it by being the kind of woman who lives outside normal gender roles anyway. I present myself more as a person who works. I’m usually muddy; I don’t pay a lot of attention to my appearance. Maybe that serves to make me seem more legitimate, especially now that we’ve been farming a while, and we’ve established ourselves as a successful farm. I don’t think anyone thinks twice about it. It’s accepted that women can be successful farmers. And certainly in the farming community, there’s lots of successful women.”
If sexism ever rears its ugly head, Alexander says, it’s most often related to being a boss. “I have at times had to direct men who are not open to taking instruction from a woman, which led to bad results. It wasn’t because I was a farmer; it was because I was a woman. These men were unwilling to see me in a leadership position, and then deferred to someone who didn’t know what they were talking about and ended up costing us extra money.” Yet even that issue is minimized by who tends to work for Tubby Creek. “Another interesting trend: We almost exclusively employ women. We just have more women apply. Certainly there are exceptions, but we get mostly women who work for us for multiple seasons.”
Beyond that, there is that special issue that women farmers with families face: motherhood. Yet the Alexanders have managed to raise their 5-year-old son Cooper with aplomb, partly because their farming methods were in place for years before Josephine’s pregnancy. “We made a lot of plans ahead of time and tried to think about the things on the farm that only I have the capacity to do. What can we do to make this so anyone could do this job? Because we didn’t know, never having had children, how much my mind would be in the game. Would my thinking be impaired, and for how long? Not only would we not have my labor; we also might not have my brain.”
As it turned out, Alexander credits motherhood with actually preserving her mental health. “Having a kid, for me, was really good in terms of putting things in balance,” she says. “On the one hand, I need to be out there farming. I need to get away from my kid, and from cooking. At the same time, I can’t be married to the farm. You can’t do crazy farm stuff like you did in the early days, when you slept outside with the chickens or the goats. But I have a lot more balance in my life now because of Cooper. I can’t abuse myself for the farm. And I don’t want to because I don’t want him to resent farming as something that takes his mom away from him. I want it to be something he enjoys. So I think that having a kid has made me a better farmer.”
Eva Brewer (Photo: Alex Greene)
Eva Brewer, Blackspring Farms
In contrast, Eva Brewer is both a single mother and a relative newcomer to farming. But she’s making it work as well, on her terms. When her career as a member of the local International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) chapter was disrupted by Covid in 2020, she decided to add flower farming to her repertoire of income streams. “When I found out about this house,” she recalls of finding a rental west of Millington, “and the prospect of having an acre of sunny land, I thought about growing vegetables. Then I realized it’s just so complicated, fighting wildlife that’s eating the same things I eat. So I went with flowers.”
Over the past three years, she’s made it work, despite having little help with childcare from the fathers of her two children. “I want to tell them, ‘Co-parenting is a thing!’” she says. With a teenage girl and a 9-year-old boy, she relies on her experience as a “professional organizer” — another income stream — to keep up. “I’m all about timers. I time myself on everything because I have so much to do. I write out my plan for the day and follow a schedule. I’ll set my timer for 20 minutes to do seedlings, and then I’m like, ‘Okay! Let’s do this!’”
Flowers from Blackspring Farms (Photo: Eva Brewer)
She’s also developed a knack for creative marketing. “Last year I did farmers markets, but at one, I was directly across from another flower farmer and we had the same flowers. And she was not friendly! So I got out of there and I got out of farmers markets. I started doing pop-up sales at coffee shops instead because there’s no one else — I’m the star. Another thing is flower crowns. I weave them and sell them at festivals and things. Which has been shockingly lucrative. I’ve also been making ceramic vases and stuff on the wheel, to put flowers in. It’s all about the hustle.”
Brewer notes that the isolation of country life is one challenge of farming as a single mom. While she has many neighbors only a stone’s throw away, she says people keep to themselves. And part of that is due to her ambiguous place in the local social order. “Once my truck got stuck,” she recalls. “Someone went by on a four wheeler and I flagged him down. ‘Can you help me? Do you know anything about trucks?’ He said, ‘Ma’am, I’d love to help you, but my wife would be real unhappy with me if I sat here and talked to you.’ And he drove off! Nobody trusts me because I don’t have a dude around. Yet there are also women around here that love to tell me about their miserable marriages. They corner me because they see me as free. Which only makes their men hate me more.”
While Brewer is a stage hand adept at power tools and other skills, she finds the gender gap alive and well in the realm of farm equipment. “Machinery is a big problem on a woman-run farm,” she notes. “Getting it, keeping it up, using it, all of that is a problem for me. Just finding someone to work on the tiller is scary. It’s hard to know if you’re getting ripped off. There are no women who do that. No one! It’s so weird. Why is that? Why are there no women small engine repair people?”
And yet she soldiers on. This weekend, March 18th, she’ll reopen a shop next to Cafe Eclectic near Rhodes College, having given it a trial run last fall, where she’ll be selling her flowers, jewelry, and pottery. “The shop is going to be called Eclectic Gifts, with flowers brought to you by Blackspring Farms,” Brewer says. “I’m bringing in other people to sell there as well. Tara Henderson has all native plants and does landscaping. She sells both plants and landscaping plans. And Nancy Morrow also sells plants. She’s helped me out a lot, and she makes beautiful terrariums.”
Throughout all this, she has had one reliable partner: “When I moved in here I just had a little Jeep; then I bought this truck,” she says, pointing to her large pickup. “It’s my spirit animal.”
Dria Price and Halima Salazar (Photo: Courtesy Dria and Halima)
Dria Price and Halima Salazar, Justevia Teas
Brewer and Alexander, a single mother and a mother with a nuclear family, are only two examples of a whole host of women farmers in the area. Down in Oxford, Mississippi, one can find yet another variation on the theme: two married women who have pooled resources across their families’ separate plots of land to pursue a common vision. Dria Price and Halima Salazar own Justevia Teas, selling their custom blends at a local farmers market and at Oxford’s Chicory Market shop. For them, tea is not just an afterthought, but a way for sustainable agriculture to have impacts on health and well-being.
With Price’s roots in Mississippi and Salazar’s in Nigeria, they’re unlikely partners, but Oxford’s international appeal has brought them together. “We met the same farmer, but at different times,” recalls Price. “He invited us out to his farm, and we just happened to go to his farm on the same day. That’s when we met. His family had been farming that land for generations, all the way back to slavery. We did work on that farm for a couple of years, and then we decided to branch off and start our own thing. As we began to learn more about farming and the importance of regenerative agriculture, we realized that our missions didn’t necessarily align.”
Justevia’s tea blends can be purchased bagged or loose. (Photo: Courtesy Dria and Halima)
For Salazar, learning how to farm partly involved remembering the practices of her grandfather, an herbalist and farmer known for using herbs to heal members of the community. “I came to the U.S. to go to college, and I eventually got married,” she recalls. “I didn’t think anything of agriculture at all, even when I was a child watching my grandfather. I was just processing it subliminally. Then, as an adult, I went back home after being in the U.S. 13 years.” That homecoming, she says, was transformative, as she saw her grandfather’s knowledge differently. “I’m going, ‘Oh my gosh, these are the things that people are craving in other cultures, that I have all this access to.’ Plants growing in the wild, things you can just pick here and there to mix in your cooking. I missed that, being here [in the U.S.]. Then I thought, ‘Now I’m going back to the U.S.; how can I take this knowledge back with me?’ That’s how I got back into agriculture.”
For her part, Price came to agriculture through her interest in nutrition. “I was finishing up my master’s in nutrition when Halima and I met,” she says. “I thought it was interesting, how you can give someone a bean and they might not even know what a bean plant looks like. We’re so disconnected from our food that people don’t know where it comes from.”
Unlike many local farmers, the two focus more on herbs for their custom tea mixtures, but produce is also a part of their practice under their Gimbia’s Kitchen brand, through which they cater and host dining events (including one in Clarksdale on March 24th and 25th). It combines Salazar’s training as a chef and Price’s expertise in nutrition. “We grow a wide variety of herbs, mainly for the teas because that’s our biggest seller,” Price notes. “Last year we got into infused avocado oils. Some of the herbs and produce we grow, we also dry and infuse into our oils. We do produce for Gimbia’s Kitchen, like peppers, onions, tomatoes. And we use the herbs in that part of the business, too. We’re also seed keepers for a company called Truelove Seeds. Their mission is to connect people with seeds that are culturally relevant to them and their ancestors. So we’re growing a combination of Southern and West African seeds such as egusi, ewedu, Mississippi butter beans, white velvet okra — things that are very relevant to us and our culture.”
Beyond that, they’ve begun acting on a more international level. “Dria and I just started working with a farm in Nigeria, and we went there for about a month late last year,” says Salazar. “Their goal is to help more young women and mothers become farmers and own land and make a profit that can sustain their families.”
This dovetails with their mission back at home as well. These two women are playing the long game. As Salazar puts it, “I want my children and my great-grandchildren to grow up seeing people like me growing their food because I think that represents who has ownership over food. It’s such an integral part of our lives. Being farmers is a massive responsibility that Dria and I take very seriously because we know that, being Black farmers, we are representing such a minute population in the country. And we want to be paid well as farmers so people can see they can make it as farmers. We want kids to grow up and say, ‘I want to do that.’ Because this helps hold families together. That’s our goal.”
Jack Black plays a singing Stalin in History of the World, Part II</i.
Mel Brooks is the king of the dad joke. The 96-year-old writer/director/producer comes by it honest. He cut his comic teeth in the Catskill mountains of New York, where former vaudevillians could make a good living doing stand-up comedy for the mostly Jewish New Yorkers who would flee the city in the summer for a weekend at a lake resort. He was there at the beginning of TV comedy — his first gig was in 1949, writing jokes for Sid Caesar on the now-defunct DuMont Network.
The Catskills style of comedy was quick, broad, and punchy. Designed to keep the attention of vacationers on their third martini, it translated well to television. One of the running bits Brooks did with his friend and co-writer Carl Reiner was “The 2000 Year Old Man.” Reiner would ask questions about historical events, and Brooks would crack wise about meeting Jesus or the Dark Ages.
The bit, which always killed, would eventually evolve into the 1981 film, History of the World, Part I. In the episodic skit film, narrated by Orson Welles, Brooks plays four different characters — Moses, a greek philosopher named Comicus, the Grand Inquisitor of the Spanish Inquisition, and King Louis XVI. Brooks was coming off of a decade when he made some of history’s greatest comedies, like Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles. History of the World, Part I never quite reaches those heights, but it has some glorious moments, like Moses dropping one of the stone tablets God gave him and quickly revising the number of commandments from 15 to 10. History of the World, Part I was kept alive through endless reruns on cable TV, but Brooks always denied he intended to do a Part II — the number was part of the joke.
Then, almost 40 years later, Hulu picked up History of the World, Part II. The concept works much better as a 30-minute sketch show than it did as a film. At 96, Brooks is more about attracting good collaborators than one-man-banding it. Wanda Sykes, Nick Kroll, and Ike Barinholtz produce and replace Brooks in the multi-role role. The Mindy Project’s David Stassen is the showrunner, and the writing staff is enormous. In the first episode, William Shakespeare pays a visit to his writers room, where a new recruit tries to hide that she’s actually a woman — a self-aware commentary on how this kind of traditional comedy has long been made.
Teasing away Borscht Belt comedy’s sexism and homophobia while keeping its vital technical aspects and still allowing some raunch is difficult, but for the most part, Brooks and co. are up to it. Brooks’ comedy was always deeply anti-racist, and episode 1 closes with the show’s brain trust posing as TV announcers at the Olympics commenting on “Hitler on Ice,” the infamous one-off gag that closed History of the World, Part I.
Any comedy nerd worth their tight five would give their schwartz to work with Brooks, so the show is studded with cameos. Jack Black slays as Stalin, who gets a musical number in the multi-episode story arc about the Russian Revolution that somehow combines Fiddler on the Roof with Reds. In a stroke of casting genius, comedian and national treasure George Wallace plays racist governor George Wallace opposite Wanda Sykes as Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm. Seth Rogen is fun as Noah, who thinks God’s “two of every kind” plan is a lot of hassle, so he just collects an ark full of cute dogs instead.
Brooks has always been a “throw everything against the wall and see what sticks” kind of guy, and History of the World, Part II is wildly uneven. The extended story of Ulysses S. Grant (Ike Barinholtz) trying to find a drink is tedious, until it ends with a big musical number. If you’re a Brooks fan, or if you’re really missing Drunk History, History of the World, Part II is for you.
History of the World, Part II is streaming on Hulu.
I stalked her in the grocery store: her crown of snowy braids held in place by a great silver clip, her erect bearing, radiating tenderness, the way she placed yogurt and avocados in her basket, beaming peace like the North Star. I wanted to ask, “What aisle did you find your serenity in, do you know how to be married for 50 years, or how to live alone, excuse me for interrupting, but you seem to possess some knowledge that makes the earth burn and turn on its axis.” But we don’t request these things from strangers nowadays. So I said “I love your hair.” — Alison Luterman, “I Confess”
You may have noticed I took a week off from writing in this space. To be honest, a few weeks of pouring heavy feelings onto the page turned out to be pretty draining. There was nothing much left to pour. Many thanks to our managing editor, Samuel X. Cicci, for covering for me with a light-hearted column about … well, bugs. A dose of humor every once in a while never hurts.
Anyhow, the above poem came to mind in my off time, as I’ve spent several days alone in the home in which my grandparents lived before they both passed away last summer. It’s a modest trailer near the county line in Greenwood, Mississippi, where the sky is wide and the stars are bright and the thunderstorms shake the ground and echo for miles between the trees across the flatlands. After writing “Death is a Door” a couple weeks ago, I found myself longing for some serenity — the kind that perhaps only comes with age and grace and a change in perspective. So I thought maybe I’d try to tap into some of that knowledge that makes the Earth burn and turn on its axis.
(Photo: Shara Clark)
The first weekend, I waded in a creek and learned that quicksand is a real-life threat, not just something people stumbled upon in treacherous landscapes in 1980s movies. I naively thought I’d be fine trotting through in my rainboots and hadn’t thought to wear something other than jeans. A cousin brought an extra pair of leggings, and as I navigated the murky, shin-high water around a little bend to change pants in private, three-fourths of my left leg was sucked right under. It startled the heck out of me, but my family got a good laugh (it’s okay; I’m sure I looked ridiculous struggling to rescue my leg and boot from two and a half feet of mud).
Over the week, I made a few trips to County Market, a grocery store that changed names to Greenwood Market Place at some point, but it’ll always be County Market to the locals. “Hey, Mr. Clark,” someone said as my father and I approached the deli for a plate lunch. “Mr. Clark, we miss seeing your daddy around here,” an employee said on our way out. There aren’t many strangers in a town whose population sits right at 14,000. Even I felt right at home in the eateries, shops, and convenience stores, where everyone smiled and spoke as if they knew me. “Did I jump in front of you in line?” one man asked as I queued up to pay for some snacks at the gas station. “No sir, but thanks for checking,” I replied with a grin. I thought about how in Memphis, it’s every man for himself, whether in line or on the road or anywhere else, really. With more than 620,000 of us, we’re practically all strangers, and everyone’s too hurried or impatient to be considerate or cordial.
(Photo: Shara Clark)
I’m writing this now from a wooden deck, overlooking a pond with wispy clouds streaking the sky beyond. It’s peaceful out here, calm, but I do miss Memphis. In a few days, I’ll be back in the bustle, traversing Poplar Avenue traffic, and following online comments from neighbors who swear they just heard gunshots.
I don’t expect to come back beaming peace like the North Star. But hopefully I can bring a little of this Southern serenity home with me.
