Earlier on this blog I’ve had occasion to celebrate the humane gravity of MSNBC commentator Jonathan Capehart, who happens to be both Black and gay. Now in JC talking about his 2025 book Yet Here I Am: Lessons From a Black Man’s Search for Home, an observation about the stoop labor historically done by Black folk in the American deep south (harvesting cotton, tobacco, and sugarcane):
“My cousin Rita and I are the first generation in our family to not have to pick cotton, and for people of a certain age, they will understand what that means,” Capehart said. “… It wasn’t until I was writing this book that I understood, when our parents were our age, they were working. They were working in the fields, picking cotton, picking tobacco. We did not have to do that.
So JC and his cousin Rita represent a shift in the fortunes of Black folk. Here’s JC informing us, explaining things, interviewing political and cultural figures, a figure of importance on national television — and a moving reporter on his own life history in that book. In what I see as the release of great abilities, drive, and insights that follow on opening up opportunity to everyone: excellent qualities that are in fact distributed widely across the population will flourish in new places (and since those who succeed first will have had to run through a lot of tough hoops, they will be seen to be especially talented).
The cover of JC’s book:
Then from my own family, my Pennsylvania Dutch grandmother Susanna Rice. Whose working life started when she was 5 years old, doing stoop labor, picking tobacco leaves in fact, as wrappers for cigars. In the farmlands of Lancaster County, working for the landowners to do her bit to support the family; everyone had to work, starting as young as possible. She spoke only Pennsylvania Dutch then, was forced to learn English (very imperfectly) when she went to school, for five years until she could read and write, when she had to go back to working full time.
The next part of the story is inutterably sad, and I don’t want to tell it again here, but she ended up having three children to raise on her own, with no work experience beyond stoop labor and household work, so she became a domestic servant, and worked as one until she died. Meanwhile picking up bits of knowledge and assorted abilities until she became a genuinely remarkable person who didn’t stand out in any way, until she trusted you enough to actually talk with you, when she turned out to be knowledgable, insightful, and funny. She brightened my life as a child, and she showed me that great spirits can find a way to thrive even in the most adverse circumstances. I wonder what she could have done if she’d been able to fully flourish, and sometimes I hope that my life has shown what could have been released.
But now this concern with stoop labor (in particular sociocultural settings) is about to lead to something of a lexicographic morass; there are other complexities centering on the use of Black and gay to refer to Capehart, but I was familiar with them, but I wasn’t prepared for the confusion surrounding stoop labor.
Two definitions for the compound noun stoop labor: from NOAD (taken right from the OED), a definition that essentially expands on the stoop of the compound noun, but adds that the labor is specifically agricultural (stooping over items on a factory assembly line isn’t stoop labor):
North American agricultural labor performed in a stooping or squatting position.
And from Merriam-Webster Online, a definition for a much wider concept, one that has no conventional label in current English (‘agricultural hand labor / hand labor done on farms’):
the hard labor done or required to plant, cultivate, and harvest a crop and especially a crop of vegetables. [AZ: the modifier hard here appears to be an appositive, not a restrictive, modifier; all such labor is hard work]
Such labor includes the stoop labor historically associated with Black laborers in the American Deep South, plus stoop labor historically associated with poor white laborers (like the Joads in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath) and stoop labor historically associated with Latino laborers (like the farm workers in California’s Salinas Valley) — picking strawberries, asparagus, lettuce, spinach, tomatoes, peppers, broccoli, cauliflower, artichokes, celery, beets, and carrots. But it also embraces picking from bushes or trees — picking avocados, mangos, peaches, plums, cherries, nectarines, grapes, apples, citrus fruit (oranges, mandarins, lemons) and so on, some of these historically the labor of Latino workers in California’s San Joaquin Valley.
Here I’ll stop for the day, having set up the complexities of Black, Latino, gay, stoop (agricultural) labor, and the unlabeled taxon embracing agricultural hand labor / hand labor done on farms). More unpacking to come.
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