tions recall unhappy aspects of the last strife-torn decades of sharecropping
and—perhaps more—doleful episodes in California’s agricultural history.
The appearance of Spanish-speakers among the rural proletariat does
not contradict our generalization about the end of the plantation complex.
The new brown proletariat is a tiny one, and everywhere else, farmworkers
are hardly visible. In the lower Mississippi deltas, where cotton still flour-
ishes, many ex-plantations are now also devoted to soybeans or to rice cul-
ture, both utterly mechanized. What workers remain in this heart of what
was once called the American Congo are more likely to be employed in light
industries, service businesses, or casino gambling than cotton or any other
agricultural commodity.
In piedmonts and hillier places across the South, plantations and all
other agriculture have simply disappeared. Once-thriving ginnery com-
pounds by rail sidings are closed, bulldozed, or rusting. Farmhouses, out-
buildings, and rural general stores by the thousands are long vacant, falling
in upon themselves and crowded or covered by trees. Countless rural ceme-
teries behind deserted churches are forgotten, nearly buried in vines and
brush, with markers toppled and human remains exposed by surging tree
roots. Fifty- and sixty-year-old forests stand on old crop fields, their straight
‘‘hills,’’ or rows, still discernible to those who venture into the woods. But
the piedmonts are also scenes of the most extensive (and ongoing) post–
World War II suburbanization. What are now ‘‘greater’’ Richmond (or ‘‘the
Richmond area’’), Raleigh-Durham, Charlotte, Columbia, and most spec-
tacularly, Atlanta, for example, overlie old tobacco, corn, and cotton land-
scapes.
Whether abandoned or suburbanized, these are principal settings for
the much-heralded ‘‘greening’’ of the South since World War II. The ex-
pression celebrates establishment of stabilizing cover and protection for
long-bare and eroded ground. If such ground is converted to suburban
housing, then suburbs will be green, too, since people as well as ground
must have shade, not to mention beauty. The problem with ‘‘green’’ for such
ex-plantation country is, first, pavement—foundations, driveways, side-
walks (although these are not popular in a car culture), roads and highways
and bypasses, and many more to come. There is more paving, too, for gas
stations, stores, and malls. I fancy that the fictional Tara, along with a num-
ber of historical plantations in Georgia’s upper piedmont, now lies beneath
Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, which has been expanding non-
stop for four decades. A second problem with suburbanization is suburbs’
squandering of water, a subject to be taken up in a later chapter.