Okay, so “Heritage” is out, and it was a nice, somewhat heart-warming story.
“Heritage”
Jesse’s Mississippi farm has been his family since their first ancestor was freed from slavery – tended by his grandfather and his father before him. But as Jesse grows into a man, he’s unsure if a patch of land in the Piney Woods and a life of tilling soil is his true destiny. But destiny can mean so much more than dirt and a tractor…
At the end it turns out to be bit of a passing the torch kind of story.
And I believe it may be semiautobiographical, because the writer, Jesse Holland, his parents are owners and operators of the Holland Family Farm in Mississippi (from the credits page and the beginning of the issue and the final page).
The New York Times recently did a story about Black farmers.
Two of the Biden administration’s biggest priorities — addressing racial inequality and fighting climate change — are converging in the lives of Black farmers. Farms run by African Americans make up less than 2 percent of all of the nation’s farms today, down from 14 percent in 1920.
Evicted sharecroppers in New Madrid County, Mo., in 1939.
Credit: Arthur Rothstein/Library of Congress
As I suspected before, and as was touched on in the New York Times “1619” project audio series, “Heritage” did address this from a historical perspective.
Anyway, yep, overall a nice story.
And Doug Braithwaite on the art; one of my top two or three favorite comic book artists.
EDIT: Related, a Vice News piece from November, 2019…
