An Interview With Wilmer Mills

Wilmer Mills served for two years as the Kenan Visiting Writer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Published widely in prominent literary journals, his book of poems, Light for the Orphans, was published by Story Line Press in 2002. This interview was conducted via telephone by Zackary Vernon on February 24, 2011. The printed text of this interview has been edited by both Mills and Vernon for clarity and concision. An essay based on this interview, “Walking Down Furrows, Talking Down Lines,” appeared in the Winter/Spring 2011 print edition of the Carolina Quarterly, Volume 61, Issue 1.

Zackary Vernon: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. I really appreciate it.

Wilmer Mills: No problem. Thank you for wanting to interview me.

ZV: Since we have not yet decided on the poems that will be published in the next issue of Carolina Quarterly, most of my questions today have more to do with your biography as well as your general philosophies on life, literature, and (my favorite topic) agriculture.

First, I’d like to just get down some basic facts. You were born in Baton Rouge in 1969, but then moved to Brazil when you were two. What exactly was your family doing in Brazil?

WM: My parents were missionaries for the Presbyterian Church, but they were specifically agricultural missionaries. They were sponsored by the Presbyterian Church as well as two other organizations, Land for the Landless and World Vision International.

ZV: Were they teaching the people of Brazil new agricultural techniques?

WM: Yes, modern farming and also gardening. Basically, they were agricultural missionaries. Half of the mission was helping with gardening and farming techniques, and the other half was spiritual and social, like building schools, churches. The bulk of our time there we were in the Amazon Basin on a tributary of the Amazon River. There was a large tract of land that had been purchased, and it was my parents responsibility to find poor Brazilians who had no land and wanted to be colonists. Portions of that land were given to them and they were expected to work it and plant rice and things like that. Then, after ten years, the land was legally deeded to these Brazilians. In the process, my parents also built two schools and two churches there. So when we left, that land remained in their names. That was the good part of it, helping poor, disenfranchised Brazilians own their own land; the bad part of it was that all of this land was Amazon jungle that we bulldozed to give the poor people their own farms; in the 1970s that was considered progress and a really good thing to do. Some of my early memories are of riding on a bulldozer and pushing over very large trees in the Amazon and then watching them burn in large rows so rice could be planted.

ZV: What brought the family back to Louisiana in 1980?

WM: The mission was winding down and what they had set out to do was largely accomplished. Also, we had gotten sick a lot, which had worn us down physically. I had malaria twice and then contracted rheumatic fever, and almost died in both of those cases, specifically from the rheumatic fever. So it was just time to come back. My parents had left their farm in Louisiana to go be missionaries, and I think daddy really wanted to go back and be a farmer himself rather than just helping other people farm. So in 1980 we came back to south Louisiana and started raising cattle among other things. One way or another, I grew up in a very rural, agricultural climate.

ZV: How do you think spending those formative years of your childhood in Brazil impacted your life, especially your conception of agriculture?

WM: I don’t think I would be the person I am at all if I hadn’t grown up there. Growing up in Louisiana is enough like growing up in a foreign country, but being in the Amazon as a boy was formative in all kinds of other ways. Having a first hand experience with a pre-modern life was something that shaped the way I see the world around me. Most of my friends there lived in mud huts without electricity or running water. Most of my childhood was defined by jungle and wild animals and a lack of electricity.

Whenever there is a storm and the power goes off in the states, I just love it because the air gets so clear and quiet. We don’t realize how much the electricity all around us is throbbing like a big electric blanket that is humming with the frequency of 110 voltage. When the power goes off, it’s palpable the way the air becomes clean and silent. This reminds me of being in Brazil without any power lines and virtually no electricity anywhere. I miss that kind of staticless experience of the world.

I’ve been studying phenomenology lately: Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty. The way they talk about experiencing the world around you with your body without interference is something that excites me. The other side of phenomenology is the philosophy of hermeneutics, how you read and interpret things you perceive. Writers like Gadamer and Ricoeur excite me because I want to interpret the world, to read it, see what it says.

The experience of being in Brazil directly influenced how I think of poetry because I’m constantly wanting to respond to the world on a one-to-one basis to engage the people and things around me without any kind of veil or static. The process of writing poetry for me is a kind of pre-modern, organic way of perceiving things and registering these things with language.

ZV: Is it true that your family received their land in Louisiana through a grant from the King of Spain in 1797?

WM: Yes. I don’t think my direct Mills ancestors did, but the land that we own originally had been granted from the King of Spain in the 1790s to other ancestors of mine. So my family has been there ever since then, and they have mostly been farmers.

ZV: I’m curious about what your family’s farm has been like historically. For instance, were your people large-scale slaveholders? Were they tenet farmers or sharecroppers? Or did they own the land and have tenet farmers and sharecroppers work it for them? What crops or animals did they cultivate?

WM: They were not large-scale slaveholders, but I know that some of them did own slaves. After the Revolutionary War, my ancestor John Mills moved South from Pennsylvannia and New York, and he ended up on the banks of the Mississippi River in Louisiana where he founded a small port city called Bayou Sarah just down the hill from what is now St. Francisville. St. Fransicville didn’t really exist at that point the way it does now. He was a landowner, and he owned several farms and ran the port, and I know that he owned slaves, but he was not like this picture you see of the plantation with big white columns, and he didn’t own hundreds of slaves and have overseers. He was not like the image of the South that people have in their minds from Gone with the Wind. It was a lot more complicated than that picture.

But no they were not sharecroppers or tenet farmers. They were larger landowners than that.

ZV: Did they rely on sharecropping and tenet farming as sources of labor post-Reconstruction?

WM: No. I don’t think so. I’m sure that there were some. For instance, on the land that my parents own now, there were some small tenet farmer houses scattered around here and there. I’m pretty sure that some of those were inhabited by black families. But I don’t really know the history of them too much.

ZV: Has the land traditionally been devoted to tobacco, cattle, cotton, or what?

WM: The area where we live in south Louisiana is called the Plains, because it used to be like the Midwest. The area north of Baton Rouge is very flat, and it was all grasslands. There were actually buffalo there when the first settlers came. It was never really good for row crops: corn or wheat or soy beans. I think the soil was too acidic. We also get too many heavy rains, and it floods too much. So cattle is the best thing for the land. There was some cotton, but when the boll weevil came, that was the end of that. There has also been some sheep farming for wool. But beef cattle and some dairy farming have been the dominant uses of the land.

Cattle was the main thing my daddy was engaged in and also pasture grass seed. When you go to the hardware store and buy a bag of lawn seed, that seed grew somewhere and had to be harvested with a combine in the same way that wheat is harvested. People just don’t think of it. It doesn’t just hop in a bag. It has to come from a farm where the farmer has let the grass go to seed and get tall the way you would if you were going to cut the grass for hay. But instead of harvesting it for hay, you just harvest the seed heads off the top in a combine whose screens have been set so that the seed doesn’t get blown out. My daddy actually owns a seed-cleaning mill in Louisiana. So he grows the seed for himself but also cleans the seed for other farmers. He wholesales his own seed to other companies who package it and sell it to hardware stores and co-ops.

ZV: In your essay “Farming Versus Poetry: The Making of a Rebel,” you say that your father practices “conventional, modern farming.” What does that mean exactly?

WM: He uses tractors and combines and bushhogs. He doesn’t use draft horses and mules and that kind of thing.

ZV: What did the farm look like before your father? How long has the grass seed operation been in place?

WM: Grass seed and cattle have been the dominant uses of the land for a long time. My grandfather, after World War II, bought the first mechanized combine in south Louisiana. Before that, farmers would harvest their seed by hand or with a horse-drawn hay cutter. Then the hay had to be collected and beaten on a tarp in order to knock the seeds off. Or they had to hire a man who owned a threshing machine. He brought the thresher to your farm after the hay was cut and threshed it out for you; then the seed had to be cleaned. My grandfather, though, supposedly bought the first combine that “combined” (that’s why it’s called that) the tasks of cutting and threshing into one machine. Before that, farmers relied a lot more on animal power. In fact, when I was a kid, my grandfather’s last mule was still alive. He was too old to do anything, but he was just kept there on the farm. My grandfather still had all the old cultivators and plows and everything. I actually wrote a poem about this. He could hook up the plows and cultivators on a single tree on the three point hitch of a tractor. Then I would drive the tractor and pull my grandfather through the garden. So I was the mule, and he would walk behind the tractor. He still preferred to do his garden that way, because he had better control of the blade and the rows. So he’d be walking along behind the tractor, without any traces of the tractor, except for metaphysical ones—traces of the old and the new.

ZV: That poem, “Rain,” like so much of your work, suggests that you feel a lot of guilt over the fact that you did not go into farming professionally?

WM: I have said that before, but I think I’ve gotten over it. I realized that if I had stayed in Louisiana and attempted to farm, it would have just been a valiant, romantic going-down-with-the-ship gesture. I don’t think I ever could have made it work for the same reason that all the other farmers in the past fifty years have gone out of business; conventional modern agriculture puts you out of business. You can’t afford to buy the tractors and the combines. The overhead is just too high. And we Americans have a certain standard of living that we want to live by. We want health insurance and all the electronic things you get at Wal-Mart. Farming has never been a profitable business. Our standard of living has priced the farmer out of business. There’s just no way that you can afford to buy the equipment and make a living with those kinds of expectations, unless the farmer’s wife works in a bank, or unless you have hundreds and hundreds of acres and you harvest one enormous row crop. Even then, though, farmers are still going out of business. Really, the only way that my daddy has been able to make it is that he only buys old, worn-out equipment. A combine can cost one to two hundred thousand dollars if you buy a new good one. But he’ll buy two thirty-year-old combines for $800 a piece, and he’ll sabotage one for parts to keep the other one running. It’s a headache because every other day it’ll break down and he’ll be out there in the middle of a field trying to fix it in the hot sun. But he doesn’t owe the bank hundreds of thousands of dollars for a tractor and a combine and all that stuff.

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