Before we go further, you should know about HJ.

HJ Kuntry Carter lives in Tallahassee. Tallahassee Magazine wrote about him in 2012 — read it when you have a minute.

[Kuntry Roads - Tallahassee Magazine https://share.google/VTsXlU4g1zRMZipNZ]

The short version: he turned down the Nashville machine, walked out of an RCA meeting, and instead spent ten years driving the back roads of America selling his albums county by county. More than 30,000 names on 3-by-5 index cards — every person who bought a record, where he met them, when. The cards are still in a storage unit in St. Marks. He also put out the fire at the Wescott building at FSU, back when he was a Tallahassee city fireman.

That's the man.

When you meet HJ, he says one word.

Compost.

That's it. That's the whole introduction. And then you start working. He and I hauled truckload after truckload of leaves and manure together before he ever set foot in our classroom garden. By the time I brought him to the school where I was teaching Agrinauts, the trust was already built — in the back of pickup trucks, in piles of leaves, in the smell of manure cooking down.

So when he started digging a shallow trench using the grub hoe/pick axe, like it was a pen on paper in the garden and I thought what is this guy doing, what did I get myself into, he's destroying the garden — I kept going anyway. Because I'd already learned: you trust the compost man.

Eventually that trench became something else. Standing right next to it, we could see it the way you'd see a river system from three thousand feet up — except we were the giants, and it was right at our feet. Muddy. Messy. Alive.

We had an unbelievable reserve of leaves. Using gravity, we pulled them down from the pile, raking with hands the size of giants', and they filled the whole space — a clean even spread on top.

But we knew the water was still moving underneath, in the same stamped impression we'd made.

The women working alongside us as volunteers from the university, felt it immediately. Finally, this is the work we came here for. The men kept questioning it. I was quietly questioning it too, but I kept going.

HJ talks about queendoms. He says the world should be run by queendoms, and men support the queendoms in order to thrive. The prerequisite is this — organic, hands-in-the-soil method. A queen who acts as steward to the land, not as king over it.

He once told me if someone handed him a bucket of dollar bills, he'd compost it. Because that's what it is. Paper.

Orchestrator of elements. Grassroots Americanism. Living within your means.

Cultural exchange as compost.

He showed me. I'm showing you. You'll do it your way.

That's what the Agrinauts are.

— Erika

3 comments