American Harvest God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland

Marie Mutsuki Mockett

eAudio - 2020

For over one hundred years, the Mockett family has owned a seven-thousand acre wheat farm in Nebraska, where Marie Mutsuki Mockett's father was raised. Mockett, who grew up in Carmel, California, with her father and her Japanese mother, knew little about farming when she inherited this land. Her father had all but foresworn it. At the invitation of Eric Wolgemuth, the conservative farmer who has cut her family's fields for decades, Mockett accompanies a group of evangelical wheat harvesters through the heartland as they follow the trail of ripening wheat from Texas to Idaho. Together they contemplate what Eric refers to as "the divide," peeling back layers of the American story to expose its contradictions and unhealed w...ounds. She joins the crew in the fields, attends church, and struggles to adapt to the rhythms of rural life, all the while continually reminded of her status as a person who signals "not white," but who people she encounters can't quite categorize. American... more