My mother has walked the hillside every morning for two years now. She goes before I'm up. When the sun is still low and the light comes in sideways between the plants and bounces off the limestone with that specific gold color of early morning on the ridges of Middle Tennessee, she carries her coffee cup and walks slowly up the path we cut between the three sections, running her fingers now and then along the foliage of the plants at the edge of the path, checking the color of the peppers that are already beginning to set for the next season. The birds, the wrens and cardinals that arrived the second year when the plants were tall enough to give shade and fruit make noise in the branches in the mornings. One morning a few months ago, I caught up with her and we walked together up to the upper section.
We stood at the highest point looking down at the bottomland and the ridges of the county toward the White County line. After a while, my mother took a sip of her coffee. Then she said, "Without it coming from any conversation we were having, your daddy would have laughed when he saw that assessment." I said, "I know." My mother looked at the plants a moment more, then said without turning toward me, "That's why you planted anyway."
It was not a question. It was the recognition of someone who had understood from the beginning why her daughter was going to keep putting seedlings in the ground while the county agent made notes on his clipboard.
Orville Pucket planted Tennessee Mountain Cayenne on the rocky hillside of his property the following spring with transplants that Ruth Ellen provided from the nursery bed she had established at the farm using seed selected from the best plants in the upper section. Bobby Ray Tatum came to the farm in the summer of 1983 alone on a weekday afternoon with the look of someone who has something to say and is choosing the words carefully. He said, "Ruthie, I was wrong. The thin soil and the rock do what you said they did. I can see it in the numbers now."
Ruth Ellen told him, "Bobby Ray, you told me what you honestly knew. You weren't wrong with what you knew. What all of us knew was just incomplete."
Dale Caldwell, the cousin who had lost the greenhouse, came to the farm in November of that year with a question. Ruth Ellen explained the system to him. Dale planted his hillside the following year. Harold Briggs published in 1986 with James Whitfield and Sandra Morse a technical guide for the University of Tennessee Extension Service on evaluation of limestone upland slopes in Middle Tennessee for Tennessee Mountain Cayenne production. The guide included a measurement protocol for the thermal mass effect that no county technical assessment in the region had incorporated before 1979.
In the introduction, Harold wrote, "The methodology of this protocol originates from the documented field observation conducted by grower Ruth Ellen Caldwell in Putnam County between 1979 and 1982, whose systematic monitoring work verified under real production conditions what experimental research at the UT Agricultural Experiment Station had predicted under controlled conditions."
He continued, "Today, the rocky hillside of the south slope of Caldwell Ridge Farm produces, in each harvest, the Tennessee Mountain Cayenne with the highest price premium in the regional specialty spice market of Middle Tennessee. The upper section, the one the assessment declared unsuitable because of insufficient limestone substrate, produces the fruit with the highest capsaicin concentration on the hillside and the highest price per pound of the entire season."
The contract with Warren Hatch has been renewed four times. The farm has a documented hill-grown designation for the hillside cayenne. My cousin Paty has kept the field notebook since the third year with a discipline that by now has exceeded my own. My mother still walks the hill every morning. Harold Briggs's assessment of 1974 is still in the manila folder in the farm documents.
I took it out once in 1986 to show Dr. James when they were writing the technical guide. Dr. James read it all the way through. Then he said, "It is a well-written assessment with the data that was available in 1974."
"The problem was not the analysis. The problem was that the analysis did not ask what was going to be planted."
Ruth Ellen put the assessment back in the folder. It is still there. Ruth Ellen Caldwell did not inherit a productive hillside. She inherited a hillside that a county assessment with official letterhead and a government signature had declared unsuitable for agriculture. She planted 340 Tennessee Mountain Cayenne transplants on that hillside alone under the August sun of the Putnam County ridge country with the man who signed the assessment watching her from the gravel road.
She did not answer him. She kept planting. Four years later, she had the cayenne with the highest price premium in the regional market. She had a purchase contract with a guaranteed price. She had the field data that made possible the technical protocol that no county assessment in the region had included before.
She had the acknowledgement of the men who had doubted, and she had 340 reasons, deep red and intensely hot, on a limestone hillside, to never again doubt what the data says when the ground stands behind it. The assessment was not the land. The land never read it.