Crop Stories - On Verse, Vegetable, and Rhetorical Violence By Cynthia Greenlee
On verse, vegetable, and
rhetorical violence
By Cynthia Greenlee
By the time the Civil War and Reconstruction ended in the United States, the Jack Sprat nursery rhyme had already been in print more than 200 years:
Jack will eat not fat, and Jull doth love
no leane,
Yet betwixt them both, they lick the
dishes cleane.
People of the past likely understood the nursery rhyme as an instrument of biting and scarcely concealed commentary, not a harmless ditty for children. As some theories go, Jack Sprat and his spouse might have been English royalty who taxed their subjects — the “cat” that got the meager scraps at the rhyme’s end — out of both meat and lean.
After John Clarke published this iteration in his 1639 compilation of popular English sayings, the catchy story of skinny, fat-deprived Jack and his plump spouse traveled the English-speaking world in books and migrants’ memories. Americans ran with the rhyme, tweaking and borrowing over time. Newspapers routinely published adaptations; one particularly unkind 1882 version from Reading, Pennsylvania, added sizeist body judgments:
A small fellow had such a fat wife/fat
wife, fat wife/God bless her/She looked
like a drum, he looked like a fife.
Political columnists ranted under the cover of Jack’s pseudonym, and along the way Jull somehow lost her name.
And somewhere else along the way, at a time when poetry had widespread mass appeal and wasn’t considered a rarefied pursuit, the venerable nursery rhyme and the humble collard green met. New Jack Sprat spins with collards began appearing in American newspapers.
Take this example from The Tarborough Southerner newspaper of eastern North Carolina in 1878. The collard was both a saving grace and sign of poverty for this Jack and Jull of the U.S. South.
Jack Spratt could eat no fat,
His wife could eat no lean,
So they mortgaged, both their little
farm
And lived on collard greens.
In due time, collards were mentioned in all manner of poems, from limericks and sonnets to free verse. In December 1895, The Boston Globe reprinted a jolly Atlanta Constitution poem about a farmer family headed to the fair after harvest. A giddy child narrator — presumably a white girl, given the lack of “blackvoice” that white authors often assumed — anticipated the fun and meal to come:
John’s got a pair of jeans,
An’ mammy’s got some chicken an’ a
load o’ collard greens,
An’ dad’s taken the mortgage from the
mule that’s standing there,
And we’re going to Atlanta to the fair.
The fair!
Contrast that with song lyrics, a poem of sorts, in the Knoxville Sentinel two years later. Attributed to “an old negro man,” the song had a much more melancholy tone and used another dialect. Perhaps the source was a real person, but more likely, “he” was a fictional character conceived by white writers who regularly ventriloquized African-American speech:
Jis afo the cherry blossoms,
You must quit er eatin’ possum
An’ den you knows what hongry means.
A’scrapin’ and a’rakin’
For jis a smell o’ bacon
An’ jis a lettle mess o’ collard greens.
Circumstance, season, age, and race made all the difference. For some people, collards were abundance; for others, the food of the stingiest subsistence. For the white girl fair-goer, that harvest-ending lunch was an uncomplicated pleasure.
But this was the 1890s. And not everyone could go to the fair — or the same one. During this period, following emancipation and the advent of Black citizenship, Southern states legalized racism and segregation. Jim Crow laws swept the South, where many states hosted separate “Colored State Fairs” or opted for a single fair that was theoretically for all but hosted a “colored day” when only African-Americans could attend.
And, not everyone could sing the praises of fried chicken and collard greens without facing jeers.
The collard did not escape the ramped-up extremism of the day. Just as the watermelon became a vehicle for stereotype, the collard green and its association with Black Southerners inspired racist creativity. The collard was fodder for both overtly white-supremacist doggerel and celebratory paeans to Southern food, the latter often written by exiled Southern whites who missed their regional fare and the old days when someone else — an enslaved “someone” — catered to their needs. The vegetable was conscripted to become an agricultural accessory to the national and Jim Crow project: the denigration and subjugation of Black Americans.
If we read publications of the late 19th and early 20th century — and read them quite literally — collard fields and watermelon patches had become the sites of a great crime wave sweeping the Southland. Incidents of Black Southerners stealing other people’s collards proliferated in newspapers — so many such reports that they reek of myth.
Black collardphilia was supposedly so strong, so entrancing that those in its sway would pilfer a workaday, inexpensive vegetable from unsuspecting gardeners. Media accounts suggested that collard spats frequently disrupted civil order, like when Atlantan Clara Mitchell’s “vengeful lawlessness” started a brawl when she cut down Bob Pounds’ winter collards in October 1897. But newspapers also contradicted themselves about the prevalence of collard crime: The Clarion-Ledger railed about a 1930 overnight collard theft in Jackson, Mississippi, saying “this hideous act is without precedent in this city!” It shook its editorial head at the presence of a “perverted and malicious vandal” in its midst. One can guess what a perverted and malicious vandal looked like in the Southern white imagination.
These collard stories supposedly served as proof positive of Black criminality, emotionalism and unreasonable appetites. Who and what could curb Black deviance and urges other than white citizens, law enforcement and surveillance?
Frequently, such accounts of collard crime often came with disdainful poems. The Atlanta Constitution excelled at this kind of reportage. The newspaper published illustrated snippets of real court cases in “Darktown,” a pejorative name for a predominantly Black district. Its cartoons depicted Black residents as little more than big-lipped, clothed monkeys, and an October 1900 roundup of police news recounted the appearance of one Mary James — “a dark brown tub queen,” likely a laundress — before a court recorder.
Mary had tossed rocks at her neighbors’ windows in the wee hours, allegedly aggravated that their chickens had razed her greens. The judge mused that good fences make good neighbors and better crop protection, and that this matter of wayward chickens and gardens “has been troubling the world ever since Cain and Abel tried poultry raising round about the garden of Eden.” No one was at fault, he ruled, though those chicken owners might just as well sue her if their yardbirds got the “collard colic.”
But before reporter Gordon Noel Hurtel shared a narrative of Mary James’ case in his “Police Roundup Pen Shots” column, there was this adaptation of another nursery rhyme: “Mary, Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow?”
Mary’s imagined voice responds:
De chickens scratch the collard patch
And the taters in de row.
The judge and newspaper writer were amused by Mary’s outrage, a peculiar kind of condescending Jim Crow jocularity. They snickered at a laundress even as they likely employed one to iron their pants.
On that day in 1900, Mary James was lucky. She avoided a stay in the city jail. She was fined $3.75 and admonished to “live up to the golden rule, and when other folks’ chickens eat your collards, rejoice in that your neighbor’s fowl are fat.”
Mary’s indignation may have seemed silly, but Hurtel’s condescending coverage is a classic example of the difference between laughing at someone rather than with them. A few short lines ridiculed Mary’s words and her apparently hair trigger temper. They would be all the more devastating because they were memorably couched in rhyme. The message was clear: Mary was uncouth, uneducated and incapable of pursuing more rational conflict resolution, characteristics that whites associated with Blackness. This was rhetorical violence at its best, establishing and shoring up narratives that Mary and her racial brethren were very different creatures than the white judge and journalist who judged her.
In the hands of early 20th-century media, Southern embrace of the collard morphed into a racialized characteristic native to Black Southerners. And despite the fact that whites also consumed collards, it was a trait worthy of derision, much like the stereotypes of googly-eyed Black people driven to distraction and petty crime by watermelon.
Disenfranchisement requires dehumanization, and the heyday of these depictions occurred as legal segregation was creeping across the region.
While one newspaper columnist’s jokes about Black voracity for this vegetable may not seem harmful, this brand of white-supremacist humor could very easily take a turn toward hard labor. Hit the wrong judge at the wrong time, and missing collards could land someone behind bars or on the chain gang. Authorities once charged a Macon, Georgia man with larceny for simply walking around with a sack of collards on his shoulder — and refusing to say where he got them. Perhaps he did steal them, but the newspaper branded him a thief and asked if anyone in town was missing a mess of greens. The evidence was his Blackness, which meant he was inherently inclined to crime and collards. This made sense in the perverse and hardening racial logic of the time, and he was convicted before he appeared in court.
Hurtel, the writer who mocked Mary, grew in influence, and ridiculous collard theft stories featuring Black Atlantans surfaced in his work again and again. Two years later, an October 1902 newspaper tidbit described a young man who worked at “one thing and den anudder” and was caught green-handed removing collards from a garden:
Hunter hungered for a mess
Of collards green and sweet.
A copper collared him and said
No cabbage on my beat.
Despite Hunter’s insistence that a friend promised he could pick the vegetables, his lack of stable employment counted against him. The judge told him that he’d get a steady diet of greens and steady work too, during his 30-day stay at the county lockup.
Listen to Episodes of the Crop Stories Podcast. Look out for an episode featuring Cynthia Greenlee's piece, out September, 2026.