February 5, 2025 • 47 mins
In this episode of the Bear Grease podcast, we hear the remarkable story of fourth-generation farmer and Arkansas Agriculture Hall of Fame member Mr. Ellis Bell from Forrest City, Arkansas. Mr. Bell tells the story of his heritage and personal journey as a minority farmer, along with the values he learned along the way.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
To me, that was success where most people were dying
to get away from the country because they saw other
people going north look like they was building a better
life because they came back driving a new car. I
didn't look at having a new car as being success.
(00:27):
I looked at my dad having a better crop. That
was the success that I was looking for, even as
a smaller child. I wanted my success to be right
here on the land.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
On this episode, I want to introduce you to a
fourth generation soybean and rice farmer, eighty seven year old
Ellis Bell from Forest City, Arkansas. Today, he still farms
on the land purchased by his great great grandfather in
eighteen eighty one. Mister Ellis as an African American, and
many in his community left the South in what historians
(01:05):
call the Great Migration, which took place between nineteen ten
and the nineteen seventies. But mister Ellis wanted to make
a life for himself on the land that he was
born on, and with much struggle, grit, and wisdom he did.
Mister Ellis is a renaissance man. He had to be
creative to keep his farm alive, and in his career
(01:28):
he built airplanes. He was an insurance broker. He's a pilot,
but deep in his bones he's a farmer. In twenty
twenty three, he was inducted into the Arkansas Agricultural Hall
of Fame, but the future of his farm is in question.
This is an extraordinary story and I really doubt that
you're gonna want to miss this one. And Hey, this
(01:53):
week on the Meat Eater YouTube channel, my Alaskan goat
bow hunting film comes out. You should check that out.
My name is Clay nukemb and this is the Bear
(02:13):
Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search
for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the
story of Americans who lived their lives close to the land.
Presented by FHF gear, American made purpose built hunting and
fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the
(02:36):
place as we explore.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
My name is Ellis bell I was born in Foyst City, Arkansas,
in nineteen thirty eight. My great great grandfather, he was
discharged in eighteen eighty three, came out after the Civil War.
They was either able to bude through whatever the government
(03:07):
program was, but my great great grandfather obtained this eighty
three acres at that time, but it's my understanding he
paid about three hundred dollars for this land.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Mister Ellis is sitting at his dining room table in
his home built sometime around nineteen thirty, and he seemed
proud to mention that the joys were handcut by his father,
Rice Bell. Myyars perked up when I learned that in
eighteen eighty one, his great great grandfather purchased the land,
just sixteen years after the end of the Civil War.
(03:46):
Joseph Doody, that was the name of his great great grandfather,
and he moved here from Tennessee after the war, but
was never enslaved. But he lived a short life.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
My great great grandfather he passed away at and he
was like a forty three or forty four. At an
early age. Supposedly he got kicked by a mule in
the service and never recovered from it. So I've got
many many letters and things like that where my grandmother
(04:18):
was trying to get a pincheon that was given to
soldiers who had got injured in the wall, and she
was getting the pension to raise her daughter, you know,
after he after he.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
Died, Joseph Dudy died a year's long, slow death from
a mule kick. Mister Ellis's home and farm is just
outside of Forest City, in a region we called the Delta.
It's flat, fertile agricultural land influenced by the ancient flooding
(04:51):
of the Mississippi River. It's also the region of Arkansas
where the vast majority of slavery took place. There was
big ag there was a need for big labor. Like
mister Ellis, I've lived in Arkansas my whole life, and
I can testify that there are social artifacts of this
(05:12):
tragic period in American history still evident today. And if
you'll permit me to be real, I'll share with you
something that's always puzzled me. I grew up in western
Arkansas and didn't go to school with a single African
American person. I didn't know a black person growing up,
(05:32):
while some schools in eastern Arkansas in the Delta were
almost all African American. This snippet will find relevance as
we continue to tell this story. And it's interesting to
me the stories that we remember and the stories that
mister Ellis Is gonna tell us. It feels like age
(05:53):
weeds out the riff raft and by the time a
man is in his eighties, even his late eighties, the
ones that he can recall all are clearly essential and
they formed the architecture of his life. This next story
is from the nineteen forties and was formative. It was
when mister Ellis was just a child.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
And I like to tell the story when my father
told my mother. This was in March. He said, they're
getting their loans and I'm going up here to the
bank to see if I can get a loan. And
I heard them talking, and I says, can I go?
And they says, no, it's too cold to No, you
can't go. Because I like to follow my dad everywhere,
(06:36):
And so we went to bed. The next morning, my dad,
I heard him. When he got up, he put the
team together, he tied them off, came back and eat breakfast.
And I was still begging to go, so they let
me go. We drove downtown and we tied off those
(06:58):
team and we walked down to the bank, and we
walked in the lobby of the bank, and I had
never seen so many white men's in one place, and
all of my life they were all having fun. And
you know they were all there. I guess they knew
that they were going to get their money to farm
that year. And my dad we walked down into Rotunda
(07:18):
and my dad by we got about halfway in the
Bank of Metals and he says to my dad, Rice,
I can't let you have no money, he says, but
if you go out to see the Lindsey Boys, they'll
take care of you.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
That story gives a razor sharp image of the nineteen
forty South. There's a controversial idea I've heard much of
my life regarding America's past, and it's problematic in a
generalization at best. If you'll permit me, I will say
something that's usually unset and it's this that the South
(07:58):
valued the individual black man but devalued the race on
a systemic level, and Northerners didn't value the individual black man,
but valued the race. And I'm being vulnerable here because
it feels weird to say that out loud, but we
see this in history, and thankfully that thing is less
(08:20):
true today than it was forty years ago. The exact
reasons are unclear, but mister Rice, who this banker knew
by name, wasn't able to get money from this bank
because he was an African American. But ironically the bankers
seemed to treat him with respect, but they'd arranged for
someone else in town to handle the black business. I'd
(08:43):
also like to note that in the early nineteen forties,
mister Ellis's family was still driving a wagon. The model
T had been around for almost four decades. Cars and
trucks were the norm. But the story continues, We're now
back with mister Ellis in the wagon.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
So we walked back down there and got in the wagon,
drove for four miles out here to Carwell, Arkansas, and
we got out of the wagon and we proceeded into
the Lindsey Boys store and there was a man standing
on the porch crying, and I was looking him up
(09:27):
and down because I had never seen a grown man cry,
so I felt like that either he had a broken
arm or somebody didn't beat him up or something. But
he was holding it up against the post, the post
to hold the porch of he was crying, so I
was that's my dad, that's the word man crying. My
dad didn't say anything. So we walked in there, and
the Lindsy guy knew my dad, and I guess he
(09:50):
knew who he's out there for. He says Rice. He says,
we got you covered. He said, anything change. My dad said, yeah,
I like to buy another meule, another cow or whatever,
few plow or whatever. He said, that's what a couple
hundred dollars, three hundred dollars. My dad said yeah, he said,
we got you covered. So we proceeded to walk back
(10:11):
out of the Lindsey Boys store and this man still
sitting there crying, and I'm looking him up and down.
Why is this man crying? I'm asking my dad. My
dad's not telling me he knew because he was listening
to what the other guys was saying. But I wasn't
listening to them. I'm wondering to what's thrown this man.
So we get in the wagon and my dad said, well,
(10:36):
the reason he's crying is because he lived on this
man's farm. And I guess you're sharecropping or whatever. And
he got his money from this from the Lindy brother
for his part, and he went in there and they
told him that the man said he couldn't stay there
any longer. Hit the move because they the man told him.
(10:56):
He says, you can't ready to your kids in school
until I get through picking my cottin And he raised
his kids in school anyway, So he had to go
home and tell his wife that they had to move.
And he didn't have no place to go, he said,
and that's why he's crying.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
The crying sharecroppers. Landowner wanted the man's kids to work
the fields until the cotton was picked, but the father
pulled them out of the fields and sent them to
school in the late summer. It's clear this man wanted
the best for his kids. He wanted him to get
an education. But it made the landowner mad and he
kicked the whole family off the land. This is the
(11:37):
kind of stuff that made many African Americans want to
leave the South, and they did in great number. It's
called the Great Migration. Let's get back in the wagon
with the young Ellis Bell.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
And of course by this time, you know it's I mean,
we got started that morning before day, going downtown. By
this time it's wed in the afternoon, it's windy, it's cold,
it's hell. And they had put a palette in the
wagon for me because they knew that I'd be took
(12:15):
it out befo. I got back so my dad put
me back there on the pallette and covered me up.
And if you ever rolled on a steel wheel wagon
over the rock road, that wheel did not miss a
rock in that road. Looked like it drove me crazy
while I was laying there until I went to sleep.
(12:36):
But anyway, that was a story I thought was worth
telling because again that's part of the hard times that
I've seen in my life. Well, we raised the hogs
(13:08):
in cattle. Like I said, it was the natural American community,
and we would get together as a community and kill hogs.
You know, we may have five or ten may would
kill hogs all day long. You know, you'd bring you
three or four up and they'd dress them and kill
them and you know, work them up. And the families
(13:30):
would get together and they would do a lot, do
the hams. And then you know they'd get together and
they'd cure them together. But you know, we raised hogs
and we raised cattle, and we had a smokehouse, and
my mother and them used to have to go to
their smokehouse and feed other people in the community. Sometimes,
(13:52):
you know, there would leave new people come into this
community that didn't have anything, didn't have anything to eat.
They could always go to their house, the smoke house,
and get a ham. She can a lot, so she
raised big garden and she'd give them a jaw. There's
a jar there. That's what Afro American people did together
(14:14):
back in those days. And I won't say they flourished,
but maybe that's how they came through hard times together
by working together. It looked like it was until integration
started taking place that people started scattering. They start not
doing his merch together, and it's been splintered. Looked like
(14:37):
to me pretty much ever since. In certain ways like that,
we didn't do that, and then a lot of people
left the country. Of course, you know, I went north,
started working in the factories and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Mister Ellis saw something interesting, tragic and complicated. It's far
beyond me to understand in its fullness. But did you
hear him say that desegregation splintered Black communities. It's clear
that segregation was a destructive cultural practice and desegregation was
a positive for society. But many now see the implementation
(15:13):
of integration brought forth many problems. Like mister Ellis saw.
It broke up many traditionally black communities and resulted in
what author sheare of Cash and described as social and
political fragmentation because it replaced community institutions that were led, supported,
and filled with Black people for community institutions that were
(15:35):
led by somebody else. Schools are the best example. Segregated
schools had black teachers and faculty, and now the black
kids went to schools without any black people and leadership
at all. And this hostility isn't speculative or exaggerated, as
evidenced by the Little Rock nine incident from September nineteen
fifty seven. I think you can see where all this
(15:58):
is going. Mister Ellis graduated from a segregated school in
nineteen fifty six, just ninety miles east of Little Rock.
But the next thing that he saw kind of blew
my mind.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
I didn't spend time crying over something that somebody didn't
want me to do. You know. I was raised up
here in Arkansas, and you know, and we passed by
the white schools all the time on our way to
the black schools, so you know, and what was hard
for me is that sometime we didn't walk almost seven
(16:36):
miles of school, and we would pass Chinese people walking
from their home to the white schools. And we would
be passing in going to the black schools.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
The rabbit hole of the South just keeps getting deeper
and deeper the more that you peer in. Arriving as
early as the eighteen seventies, there were many chineseants in
the South who came here to fill in the labor
void created by African Americans leaving after the Civil War,
and many in the South would find themselves in the
grocery business. By the mid nineteen hundreds. Do you remember
(17:14):
Bear Grease Hall of Famer Hulk Collier of Mississippi having
the neighborhood kids buy him an orange drink from the
China grocery before he would tell them stories. That's interesting.
These formative memories of mister Ellis are so powerful. But
this next one set the tone for his life. It's
a story about his mother.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
When this was an all Afro American community out here,
most people that lived out here, I didn't know about
one family that was Caucasian that lived about a mile
down the road. And there was a stir to be
told about that, and that is their name was Jones.
(17:58):
And I remember them fairly well. And one night it
was cold in the wintertime, and we had pulled all
the beds into the room where the fireplace was, and
my two sisters were sleeping at the head of the bed,
and I was sleeping at the foot of the bed,
(18:21):
and my dad mother had another bed off to the
side of that bed in the same room. And we
had a fireplace in there, and we had a frame house,
and you know, it was opening the bottom, and you know,
it took a lot to keep it warm. It was
because back in those days, that's when we had zero
(18:44):
degrees for five and six and seven days, like it's
almost unheard of now, you know, like it was back
in those days. And one night I awakened when my
dad opened the door. He said to my mother and
he says, I got the horse saddle and tied to
(19:06):
the porch, and I saw my mother. She was dressed
so bunterly tight that all I could see was like
a ball standing there, still wrapping herself. So I says
to my mother, says, where are you going? And she says,
I'm going to help missus Jones. And I thought about
(19:30):
it for a little bit. She said, I don't want
to help miss Jones, she says, having the baby. And
I said, well, missus Jones. I don't know no black
people with the last name Jones. So I said to
my mother, I says, that's a white woman. She turned
and looked at me, and I hadn't seen her face,
(19:51):
but I had saw her body being wrapped, and all
I could see was her eyes. And she says to me,
AL said, but she's a human being. And then she
walked out of the house and got on this horse.
(20:13):
And back in those days, the bridges was impassable. You
had to the horse had to go around the bridge
almost to get across him. You had to go around
in the creek. And then of course it was woods
all through here. And I we was living right over there,
and I told you it was born. And I didn't
know if she's going to come through the woods to
(20:35):
get to Missus Jones, or she's gonna try to go
around the road to get to Missus Jones. I didn't
know any of that. But anyway, I started crying because
I felt like that whatever route she took was gonna
be very dangerous, and I didn't know if i'd see
her again. So I stopped crying.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
And that was a lesson to me, you know, for
her to tell me that she was a human being.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
What a powerful story that shows the character of his
mother and father. I know we're neck deep in the
bear grease, but this next story is probably gonna make
you laugh. I wanted to know if mister Alice ever
did much hunting.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
I wasn't fishing with you know, I like to follow people,
like to do things. My dad was never a hunter.
I had an uncle.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
My cousin was Hannah.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
And they used to talk about the fun they'd have
going out of what hunt at night.
Speaker 3 (21:45):
One night they was going out coon and I went
with him. The scariest night of my life.
Speaker 4 (21:56):
Oh, I was from fridaticle falling a hole. They wouldn't
fight me and they were shooting them cool. They was
falling out of the tree. That was an experience what
I got back home, I never wanted to go again.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
That's my experiencing hunting.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
Otherwise. You know, you know there's plenty of rabbits running
around here. You know, we'd shoot one every once in
a while.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Mister Allie got a kick out of telling that story,
and so did I. But let's get back to the farm.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
See in this part of the country, this land, back
in the day wouldn't raise anything. Anything that was west
of the ridge up here wouldn't hardly grow anything. When
we picked cotton, we had knee pads because cotton wouldn't
grow two feet high, Holly, But cotton back in those
(22:59):
days was you know, and because cotten was king, they
could still make a little money by growing cotton. There
was a knee high you know in the sheds that
would be when I was a kid, that would be
knee pass all around the wall where people had to
get on their knees to pick the cotten. Well, I
(23:19):
worked very closely with my mother and my father. I
would help them, I would. I was there, chatter wherever
they went, wherever they did. I was always there, being nosy,
trying to help her in the way, you know, it
was cooking or whether it was out, you know, rowling
the horses and music. You know, I was rowling the
(23:41):
horses and music. When I had to stand on the
gate to put a bridle on them. You know, I'd
drive them to come up and get some coin, and
I'd stand up on the gate and put the bridle
on them. And uh, you know, I remember when I
was probably four years old. I guess again, I would
follow my daddy place he went. Whenever he went out
(24:03):
to feed the hogs and stuff. I'd go and he
finally built something where I could clumb up that, and
finally he put my clothes on me, and he says, okay,
you can do it by yourself. Man. Oh sure. I'd
show him how I could do it, and I was
happy to go out there early in the morning. They'd
bottle me up and put some clothes on me, and
(24:25):
I'd go feed the hogs. I was that kind of
a person. And of course that's where he used to
hide his piece round there in the cotten seed hogs,
you know, you say, the cotton seeds for the next year,
and he'd make his brand in. I knew where he
had his stash, so i'd go feed the hogs and
(24:46):
I had a jug. Did I turn up and get
me a few swags every every day? That's probably about
four and a half and one day I looked at
that jug.
Speaker 3 (24:59):
It was only fool. That's so boy, I'm in trouble now.
I don't remember.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
I drank it all up. I pulled it out, but
I didn't want him to know that. You know what,
I got three feet in a hog go back in
the house, and they'd be set at the table drinking
coffee and tea and stuff, and I'd be feeling good.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
That was something that I kept to myself.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
I didn't never tell him by.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
It, you know, mister Ellis, I think you knew better
than to be chugging your daddy's peach brandy. And what
he'd tell us later was that his dad made it
from wagon loads of peaches that he'd bring home. But
we're now at a major transition point in mister Ellis's life.
(25:48):
In the chronology of his story. He graduates high school,
but he quickly gets sucked away from the family farm.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
And I graduated in fifty six, I went away to
the Saint Louis area full of winter, and then I was
going to come back and farm. Fifty seven. Landed a
job for the winter. While they're in Saint Louis, I
was taking boys out to McDonald Douglas Aircraft where they
(26:21):
were seeking a job, and I was there transportation person
because I had a car, they didn't they have one.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
He graduated and went to Saint Louis, Missouri, in nineteen
fifty seven. While he was taking some friends to a
job interview. He ended up landing a job at a
major aircraft manufacturer, but was quickly confronted with the attitude
of the nation towards integration.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
I found out that McDonald douglas was taking in black
people because they were being asked to do it, because
they weren't hiring minority people out there, and they didn't
really want you out there, even though there was a
mandate to do it. And I found out that after
(27:09):
I was there, they wouldn't give me anything to do.
They wouldn't tell me, they wouldn't say good morning to me.
They just let me stand around out there in the shop.
And what McDonald had I used to call it fifteen
in and fifteen out. They would bring fifteen in on
(27:29):
Monday and start them for training, but on Friday they
would let fifteen go. So if you were there thirty days,
I believe it was thirty days, you could get in,
you could you could join the union, and so to
keep you from joining the union, they would take you
out of there. In other words, on Friday evening they
(27:52):
let you go. So I was watching and I was
seeing that every Friday, and I'm saying to myself, since
they're not giving me a job. They won't sign me
in to a job, but they won't give me a job.
They won't talk to me. I'm probably gonna be one
of those and shown up. They told me one Friday morning,
(28:13):
says get your belongings, and they already had a group
of black boys standing over there, and they says, go
get in that line over there, And of course, me
being visual, I saw. I knew where the supervisors were,
the general formers and people like that. I got to
know who they were. I've got to know their names.
(28:34):
I didn't know them personally, but I've heard their names
enough to know who they were. So when they asked
me to get my belongings and go and send in
that line, I broke rank and went and went to
the superintendent's office, and I asked the young lady. I says,
you know, there's Mike Golion in that said it was
(28:54):
the general forman's name. She said, no, he's out. I says,
She says, can I help you? I says yeah, I says,
I like to talk to him. I said, and I
was upstairs and I pointed to her as a big wonder.
I said, I'm standing over there with that groups of boys,
and I says, I would like to talk to him,
and she said, when he come back, i'll tell him.
(29:16):
So sure enough, about fifteen minutes he came out on
the floor and he grabbed my supervised. He didn't talk
to me, and he told my He just told my
supervitor what my name was, and my supervisor looked over
there at me, and then he begged for me to get.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
Out of the line.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
And that's how I got sieved. Otherwise i'd have been gone.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
This nineteen fifties company checked its integration box while hiring
but firing these men. Because they knew that mister Ellis
could see what was going on. They let him keep
his job, but no telling how many others were fired.
Speaker 1 (29:59):
I landed a job there and took training and smart
which was sheet metal work, and after mastering that, I
went on to become a aircraft mechanic out on the
flight line there at McDonald Douglas, and I stayed there
thirteen years.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
And anyone who's ever tried to save a family farm
knows that it takes some creativity and hard work. In
mister Ellis's case, it meant that he had to build
a career somewhere else, with the end goal of making
it back to the farm that was purchased by his
great great grandfather Joseph in eighteen eighty one, the Bell Farm.
(30:40):
There just wasn't enough money in farming to support him
and his parents right out of high school, but he
made regular trips back to Arkansas to help his dad,
but the end goal was always staying on the farm.
During his time with the aircraft company, he also earned
his pilot's license, which is an incredible feat in an
out of itself. But mister Ellis's work ethic didn't stop
(31:04):
in the aircraft industry. He started up a completely new
career while working up there.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
While there, I also took insurance courses in the evening
and started selling insurance. But in the meantime I was
almost had dual residency. I was still coming home to
help my father farm because I felt like one day
that I still might be able to come back to
(31:31):
the farm. And finally, at a point in time after
leaving McDonald Douglas, I became an insurance broker and that
gave me, you know, my own bass, so I could
be away three or four days in a row out
(31:53):
here on the farm and then go back to my
insurance business. I had a nice staff and everything. So
that was a great experience for me, and it taught
me a lot about business. Even though I only had
a high school education, I pretty well had a photostatic memory.
I didn't have to write things down. I could remember things,
(32:14):
and I could get things done. And you know, I
could go out and visit with a family and I
can remember all the kids' names and wether or that
they went to college, and all those kinds of things.
So it was a great experience. But my experience in
having a dual residency because I'd never forgot my roots.
(32:37):
Arkansas is where I was born Rokansas, where I really
wanted to be, and that's where I still am.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
From nineteen sixty five to twenty fourteen, mister Ellis ran
Bell's and Associates insurance agency and managed billions of dollars
in assets. He had to go to the city to
make money so that he could survive back here in Arkansas.
That's the difficulty with many of these rural, poverty stricken
(33:03):
states is that you got to go somewhere else if
you really want to make the money. But the thing
that stitched it together, stitched the city and his farm together,
was that he was able to fly. He was a pilot,
and he managed to buy his own plane. It was
the only way that he could run a farm and
an insurance agency out of Saint Louis. But one day
(33:25):
early in his career, he got a tip from a
crop duster that he was in serious jeopardy and it
could have cost him everything.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
And very often, you know, I would leave Kansas and
head read straight into Foyst City, or I would leave
from Chicago and head straight into Foyst City. And often
i'd come in and because I did a lot of
night flying, and that would be uh. And I used
(34:06):
to come into the Foyd City airport and I would
see cars out there, and I knew that they were
detective cars, I suppose, and I thought nothing about it.
And one day they flew They flew crop dusters and
(34:28):
stuff out of the airport in the daytime, and I
had crops and they would fly my crops and stuff
like that. And these guys knew me, they knew kind
of what I was doing. And I had seen these
guys out there, and one night I flew in there,
and when I pulled my airplane into the to the
(34:49):
parking place. They all came up to me, and when
I opened the door and stepped out, they were all
laughing and smiling and everything. And when I stepped out,
all those smiles came to a front and I wondered why,
But I didn't know. I didn't know why. But one day,
one of the pilots that was flying my crops, he
(35:11):
found out that I was in town because that was
the day that I did. I didn't. I came in
in the day, so I parked on my private runway
on the farm, didn't have lights. He came out and
he says, change your pattern, And I says, what do
you mean? He said, well, you're coming in at night
and you're disrupting their drug pick up out there, and
(35:33):
they're gonna put some drugs in your airplane and bust you.
Because when you come in, if they're plane that's delivering
their drugs can't land, he's burning up fuel and he
may not be able to get to his next stop.
So they're gonna they're gonna put a stop to you.
And that was very dishearted to know the way I
(35:54):
was working and my earnesty, you know, my not being
able to borrow money, and it was one thing, and
I'd kind of overcome that, but through skill and hard
work overcome that. But here's something now that I'm not
gonna be overcome because I'm gonna be in jail. I
(36:15):
really it really made me angry at first. And there
was some people who just couldn't understand, even from my
own people, how I was doing all of these things,
buying land, buying an airplan, farming, come in and go
on when I want to. They just see people around
it does that they do that, not even white, holly
(36:36):
white people. So I said, well, you know, I was
gonna go up there and confront the authorities about what
I was hearing. And I said to myself, boy, you're
gonna be righting the way in jail. When people be said,
I know that he was doing something wrong, finding that
airplane and doing all that stuff. We knew he was
hauling drugs. Had to be doing something. I says, no,
(36:59):
just change the pattern. So I stopped coming in at night.
I saw purposely coming in in the daytime. So I
was feel well thankful to that guy who came out
to the farm to tell me that.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
I think this is a testament to the wisdom of
mister Ellis and navigating his life in this era. Ego
could have got him into a fight that he couldn't win,
but he just changed his pattern and he beat the system.
His life is full of stories like this and him
overcoming the odds. I'd also like to note that this
man spent the first fifteen years of his life riding
(37:41):
in a wagon pulled by mules. He only had a
high school diploma, and then by middle age he owned
his own plane and would fly across the country running
a business and farm. Even from a technology aspect, wagon
to plane pretty astonishing. He did this all the while
acquiring more and more land adding to his Arkansas farm.
(38:05):
This is truly an incredible story, but I think you're
going to be surprised at the end. I now want
to understand how mister Ellis evaluated success.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
When I saw my life one year and one year
or two years later, I had a better life than
I had two years before. To me, I was always
sending some success, and it was in small increments. Sometimes
(38:39):
looked like it didn't move, sometime it did move, and
sometimes it leaf rocked. To me, that's what success it
was about. Having gone to school was about having a
little bit more money in my back and a little
bit more knowledge in my head, a little bitter outlook
on life with my mother and them having more meat
(39:02):
in the smokehouse, more hogs and a hog lot, more cattle.
Going from a wagon to a car to a truck.
To me, that was success. Where most people were dying
to get away from the country because they saw other
(39:22):
people going north looked like they was building a better
life because they came back driving a new car.
Speaker 3 (39:29):
I didn't look at.
Speaker 1 (39:31):
Having a new car as being success. I looked at
my dad having a better crop. That was the success
that I was looking for. Even as a smaller child,
I would go north for the summer some time and
spend a week or twfty days with somebody and come back.
I still had no desire to go north. I wanted
(39:55):
my success to be right here on the land. That
was what I I had looked upon as success.
Speaker 2 (40:05):
In the time period when over six million African Americans
moved out of the South to northern cities, mister Ellis
stayed home to scrap through the inherent difficulties of the
region and make it here. And at eighty seven years old.
I think we can say that he's done that. This
next story is a significant part of mister Ellis's legacy,
(40:27):
and it came from an unlikely place. You may recognize
the name Monsanto.
Speaker 1 (40:33):
I had been buying mon Santral's stock for a while,
but I've never been going to the stockholders meeting, and
I had signed up for it, but I would never go.
And my office was a couple of miles from Monsanto's headquarters.
And I happened to be in town one day and
I knew the stockholders meeting was being held. So I
(40:56):
said to myself, I think I'll go to a stockholders meeting.
So I got up and I went down there. When
I was approaching the table where you sign in, I
noticed there was some afore Americans standing around in there.
You know, I didn't know them, but they were standing
around in there, so I was cool, you know, other
(41:16):
black people here, but I didn't see many in the line,
and I didn't know what the position was there. I
guess they was in security or something, you know, And
people was kind of looking at me, kind of funny.
So I gets to the table and the lady stops
me and she looks at my condenials, and she asked
me to step aside. And I was wondering why she
(41:40):
asked me to step aside. I knew I done took
care of everything. I hadn't done this two or three
years in a row, but I hadn't been there. And
so she went back in the back, and I guess
she talked to some people because they had never seen
an A for American come through the line. So the
lady that came from the back says to me, mister Bell,
come on here. So I go on here and I
(42:01):
take my seat. They're holding Stockholds meeting and they got
a couple of Afro American people who was on the
board of Monsanto. They're sitting up there on the front
on the on the podium, and there's some other employees
setting in the audience. You know, I didn't know them,
but they were sitting here and there. You know, you
could see a black face every once in a while.
(42:21):
After the meeting was over, people who had bought stock
was testified about how well the stock had been doing
and how they was enjoining their entire retirement and their
dividings and stuff that they were getting. And I'm sitting
there listening to all of this, and something was telling
me say something. So when I got a break, I
(42:44):
got up and I said to the board, my name
was Elis bell I was I'm a fourth generation farmer
for City, Arkansas, and I says, and I read many
magazines and I see where mansanto was given to schools.
That's helping Caucasian kids, I says, But I'd never see
(43:07):
them giving to schools that's helping after American kids. And
when I say that, the CEO stood straight up and
he's talk guy.
Speaker 3 (43:18):
He's standing there and I'm still talking. And when I
finished talking, he, uh, don't you go nowhere? I want
to talk to you. So after the meeting is over, well,
he makes a v I n off that stage. I'm
(43:38):
over all right. He sets them in and we started talking.
We stayed there two hours after the meeting. Everybody was gone.
He says, I think it's a legitimate question, and I'm
gonna see if I can do something about it. And
that's how I got my non private organizations called it.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
The next thing we know, we were on our way
educating kids about agriculture in conjunction with the Universe of Missouri,
Junction of Illinois, East Saint Louis, Illinois, Bolivar County, Mississippi,
High Bluff, Arkansas. We were setting up agg classes to
(44:19):
show kids where their food was coming from and telling
how imparted there was to get involved in agriculture.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
In two thousand and seven, mister Ellis founded bell Agtech,
which for almost twenty years has helped minority high school
students find pathways into agriculture. However, there is an irony
which is sad to me, when he spoke about the
future of his own farm. I consider not putting this
(44:47):
in the story because it's deeply personal to mister Ellis,
but it's just the hard reality that isn't the beautiful
bow that we'd like to see at the end of
the story.
Speaker 1 (45:00):
Of course, the farm is not being passed on. I'm
probably the last generation of farmers. How does that make
you feel tired? At eighty seven, I don't feel like
I may find one more year of me. I'm trying
to put together something to.
Speaker 3 (45:18):
Go one more year.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
I still like to look back and said, I've still
had a good life. I've had a not a happy
life all the time, but it was it was a
you know, kind of painful, and there's some stories to
be told. You know, I've enjoyed my life. You know,
you got to have a mindset. You know, when I
(45:50):
say mindset, it gets back to that decision thing. What
decisions do you make? How do you make them? What
do you make them? Just decisions decisions. As it said,
I was always guided to do the right thing. Very
few times I wound up failing to get the job done.
(46:11):
Faith that I could get it done. You get the
Good Lord look deaft at me. You know it's me
and the Good Lord and my health. You know, I'm
trying to keep them all together.
Speaker 2 (46:26):
The complexities and challenges of the large scale row crop
agriculture of the last thirty years have seemed almost insurmountable
to small time American farmers, and though mister Ellis's great
great grandfather Joseph would now marvel at the size and
scale of the Bell Farm in twenty twenty five in
a big ag world, it's a small farm. Keeping it
(46:50):
alive this long has been a feat, not far from
a miracle, fueled by the hard work, grit, and determination
of one. What an incredible story. Thank you, mister Ellis
for who you are. I can't thank you enough for
listening to Bear, Grease and Brent's This Country Life podcast.
(47:14):
Please leave us a review on iTunes and share this
podcast with a friend. This week, keep the wild Places
wild because that's where the Bears live
To me, that was success where most people were dying
to get away from the country because they saw other
people going north look like they was building a better
life because they came back driving a new car. I
didn't look at having a new car as being success.
(00:27):
I looked at my dad having a better crop. That
was the success that I was looking for, even as
a smaller child. I wanted my success to be right
here on the land.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
On this episode, I want to introduce you to a
fourth generation soybean and rice farmer, eighty seven year old
Ellis Bell from Forest City, Arkansas. Today, he still farms
on the land purchased by his great great grandfather in
eighteen eighty one. Mister Ellis as an African American, and
many in his community left the South in what historians
(01:05):
call the Great Migration, which took place between nineteen ten
and the nineteen seventies. But mister Ellis wanted to make
a life for himself on the land that he was
born on, and with much struggle, grit, and wisdom he did.
Mister Ellis is a renaissance man. He had to be
creative to keep his farm alive, and in his career
(01:28):
he built airplanes. He was an insurance broker. He's a pilot,
but deep in his bones he's a farmer. In twenty
twenty three, he was inducted into the Arkansas Agricultural Hall
of Fame, but the future of his farm is in question.
This is an extraordinary story and I really doubt that
you're gonna want to miss this one. And Hey, this
(01:53):
week on the Meat Eater YouTube channel, my Alaskan goat
bow hunting film comes out. You should check that out.
My name is Clay nukemb and this is the Bear
(02:13):
Grease Podcast, where we'll explore things forgotten but relevant, search
for insight and unlikely places, and where we'll tell the
story of Americans who lived their lives close to the land.
Presented by FHF gear, American made purpose built hunting and
fishing gear that's designed to be as rugged as the
(02:36):
place as we explore.
Speaker 1 (02:46):
My name is Ellis bell I was born in Foyst City, Arkansas,
in nineteen thirty eight. My great great grandfather, he was
discharged in eighteen eighty three, came out after the Civil War.
They was either able to bude through whatever the government
(03:07):
program was, but my great great grandfather obtained this eighty
three acres at that time, but it's my understanding he
paid about three hundred dollars for this land.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
Mister Ellis is sitting at his dining room table in
his home built sometime around nineteen thirty, and he seemed
proud to mention that the joys were handcut by his father,
Rice Bell. Myyars perked up when I learned that in
eighteen eighty one, his great great grandfather purchased the land,
just sixteen years after the end of the Civil War.
(03:46):
Joseph Doody, that was the name of his great great grandfather,
and he moved here from Tennessee after the war, but
was never enslaved. But he lived a short life.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
My great great grandfather he passed away at and he
was like a forty three or forty four. At an
early age. Supposedly he got kicked by a mule in
the service and never recovered from it. So I've got
many many letters and things like that where my grandmother
(04:18):
was trying to get a pincheon that was given to
soldiers who had got injured in the wall, and she
was getting the pension to raise her daughter, you know,
after he after he.
Speaker 2 (04:30):
Died, Joseph Dudy died a year's long, slow death from
a mule kick. Mister Ellis's home and farm is just
outside of Forest City, in a region we called the Delta.
It's flat, fertile agricultural land influenced by the ancient flooding
(04:51):
of the Mississippi River. It's also the region of Arkansas
where the vast majority of slavery took place. There was
big ag there was a need for big labor. Like
mister Ellis, I've lived in Arkansas my whole life, and
I can testify that there are social artifacts of this
(05:12):
tragic period in American history still evident today. And if
you'll permit me to be real, I'll share with you
something that's always puzzled me. I grew up in western
Arkansas and didn't go to school with a single African
American person. I didn't know a black person growing up,
(05:32):
while some schools in eastern Arkansas in the Delta were
almost all African American. This snippet will find relevance as
we continue to tell this story. And it's interesting to
me the stories that we remember and the stories that
mister Ellis Is gonna tell us. It feels like age
(05:53):
weeds out the riff raft and by the time a
man is in his eighties, even his late eighties, the
ones that he can recall all are clearly essential and
they formed the architecture of his life. This next story
is from the nineteen forties and was formative. It was
when mister Ellis was just a child.
Speaker 1 (06:12):
And I like to tell the story when my father
told my mother. This was in March. He said, they're
getting their loans and I'm going up here to the
bank to see if I can get a loan. And
I heard them talking, and I says, can I go?
And they says, no, it's too cold to No, you
can't go. Because I like to follow my dad everywhere,
(06:36):
And so we went to bed. The next morning, my dad,
I heard him. When he got up, he put the
team together, he tied them off, came back and eat breakfast.
And I was still begging to go, so they let
me go. We drove downtown and we tied off those
(06:58):
team and we walked down to the bank, and we
walked in the lobby of the bank, and I had
never seen so many white men's in one place, and
all of my life they were all having fun. And
you know they were all there. I guess they knew
that they were going to get their money to farm
that year. And my dad we walked down into Rotunda
(07:18):
and my dad by we got about halfway in the
Bank of Metals and he says to my dad, Rice,
I can't let you have no money, he says, but
if you go out to see the Lindsey Boys, they'll
take care of you.
Speaker 2 (07:36):
That story gives a razor sharp image of the nineteen
forty South. There's a controversial idea I've heard much of
my life regarding America's past, and it's problematic in a
generalization at best. If you'll permit me, I will say
something that's usually unset and it's this that the South
(07:58):
valued the individual black man but devalued the race on
a systemic level, and Northerners didn't value the individual black man,
but valued the race. And I'm being vulnerable here because
it feels weird to say that out loud, but we
see this in history, and thankfully that thing is less
(08:20):
true today than it was forty years ago. The exact
reasons are unclear, but mister Rice, who this banker knew
by name, wasn't able to get money from this bank
because he was an African American. But ironically the bankers
seemed to treat him with respect, but they'd arranged for
someone else in town to handle the black business. I'd
(08:43):
also like to note that in the early nineteen forties,
mister Ellis's family was still driving a wagon. The model
T had been around for almost four decades. Cars and
trucks were the norm. But the story continues, We're now
back with mister Ellis in the wagon.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
So we walked back down there and got in the wagon,
drove for four miles out here to Carwell, Arkansas, and
we got out of the wagon and we proceeded into
the Lindsey Boys store and there was a man standing
on the porch crying, and I was looking him up
(09:27):
and down because I had never seen a grown man cry,
so I felt like that either he had a broken
arm or somebody didn't beat him up or something. But
he was holding it up against the post, the post
to hold the porch of he was crying, so I
was that's my dad, that's the word man crying. My
dad didn't say anything. So we walked in there, and
the Lindsy guy knew my dad, and I guess he
(09:50):
knew who he's out there for. He says Rice. He says,
we got you covered. He said, anything change. My dad said, yeah,
I like to buy another meule, another cow or whatever,
few plow or whatever. He said, that's what a couple
hundred dollars, three hundred dollars. My dad said yeah, he said,
we got you covered. So we proceeded to walk back
(10:11):
out of the Lindsey Boys store and this man still
sitting there crying, and I'm looking him up and down.
Why is this man crying? I'm asking my dad. My
dad's not telling me he knew because he was listening
to what the other guys was saying. But I wasn't
listening to them. I'm wondering to what's thrown this man.
So we get in the wagon and my dad said, well,
(10:36):
the reason he's crying is because he lived on this
man's farm. And I guess you're sharecropping or whatever. And
he got his money from this from the Lindy brother
for his part, and he went in there and they
told him that the man said he couldn't stay there
any longer. Hit the move because they the man told him.
(10:56):
He says, you can't ready to your kids in school
until I get through picking my cottin And he raised
his kids in school anyway, So he had to go
home and tell his wife that they had to move.
And he didn't have no place to go, he said,
and that's why he's crying.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
The crying sharecroppers. Landowner wanted the man's kids to work
the fields until the cotton was picked, but the father
pulled them out of the fields and sent them to
school in the late summer. It's clear this man wanted
the best for his kids. He wanted him to get
an education. But it made the landowner mad and he
kicked the whole family off the land. This is the
(11:37):
kind of stuff that made many African Americans want to
leave the South, and they did in great number. It's
called the Great Migration. Let's get back in the wagon
with the young Ellis Bell.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
And of course by this time, you know it's I mean,
we got started that morning before day, going downtown. By
this time it's wed in the afternoon, it's windy, it's cold,
it's hell. And they had put a palette in the
wagon for me because they knew that I'd be took
(12:15):
it out befo. I got back so my dad put
me back there on the pallette and covered me up.
And if you ever rolled on a steel wheel wagon
over the rock road, that wheel did not miss a
rock in that road. Looked like it drove me crazy
while I was laying there until I went to sleep.
(12:36):
But anyway, that was a story I thought was worth
telling because again that's part of the hard times that
I've seen in my life. Well, we raised the hogs
(13:08):
in cattle. Like I said, it was the natural American community,
and we would get together as a community and kill hogs.
You know, we may have five or ten may would
kill hogs all day long. You know, you'd bring you
three or four up and they'd dress them and kill
them and you know, work them up. And the families
(13:30):
would get together and they would do a lot, do
the hams. And then you know they'd get together and
they'd cure them together. But you know, we raised hogs
and we raised cattle, and we had a smokehouse, and
my mother and them used to have to go to
their smokehouse and feed other people in the community. Sometimes,
(13:52):
you know, there would leave new people come into this
community that didn't have anything, didn't have anything to eat.
They could always go to their house, the smoke house,
and get a ham. She can a lot, so she
raised big garden and she'd give them a jaw. There's
a jar there. That's what Afro American people did together
(14:14):
back in those days. And I won't say they flourished,
but maybe that's how they came through hard times together
by working together. It looked like it was until integration
started taking place that people started scattering. They start not
doing his merch together, and it's been splintered. Looked like
(14:37):
to me pretty much ever since. In certain ways like that,
we didn't do that, and then a lot of people
left the country. Of course, you know, I went north,
started working in the factories and stuff like that.
Speaker 2 (14:50):
Mister Ellis saw something interesting, tragic and complicated. It's far
beyond me to understand in its fullness. But did you
hear him say that desegregation splintered Black communities. It's clear
that segregation was a destructive cultural practice and desegregation was
a positive for society. But many now see the implementation
(15:13):
of integration brought forth many problems. Like mister Ellis saw.
It broke up many traditionally black communities and resulted in
what author sheare of Cash and described as social and
political fragmentation because it replaced community institutions that were led, supported,
and filled with Black people for community institutions that were
(15:35):
led by somebody else. Schools are the best example. Segregated
schools had black teachers and faculty, and now the black
kids went to schools without any black people and leadership
at all. And this hostility isn't speculative or exaggerated, as
evidenced by the Little Rock nine incident from September nineteen
fifty seven. I think you can see where all this
(15:58):
is going. Mister Ellis graduated from a segregated school in
nineteen fifty six, just ninety miles east of Little Rock.
But the next thing that he saw kind of blew
my mind.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
I didn't spend time crying over something that somebody didn't
want me to do. You know. I was raised up
here in Arkansas, and you know, and we passed by
the white schools all the time on our way to
the black schools, so you know, and what was hard
for me is that sometime we didn't walk almost seven
(16:36):
miles of school, and we would pass Chinese people walking
from their home to the white schools. And we would
be passing in going to the black schools.
Speaker 2 (16:51):
The rabbit hole of the South just keeps getting deeper
and deeper the more that you peer in. Arriving as
early as the eighteen seventies, there were many chineseants in
the South who came here to fill in the labor
void created by African Americans leaving after the Civil War,
and many in the South would find themselves in the
grocery business. By the mid nineteen hundreds. Do you remember
(17:14):
Bear Grease Hall of Famer Hulk Collier of Mississippi having
the neighborhood kids buy him an orange drink from the
China grocery before he would tell them stories. That's interesting.
These formative memories of mister Ellis are so powerful. But
this next one set the tone for his life. It's
a story about his mother.
Speaker 1 (17:37):
When this was an all Afro American community out here,
most people that lived out here, I didn't know about
one family that was Caucasian that lived about a mile
down the road. And there was a stir to be
told about that, and that is their name was Jones.
(17:58):
And I remember them fairly well. And one night it
was cold in the wintertime, and we had pulled all
the beds into the room where the fireplace was, and
my two sisters were sleeping at the head of the bed,
and I was sleeping at the foot of the bed,
(18:21):
and my dad mother had another bed off to the
side of that bed in the same room. And we
had a fireplace in there, and we had a frame house,
and you know, it was opening the bottom, and you know,
it took a lot to keep it warm. It was
because back in those days, that's when we had zero
(18:44):
degrees for five and six and seven days, like it's
almost unheard of now, you know, like it was back
in those days. And one night I awakened when my
dad opened the door. He said to my mother and
he says, I got the horse saddle and tied to
(19:06):
the porch, and I saw my mother. She was dressed
so bunterly tight that all I could see was like
a ball standing there, still wrapping herself. So I says
to my mother, says, where are you going? And she says,
I'm going to help missus Jones. And I thought about
(19:30):
it for a little bit. She said, I don't want
to help miss Jones, she says, having the baby. And
I said, well, missus Jones. I don't know no black
people with the last name Jones. So I said to
my mother, I says, that's a white woman. She turned
and looked at me, and I hadn't seen her face,
(19:51):
but I had saw her body being wrapped, and all
I could see was her eyes. And she says to me,
AL said, but she's a human being. And then she
walked out of the house and got on this horse.
(20:13):
And back in those days, the bridges was impassable. You
had to the horse had to go around the bridge
almost to get across him. You had to go around
in the creek. And then of course it was woods
all through here. And I we was living right over there,
and I told you it was born. And I didn't
know if she's going to come through the woods to
(20:35):
get to Missus Jones, or she's gonna try to go
around the road to get to Missus Jones. I didn't
know any of that. But anyway, I started crying because
I felt like that whatever route she took was gonna
be very dangerous, and I didn't know if i'd see
her again. So I stopped crying.
Speaker 3 (20:54):
And that was a lesson to me, you know, for
her to tell me that she was a human being.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
What a powerful story that shows the character of his
mother and father. I know we're neck deep in the
bear grease, but this next story is probably gonna make
you laugh. I wanted to know if mister Alice ever
did much hunting.
Speaker 1 (21:26):
I wasn't fishing with you know, I like to follow people,
like to do things. My dad was never a hunter.
I had an uncle.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
My cousin was Hannah.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
And they used to talk about the fun they'd have
going out of what hunt at night.
Speaker 3 (21:45):
One night they was going out coon and I went
with him. The scariest night of my life.
Speaker 4 (21:56):
Oh, I was from fridaticle falling a hole. They wouldn't
fight me and they were shooting them cool. They was
falling out of the tree. That was an experience what
I got back home, I never wanted to go again.
Speaker 3 (22:19):
That's my experiencing hunting.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
Otherwise. You know, you know there's plenty of rabbits running
around here. You know, we'd shoot one every once in
a while.
Speaker 2 (22:31):
Mister Allie got a kick out of telling that story,
and so did I. But let's get back to the farm.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
See in this part of the country, this land, back
in the day wouldn't raise anything. Anything that was west
of the ridge up here wouldn't hardly grow anything. When
we picked cotton, we had knee pads because cotton wouldn't
grow two feet high, Holly, But cotton back in those
(22:59):
days was you know, and because cotten was king, they
could still make a little money by growing cotton. There
was a knee high you know in the sheds that
would be when I was a kid, that would be
knee pass all around the wall where people had to
get on their knees to pick the cotten. Well, I
(23:19):
worked very closely with my mother and my father. I
would help them, I would. I was there, chatter wherever
they went, wherever they did. I was always there, being nosy,
trying to help her in the way, you know, it
was cooking or whether it was out, you know, rowling
the horses and music. You know, I was rowling the
(23:41):
horses and music. When I had to stand on the
gate to put a bridle on them. You know, I'd
drive them to come up and get some coin, and
I'd stand up on the gate and put the bridle
on them. And uh, you know, I remember when I
was probably four years old. I guess again, I would
follow my daddy place he went. Whenever he went out
(24:03):
to feed the hogs and stuff. I'd go and he
finally built something where I could clumb up that, and
finally he put my clothes on me, and he says, okay,
you can do it by yourself. Man. Oh sure. I'd
show him how I could do it, and I was
happy to go out there early in the morning. They'd
bottle me up and put some clothes on me, and
(24:25):
I'd go feed the hogs. I was that kind of
a person. And of course that's where he used to
hide his piece round there in the cotten seed hogs,
you know, you say, the cotton seeds for the next year,
and he'd make his brand in. I knew where he
had his stash, so i'd go feed the hogs and
(24:46):
I had a jug. Did I turn up and get
me a few swags every every day? That's probably about
four and a half and one day I looked at
that jug.
Speaker 3 (24:59):
It was only fool. That's so boy, I'm in trouble now.
I don't remember.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
I drank it all up. I pulled it out, but
I didn't want him to know that. You know what,
I got three feet in a hog go back in
the house, and they'd be set at the table drinking
coffee and tea and stuff, and I'd be feeling good.
Speaker 3 (25:21):
That was something that I kept to myself.
Speaker 1 (25:24):
I didn't never tell him by.
Speaker 2 (25:25):
It, you know, mister Ellis, I think you knew better
than to be chugging your daddy's peach brandy. And what
he'd tell us later was that his dad made it
from wagon loads of peaches that he'd bring home. But
we're now at a major transition point in mister Ellis's life.
(25:48):
In the chronology of his story. He graduates high school,
but he quickly gets sucked away from the family farm.
Speaker 1 (25:57):
And I graduated in fifty six, I went away to
the Saint Louis area full of winter, and then I was
going to come back and farm. Fifty seven. Landed a
job for the winter. While they're in Saint Louis, I
was taking boys out to McDonald Douglas Aircraft where they
(26:21):
were seeking a job, and I was there transportation person
because I had a car, they didn't they have one.
Speaker 2 (26:29):
He graduated and went to Saint Louis, Missouri, in nineteen
fifty seven. While he was taking some friends to a
job interview. He ended up landing a job at a
major aircraft manufacturer, but was quickly confronted with the attitude
of the nation towards integration.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
I found out that McDonald douglas was taking in black
people because they were being asked to do it, because
they weren't hiring minority people out there, and they didn't
really want you out there, even though there was a
mandate to do it. And I found out that after
(27:09):
I was there, they wouldn't give me anything to do.
They wouldn't tell me, they wouldn't say good morning to me.
They just let me stand around out there in the shop.
And what McDonald had I used to call it fifteen
in and fifteen out. They would bring fifteen in on
(27:29):
Monday and start them for training, but on Friday they
would let fifteen go. So if you were there thirty days,
I believe it was thirty days, you could get in,
you could you could join the union, and so to
keep you from joining the union, they would take you
out of there. In other words, on Friday evening they
(27:52):
let you go. So I was watching and I was
seeing that every Friday, and I'm saying to myself, since
they're not giving me a job. They won't sign me
in to a job, but they won't give me a job.
They won't talk to me. I'm probably gonna be one
of those and shown up. They told me one Friday morning,
(28:13):
says get your belongings, and they already had a group
of black boys standing over there, and they says, go
get in that line over there, And of course, me
being visual, I saw. I knew where the supervisors were,
the general formers and people like that. I got to
know who they were. I've got to know their names.
(28:34):
I didn't know them personally, but I've heard their names
enough to know who they were. So when they asked
me to get my belongings and go and send in
that line, I broke rank and went and went to
the superintendent's office, and I asked the young lady. I says,
you know, there's Mike Golion in that said it was
(28:54):
the general forman's name. She said, no, he's out. I says,
She says, can I help you? I says yeah, I says,
I like to talk to him. I said, and I
was upstairs and I pointed to her as a big wonder.
I said, I'm standing over there with that groups of boys,
and I says, I would like to talk to him,
and she said, when he come back, i'll tell him.
(29:16):
So sure enough, about fifteen minutes he came out on
the floor and he grabbed my supervised. He didn't talk
to me, and he told my He just told my
supervitor what my name was, and my supervisor looked over
there at me, and then he begged for me to get.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
Out of the line.
Speaker 1 (29:36):
And that's how I got sieved. Otherwise i'd have been gone.
Speaker 2 (29:43):
This nineteen fifties company checked its integration box while hiring
but firing these men. Because they knew that mister Ellis
could see what was going on. They let him keep
his job, but no telling how many others were fired.
Speaker 1 (29:59):
I landed a job there and took training and smart
which was sheet metal work, and after mastering that, I
went on to become a aircraft mechanic out on the
flight line there at McDonald Douglas, and I stayed there
thirteen years.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
And anyone who's ever tried to save a family farm
knows that it takes some creativity and hard work. In
mister Ellis's case, it meant that he had to build
a career somewhere else, with the end goal of making
it back to the farm that was purchased by his
great great grandfather Joseph in eighteen eighty one, the Bell Farm.
(30:40):
There just wasn't enough money in farming to support him
and his parents right out of high school, but he
made regular trips back to Arkansas to help his dad,
but the end goal was always staying on the farm.
During his time with the aircraft company, he also earned
his pilot's license, which is an incredible feat in an
out of itself. But mister Ellis's work ethic didn't stop
(31:04):
in the aircraft industry. He started up a completely new
career while working up there.
Speaker 1 (31:11):
While there, I also took insurance courses in the evening
and started selling insurance. But in the meantime I was
almost had dual residency. I was still coming home to
help my father farm because I felt like one day
that I still might be able to come back to
(31:31):
the farm. And finally, at a point in time after
leaving McDonald Douglas, I became an insurance broker and that
gave me, you know, my own bass, so I could
be away three or four days in a row out
(31:53):
here on the farm and then go back to my
insurance business. I had a nice staff and everything. So
that was a great experience for me, and it taught
me a lot about business. Even though I only had
a high school education, I pretty well had a photostatic memory.
I didn't have to write things down. I could remember things,
(32:14):
and I could get things done. And you know, I
could go out and visit with a family and I
can remember all the kids' names and wether or that
they went to college, and all those kinds of things.
So it was a great experience. But my experience in
having a dual residency because I'd never forgot my roots.
(32:37):
Arkansas is where I was born Rokansas, where I really
wanted to be, and that's where I still am.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
From nineteen sixty five to twenty fourteen, mister Ellis ran
Bell's and Associates insurance agency and managed billions of dollars
in assets. He had to go to the city to
make money so that he could survive back here in Arkansas.
That's the difficulty with many of these rural, poverty stricken
(33:03):
states is that you got to go somewhere else if
you really want to make the money. But the thing
that stitched it together, stitched the city and his farm together,
was that he was able to fly. He was a pilot,
and he managed to buy his own plane. It was
the only way that he could run a farm and
an insurance agency out of Saint Louis. But one day
(33:25):
early in his career, he got a tip from a
crop duster that he was in serious jeopardy and it
could have cost him everything.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
And very often, you know, I would leave Kansas and
head read straight into Foyst City, or I would leave
from Chicago and head straight into Foyst City. And often
i'd come in and because I did a lot of
night flying, and that would be uh. And I used
(34:06):
to come into the Foyd City airport and I would
see cars out there, and I knew that they were
detective cars, I suppose, and I thought nothing about it.
And one day they flew They flew crop dusters and
(34:28):
stuff out of the airport in the daytime, and I
had crops and they would fly my crops and stuff
like that. And these guys knew me, they knew kind
of what I was doing. And I had seen these
guys out there, and one night I flew in there,
and when I pulled my airplane into the to the
(34:49):
parking place. They all came up to me, and when
I opened the door and stepped out, they were all
laughing and smiling and everything. And when I stepped out,
all those smiles came to a front and I wondered why,
But I didn't know. I didn't know why. But one day,
one of the pilots that was flying my crops, he
(35:11):
found out that I was in town because that was
the day that I did. I didn't. I came in
in the day, so I parked on my private runway
on the farm, didn't have lights. He came out and
he says, change your pattern, And I says, what do
you mean? He said, well, you're coming in at night
and you're disrupting their drug pick up out there, and
(35:33):
they're gonna put some drugs in your airplane and bust you.
Because when you come in, if they're plane that's delivering
their drugs can't land, he's burning up fuel and he
may not be able to get to his next stop.
So they're gonna they're gonna put a stop to you.
And that was very dishearted to know the way I
(35:54):
was working and my earnesty, you know, my not being
able to borrow money, and it was one thing, and
I'd kind of overcome that, but through skill and hard
work overcome that. But here's something now that I'm not
gonna be overcome because I'm gonna be in jail. I
(36:15):
really it really made me angry at first. And there
was some people who just couldn't understand, even from my
own people, how I was doing all of these things,
buying land, buying an airplan, farming, come in and go
on when I want to. They just see people around
it does that they do that, not even white, holly
(36:36):
white people. So I said, well, you know, I was
gonna go up there and confront the authorities about what
I was hearing. And I said to myself, boy, you're
gonna be righting the way in jail. When people be said,
I know that he was doing something wrong, finding that
airplane and doing all that stuff. We knew he was
hauling drugs. Had to be doing something. I says, no,
(36:59):
just change the pattern. So I stopped coming in at night.
I saw purposely coming in in the daytime. So I
was feel well thankful to that guy who came out
to the farm to tell me that.
Speaker 2 (37:19):
I think this is a testament to the wisdom of
mister Ellis and navigating his life in this era. Ego
could have got him into a fight that he couldn't win,
but he just changed his pattern and he beat the system.
His life is full of stories like this and him
overcoming the odds. I'd also like to note that this
man spent the first fifteen years of his life riding
(37:41):
in a wagon pulled by mules. He only had a
high school diploma, and then by middle age he owned
his own plane and would fly across the country running
a business and farm. Even from a technology aspect, wagon
to plane pretty astonishing. He did this all the while
acquiring more and more land adding to his Arkansas farm.
(38:05):
This is truly an incredible story, but I think you're
going to be surprised at the end. I now want
to understand how mister Ellis evaluated success.
Speaker 1 (38:18):
When I saw my life one year and one year
or two years later, I had a better life than
I had two years before. To me, I was always
sending some success, and it was in small increments. Sometimes
(38:39):
looked like it didn't move, sometime it did move, and
sometimes it leaf rocked. To me, that's what success it
was about. Having gone to school was about having a
little bit more money in my back and a little
bit more knowledge in my head, a little bitter outlook
on life with my mother and them having more meat
(39:02):
in the smokehouse, more hogs and a hog lot, more cattle.
Going from a wagon to a car to a truck.
To me, that was success. Where most people were dying
to get away from the country because they saw other
(39:22):
people going north looked like they was building a better
life because they came back driving a new car.
Speaker 3 (39:29):
I didn't look at.
Speaker 1 (39:31):
Having a new car as being success. I looked at
my dad having a better crop. That was the success
that I was looking for. Even as a smaller child,
I would go north for the summer some time and
spend a week or twfty days with somebody and come back.
I still had no desire to go north. I wanted
(39:55):
my success to be right here on the land. That
was what I I had looked upon as success.
Speaker 2 (40:05):
In the time period when over six million African Americans
moved out of the South to northern cities, mister Ellis
stayed home to scrap through the inherent difficulties of the
region and make it here. And at eighty seven years old.
I think we can say that he's done that. This
next story is a significant part of mister Ellis's legacy,
(40:27):
and it came from an unlikely place. You may recognize
the name Monsanto.
Speaker 1 (40:33):
I had been buying mon Santral's stock for a while,
but I've never been going to the stockholders meeting, and
I had signed up for it, but I would never go.
And my office was a couple of miles from Monsanto's headquarters.
And I happened to be in town one day and
I knew the stockholders meeting was being held. So I
(40:56):
said to myself, I think I'll go to a stockholders meeting.
So I got up and I went down there. When
I was approaching the table where you sign in, I
noticed there was some afore Americans standing around in there.
You know, I didn't know them, but they were standing
around in there, so I was cool, you know, other
(41:16):
black people here, but I didn't see many in the line,
and I didn't know what the position was there. I
guess they was in security or something, you know, And
people was kind of looking at me, kind of funny.
So I gets to the table and the lady stops
me and she looks at my condenials, and she asked
me to step aside. And I was wondering why she
(41:40):
asked me to step aside. I knew I done took
care of everything. I hadn't done this two or three
years in a row, but I hadn't been there. And
so she went back in the back, and I guess
she talked to some people because they had never seen
an A for American come through the line. So the
lady that came from the back says to me, mister Bell,
come on here. So I go on here and I
(42:01):
take my seat. They're holding Stockholds meeting and they got
a couple of Afro American people who was on the
board of Monsanto. They're sitting up there on the front
on the on the podium, and there's some other employees
setting in the audience. You know, I didn't know them,
but they were sitting here and there. You know, you
could see a black face every once in a while.
(42:21):
After the meeting was over, people who had bought stock
was testified about how well the stock had been doing
and how they was enjoining their entire retirement and their
dividings and stuff that they were getting. And I'm sitting
there listening to all of this, and something was telling
me say something. So when I got a break, I
(42:44):
got up and I said to the board, my name
was Elis bell I was I'm a fourth generation farmer
for City, Arkansas, and I says, and I read many
magazines and I see where mansanto was given to schools.
That's helping Caucasian kids, I says, But I'd never see
(43:07):
them giving to schools that's helping after American kids. And
when I say that, the CEO stood straight up and
he's talk guy.
Speaker 3 (43:18):
He's standing there and I'm still talking. And when I
finished talking, he, uh, don't you go nowhere? I want
to talk to you. So after the meeting is over, well,
he makes a v I n off that stage. I'm
(43:38):
over all right. He sets them in and we started talking.
We stayed there two hours after the meeting. Everybody was gone.
He says, I think it's a legitimate question, and I'm
gonna see if I can do something about it. And
that's how I got my non private organizations called it.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
The next thing we know, we were on our way
educating kids about agriculture in conjunction with the Universe of Missouri,
Junction of Illinois, East Saint Louis, Illinois, Bolivar County, Mississippi,
High Bluff, Arkansas. We were setting up agg classes to
(44:19):
show kids where their food was coming from and telling
how imparted there was to get involved in agriculture.
Speaker 2 (44:27):
In two thousand and seven, mister Ellis founded bell Agtech,
which for almost twenty years has helped minority high school
students find pathways into agriculture. However, there is an irony
which is sad to me, when he spoke about the
future of his own farm. I consider not putting this
(44:47):
in the story because it's deeply personal to mister Ellis,
but it's just the hard reality that isn't the beautiful
bow that we'd like to see at the end of
the story.
Speaker 1 (45:00):
Of course, the farm is not being passed on. I'm
probably the last generation of farmers. How does that make
you feel tired? At eighty seven, I don't feel like
I may find one more year of me. I'm trying
to put together something to.
Speaker 3 (45:18):
Go one more year.
Speaker 1 (45:27):
I still like to look back and said, I've still
had a good life. I've had a not a happy
life all the time, but it was it was a
you know, kind of painful, and there's some stories to
be told. You know, I've enjoyed my life. You know,
you got to have a mindset. You know, when I
(45:50):
say mindset, it gets back to that decision thing. What
decisions do you make? How do you make them? What
do you make them? Just decisions decisions. As it said,
I was always guided to do the right thing. Very
few times I wound up failing to get the job done.
(46:11):
Faith that I could get it done. You get the
Good Lord look deaft at me. You know it's me
and the Good Lord and my health. You know, I'm
trying to keep them all together.
Speaker 2 (46:26):
The complexities and challenges of the large scale row crop
agriculture of the last thirty years have seemed almost insurmountable
to small time American farmers, and though mister Ellis's great
great grandfather Joseph would now marvel at the size and
scale of the Bell Farm in twenty twenty five in
a big ag world, it's a small farm. Keeping it
(46:50):
alive this long has been a feat, not far from
a miracle, fueled by the hard work, grit, and determination
of one. What an incredible story. Thank you, mister Ellis
for who you are. I can't thank you enough for
listening to Bear, Grease and Brent's This Country Life podcast.
(47:14):
Please leave us a review on iTunes and share this
podcast with a friend. This week, keep the wild Places
wild because that's where the Bears live
Host
Clay Newcomb
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