‘With This Inheritance, I Was Getting Too Much’

CALLIE WALKER GREW up in central Virginia, where her father farmed cattle on land he’d purchased in the 1960s. Walker, 56, with bright blue eyes and a shock of salt-and-pepper hair, doesn’t know how much land her father originally owned. “It was certainly hundreds of acres,” she said, “and it may have been thousands.”

At least 100,000 church properties will be sold by 2030.

He spent 30 years paying it off, Walker told me, and succeeded, largely, by selling off a parcel of land here or there to pay the bills. When Walker’s father died in 2014, at 91, he left his three children portions of the remaining acreage; Walker’s inheritance — green, rolling farmland unfurling on either side of a small country road — totaled 134 acres.

Walker attended Princeton Theological Seminary and spent years living communally and working for racial justice. She had known since the 1990s that she wanted to use the property she would one day inherit for some kind of intentional community.

By January 2020, Walker’s intentions for the land clarified: She wanted to give it away.

From soil to subdivisions 

ACROSS THE UNITED States, roughly 2,000 acres of farmable land are lost daily to development. As an older generation of farmers retires, their children often have no interest in taking over the family farm. Seniors over the age of 65 own more than 40% of the country’s agricultural land, and many sell it off to afford retirement. According to the American Farmland Trust, more than 40% of American farmland — 370 million acres — will change hands in the next 20 years.

This massive transfer highlights disparities in access to farmland. According to one study, white people account for 96% of agricultural land ownership. Black, Indigenous, and other people of color make up more than 80% of farmworkers but own less than 2% of the nation’s farmland.

A bevy of nonprofits and organizations across the country, such as American Farmland Trust, the Farmers Land Trust, Agrarian Trust, and Nuns and Nones Land Justice Project, are working to address these intersecting crises. When Walker decided to donate her land, she reached out to Agrarian Trust, which advocates for land access for new farmers and people of color. They use land trusts to protect farmland from development and remove it from the speculative market.

Shortly after Walker began the process of donating her land, she took a leave of absence from her position as a United Methodist minister to focus on the logistics.

In 2021, Walker applied to rezone her 100 undeveloped acres into 10-acre plots, each of which would eventually have a single-family home and a mini-farm for Black farmers. A local zoning commission meeting invited public comments. Recounting this episode, Walker sighed. “There was significant opposition.” She listed their complaints: “‘Walker’s going to bring out homeless people from Richmond,’ or ‘I finally got my little piece of paradise, and I don’t want to lose it,’ or ‘This project is going to bring down property values.’ There was probably a little something about immigrants, too.”

“We are having a class conflict here as well as a race conflict,” Walker said. “I had to accept that I believe in and aspire to a kind of downward mobility that would bring down the property values with acreage this large.”

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Too-small changes 

I DROVE PAST white clapboard houses with wraparound porches, electric green hillsides, the occasional Confederate flag, and symphonies of pine to a tiny local library where Walker leads a weekly book club. A handful of older white women listened to a chapter of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, then held a wide-ranging conversation about listening to trees breathing with a stethoscope and mining landfills for resources. There were many complaints of littering and spotty recycling service.

Finally, Walker posed a question: “For those of us who are environmentally minded, do we persist even though there aren’t enough people doing this work to make a difference?”

Later, at Walker’s house as she prepared lunch with fresh chicken and greens from her land, she and I had a version of a common conversation: The climate crisis demands large-scale collective action; in its absence, we are often left conversing as we did at the library about litter, recycling, and buying less plastic.

These are not really solutions, yet it also feels crucial, in some utterly unquantifiable way, that individuals make these too-small changes in their lives. Because ultimately, we must transform the way we live; to repair the “rupture in relationship” Kimmerer described in the chapter we’d discussed.

Walker’s husband Dan joined us and listened to us talk. “What’s the old saying ... how do you eat an elephant?” He smiled, chewing his salad. “One bite at a time!”

What about church land?

IN 2019, PROTESTANT church closures officially outpaced new churches opening. Mark Elsdon, author of Gone for Good?: Negotiating the Coming Wave of Church Property Transition, estimates that at least 100,000 church properties will be sold by 2030.

Nonprofits including Partners for Sacred Places, RootedGood, and Enterprise Community Partners’ Faith-Based Development Initiative help faith communities transfer their properties in ways that align with their missions and do less harm to their surrounding communities. Some of them work at the overlap between church closures and the loss of farmable land.

When I interviewed Ian McSweeney, he was the director of Agrarian Trust (he is now co-founder and co-executive director of The Farmers Land Trust). He explained that Agrarian Trust paused its pilot program on church land transition after losing hope that large-scale solutions would gain traction across churches or denominations: “Even if the individual people in the church are well-intentioned, the systems they work within present obstacles,” McSweeney said.

McSweeney had seen greater success with individuals — people like Walker — doing the work their faith compels them to do.

Walker always knew her father intended to leave the land to his children. But for Walker, that wasn’t an option: “I don’t have kids, so I don’t have to deal with that constraint,” she said. “I have a freedom. There may be white landowners [like me] who share my sense of injustice but who might not be able to break out of those family obligations. But I am free.”

Walker told me that she had been called to this work by “the enormity of land, labor, and life theft” experienced by Black and Indigenous people in America. But she was also compelled by her faith: “The earth is the Lord’s,” she said, “and this land belongs to a creator. It has an eternity that I shouldn’t mess up.”

Rest and return 

“LAND IS A central, if not the central theme of biblical faith,” wrote biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann; the stories of the Hebrew Bible veer between “landlessness (wilderness, exile) and landedness,” he wrote, “the latter either as possession of the land, as anticipation of the land, or as grief about loss of the land.” In the Hebrew Bible, Adam and Eve are entrusted with paradise and then exiled from it. The books that follow detail the creation of a people in pursuit of a common home.

The gift of homeland in the Bible is entirely contingent on specific restrictions. One of these, shmita, was a year of release every seven years, in which farmers were required to let their fields lie fallow and are prohibited from pruning, plowing, planting, and harvesting. Any fruits were declared ownerless and returned to the commons to be picked and eaten by anyone.

Sabbath, Brueggemann wrote, “is the affirmation that people, like land, cannot be finally owned or managed.” Leviticus warns that if the land is not allowed to cycle through periods of rest and return, the Israelites will be cast out and the land would have the rest that it had been denied.

Leviticus also mandated a year of jubilee, every 50 years, in which slaves were freed and debts were erased. These years of shmita and jubilee would, as Lisa Wells wrote, “serve as a culturally imposed limit to growth.” The Israelites’ stewardship of this land — their ability to form a community within it — was entirely dependent upon these limits.

The “promised land” story I inherited growing up in the church largely ignored the fact that the land “promised” to the Israelites was not vacant or uninhabited but taken by force from the people who lived there. The interpretation that the Canaanites were descendants of Ham and had inherited Ham’s “curse,” has been used to justify all manner of racist beliefs and actions for centuries, evident still, today, in Israel’s brutal occupation of Palestine.

The promised land story reminds us that “land promise and land violence,” as Brueggemann wrote, are “twin claims that ... cannot be separated out.” Is there anything in the story of the promised land that can be redeemed? Is there anything in this inheritance that can be made, somehow, instructive? In his writing reexamining the promised land, Brueggemann used a phrase — “epistemological repentance” — that I wrote repeatedly in my notebook, as a kind of incantation.

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More than her share

WHEN I ASKED Walker about her inherited land in relation to faith and justice, she told me she would have to bumble around a bit as she came up with an answer. But her response was cogent, braiding environmental and ethical concerns rooted firmly in her rural corner of Virginia.

“With this inheritance, I was getting too much. Way more than one human person’s share. I would have to figure out how to even that out and be a good and faithful steward,” Walker said. “I see the land itself as having been a place of more injustice than justice over the past 400-ish years. This is a place where Indigenous people were run off and annihilated. I don’t know whose blood was literally spilled on this piece of land, but I know that in 1790, my county already existed in its current geographic limits. In that year, [over] 11,500 people were enslaved in Amelia County. That’s almost equal to our current total population now.”

“When I start multiplying out generations and years,” Walker said, “I think that approximately 100,000 people were born and died in Amelia County without anybody knowing their names anymore. Nobody knows where they’re buried. That’s 100,000 lives of unjust brutality and suffering. That is an unrepairable and irredeemable thing. I don’t see this land donation as living up to the word ‘reparations’ or being able to genuinely repair that kind of injustice. But I see my own heart as being moved and broken open by that kind of injustice and wanting to acknowledge it and to do what can be done to atone for it.”

Her voice wavered as she said, “Whatever blood is crying out to God for justice, I want to hear that and honor that and respond to that.”

In the end, Walker dropped her original zoning request to divide the property into several small plots. She put a 15-acre buffer between any disgruntled neighbors and two large plots, totaling roughly 75 acres, that she donated to the Central Virginia Agrarian Commons, which is working to make the land available to Black farmers.

Duron Chavis, a Black community leader, gardener, and educator, serves as the chair of the board of the Central Virginia Agrarian Commons. Chavis sees urban gardening programs in nearby cities like Fredericksburg and Richmond as incubators where beginning farmers can discern whether they’d like to try farming on a larger piece of land like Walker’s. In one interview, Chavis said, “The Agrarian Trust shows up as a collaborator to help create these liberation strategies for communities that have been marginalized.”

“Whatever blood is crying out to God for justice, I want to hear that and honor that and respond to that.”

As a founding member and secretary of the Central Virginia Agrarian Commons, Walker is working with Chavis and the rest of the board to solidify a sustainable plan for the future of the land. Walker is eager to see what comes next. She doesn’t like to say she’s ‘giving away’ her inherited land: “I think I’ve made a great investment,” she said. “We’re going to have the best neighbors ever.”

In the weeks and months after Walker’s father died, she heard stories from others in Amelia County. “Whenever people asked my dad what he intended to do with his land when he died, his answer was, ‘My son William is going to farm it. My daughter Annie’s going to sell it. And my other daughter Callie is going to give it away.’”

“I didn’t know that he’d said that,” Walker said. “When I started hearing that from people after he died, I felt like he knew me better than I knew myself.”

As Walker and I talked, I thought about the way an inheritance can be a burden. For Walker, her father’s remarks about her inheritance — that he expected her to give it away, and that he spoke about that expectation with levity and delight — were a kind of recognition. A blessing.

“He accepted me and entrusted me with the land that had been his life’s accomplishment,” Walker said. “And it all worked out exactly the way my dad predicted it would.”

In the end, what we inherit — whether it be imperfect, sacred stories, or complicated faith, or a piece of family land — might matter less than what we do with that inheritance.

At Walker’s book club, I wrote down one line we heard from Braiding Sweetgrass: “What would it be like,” Kimmerer asked, “to follow back the thread of life in everything and pay it respect? Once you start, it’s hard to stop, and you begin to feel yourself awash in gifts.”