Carol Judy
American Ginseng: Local Knowledge Global Roots
Carol Judy (1949-2017) wove ginseng into a dense and vibrant meshwork connecting human and more-than-human, deep past with deep future, and local with global (some would say intergalactic).
Carol Judy (1949-2017) wove ginseng into a dense and vibrant meshwork connecting human and more-than-human, deep past with deep future, and local with global (some would say intergalactic). Born in Florida, and raised in Georgia, Carol made her way at the age of 19 to her grandfather’s home state of Tennessee where for most of her adult life she claimed Eagan, in the Clear Fork Valley, as her home. It was there that she raised her children, co-founding, with Marie Cirillo and others in the community, the Clearfork Community Institute, and there that she learned from fellow woods walkers to identify and harvest roots and herbs of the forest. Her woods walking suffused and energized her life’s work: caring for the most vulnerable in Appalachian communities – especially women, youth, and threatened and endangered species. A familiar presence at regional festivals, conferences, and demonstrations, Carol was known to many as “Forest Granny.”
“In the mountains of Eagan, Tennessee, there once lived a Mountain Granny by the name of Carol Judy.” -- Ashley McNealey, in Cawley et al. 2019. Sacred Orchards: Cherokee Lands
“I knew that local young people were really being denied chances and I knew I couldn’t do much about it by myself. But the ones that would follow me into an institution that I was helping to develop, they were the ones I would work with. And I met them digging in the woods.” -- Carol Judy, interviewed by Felix Blevin, Empyrean Research
“She taught me a lot about ginseng. She taught me basically how to protect it, and how to keep people from digging it, how to make sure that it doesn’t get dug out.” -- William Isom, East Tennessee Public Broadcasting, and Director of Black in Appalachia
“She was a root whisperer.” -- Deborah Bahr, Director, Clean Water Expected in East Tennessee (CWEET)
In many places in the Appalachian mountains, the wise female elder to whom people turned for advice, for healing, and for the delivery of babies was known as a granny woman. Carol Judy exceeded that model to become a kind of leader most urgently needed in these times, scaling up her leadership from the holler to the hood, from the local to the regional. Working with women, youth, and activists for social and environmental justice, Carol’s midwifery delivered a new kind of history out of the depleted ruins left by centuries of top-down, plantation-style, market-driven forms of development. Reaching across national borders, her practice was grounded in the forested hollows of Roses Creek to which she returned throughout her life. As Bonnie Swinford, organizer for the Sierra Club, points out, Carol’s unique identity and trajectory are beautifully encapsulated in the email address she used: forestgranny@riseup.net. Exceeding her role as a granny woman in life, Carol was honored with a photograph on the ancestor table at the wedding of Terren Sparkle Young and Joshua Outsey, whom Carol had brought together.
Carol was especially interested in leadership development for women in Central Appalachia, and worked tirelessly on programs that equipped women for jobs. This work was organically connected to Carol’s lifelong work on rural environmental issues, especially mountaintop removal, around which she developed rich, lasting relationships with activists working intersectionally to tackle issues of race, gender, and environmental injustice in Appalachia and around the world. With Michele Mockbee and Ricki Draper, Carol founded Fair Trade Appalachia and was a familiar face at “The Bird House,” a community center in Knoxville, Tennesses, selling her salves, tinctures, roots and herbs at the nearby Mama’s Market. “She always had like a gaggle of young people with her, that she was toting around,” recalled William Isom, who directs community outreach for Tennessee Public Broadcasting, as well as “Black in Appalachia.” “She would come and set up a crock pot, and cook sassafrass for hours and hours and hours, she’d cook it down to make a sassafrass tonic out of that.”
For Carol, it all boiled down to the woods. “The whole world is woods to me,” she told Felix Bivens, of Empyrean Research, in a 2016 interview: “I can deal with people only as long as the context for people is the woods.” She made her home on Roses Creek, on the Land Trust she co-founded with Marie Cirillo and others in the community, including an elderly woman named Dorothy Metzger who tutored Carol on the medicinal plants of the coves. Expanding from 84 to nearly 500 acres, the Woodland Community Land Trust fostered conditions needed to restore the forest commons that Carol saw as foundational to mountain society, ecology, and economy. “Creating a land trust and taking it off of the public market creates an endowment that you can live off of.” She drew on that endowment herself to train a cadre of followers who remember the difference that training made in their lives.
“Carol ginsenged everywhere, and she taught everyone,” recalled April Jarocki, who runs the Cyber Café at the Clearfork Community Institute. “In July of 2014 I was hit head on and totaled my car and dislocated my left elbow, so I had no job, no car, no income, and Carol was like: “You can ginseng, you can yellow root, you can sell this stuff, you can make things.” And she took me out and showed me what ginseng was and how to find it. And where all the wild yams are. . . .I found my very first ginseng root in that little patch of woods right there.”
“Because of meeting her,” reflected Adam Malle, during a conversation at the Southern Appalachian Mountain Stewards community center in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, “I started a business making salves and lip balms and candles and selling at farmers markets!”
Through value added projects such as Mountain Made, Mountain Ways, and Fair Trade Appalachia, Carol scaled outward from the rich pharmacopoeia of the cove forest toward locally-driven community development and empowerment. “I dig roots, I harvest, I learned to make oils, I learned to make salves,” she told Felix Bivens. “Mountain Made, Mountain Ways was a two-year effort, very locally, of pulling the diggers together, the harvesters together, and creating value-added products. It led to the formation of Fair Trade Appalachia by me, Ricki Draper, and Michelle Mockbee.”
As Carol saw it, persisting poverty and environmental degradation in the region are legacies of more than a century of resource extraction and the related displacement of hundreds of thousands of people from Central Appalachia. In the mid-20th century Appalachian diaspora, she saw a hemorrhage of the local knowledge and collective memory that traditionally ensured community-based practices of stewardship. “Storytelling is a way of communicating, and passing along our heritage,” Carol explained to Felix Bivens. “It doesn’t make it into the history books. When you lose 27,000 people, you lose a lot of knowledge. So just trying to regain that knowledge is part of the task.” In Carol’s view, forest species such as ginseng tether the time frame needed for rural economic development. “She believed,” wrote Michelle Mockbee, “that understanding ‘old man seng’ was a way of understanding and interpreting the entire forest as a system seven generations forward and seven generations back.”
Carol was known for her practices of conserving ginseng, tending ginseng and other medicinal herbs in small patches strewn throughout the hollers surrounding Roses Creek. She left guidelines for her apprentices, noting the plants that keep company with ginseng, like rattlesnake fern (Botrypus virginianus). “She called them ‘seng pointer,’” said Willie Dodson, Central Appalachian Field Coordinator for Appalachian Voices. “And she said they point to where the ginseng is.”
Gabby Gillespie, a community organizer in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, recalled Carol’s rule of thumb for harvesting ginseng: “She always taught me: ‘Make sure you see, in a small area, at least seven other plants before you harvest one.” Carol’s conservation included monitoring and stewarding existing populations, “ginsenging” not only for harvesting, but as a way of being in the mountains. “There was a place that we went ginsenging,” said William Isom, of Knoxville, TN, founder of Black in Appalachia. “Not to dig ginseng, but just to look and spend a couple of days on the side of this mountain.. .This area had a lot of ginseng in it that had not been touched, and at some point she just disappeared, and came back with a bagful of ginseng tops. So she went down and found this huge patch, and she just plucked the tops off of all the ginseng so that people couldn’t find them. . . .And we also transplanted one.” Asked whether he goes back to check on it, William replied, “I do and it’s still there.” Walking peoples’ land with them was one of the ways in which Carol Judy sought to heal a ruptured relationship between people and land, a practice commemorated in Ashley McNealy’s composition, sung at a memorial gathering to celebrate Carol’s life, “Walk My Land, Carol Judy.”
Carol attended U.N. meetings in New York, represented grassroots rural women at a conference in Istanbul, and co-hosted an exchange among Guatemalan and Appalachian mountain activists at the Clearfork Community Institute. She appeared at festivals, conferences, and demonstrations throughout the Appalachian region, leading workshops and speaking out about the need to build an alternative economy and way of life centered around the stewardship of the region’s biological and cultural diversity.
She was famous for her woods walks, and her thousand megawatt smile. She drove a yellow truck, had blue and purple hair, smoked “knik knik” (Uva ursi aka “bearberry”), laughed her infectious laugh, and called the earth her lover.
But her environmentalism did not stop at the earth.
“Frankly,” as she told Felix Bivens, “It is about saving humanity, not just the mountains.”
For Online interviews with Carol Judy and tributes to her, see:
Bivens, Felix. 2016. “In Memoriam: Carol Judy, Appalachian Warrior and Healer.” Empyrean Research. https://www.empyreanresearch.org/blog/caroljudy?utm_content=buffer448ba&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
Cawley, Jon C., Philip Hash, O’Hara Hash, Ashley McNealy, Mackay Pierce. 2019. Sacred Orchards: Cherokee Lands. Middletown, DE.
Save Our Cumberland Mountains (SOCM). America’s Most Endangered Mountains.
Nature and Wilderness Educators Profile: Carol Judy
“Love Earth as your lover not just mother.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ap-Zpu77WA