This is Planet Money from NPR.

I was born in 1972. I am the ninth child of 11, a huge family.

Fred Wardlock grew up in Northwest Louisiana, in a tiny town called Castor.

About a mile from his parents' house was a big parcel of land that belonged to his extended family.

A lot of his family had houses there.

It has rivers, little creeks. I grew up picking corn, picking peas, picking butter beans.

It was a community, a very vibrant community.

Sometimes he'd walk from house to house to visit his relatives.

Sometimes he'd go out into the woods to explore with his brothers and sisters.

I have siblings and I could walk to a creek and walk down the creek and fish from this land.

Wardlock says it was a pretty happy childhood.

We was poor, but we just didn't know it was full.

But after high school, he was ready for something new.

Growing up in rural Louisiana as a young black man, and you're not open to the full world.

You're kind of left out of what's going on around you.

So Fred joined the army for a few years, lived in Texas, Korea, California, and he went to college.

Eventually, he settled near Washington, D.C. and got a job as a systems analyst for a publishing company.

His hometown of Castor, Louisiana seemed a long way away until the day his mother called him with some bad news.

She told us that we could possibly lose the land.

She meant the families land where Fred Wardlock's grandparents had had their farms, where he had spent his childhood fishing and exploring the woods.

That land, she said, was it risk?

It could be forced to be going to a share sale.

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