Belonging: A Culture of Place (23 page)

I wonder how she sees me now. I wonder what she thinks of me coming home to live in Kentucky. No doubt she is certain she was right in thinking it unnatural to live away from your people and that to save your soul the best you can do is come home, even if you are coming home to die. We saw a lot of that when we were growing up. Folk who had lived in northern cities all their lives coming home to die. Surely Baba knows I have come home to live and, yes, to one day die, but hopefully no time soon.

Here, the place I have chosen to make home is known for the presence of Kentucky artisans, many of them quiltmakers. Showing my grandmother’s quilt top to neighbor and friend Alina Strand, I hear from her that she knows just the right somebody to quilt this piece for me. Listening to me share my fears, about losing this last living piece of intimate childhood shared with Baba, she assures me she understands. But she says with her blunt I know what I am talking about voice: “Give me this quilt top to give to Miss Pauline. She will know what to do with it and she will do it right.” This is a mountain woman she tells me, “who has been quilting since she was a girl. She will sew your quilt by hand. You’ll see.” I wait until my sister V. is visiting before I will hand over the quilt top. I need there to be a witness. I tell Alina: “What if I were to die and you all just forgot all about my quilt.”

When I am gone, I tell them, “this quilt has got to stay in the family somewhere. It has got to tell the story.” That’s what the older Gee’s Bend quiltmakers share that a quilt is as much a document tracing the story of lives as it a comforting cover. In her introduction to the big book about their work,
The Quilts of Gees Bend,
Alvia Wardlaw tells of the cultural geography documented in this collective story of quiltmaking: “The women of Gees’ Bend regard their quilts not only as gifts for family, but also emblems of their own unique natures — a combination of industry and ingenuity, a singular hallmark of their capabilities as homemakers.” In all ways Baba took pride in her home, from the eggs her chickens laid, the flowers in the yard, the fresh fish caught at the creek, or the quilts she made through times. It was all testimony of her artistry — her skill at self-invention, her power to be self-determining.

The day I spread out Baba’s “Star of David” quilt was just a day of happiness. It touched my soul this meeting of two grand quilters, one dead, one living, but both knowing how to breathe life into scraps of cloth. When Miss Pauline finished the quilt it was a beautiful work to behold; it brought tears to our eyes. The quilting sewn by hand was itself a work of art. It was as though each point of the star was sewn with a tender watchful caring eye. The quilting called for a conversation between the dead and the living. Like many older white women living in the Kentucky hills, Miss Pauline had little contact with black folks growing up, but with this quilt she was making a connection. She and her sisters, formed a bond with Sarah Oldham, learning her from the way she sewed, from the way she put the pieces together. Miss Pauline laughed as she shared with me the details of Baba’s character that she had gleaned from a pieced quilt top telling me “she was a strong woman — a woman who knew her own mind.” Geraldine Westbrook, one of the Gee’s Been quilters who started young testifies: “I don’t follow no pattern…. When you sit down you got to get yourself a mind of your own, figure out a way to put them together.” Feminist thinkers have only begun to look at quilting, whether individually or collectively, as conscious-raising work that is rarely created by a subjugated being. Alvia Wardlaw affirms this when she writes about the Gee’s Bend quilters creating public art declaring: “Then she has made her own statement of bold independence, almost defiant in a sense, because in the face of such near tragic epic sagas of poverty and misery, she has had the audacity to create something bright and beautiful that has never been seen before and will never be seen quite that way again and it is all hers…” Clearly this is the power of imagination, that it can transform us, that it can spark a spirit of transcendent survival.

For the spirit of self-reliance and self-determination that was a aroused and is aroused by quiltmaking, by this fusion of the practical with the artistic, stirs the imagination in ways that almost always lead to emotional awareness and emotional growth. That spirit of self-reliance often creates the social context that made survival possible, that made it is possible for there to be moments of triumph and possibility. Even though most of the older Gee’s Bend quilters talk about growing up hard, facing adversity, a great majority of them have lived a long time. And they lived into their glory. They were all hard workers who labored in the fields as consistently as they pieced quilts.

Certainly in times past most homemakers did not separate hard outdoor work on the land from the work done inside domestic households. There is much to be written about the connection between ecopsychology and the art of quilting. Almost all the elder black women who made awesome quilts that I knew growing up also worked growing gardens — food and flowers. Indeed, the quilt on my bed today is called “grandmama s flower garden.” In the history of black women quiltmakers we see an empowering imagination revealed.

Writing about the power of the imagination in an essay on the civil war, Wendell Berry emphasizes that “the particularizing force of imagination is a force of justice…. Imagination, amply living in a place, brings what we want and what we have ever closer to being the same…. If imagination is to have a real worth, to us, it needs to have a practical, an economic effect. It needs to establish us in our places with a practical respect for what is there besides ourselves. I think the highest earthly result of imagination is local adaptation. If we could learn to belong fully and truly where we live, then we would all finally be native Americans, and we would have an authentic multiculturalism.” No one spends much time talking about quilts and justice, about quilts and the uses of the imagination.. And yet the local functional use of quilts created to keep a family a warm were a major gesture or recycling, of letting nothing go to waste. This economic use of cloth was and is a important contribute to the development of sustainability. Quilts are an amazingly democratic art form. They have been created and used by folks of all classes and races. They are a grand symbol of democracy. They keep folks warm while at the same time bringing beauty and creativity into their lives. As a form of public art quilts have played a major role in projecting visions of aesthetic beauty into the lives of the poor, of those who lack economic power and privilege, who may or may not be educated, who may have no book learning.

Baba could not read or write. But you would only have known this fact of her life (it was an aspect of her childhood she spoke of with bitterness in her memory for she was forced to leave school at an early age to work in the fields), if she shared that information. The interior landscape of her world was one of constant creative engagement. She was making something. And like most Kentucky backwoods folk she could talk and talk and tell a right good story. Her stories that live are there in her quilts. Were they all collected together and shown they would reveal a culture of place carefully, imaginatively constructed.

Fortunately, the Gee’s Bend quiltmakers have received national attention and as a consequence there may be greater awareness of the artistry of quilt making in the lives of poor and working class southern black women. It is vital that attention to this culture of place not be seen as a dead or dying expression of creativity, to be treasured because it is no more. Instead it should be regarded as part of a continuum where this legacy of creativity, of using the imagination to enhance well-being, if fully honored will no doubt take new and different forms. There are individual black women quiltmakers whose work will never gain public recognition. This does not diminish its transformative power in its own isolated local culture. For whether present in a mansion or a shack, the quilt can open our eyes to beauty, to an aesthetics of possibility that is infinite.

16
On Being a Kentucky Writer

Being a Kentucky writer is for me a question of upbringing and sensibility. All the writing I have done and currently do has the particular flavor of my growing up in rural Kentucky hills as a child then later in town. This sensibility can be likened to a seasoning in food preparation. A particular herb or spice used to flavor a dish may make it distinctly different — unusual, outstanding even. Those who eat the dish may taste the difference with no clue as to where the difference is coming from. This same dish may be cooked and eaten all over the world, but prepared by diverse cooks it may have distinctive flavors that make it stand out. Like many great and good cooks, I might know what flavor makes my dish unique but never tell. In the telling it may lose it delicious seductive essence.

I begin this discussion of being a Kentucky writer with food in part because the home cooking of Rosa Bell my mother who is a great cook (even in her old age as she struggles with the loss of short term memory) nourished my body and spirit. When I first left Kentucky to live elsewhere and could not find in new places food like that I had mostly intimately known I felt utterly strange. Eating food foreign to my tastes and appetite was a constant reminder of the distinctiveness of the world I was coming from. The food I ate growing up was not known away from my home. I ate food no one in my world away from Kentucky was accustomed to eating.

Those appetites, those familiar longings so inviting to my senses could not be easily shared. I stored them. I put them away. I felt no need to talk about my hunger for familiar food. I felt no need to explain the sense of profound lack haunting me at meal time. On those rare occasions where I felt the need to explain, words were never fresh or tasty enough. They could not convey a sensibility learned mouth to mouth, heart to heat. Even now when I go to the family home Rosa Bell cooks the familiar foods — nurturing a particular body and soul, recipes handed down by generations of Kentucky women.

Geography shaped my perspective in ways that made it more complex. Coming from a rural Kentucky small town into the wide world beyond distance clarified for me the uniqueness of my bluegrass sensibility. Unlike most of my college peers I had been compelled by circumstances of birth and origins to face the intersections of geography, race, class, gender. When I left Hopkinsville, Kentucky, to attend college, geography more so than any other factor shaped my destiny. My Kentucky accent always separated me from peers. And even though it did not take long for me to change the way I talked, in my dreams I spoke in the vernacular of home place. Learning to be silent about the ways of thinking and being I had learned as a Kentucky girl, a child of the backwoods did not mean that this sensibility did not continue to be the foundation of my thoughts and actions.

Writing was the place where I could best express that sensibility without overtly calling attention to geography. Since I had been taught as an English major both in undergraduate and graduate classes that the goal of a writer was to be universal, I endeavored to keep the person “I” and the personal self out of writing, or at least buried in the writing so deep it would be difficult to find. This equation of universal with the absence of personality in writing I came to realize is a false dichotomy, for it is in calling out our specific and unique sense of who we are in that we invite that empathic identification which makes the specific also encompass the universal. During those years when I was seeking to gain affirmation from an academic elitist white (usually) male hierarchy, I allowed my self and my personal voice to be diminished by a symbolic cultural imperialism that used a false focus on being universal to mask the loud and aggressive sound of the particular world view of elitist white males.

In his fiction book,
The Language of Cannibals,
George Chesbro’s critiques dominator culture stating that “the fastest way to destroy a society is to corrupt language.” Indeed, he maintains “lies are the language of cannibals.” The dedication to truth that has been a driving force in my life and work was a value instilled in me growing up. It was an essential part of the cultural ethos of the Kentucky backwoods, of the hillbilly country folk who were my ancestors and kin. Truth was central to their resisting anarchist mindset, their rebellion against established norms. They prided themselves on their ability to cut through the false and fake to find the real authentic treasure. Rebellion against false authority was essential to freedom my backwoods kin taught me.

Yet these beliefs merely made me feel as though I was a stranger in a strange land when I left the poor and working-class world of my growing up in Kentucky to attend an elite college. There I found that folks took my concern with integrity and honesty to be naïve, just another habit of being that marked me as county and unsophisticated. Like all Kentucky folks who embraced the anarchist values of the backwoods, I considered myself an outsider even before I left my homeplace. Writing about the spiritual significance of outsiderness, Judy Lief offers her understanding of what it means to stand outside: “The outsider is ready to speak out when others are silent, ready to challenge conventional wisdom, ready to sacrifice her own comfort and reputation in the service of turning people from despair and reconnecting them with what is sacred. The outsider, through personal example, presents an alternative vision of reality, an alternative way of living your life.” While I understood how to live as an outsider in the Kentucky hills, I did not know how to survive and thrive as an outsider in a more conventional world.

Like many outsiders engaged in the arts I turned to the world of bohemian culture, of writers and artists to receive a new life map, a blueprint for how to be alternative hip, cool. That world was no more affirming of geographical outsiderness than the conservative world of conservative biases and hierarchies. Being country folk, having a “country” sensibility was as uncool in hip circles as it was in mainstream culture. Significantly, the world of hedonistic cool was as disdainful of commitment to truth, honesty, and a life of integrity as the culture of cannibals. When as poet and visual artist I found myself firmly ensconced in the world of cool, I felt the need to keep all those Kentucky based values hidden deep in my own personal and private geographical subculture.