Belonging: A Culture of Place (24 page)

Feminist movement with its focus on recovering women’s history and telling women’s stories was the social and political context where the demand that women reclaim our individual and collective voice was linked to an appreciation for difference, for vernacular culture. It was impossible to conjure the voices of female ancestors and not hear in their stories, their words the nuances of the Kentucky hills, the strong accents of folk speech, the hidden roots of old English and Appalachian cadences. To return to the voice of the primal mother, I had to return to my own vernacular Kentucky speech. The voice I never used in the college environment was the voice that was needed to reaffirm my connections to homeplace.

Kentucky as the homeplace of my mind and heart is both real and mythic, distinct from the concrete experience of living in the bluegrass state. The Kentucky I conjured in geographical exile was always sweeter than the real life culture of the backwoods. When I left home I carried, deep and profound memories of old time religion and hardcore church going, but I did not seek out church homes in my new locations. Identifying myself with the backwoods outlaws of my growing up who eschewed any notion that the holy spirit and spirituality could be institutionalized, I claimed my spiritual practice in private away from the conventional gaze of patriarchal religion and father god.

As my writing career developed and I became more well-known when interviewed, no one asked if I saw myself as a Kentucky writer. Writing primarily non-fiction, usually social and political critique that did not evoke a geography of place, my work was rarely seen as having a vital connection to the region of my upbringing. When I begin to write cultural criticism often using personal experience as a framework, I wrote openly about my Kentucky past but rarely did I directly identify my home state. Readers simply saw and see me as writing about “southern” roots. Perhaps, had my writing been fiction there would have been more critical acknowledgement of the role geographical location as place of origin and object constancy in the cultivation of my sensibility as a writer.

The more well-known one becomes as a thinker, as a writer, particularly if you did not begin life as a member of any privileged group, the more you are asked to explain how you became the writer you are. To me, all the years of my life growing to young womanhood in Kentucky and the years coming home represent to me the foundation of all that I have become as a critic and a writer. All the eccentric sensibility of the Kentucky backwoods, its nuances and particular flavors mixed with all the other experiences I have had make me all that I am.

Like poke, a Kentucky favorite which changes the flavor when added to turnip, collard, or mustard greens, the hillbilly culture, the backwoods ethos is that particular ingredient which shapes and forms me. It is that foundation that leads me to embrace wholeheartedly the reality that I am indeed a Kentucky writer.

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Returning to the Wound

When I began teaching at Berea College, the first short seminar focused on the work of Kentucky writer Wendell Berry. Reading and writing poetry first led me to his work. Excited to discover in my late teens a Kentucky writer whose work bespoke an interior landscape that I understood intimately, I embraced his work wholeheartedly. To read Berry writing such powerful lines as “we hurt and are hurt and have each other for healing” was to enter that space where words renew the spirit and make it possible for one to hold onto life. Once I discovered the work of Wendell Berry, I read everything he had written that I could find.

His vision of a culture of place where one makes a homeplace in a world rooted in respect for all life, earth and community, where there is spiritual grounding and aesthetic celebration of beauty, where there is a pure enjoyment of simple pleasures, was for me a guiding light. My development as intellectual, critical thinker, poet, essayist, “writer” has followed a path charted by Berry. Like Berry, I write poetry, essays, fiction, and cultural criticism. Even our movements out into the world have had a similar trajectory writing and teaching at Stanford University in California, working in New York City, ultimately returning to Kentucky — to make home forever in our native place. Twenty years separate our experiences. When Wendell returned to Kentucky and bought a small farm in the spring of 1964, I was still a typical Kentuckian, I had never been away from my native place and there was no thought in my mind then that one could live in any other place.

Reflecting on his return Wendell declares: “That return made me finally an exile from the ornamental Europeanism that still passes for culture with most Americans. What I had done caused my mind to be thrown back forcibly upon its sources: my home countryside, my own people and history… It occurred to me that there was another measure for my life than the amount or even the quality of the writing I did; a man, I thought must be judged by how willingly and meaningfully he can be present where he is, by how fully he can make himself at home in his part of the world. I began to want desperately to learn to belong to my place.” My sense of belonging in a culture of place has been profoundly shaped by the words and wisdom of Wendell Berry. He is for me and many other readers a prophetic voice. When asked in a interview if he was comfortable with being seen in this way he responded, “we all ought to be prophets in the sense that we should see the truth and tell it.”

One of the most profound truths of our nation is the entrenched racism and white supremacy that continues to inform the politics of daily life. When civil rights initiatives failed to create a program for the systematic destructions of racism both in theory and practice, many citizens of our nation just began to feel that race and racism was a topic that should simply not be openly discussed. This was not the case for Wendell Berry. Indeed, in response to civil rights struggle to end racism, he wrote
The Hidden Wound.
This is the work by Berry that I consistently teach. There is little public discourse on the subject of race and racism in the state of Kentucky. Shame based memory of both past and present domination and subjugation of black people by white people has led to a deep silence which must be continually broken if we are to ever create here in our native place a world where racism does not wound and mark all of us everyday.

The Hidden Wound
is both memoir and critical reflection on the state of race and racism. Berry contends: “It seems to me that racism could not possibly have made merely a mechanical division between the two races; at least in America it did not. It involves an emotional dynamics that has disordered the heart of the society as a whole and of every person in the society. It has made divisions not only between white people and black people, but between black men and black women, white men and white women; it has come between white people and their work, and between white people and their land. It has fragmented both our society and our minds.” To counter this fragmentation we must confront one and consistently challenge each other to do the work of ending racial domination, of ending racism within and without. Writing
The Hidden Wound
was a way for Berry to take part in civil rights struggle by both offering a more complex understanding of social relationships between black and white people formed even in the midst of intense racial apartheid.

This work is important testimony. Long before contemporary cultural studies made the study of “whiteness” a crucial discipline necessary for any complete understanding of the way in which racism has shaped our national consciousness, Berry was engaged in critical thinking about just this subject. In
The Hidden Wound
he presented a critical reading of the way in which whiteness constructed as an identity rooted in domination — the need for an exploited and oppressed other — served to distort reality for whites and blacks alike. Importantly, Berry begin his deconstruction of whiteness by examining his family history, the relationships between himself and the black folks that were a part of his childhood life in Henry County, Kentucky. He paints an intimate portrait of his relationship with two black folks who worked and lived as part of the extended community on his family land. In his remembering of social interaction with Nick Watkins and Aunt Georgie, Berry endeavors to show that dominator culture and the racial apartheid it upheld could not prevent intimacy from emerging between black and white folk. And he emphasizes that such intimacy always humanizes, even though it forms itself within a dehumanizing social framework.

Throughout his description of his childhood relations with Nick and Aunt Georgie, Berry is careful to acknowledge that white privilege may be informing his perspective, that he may be describing these two folks in ways that they would not have described themselves. And while there is no doubt that his personal reflections include at times sentimental accounts of a boyhood bond with two black folks, his intent is always to make clear to the reader their essential humanity. He wants readers to understand that despite the persistence of racism, these inter-racial social relations rooted in mutual acknowledgement, that there was more to life than race that made it possible for individual black and white folks to love one another. With the lives of these two seemingly subjugated ordinary black people as backdrop, he attempts to show readers a world of emotional intelligence and awareness powerful enough to mediate domination and make equality of longing and desire the measure of meaning and not skin color. He states: “And so I have not written at such length out of my memory of Nick and Aunt Georgie in order…in order to reexamine and to clarify what I know to be a moral resource, a part of the vital and formative legacy of my childhood. The memory of them has been one of the persistent forces in the growth of my mind. If I have struggled against the racism that I have found in myself, it has been largely because I have remembered my old sense of allegiance to them. That I have gone back to my native place, to live there mindful of its nature and its possibilities, is partly because of certain thins I learned from them of that they exemplified to me.” Significantly, the portraits Berry paints of Nick Watkins and Aunt Georgie are evocative of folks I grew up with in the segregated world of my childhood.

Berry was one of the first Kentucky writers to document in non-fiction the special oppositional consciousness of subjugated black people that I often write about. In the many essays I have written about family and community, I describe a culture of belonging where folks like Nick and Aunt Georgie are the norm. Berry acknowledges that they both had a profound engagement with the natural world, with sustainability, with a metaphysical universe that is beyond race. Indeed, he intends readers to understand that despite the power of racism to a grave extent Nick and Aunt Georgie lived an interior life of their own invention. The values and beliefs governing the world they made for themselves shaped their actions as much if not more than the imposed constraints of racial domination. As I began to remember and write about the unique black elders who had shaped my life vision, I begin to see the importance of Wendell’s documenting the lives of Nick Watkins and Aunt Georgie.

Since history has denied so many poor and disenfranchised citizens of our nation a voice, no matter their color, all contributes that document and given voice to diverse experiences are needed. I needed to place the stories of Nick and Aunt Georgie alongside my stories of Baba, Daddy Gus, Sister Ray, Daddy Jerry, and so many other black folks who farmed Kentucky land, who taught us about the importance of nature, of listening and believing in divine spirit. Our shared blackness does not mean that the stories I tell of their lives would be what they would speak if their voices were doing the telling. But it is vital that their visions — that their will to live lives informed by transcendent notions of freedom and possibility be on record. I would not be all that I am today without their witness. Wendell echoes this sentiment when he speaks of Nick and Aunt Georgie.

Significantly, as I have traveled around our nation asking folks what is the force that has mostly led them to resist domination culture, to stand against racist domination and oppression, the response is almost always the presence of love. In my critical writing on ending racism, I have talked about the role of choice, of loving justice and making a commitment based on that love. Importantly, in speaking against any notion that racism cannot be changed that it represents some cultural absolute, I have called attention to white children who early on in life refused to accept the mantle of white privilege and embrace racism. One crucial aspect of
The Hidden Wound
is Berry’s sharing of his own conviction in childhood that there was need to separate people on the race. As a child he understood and lived within the politics of racial segregation. And it was in that childhood that he learned to resist.

I am often asked by committed white folks who sincerely want to see racism end to provide them a map of what they might do. My response is always to share that it is they who must bring critical awareness to the places they live and discover there what it is they must do. Wendell narrates just such a moment, of refusing white privilege, and taking a stand for love and justice in
The Hidden Wound.
His grandmother plans a birthday party for her grandson but she does not invite Nick as the social mores of her time governed by racism would have frowned upon black and white folks socializing together formally. When the boy invites his beloved friend Nick to the party, the unease that has stirred up around him creates the awareness that he has “scratched the wound of racism” and that everyone around him feels the pain. He recalls: “It was suddenly evident to me that Nick neither would nor could come into the house and be a member of the party… If Nick has no place at my party, then I would have no place there either; my place would be where he was.” By choosing to give up white privilege, the boy was able to create a zone of mutuality beyond race where “we transcended our appointed roles.” This small act of resistance where in the boy refused to stand with racism but rather marks a path of resistance wherein he stands outside is the true meaning of solidarity. And it is the enactment of such solidarity that is racism’s undoing. No doubt that is why Wendell can testify that at that moment: “I was full of a sense of loyalty and love that clarified me to myself as nothing every had before.” When teaching
The Hidden Wound,
I ask students to think about how this simple story, the gesture of friendship, works to humanize both individual whom the enacted practice of racism would disfigure and distort. To end racism white folks who have accepted unearned white privilege must be willing to forego those rewards and stand down, expressing their solidarity with those to are the most immediate victims of racist assault and domination.