Belonging: A Culture of Place (27 page)

WB: I think that this is what is most authentic about
The Hidden Wound,
the understanding that Nick and Georgie were admirable people.

BH: They were people of integrity. The root meaning of integrity is wholeness. And they are the people who are my teachers who are helping me by their example to be whole. Certainly loving these two black folks helped the little boy that you were to grown into a whole man. Look at what intimacy and genuine love can do.

WB: Well, strange things happen. I had an aunt who grew up down here, and she moved to Indianapolis. She and her next door neighbor shared a black housemaid. My aunt’s neighbor always set a place for the maid, and they sat and ate dinner together.   When she came to my aunt’s house, my aunt ate and then the black woman ate. One day the neighbor was at my aunt’s house, and the maid got a call about a death in the family. She went all to pieces, as people do. My aunt just gathered her up in her arms and comforted her. The neighbor, who always ate with the maid asked, “How could you put your arms around that nigger.” It’s so mixed.

BH: This is why it has been difficult to honestly talk about race. We are surrounded by a profound silence about race. And the talk we hear, the public talk about race is usually just a pouring of gasoline onto the fire. Most if it does nothing to end racism. It’s the profound silence that we live within because we lack a language that is complex enough. Our task as people who love justice is to create that language. And to affirm those social contexts where white and black folks bond beyond race.

WB: I know there are situations in which there is mutual respect and situations where there is no coming together. The churches are still segregated.

BH: Being in the church is also about being in the body. Religion so often determines which body will be seen as sacred, as worth of life. It takes us right back to the earth you know, because in a sense that same kind of paradoxical relationship is what many Kentuckians have with the land. People, many of them Christians can say they love Kentucky… its “unbridled spirit” but then be passive in the face of mountain top removal, all the while talking about the beauty of these Kentucky hills and the majesty of our mountains. And folks outside Kentucky rarely understand. Many of them have never heard about mountain top removal. And how many Americans even think coal — where it comes from — what it is used for. That’s why every thing you write about industrial agriculture is so important. It’s why
The Unsettling of America
is still a book that opens our eyes.

WB: In an interview with Rose Berger…

BH: Oh, yes the one called “Heaven In Henry County” (shared laughter)

WB: I stated that: “It’s sort of normal to wish that things like that would not be applicable any longer and it’s discouraging to see that they stay current. You want that a book like
The Unsettling of American
would become obsolete, but it’s more relevant now than it ever was…. Look at the way we mine coal, for instance. Look at the way we’re logging the forests. These are not sustainable procedures. They’re not conservative procedures.”

BH: In
The Hidden Wound
you talk about racism as a “disorder of the heart” and that’s just a beautifully way to name this pathology. And that sense of disorder governs most of our citizen’s relationship to land, to development. Just as the internalized racism of black people makes many of us terribly complicit in this system of domination, racism cannot shield those black people who follow the ecological madness of the mainstream. Certainly black folks have been complicit with the erasure of our agrarian past. George Washington Carver is still one of the most visionary conservationist. Devoting his life to issues of sustainability, he wanted to teach everyone but especially farmer, white and black how to tend the soil, how to grow appropriate crops. He wanted to save and preserve the way of life of the small farmer, of any race.

WB: Booker T.Washington had his share of trouble attempting to teach folks to value the land. Remember the statement he made that people resented was: “Cast down your buckets where you are.”

BH: Washington was different from Carver who was a practitioner. Carver was hands on. Every day of his life he went out into nature, working with the earth. His seemingly mystic communion with nature was a way to be guided by divine spirit. Washington was led by politics. When we read Carver he’s talking about working the land but he is also talking about   finding peace in communion with nature. He’s talking about the spirit of land and what’s going to happen when we learn to use the land in way that is not destruction. Few schoolchildren today know about Carver, all that he did with the peanut and the sweet potato to create a revolution for the farmer in the deep South. Erasing this knowledge enhances white supremacy. Environmentalists, mostly white people, will say they can’t get black folk to be concerned about ecology or sustainable. But this is another racial silence. How many black people were socialized to devalue working land — to look down on farming. Whose interest has it served to deny our agrarian African-American past? At what point did we stop hearing the language of the black farmer? I had that language growing up. What’s happened to that language is systematic destruction! It has served the interest of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy to teach everyone, especially black people, that there is only world that matters — the world of the city, of buying, of things. That’s why I teach
The Hidden Wound
as often as I can because it documents that agrarian past. There is always a degree of tension in the class because there are always students who want to know why I think this book is relevant to today. I especially want students to read about the black elders you knew and loved as a boy, to read about their deep sense of integrity of being. That’s something most Americans, including black folks, don’t know about.

WB: People are ashamed of that part of our heritage and to refuse to own it is a mistake. If we every fully recognize our past, we will understand how deeply we need each other. One of the things I remember and think about is how well the agrarian black folk knew this county at night because they hunted then. No one expected them to work at night, so then they were free. They might have been hunting to put food on the table or just going out to hear their dogs run a fox. Nick always has a fox hound or two.

BH: A fox hound and a coon dog, Daddy Jerry loved to prowl the night. When the poet writes: “I have been on acquainted with the night.” I think of those escaped slaves then those black male farmers who found the dark a place to roam, a place of freedom. Daddy Jerry always tried to get his grandchildren to come out in the pitch dark “to learn the dark” — to learn its comforts and its solace. We can do that and learn to be comfortable in the darkness and beauty of our skin. No one can take that spirit of belonging away. That power in loving blackness was there in my childhood, and I learned these lessons from black and white folks. The world of shared work brought folks together across the boundaries of race. We hear these true life stories from coal miners and their family who say, “when we went down in that coal pit, it didn’t matter if you were black or white because we all black. We all come out black.” People who do not know that black men and women worked in the mines need to go to Lynch, Kentucky. Again, in this work there was a sense of the urgency of life and death. That when facing death false constructions like race cease to matter. Today we are living in a culture where that urgency is not acknowledged. People believe they can control, that can escape. They really believe they can destroy nature and succeed. They believe that they can survive and thrive. This is the insanity we live with.

WB: When black men and white men mine coal together they are in mutually useful relationships. They depend on each other. This relationship is urgent at times. If there were white and black people on the same farm, you saw the same thing. Someone, whoever he was, would get the reputation of being a good hand wherever you put him. You didn’t need to worry about him. He’d be there.

BH: And he would work long and hard. When I entered classrooms at Stanford University and I would hear stories about black men, their laziness and their corruption. I felt it was all surreal. I did   not know too many black men like the ones they described. Every black man I had known in my life up until that point had been a worker on the earth, a hard worker. As a child I was fascinated by the hands of grandfathers. These were hands plowed, planted, and prayed, hands that would protect me, that would embrace and caress when the days work was done. I would touch every crevice of these big calloused black hands. So, when I went to college and heard all these negative stereotypes about black males, I was stunned. Growing into the realization that to recover the experience of these glorious agrarian black male has deepened my work; it is my way to pay tribute. That’s why I think Kentucky is my fate. It is my calling to remember their hard work and along with others tell their stories.

WB: There is ecstasy in that kind of work. Ernest Gaines understands this. He understands what that accomplishment meant. Another thing is that agrarian black males often had their own domestic animals. If you were a black hand around this part of the country and you were living on somebody’s farm, working by the day, raising a crop, or whatever you did, you would always work with your own team. There is a complex relationship between a person and a team. It can be a transfiguring relationship when you are calling on them and your team does what you want them to do and do it beautifully. There is a great beauty involved in that. It’s horrible that there are all these bodies that are not useful for anything. When I see people on treadmills I think, if you had that human power working on a farm, you might be able to clear out a fence row.

BH: Most people imagine that black folks working the land were just victims, working for little and living a starvation life. We both know that the life of a small farmer can be terribly hard. What outsiders rarely see is the spiritual reward — the power of redemptive suffering. When you live in a capitalist culture that tells you all forms of suffering is bad (take this pill, this shot, have   this operation, make the pain go away), then you lose the mystery and magic of redemptive suffering. When her children were sold from her, Sojourner Truth could declare: “When I cried out with a mother’s grief none but Jesus heard.” She’s crying out in the woods. She’s down on her knees surrounded by a powerful natural world. And there in her moment of profound grief she finds solace. Hers is a mystical moment of union with the divine. Much of what our nation has lost is that awareness that the earth can be for us a place of spiritual renewal, not just a place to stroll in a park, or hike in a forest, or find land to mine resources, but that it is a place where we can be transformed. As black people go back to the testimony of Nick and Aunt Georgie, and black folks like them living and dead, we can remember and learn from them. Their strength came from knowing they could look at the hills and be restored — that no matter the deathly deeds of humans the earth would stand as their eternal witness.

19
Take Back the Night — Remake the Present

I have always come home to Kentucky but I was just visiting. Now I have come home to stay — to stay forever is what I dream even though I know that everyday dreams change. Coming back to my native place once or twice a year as I did for thirty years, to the eclectic strange world of small town Kentucky, I was welcomed with open arms and those same arms held me close as I was leaving. All those years Rosa Bell and Veodis, mama and daddy, would begin the slow process of saying goodbye by walking with me out the door into the yard. There they would stand watching, holding onto their farewells as a musician holds onto a musical note until its reaches an end — until those leaving and those left behind can see each other no more. All the time leaving and returning, never staying in one place, I carry in my mind’s eye this snapshot of my parents standing in one place, standing in their marriage of more than fifty years, standing in the familiar homeplace. In the world of our growing up it was deemed vital for one’s well-being to stay in one place. Poet Gary Snyder says that there comes a time in life when you have to “stop somewhere.” I have stopped here in small town Kentucky. I am staying in place.

A true home is the place — any place — where growth is nurtured, where there is constancy. As much as change is always happening whether we want it to or not, there is still a need we have for constancy. Our first home is the earth, and it will be where we come again to rest forever, our final homeplace. The red clay dirt I ate as a child, being told “you gotta eat dirt before you die,” would keep me familiar with the dying process. As though eating dirt helped make one ready to be at home in the grave. This red dirt that was the ground of my being and becoming was a color more typically found in the terrain of the southwest and other desert landscapes. Here in Kentucky, it was special, sacred, part of a magical landscape.

Giddy with delight as I walk in the wet mud in the back of my hill house, I feel as ecstatic on this Kentucky ground as I felt as a child innocently confident that the earth was a gigantic playground. Surrounded by trees (climbing trees was part of childhood fun) stumbling down the hill, I am reminded of that moment in childhood when our brother convinced me and my younger sister to lie down and curl our bodies so that like a ball he could roll us down the hill. My younger sister carries the scars from that adventure to this day. I sit at the top of a hill as I once did as a child and give thanks that this powerful experience of the healing power of nature are not just nostalgic and sentimental reflections on the past that in my present I experience this healing power once again.

When we were not roaming the hills in our childhood, we were walking and playing in meadows. An open ongoing meadow was my field of dreams as a child. In that expanse of land and magical growing things I felt sublimely blissful, able to sit for hours, to lie back and soak in the sky, to feel the coolness of earth on my back and the heat of the sun covering the front of me. This was heaven — this world of weeds, wildflowers, wild berries, and asparagus. Later in life, lines from a poem by Robert Duncan “often I am permitted to return to a meadow” evoke for memories of contentment. These words conjure for me an active nostalgia in which imaginative memory enables one to return to the state of mind evoked by a place even if you are no longer able to return to that place. Now in my Kentucky present there is always a meadow to return to, a place to sit, wonder, contemplate.