Belonging: A Culture of Place (4 page)

This spirit of resistance and revolution that has been nurtured in me by generations of Kentucky black folks who had chosen self-reliance and self-determination over dependency on any government provided the catalysts for my personal struggle for self-definition. The core of that resisting oppositional culture was an insistence on each of us being people of worth and dignity. Acknowledging one’s worth meant that one had to choose to be a person of integrity, to stand by one’s word. In my girlhood I was taught by my elders, many of whom had not been formally educated and lacked basic skills of reading and writing, that to be a person of integrity one had to always tell the truth and always assume responsibility for your actions. Particularly, my maternal grandmother Baba taught me that these values should ground my being no matter my chosen place or country. To live these values then, I would, she taught, need to learn courage — the courage of my convictions, the courage to own mistakes and make reparation, the courage to take a stand.

In retrospect I have often wondered if her insistence on my always being dedicated to truth, a woman of my word, a woman of integrity was the lesson learned by heart that would ultimately make it impossible for me to feel at home away from my native place, away from my people. Striving to live with integrity made it difficult for me to find joy in life away from the homefolk and landscape of my upbringing. And as the elders who had generously given of their stories, their wisdom, their lives to make it possible for me, and folks like me, to live well, more fully, began to pass away, it was only a matter of time before I would be called to remembrance, to carry their metaphysical legacy into the present. Among illiterate backwoods folk I had been taught values, given ethical standards by which to live my life. Those standards had little meaning in the world beyond the small Kentucky black communities I had known all my life.

If growing up in an extremely dysfunctional family of origin had made me “crazy,” surviving and making home away from my native place allowed me to draw on the positive skills I had learned during my growing up years. Kentucky was the only place I had lived where there were living elders teaching values, accepting eccentricity, letting me know by their example that to be fully self-actualized was the only way to truly heal. They revealed to me that the treasures I was seeking were already mine. All my longing to belong, to find a culture of place, all the searching I did from city to city, looking for that community of like minded souls was waiting for me in Kentucky, waiting for me to remember and reclaim. Away from my home state I often found myself among people who saw me as clinging to old fashioned values, who pitied me because I did not know how to be opportunistic or play the games that would help me get ahead.

I am reminded of this tension causing duality of desire when I read Lorraine Hansberry’s play
A Raisin in the Sun.
In the play she dramatizes the conflicts that emerge when the values of belonging, the old ways, collide with the values of enterprise, and career opportunism. Sad that her son wants to take the insurance money they have received at the death of her husband, Mama declares: “Since when did not money become life.” Walter Lee answers: “It was always life mama. We just did not know it.” No doubt masses of black folk fleeing the agrarian South for the freedom from racist exploitation and oppression they imagined would not be their lot in the industrialized North felt an ongoing conflict of values. Leaving the agrarian past meant leaving cultures of belonging and community wherein resources were shared for a culture of liberal individualism. There is very little published work that looks at the psychological turmoil black folks faced as they made serious geographical changes that brought with them new psychological demands.

Certainly when I left Kentucky with its old fashioned values about how to relate in the world, I was overwhelmed by the lack of integrity I encountered in the world away from home. Most folks scoffed at the notion that it was important to be honest, to be a person of one’s word. This lack of integrity seemed to surface all the more intensely when I moved to New York City to further my career as a writer. During these years away from my native place, I often felt confusion and despair. My fundamentalist Christian upbringing had taught me to consider the meaning of sin as missing the mark. During those times in my life I often felt I was missing the mark, failing to live in accordance with the core values I believed should be the foundation of my identity. I struggled psychologically to repair the damages to my soul inflicted by my trespasses and those who trespassed against me.

Becoming successful as a cultural critic and creative writer, away from my native place, I was consistently astounded when readers and reviewers who wrote about my work failed to mention the extent to which the culture of place I had known in Kentucky, shaped my writing and my vision. Surprised when the literary world did not acknowledge the significance of my Kentucky roots, I felt a greater necessity to articulate the role of homeplace in my artistic vision. Often critics would talk about my southern roots never naming a specific location for those roots. To some extent this failure to focus on Kentucky was linked to assumptions about whether Kentucky really was the “South.” I would tell people that growing up black in Kentucky we experienced our world as southern, as not very different from other southern places, like Alabama and Georgia. It may very well be that the culture of whiteness in Kentucky has characteristics that would not been seen as distinctly southern but certainly the subcultures black folks created and create were formed by the understanding of what it meant to be black people in the South. For all the talk about Kentucky as a border state, the culture of slavery, of racial apartheid had won the day in the state despite places in the region that had sprouted fierce assertions of civil rights for all. Certainly, reading the biographical and autobiographical memoirs of black Kentuckians one learns of a world shaped by feudal forces of imperialist white supremacist capitalism but one also learns of all the inventive ways black folks deployed to survive and thrive in the midst of exploitation and oppression.

During the more than thirty years that I did not make my home in Kentucky, much that I did not like about life in my home state (the cruel racist exploitation and oppression that continued from slavery into the present day, the disenfranchisement of poor and/or hillbilly people, the relentless assault on nature) was swiftly becoming the norm everywhere. Throughout our nation the dehumanization of poor people, the destruction of nature for capitalist development, the disenfranchisement of people of color, especially, African-Americans, the resurgence of white supremacy and with plantation culture has become an accepted way of life. Yet returning to my home state all the years that I was living away, I found there essential remnants of a culture of belonging, a sense of the meaning and vitality of geographical place.

All the positive aspects of a culture of belonging that Kentucky offered me were not present in other places. And maybe it would have been harder for me to return to my native place if I had not consistently sustained and nurtured bonds of kin and family despite living away. My last lengthy place of residence prior to becoming a resident of Kentucky was New York City. Had anyone ever predicted when I was younger that I would one day live in Manhattan I would have responded: “that is never gonna’ happen — cause I am a country girl through and through.” Concurrently, had I been told that I would return in mid-life to live in Kentucky, I would have responded: “when they send my ashes home.” New York City was one of the few places in the world where I experienced loneliness for the first time. I attributed this to the fact that there one lives in close proximity to so many people engaging in a kind of pseudo intimacy but rarely genuine making community. To live in close contact with neighbors, to see them every day but to never engage in fellowship was downright depressing. People I knew in the city often ridiculed the idea that one would want to live in community — what they loved about the city was the intense anonymity, not knowing and not being accountable. At times I did feel a sense of community in the city and endeavored to live in the West Village as though it was a small town. Bringing my Kentucky ways with me wherever I made homeplace sustained my ties to home and also made it possible for me to return home.

My decision to make my home in Kentucky did not emerge from any sentimental assumption that I would find an uncorrupted world in my native place. Rather I knew I would find there living remnants of all that was wonderful in the world of my growing up. During my time away, I would return to Kentucky and feel again a sense of belonging that I never felt elsewhere, experiencing unbroken ties to the land, to homefolk, to our vernacular speech. Even though I had lived for so many years away from my people, I was fortunate that there was a place and homefolk for me to return to, that I was welcomed. Coming back to my native place I embrace with true love the reality that “Kentucky is my fate” — my sublime home.

3
Moved by Mountains

Life is full of peaks and valleys, triumphs and tribulations. We often cause ourselves suffering, by wanting only to live in a world of valleys, a world without struggle and difficulty, a world that is flat, plain, consistent. We resist the truth of difference and diversity. We resist acknowledging that our constants exist within a framework where everything is always changing. We resist change. When we are able to face the reality of highs and lows embracing both as necessary for our full development and self-actualization, we can feel that interior well-being that is the foundation of inner peace. That life of appreciation for difference, for diversity, a life wherein one embraces suffering as central to the experience of joy is mirrored for us in our natural environment.

Earth is a diverse ecosystem. Mountains, hills, valleys, rivers and lakes, the forest are all naturally organically balanced. We have much to learn as inhabitants, as witnesses to this environment. Like the indigenous Native Americans who peopled the Americas before the rest of us, if we listen nature will teach us. However, if we think of the natural landscapes that surround us as simply, blank slates, existing for humans to act upon them according to our will then we cannot exist in life sustaining harmony with the earth. We cannot proudly declare like the biblical psalmist that “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills from whence cometh my help.” The psalmist wanted us to know that we can gain spiritual strength by simply beholding the natural world, that indeed to look upon the wonders of nature is to gaze at divine spirit. Estrangement from our natural environment is the cultural contest wherein violence against the earth is accepted and normalized. If we do not see earth as a guide to divine spirit, then we cannot see that the human spirit is violated, diminished when humans violate and destroy the natural environment.

Nothing epitomizes this violence more in our contemporary life than mountain-top removal (when the summit of the mountain is removed to extract coal) and the devastation that occurs in its wake. In Stephen Georges’s essay, “Bringing Down The Mountain,” he explains the way it all happens: “Mountaintop-removal mining is a simple process, plow the trees (but don’t bother to harvest them) and everything else living on the mountain, blast off the top (usually 800 to 1,000 feet), take out the coal, and leave a leveled area.... “Much of this mining takes place in Appalachia yet it still one of the materially poorest regions in our nature. The wealth that is in our natural world when measured in dollars is not ever abundant yet it could be so if humans were not abusing and wasting this precious resource. As George explains, the amazing natural legacy of the Appalachians is endangered “a splendorous spread of rolling hills and green mountains mirrored nowhere in the world — is being systematically destroyed so than an unsustainable way of life in our cities may continue.”

Coal is one of earth’s great gifts. As a child in Kentucky our family lived in an old Victorian style house. Its modern heating system was not effective. To stay warm during the freezing cold months we burned coal in the small fire places that were a given in this old style architecture. Watching the coal burn, feeling its hot heat, we were in our childhood filled wonder. Coal was awesome. Colored the deepest shade of black, it was both beautiful and functional. Yet it did not come into our homes and into our lives without tremendous sacrifice and risk.

In the early evenings when the neighborhood men who mined coal came home from work with their bodies covered in ash, their hats with lights, their lunch boxes, we would follow them, not understanding that they were beat, bone weary, not in the mood to play. There is no child raised in the culture of coal mining who does not come to understand the risks involved in harvesting coal. In the world of coal mining without big machinery, coal mining has a human face. Man is limited in his physical capacity. He can only extract so much. Machines can take and keep taking.

The smallest child can look upon a natural environment altered by conventional mining practice and see the difference between that process and mountaintop removal. Introducing the collection of essays in the book
Missing Mountains,
Silas House shares the way in which being raised in a cold mining family was for him a source of pride. He begins with the statement, “coal mining is a part of me” then recalls a long history of family members working in the mines. And while he speaks against mountaintop removal he shares this vital understanding: “We are not against the coal industry. Coal was mined for decades without completely devastating the entire region. My family is a part of that coal mining legacy. But mountaintop removal means that fewer and fewer people work in mining, because it is so heavily mechanized. If mountaintop removal is banned, there might actually be more mining jobs for the hard-working people of Kentucky. And beyond that the proper respect might finally be returned to the spirit of the land and its people.” Without a sustainable vision of coal usage, without education for creating consciousness that would enable our nation to break with unhealthy dependency on coal, we cannot restore the dignity both to the earth and to this rich resource.