Belonging: A Culture of Place (25 page)

In
The Hidden Wound,
first published in 1968, Wendell Berry was prescient in his insightful critique of whiteness, showing himself to be among the first well known cultural critic to see and publicly name the link between white racist domination and destruction of the earth. He does not sugarcoat his critique boldly proclaiming: “…the white race in America has marketed and destroyed more of the fertility of the earth in less time than any other race that has ever lived. In my part of the country, at least, this is largely to be accounted for by the racial division of the experience of the landscape. The white man, preoccupied with the abstractions of the economic exploitation and ownership of the land, necessarily has lived on the country as a destructive force, an ecological catastrophe, because he assigned the hard labor, and in that the possibility of intimate knowledge of the land, to a people he considered racially inferior; in thus debasing labor, he destroyed the possibility of a meaningful contact with the earth.” Berry acknowledged that agrarian subjugated black folk were able to work the land and “develop resources of character and religion and art that have some resemblance to the old world.” Displaced African people found working the land to be one of the few locations where ties to their landscape of origin could be reclaimed.

In seeking freedom in the city via mass migration from the agrarian South, most black people began to embrace dominator ways of thinking about the earth. Berry contends: “The move from country to city, moreover deprives them of their competence in doing for themselves. It is no exaggeration to say that, in the country, most blacks were skilled in the arts-of-make-do and subsistence… They knew how to grow and harvest and prepare food. They knew how to gather wild fruits, nuts, and herbs. They knew how to hunt and fish… In the cities, all of this know-how was suddenly of no value… In the country, despite the limits placed upon them by segregation and poverty, they possessed a certain freedom in their ability to do things, but once they were in the city freedom was inescapably associated with the ability to buy things.” Of course, not all black folk migrated to cities. And it the memory of a sustained oppositional living sub-culture, like the one Berry describes that offers a glimmer of hope in the present day. Hence the importance of both naming black folks collective estrangement from our agrarian past and taking steps to uncover the true nature of culture of belonging as well as the naming of the trauma that took place when country life lost meaning and visibility.

This estrangement from our agrarian past, this rupture can only be healed by full acknowledgement of that legacy and the functional use of that legacy in the present. Remembering Nick Watkins and Aunt Georgie (and folks like them) is one way to intervene on our nation’s collective forgetting. One of the silent spaces in Berry’s narrative is caused by his lack of familiarity with the more developed and articulated land stewardship of Kentucky black people. He learns some of that sub-culture of blackness from his conversations with southern black writer Ernest Gaines. In Berry’s short story “Freedom,” a fictionalized account of Nick’s funeral, he shares accurate secondhand knowledge of the unique way many southern black folks approach death.

Certainly, Berry in
The Hidden Wound
shows both a keen awareness and a profound respect for the humanizing culture black folks created in the midst of adversity. Rightly, in the afterword added in 1988, twenty years after the initial publication, he still acknowledges “the freedom and prosperity of the people” cannot be seen as separate from the issue of the health of the land” and that “the psychic wounds of racism had resulted inevitably in wounds in the land, the country itself.” While Berry can state that he believed then and now “that the root of our racial problem in American is not racism” but “our inordinate desire to be superior.” Of course were Berry a student of my work, I would encourage him to think more about the ideology of white supremacy which has proven to impact the psyches of white dominators of all classes as well as people of color, especially black people so those of us who have not decolonized our minds collude in perpetuating the very structures of racist domination. It has been far easier for our society to rid itself of many of the outward manifestations of racial inequality than is has been to rid this nation of the western metaphysical dualism that gives white supremacist thinking its foundation.

As Berry foresaw separation of the races into work and living environments where there is no chance that humanizing encounters will occur, interactions that would challenge biases and stereotypes, has simply led to an intensification of white supremacist thought and action. Recent public discussion of race and racism show that this notion has advance little in the direction of ending racism. And it has become more than evident that legislation that has created greater racial equity has done little to change the nature of social relations between diverse groups of people. What has become clear is that education for critical consciousness coupled with anti-racist activism that works to change all our thinking so that we construct identity and community on the basis of openness, shared struggle, and inclusive working together offers us the continued possibility of eradicating racism. The struggle to end racial discrimination and domination must be renewed. And one of the clear means of challenging and changing racism is the will to change our interior lives, to live differently.
The Hidden Wound
continues to be a useful discussion of importance to think about race, especially when it calls all of us to think of people of color, black people as more than simply victims. It has been so detrimental for black people to internalize the notion that we are always and only victims. There is much to be gained by studying the lives of elder black people who mapped an oppositional world view, a culture of belonging that was both humanizing and spiritually uplifting, one that helped us understand that we are always more than our pain,

One of the most insightful ideas presented in
The Hidden Wound
is the acknowledgement that inter-racial living, even in flawed structures of racial hierarchy, produces a concrete reality base of knowing and potential community that will simply be there when all that white and black folks know of one another is what they find in the media, which is usually a set of stereotypical representations of both races. The love that flourished in Berry’s heart for Nick, a love so deep it would lead him to write in another fiction based on this relationship “if he loved me as I loved him, I was indeed blessed.” We should all be so blessed as to engage in social relations that are not tainted and distorted by the twisted politics of racist thought and action.

Like Wendell Berry, I believe that we can restore our hope in a world that transcends race by building communities where self-esteem comes not from feeling superior to any group but from one’s relationship to the land, to the people, to the place wherever that may be. When we create beloved community, environments that are anti-racist and inclusive, it need not matter whether those spaces are diverse. What matters is that should difference enter the world of beloved community it can find a place of welcome, a place to belong.

18
Healing Talk: A Conversation

On both days that I journeyed to Wendell Berry’s home in Port Royal, Kentucky, with my friend Timi Reedy (sustainability and holistic life consultant), the sun was shining bright and the skies were that brilliant shade of breathtaking blue. As we traveled I begin to hear a song in me head that we sang in grade school: “I look at the sky, the clouds floating by, the blue like no blue on earth could be. I greeted the air and whispered a pray, for god made this loveliness for me.” And as the song in my head ended, I repeated aloud a line of poetry “the world is charged with the grandeur of god.” Those two journeys were heavenly. I was on my way to see and talk with Wendell Berry poet, essayist, novelist, cultural critics, farmer, a fellow Kentuckian whose work has influenced my intellectual development. I was downright giddy. Our first visit there we sat with Wendell and Tanya (his wife of long years) around their kitchen table eating pound cake, drinking tea, and talking. There was much wit, laughter, and general silliness on display as well as much serious and deep thought. There was no tape recorder documenting our conversation. In the past I have often scoffed at those folks who cannot go anywhere without a camera, a recording device, video, without some instrument to document for the future. Now that I have witnessed the deep pain and grief that can be caused by loss of memory, through illness, dementia and Alzheimer’s (my mother begin to fall into a world of profound forgetfulness shortly before my first visit to the Berry household), I can acknowledge the value of documentation for a future time. I know firsthand what a blessing it is to have a record — a way to remember that goes beyond the mind.

The second time I go to Port Royal, there are only three of us present Wendell, Timi, and myself. This time we sit on the porch, talking, recording. Our conversation is not as magical as it was that first time. We are more serious. We talk together across our differences of age, race, sex. Almost twenty years separates us in time. As a black girl growing up in the Kentucky hills and later in a small segregated part of my town, my experiences were concretely different from that of Wendell’s growing up white, male, privileged. Yet, here we are, two Kentucky writers one old and one not so old finding a place of closeness despite all that would and could separate us. We do not think alike about all matters but there is so much shared understanding that our words seem to belong together as we talk in our native place. Although I could have talked with Wendell endlessly about poetry, writing, farming, beauty, I chose to speak with him about race and racism, topics that more often than not are not addressed when folks interview Wendell. It was my hope that our words would break through the profound racial silence that is present in public discourse on the subject, a silence that must be broken if we are to truly find ways to end racism.

Meeting with Wendell Berry, talking and laughing with him, I am grateful that we can transgress the boundaries that would keep us from talking together, from knowing one another boundaries of race, class, experience. Talking together, we listen and hear beneath our words the possibility of making beloved community. We experience that movement beyond race where we can talk together and let our hearts speak.

BH: Wendell, you were one of the first thinkers to insist that we cannot have health in mind, body, and spirit if we don’t have health in relationship to the land. You are one of the few elder white male writers who has consistently linked the persistence of racism to destruction of land and people reminding us that we cannot have a world of great environmentalism while we maintain the violence of white supremacy and racism.

WB: I hope we are more than a few. Your summary of the general position is about right. We are under obligation to take care of everything and you can’t be selective if you are going to take care of everything,

BH: Your book
The Hidden Wound,
continues to be a useful contribution to discussions of race and racism in our nation. It is always particularly relevant to me because you are one of the few writers of any race who understands the agrarian history of African-American folk in this nation.

WB: A writer who really understands this subject is the African-American writer Ernest Gaines.

BH: Absolutely. I have been writing about his work referring to the comments you make in the essay “American Imagination and The Civil War” where speaking about Gaines you explain to readers: “He has imagined also the community of his people as part of the life of their place and the hardships of that community. He has imagined the community’s belonging to its place, the houses that had the names of people, the flower-planted dooryards, the church, the graveyard, the shared history and experience, the shared stories, the talk of old people on the galleries in the summer evenings and the young people listening. He has also imagined the loss of these things…. He has shown   that the local, fully imagined becomes universal.” He writes so poignantly about that loss when he describes in
A Gathering of Old Men
a scene where white folks talk about plowing over the graves of black folks as a metaphor for erasing the history of the black farmer, erasing even evidence that black folks were ever stewards of the land.

WB: That they ever had an intimate relationship. Did you know that Ernie has bought land down there where he grew up. And he’s bought the church, the building that serves his church and school and moved it to this property.

BH: Yes, he’s been a role model for me and other black folks returning to the South from the North. Like me he was probably influenced by Wendell Berry. I know it was following your lead that influenced me to buy my Kentucky land, to assume a stewardship position. In my case it’s just about keeping green space, protecting the land from development. I’m not a farmer. I don’t have a green thumb, but I know I have fifteen acres of land that will be “forever green.”

WB: Well, now you may have to look at the possibility that I was influenced by Ernie. You know Ernie and I started out together.

BH: Tell me more. I didn’t know this.

WB: We were both Stegner Fellows in the writing program at Stanford in 1958. There we were, two young men, one white and one black, with all this common knowledge. We both knew things that nobody else in our class knew. Then there came a time when Ernie and I had to have a little talk and lay it all out between ourselves. You know you don’t understand everything at the start — you grow into understanding. The two people I grew to understand in that seminar were Stegner himself and Ernie.

BH: Do you still believe, Wendell, as you wrote in 1968, that the lives of white people are conditioned by the lives of black folks, that there is an ongoing “emotional dependency.”