Belonging: A Culture of Place (6 page)

We lived a happy, comfortable life to be right outa slavery times. I didn’t know no thin else but the farm so it was happy and we was happy… We couldn’t do anything else but be happy. We accept the days as they come and as they were. Day by day until you couldn’t say there was any great hard time. We overlooked it. We didn’t think nothin about it. We just went along. We had what it takes to make a good livin and go about it.

Living in modern society, without a sense of history, it has been easy for folks to forget that black people were first and foremost a people of the land, farmers. It is easy for folks to forget that at the first part of the twentieth century, the vast majority of black folks in the United States lived in the agrarian south.

Living close to nature, black folks were able to cultivate a spirit of wonder and reverence for life. Growing food to sustain life and flowers to please the soul, they were able to make a connection with the earth that was ongoing and life-affirming. They were witnesses to beauty. In Wendell Berry’s important discussion of the relationship between agriculture and human spiritual well-being,
The Unsettling of America,
he reminds us that working the land provides a location where folks can experience a sense of personal power and well-being:

We are working well when we use ourselves as the fellow creature of the plants, animals, material, and other people we are working with. Such work is unifying, healing. It brings us home from pride and despair, and places us responsibly within the human estate. It defines us as we are: not too good to work without our bodies, but too good to work poorly or joylessly or selfishly or alone.

There has been little or no work done on the psychological impact of the “great migration’ of black people from the agrarian south to the industrialized north. Toni Morrison’s novel,
The Bluest Eye,
attempts to fictively document the way moving from the agrarian south to the industrialized north wounded the psyches of black folk. Estranged from a natural world, where there was time for silence and contemplation, one of the “displaced’ black folks in Morrison’s novel, Miss Pauline, loses her capacity to experience the sensual world around her when she leaves southern soil to live in a northern city. The south is associated in her mind with a world of sensual beauty most deeply expressed in the world of nature. Indeed, when she falls in love for the first time she can name that experience only by evoking images from nature, from an agrarian world and near wilderness of natural splendor:

When I first seed Cholly, I want you to know it was like all the bits of color from that time down home when all us chil’ren went berry picking after a funeral and I put some in the pocket of my Sunday dress, and they mashed up and stained my hips. My whole dress was messed with purple, and it never did wash out. Not the dress nor me. I could feel that purple deep inside me. And that lemonade Mama used to make when Pap came in out of the fields. It be cool and yellowish, with seeds floating near the bottom. And that streak of green them June bugs made on the tress that night we left from down home. All of them colors was in me. Just sitting there.

Certainly, it must have been a profound blow to the collective psyche of black people to find themselves struggling to make a living in the industrial north away from the land. Industrial capitalism was not simply changing the nature of black work life, it altered the communal practices that were so central to survival in the agrarian south. And it fundamentally altered black people’s relationship to the body. It is the loss of any capacity to appreciate her body, despite its flaws, Miss Pauline suffers when she moves north.

The motivation for black folks to leave the south and move north was both material and psychological. Black folks wanted to be free of the overt racial harassment that was a constant in southern life and they wanted access to material goods — to a level of material well-being that was not available in the agrarian south where white folks limited access to the spheres of economic power. Of course, they found that life in the north had its own perverse hardships, that racism was just as virulent there, that it was much harder for black people to become landowners. Without the space to grow food, to commune with nature, or to mediate the starkness of poverty with the splendor of nature, black people experienced profound depression. Working in conditions where the body was regarded solely as a tool (as in slavery), a profound estrangement occurred between mind and body. The way the body was represented became more important than the body itself. It did not matter if the body was well, only that it appeared well.

Estrangement from nature and engagement in mind/body splits made it all the more possible for black people to internalize whitesupremacist assumptions about black identity. Learning contempt for blackness, southerners transplanted in the north suffered both culture shock and soul loss. Contrasting the harshness of city life with an agrarian world, the poet Waring Cuney wrote this popular poem in the 1920s, testifying to lost connection:

She does not know her beauty

She thinks her brown body

has no glory.

If she could dance naked,

Under palm trees

And see her image in the river

She would know.

But there are no palm trees on the street,

And dishwater gives back no images.

For many years, and even now, generations of black folks who migrated north to escape life in the south, returned down home in search of a spiritual nourishment, a healing, that was fundamentally connected to reaffirming one’s connection to nature, to a contemplative life where one could take time, sit on the porch, walk, fish, and catch lightning bugs. If we think of urban life as a location where black folks learned to accept a mind/body split that made it possible to abuse the body, we can better understand the growth of nihilism and despair in the black psyche. And we can know that when we talk about healing that psyche we must also speak about restoring our connection to the natural world.

Wherever black folks live we can restore our relationship to the natural world by taking the time to commune with nature, to appreciate the other creatures who share this planet with humans. Even in my small New York City apartment I can pause to listen to birds sing, find a tree and watch it. We can grow plants — herbs, flowers, vegetables. Those novels by African-American writers (women and men) that talk about black migration from the agrarian south to the industrialized north describe in detail the way folks created space to grow flowers and vegetables. Although I come from country people with serious green thumbs, I have always felt that I could not garden. In the past few years, I have found that I can do it — that many gardens will grow, that I feel connected to my ancestors when I can put a meal on the table of food I grew. I especially love to plant collard greens. They are hardy, and easy to grow.

In modern society, there is also a tendency to see no correlation between the struggle for collective black self-recovery and ecological movements that seek to restore balance to the planet by changing our relationship to nature and to natural resources. Unmindful of our history of living harmoniously on the land, many contemporary black folks see no value in supporting ecological movements, or see ecology and the struggle to end racism as competing concerns. Recalling the legacy of our ancestors who knew that the way we regard land and nature will determine the level of our self-regard, black people must reclaim a spiritual legacy where we connect our well-being to the well-being of the earth. This is a necessary dimension of healing. As Berry reminds us:

Only by restoring the broken connections can we be healed. Connection is health. And what our society does its best to disguise from us is how ordinary, how commonly attainable, health is. We lose our health — and create profitable diseases and dependencies — by failing to see the direct connections between living and eating, eating and working, working and loving. In gardening, for instance, one works with the body to feed the body. The work, if it is knowledgeable, makes for excellent food. And it makes one hungry. The work thus makes eating both nourishing and joyful, not consumptive, and keeps the eater from getting fat and weak. This health, wholeness, is a source of delight.

Collective black self-recovery takes place when we begin to renew our relationship to the earth, when we remember the way of our ancestors. When the earth is sacred to us, our bodies can also be sacred to us.

5
Reclamation and Reconciliation

Although I had been raised to think of myself as a southerner, it was not until I lived away from my native state of Kentucky that I begin to think about the geography of north and south. That thinking led me to consider the history of the African-American farmer in the United States. Coming from a long legacy of farmers, from rural America, when I left the state, I was initially consistently puzzled by the way in which black experience was named and talked about in colleges and university settings. It was always the experience of black people living in large urban cities who defined black identity. No one paid any attention to the lives of rural black folks. No matter that before the 1900s ninety percent of all black people lived in the agrarian South. In the depths of our psychohistory we have spent many years being agrarian, being at home on the earth, working the land. Cities are not our organic home. We are not an organically city people.

Even though the men and women in my family history farmed, living off the land, I was not raised to be a farmer or a farmer’s wife. My hands failed at quilting, at growing things. I could not do much with the needle or the plow. I would never follow aunts, uncles, nephews, and cousins into the tobacco fields. I would not work on the loosening floor. The hard, down and dirty work of harvesting tobacco would not determine my way of life. My destiny, the old folks constantly told me was different. They had seen it in dreams. In the stillness of the night they had spoken with god; the divine let them know my fate. While they could not tell me the nature of that fate, they were confident that it would be revealed. My elders encouraged me to accept all that was awaiting me, to claim it. Even if claiming it meant I had to leave my home, my native place. “Jesus,” they would tell me, “had to turn away from mother and father and make his own way. And was it not also my destiny to follow in the path of Jesus.”

Even though I left the land, left my old grandfathers sharecropping, plowing massa’s field just as though plantation culture had never come to an end or sometimes plowing the plots of land, the small farms that were their very own to do with as they wanted, I was taught to see myself as a custodian of the land. Daddy Jerry taught me to cherish land. From him I learned to see nature, our natural environment as a force caring for the exploited and oppressed black folk living in the culture of white supremacy. Nature was there to teach the limitations of humankind, white and black. Nature was there to show us god, to give us the mystery and the promise. These were Daddy Jerry’s lessons to me, as he lifted me onto a mule, as we walked the rows and rows of planted crops talking together.

It was sheer good fortune that I was allowed to walk hand in hand with strong black men who cared for me body and soul, men of the Kentucky backwoods, of the country. Men who would never think of hurting any living thing. These black men were gentle and full of hope. They were men who planted, who hunted, who harvested. They shared their bounty. As I take a critical look at what black males have collectively become in this nation, defeated and despairing, I recognize the psychic genocide that took place when black men were up-rooted from their agrarian legacy to work in the industrialized North. Working the land, nurturing life, caring for crops and animals, had given black men of the past a place to dream and hope beyond race and racism, beyond oppressive and cruel white power. More often than not black females worked alongside farming black men, sometimes working in the fields (there was no money for hiring workers) but most times creating homeplace. In my grandmother’s kitchen, soap was made, butter was churned, animals were skinned, crops were canned. Meat hung from the hooks in the dark pantry and potatoes were stored in baskets. Growing up, this dark place held the fruits of hard work and positive labor. It was the symbol of self-determination and survival.

There is so little written about these agrarian black folks and the culture of belonging they created. It is my destiny, my fate to remember them, to be one of the voices telling their story. We have forgotten the black farmer, both the farmer of the past, and those last remaining invisible farmers who still work the land. It has been in the interest of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy to hide and erase their story. For they are the ancestors who gave to black folk from slavery on into reconstruction an oppositional consciousness, ways to think about life that could enable one to have positive self-esteem even in the midst of harsh and brutal circumstances. Their legacy of self-determination and hard work was a living challenge to the racist stereotype that claimed blacks were lazy and unwilling to work independently without white supervision.

Black male writer Ernest Gaines recalls the spirit of these agrarian visionaries in his novel,
A Gathering of Old Men,
as he also evokes the recognition that their legacy threatened those in power and as a consequence was marked for erasure. Remembering the folks who worked the land his character Johnny Paul exclaims: “… They are trying to get rid of all proof that black people ever farmed this land with plows and mules — like if they had nothing from the starten but motor machines…. Mama and Papa worked too hard in these same fields. They mama and they papa worked too hard, too hard to have that tractor just come in that graveyard and destroy all proof that they ever was.” Within imperialist white supremacist capitalist culture in the United States there has been a concentrated effort to bury the history of the black farmer. Yet somewhere in deeds recorded, in court records, in oral history, and in rare existing written studies is the powerful truth of our agrarian legacy as African-Americans. In that history is also the story of racist white folks engaged in acts of terrorism chasing black folk off the land, destroying our homeplace. That story of modern colonialism is now being told. Recent front page articles in the Lexington, Kentucky, newspaper, the
Herald-Leader,
highlighted the historical assaults on black landowners. In a section titled “Residue of A Racist Past” Elliot Jaspin’s article, “Left Out of History Books,” tells readers that “Beginning in 1864 and continuing for about 60 years whites across the United States conducted a series of racial expulsions, driving thousands of blacks from their homes to make communities lily-white.” Black farmers, working their small farmers, were often a prime target for white folks who wanted more land.