Belonging: A Culture of Place (7 page)

In my family, land was lost during hard times. Farming was looked down upon by the black elites active in racial uplift who had no more respect for agriculture than their affluent white counterparts. Contempt for the poor black farmer had become widespread in the latter part of the nineteenth century as black people begin to desire affluence. W.E.B. DuBois’ vision of the talented tenth did not include farmers. Despite his internalized racism Booker T.Washington was the black male leader who understood the importance of land ownership, of our agrarian roots. He understood that knowing how to live off the land was one way to be self-determining. While he was misguided in thinking that white paternalism was useful and benevolent, he remains one of the historical champions of the black farmer. He understood the value and importance of land ownership, of agriculture. The elite did not favor Washington’s focus on vocational training. They did not value his work with Native Americans nor his lifelong concern for the fate of poor black folk. In his autobiography,
Up from Slavery,
Washington urged black folks to choose self-reliance: “Go out and be a center, a life-giving center, as it were, to a whole community, when the opportunity comes, when you may give life where there is no life, hope where there is no hope, power where there is no power. Begin in a humble way, and work to build up institutions that will put black people on their feet.” Agriculture was one arena where Washington saw black folks excelling. Working the land was one place where he could see black folks creating a culture of belonging.

In
Rebalancing the World
Carol Lee Flinders cites these characteristics of a culture of belonging — “intimate connection with the land to which one belongs,, empathetic relationship to animals, self-restraint, custodial conservatism, deliberateness, balance, clarity, honesty, generosity, egalitarianism, mutuality, affinity for alternative modes of knowing, playfulness, and openness to Spirit.” These core values of belonging were not taught to me by teachers and professors. Certainly in graduate school and beyond it was the culture of enterprise that mattered, what we were taught would determine our success in life. At no point in my liberal arts education was farming ever mentioned. When I first went to college and named Kentucky as my native state, laughter was often the response. Stereotypes about Kentucky, about hillbillies and the like were the norm. No one talked about the Kentucky I knew most intimately. No one mentioned black farmers at Stanford University in my classes. Everywhere I journeyed the world of environmental activism was characterized by racial and class apartheid. In those locations no one ever assumed that black folks cared about land, about the fate of the earth.

Meanwhile in the small town Kentucky world of my upbringing the elders were dying and the young had no interest in farming, in land. The organic gardens, the animals raised both in the country on farms and in city limits that were a way of life for my grandparents were a legacy no one wanted to preserve. And the bounty their labor brought to our impoverished and needy world was soon forgotten. Wherever I lived I made an effort to grow vegetables, even if just in pots, to garden as tribute to the elders and the agrarian traditions they held to be sacred and as a way to hold on to those traditions. Like my maternal and paternal grandparents, I wanted to be self-reliant, to live simply. My father’s father had worked land in the country, sharecropping. From him I learned much about farming and rural life. My maternal grandparents lived in city limits as though they were living in the country. They all believed in the dignity of labor. They all taught that the earth was sacred.

No one talked about the earth as our mother. They did not divide the world into the neat dualistic gendered categories that are common strategies both in reformist feminist movement and in environmental activism. The earth, they taught me, like all of nature, could be life giving but it could also threaten and take life, hence the need for respect for the power of one’s natural habitat. Both grandparents owned land. Like Booker T.Washington, they understood that black folks who had their “forty acres and a mule” or even just their one acre could sustain their lives by growing food, by creating shelter that was not mortgaged. Baba and Daddy Gus, my maternal grandparents, were radically opposed to any notion of social and racial uplift that meant black folks would lead us away from respect for the land, that would lead us to imitate the social mores of affluent whites. They understood the way white supremacy and its concomitant racial hierarchies led to the dehumanization of black life.

To them it was important to create one’s own culture — a culture of belonging rooted in the earth. And in this way they shared a common belief system with that of anarchist poor white folks. Lots of poor Kentuckians black and white never embraced the renegade beliefs of the backwoods. But for those po’ folks who did, they lived with a different set of values. And contrary to negative stereotypes those oppositional ways of thinking, those different values were more often than not life sustaining. In
Dreaming the Dark
feminist activist Starhawk shares this powerful insight: “When we really understand that the earth is alive, and know ourselves as part of that life, we are called to live our lives with integrity, to make our actions match our beliefs, to take responsibility for creating what we would have manifest, to do the work of healing.” These were the values taught to me by my agrarian ancestors. It is their wisdom that informs my efforts to call attention to the restorative nature of our relationship to nature. Collective healing for black folks in the diaspora can happen only as we remember in ways that move us to action our agrarian past.

Individual black folk who live in rural communities, who live on land, who are committed to living simply, must make our voices heard. Healing begins with self-determination in relation to the body that is the earth and the body that is our flesh. Most black people live in ways that threaten to shorten our life, eating fast foods, suffering from illnesses that could be prevented with proper nutrition and exercise. My ancestors were chain smokers, mostly rolling their own smokes from tobacco grown locally and many of them were hard drinkers on the weekends. Yet they ate right, worked hard, and exercised everyday. Most of them lived past seventy. We have yet to have movements for black self-determination that focus on our relation to nature and the role natural environments can play in resistance struggle. As the diverse histories of black farmers are uncovered, we will begin to document and learn. Many voices from the past tell us about agriculture and farming in autobiographical work that may on the surface offer no hint that there is documentation of our agrarian history contained within those pages. Anthropologist Carol Stack offers information about black farmers in
Call To Home: me: African Americans Reclaim the Rural South
explaining: “After the Civil War, beginning with no capital or equity of any kind, freedmen began working to assemble parcels of land. By 1920 more than 900,000 black Americans, all but a handful of them in the South, were classified as farm operators, representing about 20 percent of southern farmers… One-fourth of black farmers were true landowners, controlling a total of 15 million acres of farmland.” Stack documents the way in which black folks struggled and worked to own land, even if that land would simply a small farm, averaging, Stack reports “one-third the acreage of white farms.”

Reading the autobiography of an African-American midwife in the deep South whose family lived off the land and were able to live well during hard times served as a catalyst compelling me to think and write about growing up in rural southern culture. Much of what we hear about that past is framed around discussion of racist exploitation and oppression. Little is written about the joy black folks experienced living in harmony with nature. In her new book,
We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For,
Alice Walker recalls: “I remember distinctly the joy I witnessed on the faces of my parents and grandparents as they savored the sweet odor of spring soil or the fresh liveliness of wind.” It is because we remember the joy that we call each other to accountability in reclaiming that space of agency where we know we are more than our pain, where we experience our interdependency, our oneness with all life.

Alice Walker contends: “Looking about at the wreck and ruin of America, which all our forced, unpaid labor over five centuries was unable to avert, we cannot help wanting our people who have suffered so grievously and held the faith so long, to at last experience lives of freedom, lives of joy. And so those of us chosen by Life to blaze different trails than the ones forced on our ancestors have explored the known universe in search of that which brings the most peace, self-acceptance and liberation. We have found much to inspire us in Nature. In the sheer persistence and wonder of Creation itself.” Reclaiming the inspiration and intention of our ancestors who acknowledged the sacredness of the earth, its power to stand as witness is vital to our contemporary survival. Again and again in slave narratives we read about black folks taking to the hills in search of freedom, moving into deep wilderness to share their sorrow with the natural habitat. We read about ways they found solace in wild things. It is no wonder that in childhood I was taught to recite scripture reminding me that nature could be an ally in all efforts to heal and renew the spirit. Listening to the words of the psalmist exclaiming: “I will lift up mine eyes until the hills from whence cometh my help.”

Seeking healing I have necessarily retuned to the Kentucky hills of my childhood, to familiar rural landscapes. It is impossible to live in the Kentucky of today and not feel sorrow about all that humans have done to decimate and destroy this land. And yet even as we grieve we must allow our sorrow to lead us into redemptive ecological activism. For me that takes myriad forms — most immediately acquiring land that will not be developed, renewing my commitment to living simply, to growing things. I cherish that bumper sticker that wisely reminds us “to live simply so that others may simply live.” Now past the age of the fifty, I return to a Kentucky where my elderly parents live. I see the beautiful neighborhoods of my childhood, the carefully tended lawns, the amazing flower gardens making even the poorest shack a place of beauty, turned into genocidal war zones as drugs destroy the heart of the community. Addiction is not about relatedness. And so it takes us away from community, from the appropriate nurturing of mind, body, and spirit. To heal our collective spiritual body the very ground we live on must be reclaimed. Significantly in his essay, “The Body and the Earth,” Wendell Berry shares this vital insight: “The body cannot be whole alone. Persons cannot be whole alone. It is wrong to think about bodily health as compatible with spiritual confusion, or cultural disorder, or with polluted air and water or an impoverished soil.” Our visionary agrarian ancestors understood this.

Tragically the power of dominator cultural to dehumanize more often than not takes precedence over or collective will to humanize. Contemporary black folks who embrace victimhood as the defining ethos of their life surrender their agency. This surrender cannot be blamed on white folks. In more dire straits, slavery and the years thereafter, black folks found ways to nurture life sustaining values. They used their imagination. They created. We must remember that wisdom to resist falling into collective despair. We must, both individually and collectively, dare to critically examine our current relationship to the earth, to nature, to ecosystems and to local and global environments.

When I examined my relationship to the rural world that I grew up in, it was clear to me that I needed to rekindle the custodial relationship to land that was a defining characteristic of my Kentucky kin. I grew up in a rural area where many black elders owned land. Some were rewarded by white employers for faithful service with the gift of an acre or two. That was often especially the case with individual black male sharecroppers who developed co-equal bonds with white bosses. Obviously, this was not the norm, but it is meaningful to register that folk can choose to move beyond the estrangement produced by exploitation and oppression to create bonds of community. Even though black farmers were more that fifty percent of the farming population as late as 1964, by 1982 farm ownership among black southerners declined. Stack offers this explanation: “As American agriculture consolidated and shook out the many poor people in its ranks, black farms went under at six times the rate of white farms. In county after county in every southern state, land that had been in black families for generations fell into the hands of white people.” And more importantly white folks who acquired land cheap, especially land previously owned by black folks, were not willing to sell land to black folk even for high prices.

Years ago I came home to my native place to give a lecture. During the question and answer time I spoke about the white supremacy that is still pervasive when it comes to the issue of land ownership in Kentucky. Calling attention to the fact that white Kentuckians were often willing to sell land to white folks coming from other states rather than sell land to Kentucky black folks. In some cases black folks may have come from families who for generations worked white owned land, but when that land came up for sale their offers to buy were refused. Certainly the black Appalachian experience has always been contested by folks who either know little about Kentucky or refuse to accept the diversity of that history and the true stories of diversity in these hills. Not far from where I live in Madison County, a black man who has lived there all his life pleads with white folks to purchase land for him, and he will pay them cash. Often those rare individual black folks who purchase farm land or land in the hills find themselves paying more than their white counterparts would pay In the old days, after slavery and reconstruction, this was called the “race tax” — “you can get it but you gotta pay more.” Your paying more reassures the racist white seller that white supremacy is still the order of the day for the white folks have shown they are smarter.