Belonging: A Culture of Place (8 page)

When I first purchased land in the Kentucky hills, I was first a silent partner with a white male friend. We did not know whether or not the owner of the property would have been prejudiced against black folks, but we chose not to openly disclose our partnership until all transactions were completed. Many of my white friends and acquaintances who own land in the Kentucky hills are gay yet their gayness is not initially visible, and shared whiteness makes it possible for them to move into areas that remain closed to black folk because of prejudice. Liberal and progressive white folks who think it “cool” to buy land next to neighbors that are openly racist rarely understand that by doing so they are acting in collusion with the perpetuation of white supremacy. I like to imagine a time when the progressive non-black folks who own hundreds and hundreds of acres will sell small lots to black people, to diverse groups of people so that we might all live in beloved communities which honor difference. M.Scott Peck introduced his book,
The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace,
with the powerful insight that: “In and through community is the salvation of the world.” By definition, he tells us, community is inclusive.

Writing about the issue of race in
The Hidden Wound
published in 1968 and then again in the 1988 afterword, Wendell Berry reminds us that issues of freedom and prosperity cannot be separated from “the issue of the health of the land,” that “the psychic wound of racism had resulted inevitably in wounds in the land, the country itself.” My own deep wounds, the traumas of my Kentucky childhood are marked by the meeting place of family dysfunction and the disorder produced by dominator thinking and practice, the combined effect of racism, sexism, and class elitism. When I left Kentucky I hoped to leave behind the pain of these wounds. That pain stayed with me until I began to do the work of wholeness, of moving from love into greater understanding of self and community. It is love that has led me to return home, to the Kentucky hills of my childhood where I felt the greatest sense of being one with nature, of being free. In those moments I always knew that I was more than my pain. Returning to Kentucky, doing my part to be accountable to my native place, enables me to keep a sublime hold on life.

Everyday I look out at Kentucky hills. They are a constant reminder of human limitations and human possibilities. Much hurt has been done to these Kentucky hills and yet they survive. Despite devastation, and the attempts by erring humans to destroy these hills, this earth, they will remain. They will witness our demise. There is divinity here, a holy spirit that promises reconciliation.

6
To Be Whole and Holy

Reading from a Kentucky journal written before I left my homeplace to live elsewhere, I find these words: “Troubled in mind and heart I take to the hills.” The sublime happy years of my childhood were spent roaming the hills. Also in my journal I wrote: “The hills are where I am home.” As a family we were isolated in the hills surrounded by nature, not another house in sight. Houses in the hollows close to ours were inhabited by poor white folk, who we were taught were rabid racists. They were not our friends. Even if they were by chance neighborly, we were taught to mistrust their kindness. We were taught to see their friendliness as simply a gesture aimed at luring us into a trap where we would be wounded and hurt like any captured animal. No wonder then that as children we feared and yet were fascinated by white hillbillies. Individual black folk justified their anti-poor white color prejudice by saying they did not like them anymore than they liked us, calling them by derogatory names like po pecks, peckerwoods, and po white trash. The disdain with which some black folks regarded poor white folk was definitely an inherited legacy of white supremacist hierarchies.

Privileged-class white folks looked down on the poor white folks who lived outside the law projecting onto them many of the same negative stereotypes they used to define black people. They defined poor white people as ignorant, lazy, lawless. They talked about the broken down cars in their yards, the trash, the way they littered their world with random objects like mouse droppings. No wonder then that most fully colonized black folks taught how and what to think by imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchs, looked down on poor white folk seeing them as an example of what not to be and become. Black folks were told by the white folks who dominated the poor of all colors that poor white folks were mean, cold hearted, the kind of people you had to stay away from, people who could soil and contaminate you.

I have written in the book
Class Matters
about the way in which I witnessed black teenagers mock and ridicule the one poor white female who road the bus to school with us. They taunted her with all the negative stereotypes about poor white folks shouting loudly “she smells” or “she stinks.” She was regarded with disdain and contempt, looked down upon, the way racist white folks of all classes looked down upon black folks. This lone representative of the white working class boarded a bus daily where she often had to sit alone. If there were no seats available next to someone who was not verbally abusive (oftentimes she sat next to me), she would stand, juggling books while holding tightly to the overhead hand rail knowing all the while that if she fell her tormentors would laugh and shout.

This persecution of an individual poor white girl by a group of black boys and girls revealed the depths of our internalized racism as colonized black people. That internalized white supremacy had taught black folks to regard any white person who would “choose” to come upon us, to be near us, near enough to touch our flesh, with contempt so strong it was akin to hatred. Such a response laid bare the reality of black self-hatred. There is no way we could collectively love ourselves and hate those who were most like us in habits and lifestyle.

The Kentucky hills I roamed as a child were racially integrated. Since they were outside the realm of the city, they were a location of possibility. Folk who lived there could make their own rules. In that space apart, laws could be broken and boundaries could be transgressed. There, in those lush green hills, the innate wildness of the human animal expressed itself. No wonder then that black and white in those hills feared and fascinated one another.

Not enough has been written about the psycho history of racism in the United States, the ways in which the traumas that are a consequence of exploitation and oppression leave their mark. When I returned to Kentucky and bought acres of land in the hills, I was surprised that my six siblings (most of whom have lived in dangerous urban environments) expressed fear about living in the hills, fear of the poor white folks who live nearby. To my knowledge none of us has been wounded or assaulted by poor white folks and yet the memory of all those childhood lessons teaching us to see poor whites as the enemy made lasting imprints, marks so deep that some of my siblings say that could not stay a night in these hills. Concurrently, African-American colleagues who teach at the college where I am a distinguished professor in residence in Appalachian Studies, a college with a long legacy of anti-racist activism, warn me, deploying the same language and stereotypes of the past, telling me that it is dangerous for me to think that it is safe to live in close proximity to “rednecks.” While I do not feel afraid, I recognize that there may be some white folks who resent my presence, the white folks with confederate flags and bumper sticks that declare “heritage not hate.” My response is to share with anyone who listens that the history the confederate flag evokes is one of both “heritage and hate.”

Racial hatred and the racist actions it engenders are not the exclusive domain of poor whites. When I ask folks black and white who ask me whether or not I feel fear in these Kentucky hills, I counter first by asking why it is they assume that I am “safe” or more safe in the middle-class predominately white neighborhood that is my in town residence. Class prejudice is at the core of their belief that these white people are “safer” and more likely to be free of racial prejudice. In actuality, I have found white neighborhoods in all the privileged- class environments I have lived in throughout the United States, including Kentucky, to have as active a presence of racial prejudice as their poor counterparts. Significantly, those who allow that prejudice to lead them to hostile acts are in the minority no matter the class standing of the neighborhood. And in poor or privileged predominantly white environments I have found that when the few engage in active racist assaults, the many rarely take a courageous stand.

Writing about growing up in the segregated world of small town Louisiana in the essay, “Dark Waters,” black male poet Yusef Komaunyaka vividly recalls the atmosphere of fear and mistrust that was the dominant force in encounters between black and white folk. Remembering, he writes: “I grew up in a climate of distrust. Blacks didn’t trust whites, and it was sometimes difficult to disentangle truth from myth and folklore. For example, no black person would sell illegal, homemade liquor, but there was a white man who sold his brew to blacks. Not only did he sell ‘stoopdown’ under the nose of the law, but it was rumored that he doctored his corn whiskey with pinches of Red Devil lye. We believed that some among us were slowly being poisoned. This is the kind of thing that fosters mistrust… ‘There’s nothing a white man won’t do to keep a black man down,’ they’d say: ‘If he can’t legally keep you in chains, he’ll connive some way to keep his foot on your neck….’ This was the folk wisdom from my community.” So little has been written about the ways in which living in racial apartheid damaged the psyches of black folks, creating in some of us a pathological fear of whiteness, a fear rooted in unresolved trauma, that there is little open discussion of the way in which this psycho history, the legacy of racialized trauma keeps many black folks fearful of whites, convinced that all white folk have a deep seated will to harm us. This fear and the profound mistrust it engenders is especially intense among poor folks.

Years ago when racial segregation was the norm, most folks learned about folks from a different ethnic/racial background by hearsay, that is relying on stereotypes, gossip, and fantasy-based projections. Nowadays, mass media is the location where most folks gather information about the “other,” that is folks who are different from themselves. Unfortunately, since the culture produced in mass media often uses existing stereotypes and biases for its raw material, information about poor blacks and whites is largely negative. Yet this negative content does not constitute a closed system of thinking and being. Making the choice to look at images or read about people different from oneself, irrespective of whether those images are positive or negative, opens up the possibility that positive curiosity will be awakened and lead to positive contact. When my brother and I roamed the Kentucky hills meeting white “hillbillies” we found they were not all alike, that they were not all hateful. Yet the boundaries separating our two worlds precluded the possibility of friendship. Even so it may be that those early positive imprints provided foundation that enables me to meet white “hillbilly” neighbors today with the respect and openness they deserve. Just as I did not prejudge the white residents in the more privileged area where I live some of the time, I do not prejudge my white neighbors in the hills. In both places I exercise careful vigilance when needed because racism is an active systemic disorder impinging on all our lives, particularly those of people color, some of the time.

While I counted Wilma, the white female from a poor background who road the bus with us, among my high school cohorts and friends, I did not stay in contact with her. Of course I have wondered about her fate, pondered whether or not the persecution she experienced at the hands of young black peers on the bus marked her for life. I have wondered whether she nurtured anti-black sentiments that stayed with her from her teenage years into adulthood. Or if she, was like me, one of the ones who understood the interconnectedness of race and class early. I like to imagine that she knew the reasons she was attacked and pitied her attackers understanding the way in which internalized self-hate fueled their prejudices. Through time, what has become clear to me is how much a cultural politics of white supremacy separates poor southern black folk from their white counterparts with whom they share a common class reality. While I felt friendship with Wilma, I did not understand in my teen years that our closeness was forged by the bonds of a shared class reality. We had both been taught to think about race but not about class.

When I left the Kentucky hills, I thought that I would be leaving behind a harsh world of white supremacy, racial hatred and prejudice, for a more enlightened environment. There was no overt awareness on my part that leaving Kentucky was also about class mobility. In the world of my upbringing where class and race converged, there was only a limited range of possibilities for a black girl from a poor and working-class background. I could be a teacher, a maid, or a housewife. If there were black college professors in our town, I did not know them. Just as I did not know that choosing to leave Kentucky to live in California and study at Stanford University was the start of a journey away from being working class, southern, country (in fact a low-class black hillbilly) to being geographically neutral. By erasing those markers I would make myself ready to engage a class mobility that would move me up, up, and away.

Yet I was never able to truly “get away.” In my mind and imagination I was always returning to the Kentucky hills, to find there a way to ground my being, a place of spiritual sustenance. This internal land-scape, the world of the Kentucky hills, where I felt the deepest sense of freedom in my girlhood, was the site I returned to in my imagination to restore my soul as I lived a life in exile far away from the only place where I had felt a true sense of belonging. No wonder then that I had to return to those Kentucky hills to reclaim my sense of belonging on the earth.