Belonging: A Culture of Place (9 page)

When I left the Kentucky hills to attend a prestigious university out west I did not know then that more than thirty years would go by before I would return to live in the state that formed the ground of my being. Even though not a year of my life passed without me coming home to Kentucky to visit, mostly I could not imagine myself living there again. Each time I came home it seemed that so little had changed. Particularly it seemed that the harsh racial apartheid which shrouded my girlhood life in fear and rage was still unchallenged. Coming home to visit, I never went to the hills. The place I was raised as a young girl had become just another destroyed piece of earth, violated to make way for new construction. All the years I returned home to visit I sought sanctity in my parent’s house and rarely ventured out. Now and then I ventured out to the porch or walked in the back yard. But I did not take to the hills. I did not want to experience again and again painful leavetaking. There was no pain when I bid farewell to the family. After visits which showed that the old Kentucky home was just as dysfunctional as always, the passion that led me home turned to a desperate will to leave and never come back. To me the family has always been that place of familiarity that holds and hurts us. Living away from home I dreamed always myself there and yet I did not think that I would ever return to live in Kentucky.

Even as years past and the years of my growing up in Kentucky served as a catalyst and a resource for much intimate autobiographical writing, I still did not consider returning to live in my home state. To return home was to come back to the pain and hurt that I had spent years of my life working to make go away. My hurt was rooted in trauma experienced in the dysfunctional family and the pain of growing up in a socially segregated world in the midst off racial apartheid. It was also hard to face the corrupt race biased public policies that have allowed drug trafficking to devastate poor black communities. Concurrently, the flight of privileged-class black folks from our old segregated neighborhoods has made it all the more possible for these poor communities to be ravaged.

In the worlds I chose to live in away from Kentucky, I did not choose to reside in segregated black communities. These environments were more often than not places where conservative mores prevail. I also did not choose to live in narrow minded white communities. Instead, I chose places that were diverse, neighborhoods with ethnic, racial, religious, and sexual diversity, neighborhoods that were characterized by acceptance of difference. Even when those neighborhoods were predominately white, they were always liberal progressive locations. The environment I lived in as a teenager was firmly shaped by a social world constructed by patriarchal white supremacy and even though there was this rich sub-culture of blackness existing within and apart from this racist norm it was not a world that allowed black folk or for that matter white folks to live fully and freely. Much of the anthropological and sociological work on “return migration” (the movement of northern blacks back to southern homes) documents that many southern born blacks long to return to the rich sub-cultures of our upbringing yet fear returning to old style racism.

Many southern black folks long to re-capture a sense of the life lived in community with its value of relating, civility, courtesy, and mutual caretaking that most of us knew growing up. It is those ethics and values that we took with us from the South and tried to hold on to in other places. Whether living in California, Wisconsin, Florida, or Ohio, I still used my early life experience in Kentucky as the standard against which I judged the substantive quality of my life. Like many folks living in exile (this term seems appropriate because it feels to many southern blacks that sustained vicious racial segregation forced us to leave the regions of our origin), it was easier to look back at the places we left and view them in a more positive light when we were far away. Away from home I was able to look back at the world of homeplace differently separating all that I treasure, all that I needed to cherish, from all that I dreaded and wanted to see destroyed. Like a country estate sale where all belongings are brought from a private world and are publicly exposed for everybody to gaze at them, pick them over, choosing what to reject or keep, ultimately deciding what to give away or just dump, away from home I was able to lay bare the past and keep stored within me much that was soul nourishing. And I was able to let much unnecessary suffering and pain go.

Helped by therapy, by self-analysis, by liberating changes of mind and heart, I began to reclaim all that was precious in the Kentucky years. Appreciating that good, I could look at the old elders and the folks my age who never left our Kentucky homeplace and see all the ways they were able to keep a hold onto life despite the impositions faced by the system of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Significantly, as I examined my past and our relationship to the environment, it was evident that generations of black folk in my homeplace had worked to maintain a profound relationship to the earth. Introducing the collection of essays
At Home On The Earth: Becoming Native To Our Place
editor David Barnhill begins with the declaration: “Our relationship to the earth is radical: it lies at the root of our consciousness and our culture and of any sense of a rich life and right livelihood.” Before our contemporary concern with the earth gained a hearing, similar sentiments were often expressed by one of the most famous black environmentalists who has lived on the planet George Washington Carver who was fond of saying: “What is money when I have all the earth.” Carver wanted everyone, but especially black folks, to engage in careful husbandry with the earth.

Engaged with issues of sustainability before these concerns were popular, he continually worked to teach reverence for the earth. Understanding the way that refusal to care rightly for the earth was linked to a willingness on the part of humans to exploit and dehumanize one another, Carver spent a lifetime working to demonstrate the life enhancing relationship humans could have with the earth, with plants. Despite his efforts many southern black folks felt that progress could be theirs only if they turned away from their agrarian roots. The end of slavery, the mass migration of agrarian southern black folks to northern cities, the demise of a collective presence of black farmers, all produced grave silences about our relationship to the earth. Breaking that silence has been crucial for individual progressive southern black folks engaged in decolonizing our minds, especially those of us who are choosing to reclaim our legacy as stewards of the earth.

Erasing the agrarian past wherein black folks worked the land, sustained our lives by growing and tending crops, was a way to deny that there were any aspects of life in the white supremacist South that was positive. At the end of nineteenth century the cultural myths that made freedom synonymous with materialism necessarily denied the dignity of any agrarian based life style. Black folks who embraced this version of the American dream were as eager as their white counterparts to leave behind an agrarian past to seek freedom in the industrialized North. The life of the black farmer was one of hard work often without substantial material reward.

Black folks (like my maternal and paternal grandparents) who felt working the land rooted them in a spiritual foundation that was mystical had no visibility in the movement for racial uplift that privileged material success above all else. By the time George Washington Carver passed away, there were no visible black leaders telling black folks that farming was a right livelihood that in his words would “unlock the golden door of freedom to our people.” Carver believed that black folks could gain self-determination and self-sufficiency by living in harmony with the earth even as his transcendent vision encompassed all people. To Carver, maintaining a caring relationship to the earth, to nature was a means to have union with the divine. Time and time again he told listeners: “Nothing is more beautiful than the woods before sunrise. At no other time have I so sharp an understanding of what God means to do with me.” This spiritual bond with the earth is one of the many counter hegemonic beliefs that sustained exploited and oppressed black folks during the years of slavery and reconstruction. Indeed, experiencing the divine through union with nature was a way to transcend the imposed belief that skin color and race was the most important aspect of one’s identity. Leaving a rural past many black folks began to feel estranged from our southern roots, from nature. This estrangement meant that the organic spiritual renewal generated by direct engagement with the natural world was no longer a given in the daily life of ordinary black folks.

Growing up in Kentucky I knew as a child that there was a tremendous tension between those black folks who lived in the country and those who lived in the city. As a young girl I knew there were conflicts between these two Kentucky cultures the world of the hills, the backwoods, the country, and the world of the city, civilization, law and order. One of the most traumatic experiences of my early childhood was the movement of our family from the country to the city. In my child mind rural life was synonymous with belonging in nature, freedom, adventure, safety, city life was about containment, restricted movement, an overdeveloped dangerous landscape. The fearlessness and awe I experienced as child belonging in nature imbued me with a power and confidence I soon lost in the city where I felt invisible, powerless, and lost. In the isolated, underpopulated, rural environment of the Kentucky hills, there had been no persistent sense of threat or danger — no need for a child to be endlessly told, to be careful, to always be on guard. In the world of the city danger was everywhere. Interviewed in the magazine,
Kentucky Living,
mystery writer Sue Grafton recalls her childhood in Kentucky testifying that she continues to “value the simplicity of the world I grew in” remembering that “in those days, the world was much more innocent.” She acknowledges: “I feel fortunate that I was able to have as much freedom as I did.” Experiencing freedom in nature during girlhood was fundamentally empowering.

My childhood heart broke when I had to leave the country where I felt safe, the country of quiet slow days, no crowds, and a stillness never felt in a noisy small city full of fast paced movement and strangers. Living away from a renewing natural world I felt a deep sense of soul loss that was traumatic. Away from rural Kentucky life I was taught that to be really self-actualized, to become someone of value, I would need to leave my Kentucky roots. At the end of my teenage years, my next big move was to board a bus then a plane that would take me to California, as far from Kentucky as a girl could go, a black girl with few resources. Leaving home I fulfilled the expectations of those who had taught me to believe that I should leave Kentucky and become a better person, be born again. Leaving Kentucky triggered the underlying feelings of brokenheartedness that had surfaced during that initial move from country to city. In all the places I journeyed to in an effort to become that “better” human being away from my Kentucky home, I confronted a culture of narcissism, one in which spiritual beliefs and ethical values had very little meaning for most folk. I longed to find in those places the values that I had learned in my growing up years. Simple values had grounded my sheltered life. Taught first and foremost to be a person of integrity, to love one’s neighbor as oneself, to be loyal and to live at home on the earth, I did not know how best to live in a world where those values had no meaning.

My decision to return to Kentucky to live was rooted in a growing awareness that much of what I did not like about my native state (the persistence of a cruel and violent racism in daily life and sustained patriarchal assumptions) was more and more becoming the norm everywhere. Concurrently, remnants of all that I cherished in my childhood years were still present among my Kentucky family and community. Though old and frail my parents were and are still hanging on to life. Coming back to live in Kentucky affords me the opportunity to spend time with them during the last years of their days on earth. My father describes these years as a time when “we are going down the mountain.” In Barbara Kingsolver’s book,
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle,
she shares that her family moves from Arizona to rural Kentucky because of many “conventional reasons for relocation” but an important one being extended family. She explains “Returning now would allow my kids more than just a hit-and-run, holiday acquaintance with grandparents and cousins. In my adult life I’d hardly shared a phone book with anyone else using my last name. Now I could spend Memorial Day decorating my ancestors graves with peonies from my backyards. Tucson had opened my eyes to the world and given me a writing career and legions of friends and a taste for the sensory extravagance of red hot chilies and five-alarm sunsets. But after twenty years in the desert, I’d been called home.” This call to home comes at a time when many of us are ready to truly slow down and settle down.

Like many folk returning to small town southern roots, one of the most immediate experiences that calls us is the slowing down of everything. In childhood my siblings and I often hated the languid slow pace of everyday life once chores were done. Then, we wanted action, movement, the possibility of something happening. We were not interested in sitting still. Seeking a place of spiritual grounding from Buddhist and Christian practice in my life today, I experience stillness as a path to divine mind. Now, I want to be still. I want to live in that experience of knowing unity with the divine in stillness.

Returning to the Kentucky landscape of my childhood and most importantly to the hills, I am able to reclaim a sublime understanding that living in harmony with the earth renews the spirit. Coming home to live in Kentucky was for me a journey back to a place where I felt I belonged. But it was also returning to a place that I felt needed me and my resources, a place where I as a citizen could be in community with other folk seeking to revive and renew our local environment, seeking to have fidelity to a place. Living engagement with both a specific place and the issue of sustainability, we know and understand that we are living lives of interdependence. Our thinking and our actions are constantly informed by what Wendell Berry defines as “an ecological intelligence: a sense of the impossibility of acting or living alone or solely in one’s own behalf, and this rests in turn upon a sense of the order upon which any life depends and of the proprieties of place within that order.” To simply return to agrarian locations without coming full circle and letting go of manners and mores taken from living in small and large cities, we have little to offer the places we return to. Hence we return to the unforgettable homeplaces of our past with a vital sense of covenant and commitment.