Appalachian Elegy

Praise for
Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

“‘I will guide you,' bell hooks promises, and delivers, in her remarkable collection, Appalachian Elegy. In meditations intimate and clear, with ‘radical grace,' she negotiates ‘beauty and danger,' the animal and human worlds, the pain of history, the dead and the living. With wisdom and courage, she moves through lamentation to resurrection, and the worlds she unearths are an ‘avalanche of splendor.'”

—Paula Bohince, author of
The Children
and
Incident at the Edge of Bayonet Woods

“Hush arbors were safe places in the deep woods where slaves could commune with each other to lift their choral voices to the heavens as they tarried for freedom. bell hooks comes from a people who deeply connected with this country's ‘backwoods' and hills in Kentucky and decided to stead in these spaces. Tending and tilling the land that afforded them independence and the freedom to unmask in isolation. They were ‘renegades and rebels' who didn't seek to civilize Kentucky's wilds, instead developing a besidedness with the land that informs bell hooks's sense of self and belonging. This collection of poems is a departure for the important polemicist, a place where she is able to roam her boundless imagination using her emotional intelligence as her primary compass. Praise songs for her ancestors sit beside her meditations on turtles. Here is a rare glance into the soul of our beloved, prolific, yet private bell hooks, who took her mother's surname as her nom de plume. Here she returns to her mother's woods, to the ‘wilderness within.'”

—dream hampton, journalist and filmmaker

“The collection reflects aesthetic and linguistic choices based on the thinking and feeling of someone who has made important contributions to contemporary thought and who thinks and feels deeply about what Kentucky—as ‘here' and home—means to her.”

—Edwina Pendarvis, Professor Emeritus at Marshall University and author of
Like the Mountains of China

“bell hooks has crafted a lyrical, sweeping panorama, deftly conjuring the tangled root and insistent steam of Appalachia. In these lean, melodic poems, she holds the land close; it's achingly apparent how essential these memories are to the raw, unleashed spirit that typifies her body of work. These communiqués, from an elsewhere the mind visits too rarely, reside in that constantly shifting space between melancholy and celebration. No one but bell hooks could have taken us there.”

—Patricia Smith, four-time National Poetry Slam individual champion

Copyright © 2012 by Gloria Jean Watkins (bell hooks)

Published by the University Press of Kentucky

Scholarly publisher for the Commonwealth,

serving Bellarmine University, Berea College, Centre

College of Kentucky, Eastern Kentucky University,

The Filson Historical Society, Georgetown College,

Kentucky Historical Society, Kentucky State University,

Morehead State University, Murray State University,

Northern Kentucky University, Transylvania University,

University of Kentucky, University of Louisville,

and Western Kentucky University.

All rights reserved.

Editorial and Sales Offi ces
: The University Press of Kentucky

663 South Limestone Street, Lexington, Kentucky 40508-4008

www.kentuckypress.com

16 15 14 13 12        5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

hooks, bell.

Appalachian elegy : poetry and place / bell hooks.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-8131-3669-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8131-3670-7 (pdf) —

ISBN 978-0-8131-4076-6 (epub)

1. hooks, bell—Childhood and youth—Poetry. 2. Appalachian Region—

Poetry. 3. Kentucky—Poetry. I. Title.

PS3608.O594A84 2012

811'.6—dc23

2012018046

This book is printed on acid-free paper meeting the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence in Paper for Printed Library Materials.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

Introduction: On Reflection and Lamentation

Appalachian Elegy

Index of First Lines

Sublime silence surrounds me. I have walked to the top of the hill, plopped myself down to watch the world around me. I have no fear here, in this world of trees, weeds, and growing things. This is the world I was born into: a world of wild things. In it the wilderness in me speaks. I am wild. I hear my elders caution mama, telling her that she is making a mistake, letting me “run wild,” letting me run with my brother as though no gender separates us. We are making our childhood together in the Kentucky hills, experiencing the freedom that comes from living away from civilization. Even as a child I knew that to be raised in the country, to come from the backwoods, left one without meaning or presence. Growing up we did not use terms like “hillbilly.” Country folk lived on isolated farms away from the city; backwoods folks lived in remote areas, in the hills and hollers.

To be from the backwoods was to be part of the wild. Where we lived, black folks were as much a part of the wild, living in a natural way on the earth, as white folks. All backwoods folks were poor by material standards; they knew how to make do. They were not wanting to tame the wildness, in themselves or nature. Living in the Kentucky hills was where I first learned the importance of being wild.

Later, attending college on the West Coast, I would come to associate the passion for freedom and the wildness I had experienced as a child with anarchy, with the belief in the power of the individual to be self-determining. Writing about the connection between environments, nature, and creativity in the introduction to
A Place in Space
, Gary Snyder states: “Ethics and aesthetics are deeply intertwined. Art, beauty, and craft have always drawn on the self-organizing ‘wild' side of language and mind. Human ideas of place and space, our contemporary focus on watersheds, become both models and metaphors. Our hope would be to see the interacting realms, learn where we are, and thereby move towards a style of planetary and ecological cosmopolitanism.” Snyder calls this approach the “practice of the wild,” urging us to live “in the self-disciplined elegance of ‘wild' mind.” By their own practice of living in harmony with nature, with simple abundance, Kentucky black folks who lived in the backwoods were deeply engaged with an ecological cosmopolitanism. They fished; hunted; raised chickens; planted what we would now call organic gardens; made homemade spirits, wine, and whiskey; and grew flowers. Their religion was interior and private. Mama's mama, Baba, refused to attend church after someone made fun of the clothes she was wearing. She reminded us that God could be worshipped everyday, anywhere. No matter that they lived according to Appalachian values, they did not talk about themselves as coming from Appalachia. They did not divide Kentucky into East and West. They saw themselves as renegades and rebels, folks who did not want to be hemme d in by rules and laws, folks that wanted to remain independent. Even when circumstances forced them out of the country into the city, they were still wanting to live free.

As there were individual black folks who explored the regions of this nation before slavery, the first black Appalachians being fully engaged with the Cherokee, the lives of most early black Kentuckians
were shaped by a mixture of free sensibility and slave mentality. When slavery ended in Kentucky, life was hard for the vast majority of black people as white supremacy and racist domination did not end. But those folks who managed to own land, especially land in isolated country sites or hills (sometimes inherited from white folks for whom they had worked for generations, or sometimes purchased), were content to be self-defining and self-determining even if it meant living with less. No distinctions were made between those of us who dwelled in the hills of eastern or western Kentucky. Our relatives from eastern Kentucky did not talk about themselves as Appalachians, and in western Kentucky we did not use the term; even if one lived in the hills where the close neighbors were white and hillbilly, black people did not see themselves as united with these folk, even though our habits of being and ways of thinking were more like these strangers than those of other black folks who lived in the city—especially black folks who had money and urban ways. In small cities and towns, the life of a black coal miner in western Kentucky was more similar to the life of an Eastern counterpart than different. Just as the lives of hillbilly black folks were the same whether they lived in the hills of eastern or western Kentucky.

In the Kentucky black subcultures, folks were united with our extended kin, and our identities were more defined by labels like “country” and “backwoods.” It was not until I went away to college that I was questioned about Appalachia, about hillbilly culture, and it was always assumed by these faraway outsiders that only poor white people lived in the backwoods and in the hills. No wonder then that black folks who cherish our past, the independence that characterized our backwoods ancestors, seek to recover and restore their history, their legacy. Early on in my life I learned from those Kentucky backwoods elders, the folks whom we might now label “Appalachian,” a set of values rooted in the belief that above all else
one must be self-determining. It is the foundation that is the root of my radical critical consciousness. Folks from the backwoods were certain about two things: that every human soul needed to be free and that the responsibility of being free required one to be a person of integrity, a person who lived in such a way that there would always be congruency between what one thinks, says, and does.