Belonging: A Culture of Place (15 page)

It is the telling of our history that enables political self-recovery. In contemporary society, white and black people alike believe that racism no longer exists. This erasure, however mythic, diffuses the representation of whiteness as terror in the black imagination. It allows for assimilation and forgetfulness. The eagerness with which contemporary society does away with racism, replacing this recognition with evocations of pluralism and diversity that further mask reality, is a response to the terror. It has also become a way to perpetuate the terror by providing a cover, a hiding place. Black people still feel the terror, still associate it with whiteness, but are rarely able to articulate the varied ways we are terrorized because it is easy to silence by accusations of reverse racism or by suggesting that black folks who talk about the ways we are terrorized by whites are merely evoking victimization to demand special treatment.

When I attended a recent conference on cultural studies, I was reminded of the way in which the discourse of race is increasingly divorced from any recognition of the politics of racism. Attending the conference because I was confident that I would be in the company of like-minded, “aware,” progressive intellectuals, I was disturbed when the usual arrangements of white supremacist hierarchy were mirrored both in terms of who was speaking, of how bodies were arranged on the stage, of who was in the audience. All of this revealed the underlying assumptions of what voices were deemed worthy to speak and be heard. As the conference progressed, I began to feel afraid. If these progressive people, most of whom were white, could so blindly reproduce a version of the status quo and not “see” it, the thought of how racial politics would be played out “outside” this arena was horrifying. That feeling of terror that I had known so intimately in my childhood surfaced. Without even considering whether the audience was able to shift from the prevailing standpoint and hear another perspective, I talked openly about that sense of terror. Later, I heard stories of white women joking about how ludicrous it was for me (in their eyes I suppose I represent the “bad” tough black woman) to say I felt terrorized. Their inability to conceive that my terror, like that of Sethe’s, is a response to the legacy of white domination and the contemporary expressions of white supremacy is an indication of how little this culture really understands the profound psychological impact of white racist domination.

At this same conference, I bonded with a progressive black woman and her companion, a white man. Like me, they were troubled by the extent to which folks chose to ignore the way white supremacy was informing the structure of the conference. Talking with the black woman, I asked her: “What do you do, when you are tired of confronting white racism, tired of the day-to-day incidental acts of racial terrorism? I mean, how do you deal with coming home to a white person?” Laughing she said, “Oh, you mean when I am suffering from White People Fatigue Syndrome? He gets that more than I do.” After we finish our laughter, we talk about the way white people who shift locations, as her companion has done, begin to see the world differently. Understanding how racism works, he can see the way in which whiteness acts to terrorize without seeing himself as bad, or all white people as bad, and all black people as good. Repudiating us-and-them dichotomies does not mean that we should never speak of the ways observing the world from the standpoint of “whiteness” may indeed distort perception, impede understanding of the way racism works both in the larger world as well as in the world of our intimate interactions.

In
The Post-Colonial Critic,
Gayatri Spivak calls for a shift in locations, clarifying the radical possibilities that surface when positionality is problematized. She explains that “what we are asking for is that the hegemonic discourses, and the holders of hegemonic discourse, should dehegemonize their position and themselves learn how to occupy the subject position of the other.” Generally, this process of repositioning has the power to deconstruct practices of racism and make possible the disassociation of whiteness with terror in the black imagination. As critical intervention it allows for the recognition that progressive white people who are anti-racist might be able to understand the way in which their cultural practice reinscribes white supremacy without promoting paralyzing guilt or denial. Without the capacity to inspire terror, whiteness no longer signifies the right to dominate. It truly becomes a benevolent absence. Baldwin ends his essay “Stranger in the Village” with the declaration: “This world is white no longer, and it will never be white again.” Critically examining the association of whiteness as terror in the black imagination, deconstructing it, we both name racism’s impact and help to break its hold. We our minds and our imaginations.

9
Drive through Tobacco

Riding in the car, away from the town, riding in the country we were surrounded by fields and fields of tobacco. Growing up in Kentucky I learned the reverence for the tobacco plant that had been handed down from generation to generation. In those days tobacco was not demonized. Tobacco was a sacred plant, cherished and deemed precious by the old folks who knew its properties and its potentialities.

I cannot recall any time in my childhood when tobacco did not have meaning and presence. Whether it came from watching Big Mama smoke her pipe, or emptying the coffee cans that were used to spit out chewing tobacco, or watching mama’s mother Baba braid tobacco leaves for use to ward off bugs, or watching Aunt Margaret hand roll tobacco for cigarettes and cigars, the odor of tobacco permeated our lives and touches me always with the scent of memory. Once upon a time tobacco ruled the economy of many small Kentucky towns. For poor illiterate black folks picking tobacco was down and dirty work but it let one bring home ready cash, extra money. The history of black folks and the history of tobacco like braided leaves were once deeply intertwined. And even though that history, like so many aspects of our ancestral past is unsung, buried, the old folks remember, think of the past, and smell the fragrance of tobacco.

Tobacco planting, harvesting, picking, and curing played a major role in the drama of enslaved Africans throughout the southern states. While displaced Africans encountered many odd ways and strange appetites in the so called “new world,” tobacco was a “familiar.” When tobacco first came to Africa, its power and pleasure quickly spread throughout the continent. At the very onset Africans conferred on the plant mystical and magical powers. Both in Africa and parts of South America, tobacco shamans used the plant ceremoniously and ritualistically. Used to heal, to bless, to protect tobacco had divine status. In his lengthy work
Tobacco: A Cultural History of How An Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization,
cultural critic Iain Gately informs readers that: “Tobacco played a central role in the spiritual training of shamans… A tobacco shaman used the weed in every aspect of his art.” In North America the indigenous Native Indians also considered tobacco a sacred plant and many tribal groups continue to honor the spiritual nature of tobacco both as powerful legacy and potent element of current traditions. Writing about the history of tobacco in this country, Gately emphasizes that it was ‘a defining habit of the diverse tribes and civilizations that occupied pre-Columbian North American” as “everyone of its cultures living and vanished, used tobacco.” Indians used tobacco medicinally, to clear the skin, to cleanse the body, to purge. While tobacco was more often than not the sole purview of men in cultures around the world, on the African continent men and women used tobacco with equal relish fervor seeking empowerment and solace from holy smoke.

Spirituality, people of color globally have viewed and continue to view tobacco as a way to be initiated into the spirit world. Many shamans both past and present use tobacco to trance or even go toward death then resurrect as a sign of their powers. Exploring the link between tobacco and religion, Gately informs readers that: “Ritual smoke blowing, by which a shaman might bestow a blessing or protection against enemies was intended to symbolize a transformation in which the tobacco smoke represented a guiding spirit, and this is reminiscent of Christian ritual, whereby wine and bread are transubstantiated by a priest into body and blood if Christ himself.” In Native American culture smoke signals are a nonlocal means of cosmic communication. In
Reinventing Medicine
Larry Dossey explains that “the function of the smoke signal was only to get everyone’s attention so that distant, mind-to-mind communications might then take place.” According to Dossey, “the possibility that the mind might function at a distance, outside the confines of the brain and body and not just in dreams, is taken for granted in most of what we call ‘native’ cultures.” Tobacco and tobacco smoke bring the promise of transcending one’s limitations. Hence native culture’s reverence and respect for tobacco.

At the onset of the powerful memoir
Black Elk Speaks: Being The Life Story Of A Holy Man Of The Oglala Sioux,
this wise tribal elder tells the story of how sacred visions come to him as he smokes the “pipe with a bison calf carved on one side to mean the earth that bears and feeds us, and with twelve eagle feathers hanging from the stem to mean the sky and the twelve moons, and these were tied with a grass that never breaks.” When he smokes the pipe after offering “it to the powers that are one Power, and sending forth a voice to them, we shall smoke together.” He talks with the Great Spirit declaring: “Great Spirit, Great Spirit, my Grandfather, all over the earth the faces of living things are all alike. With tenderness have these come up out of the ground. Look upon these faces of children without number and with children in their arms, that they may face the winds and walk the good road to the day of quiet.” After his prayers to the Great Spirit, he welcomes tribal companions telling them, “let us smoke together so that there may be only good between us.”

Within popular culture in the United States negative media representations of Native Americans, especially television images, have changed little. Smoking a peace pipe is consistently caricatured. Clearly, dominator culture mocked the Native belief in oneness with nature and the naturalness of peace when slaughtering Indians was deemed justified because they were supposedly a savage and violent people. Yet surviving artifacts relating to tobacco (beautifully carved pipes) attest to the spiritual significance of smoking.

Though little is written of the role tobacco played as social currency between enslaved Africans and white slavers, demands for workers to plant and harvest the crop was so intense in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that more slaves were purchased to do the dirty work of planting and harvesting tobacco and thereby increasing an owner’s wealth. Gately reminds readers that “tobacco’s importance was not limited to the colonies of the south” as it soon became a principle crop for export. Indeed he contends “the weed had given the colonies a place in the world.” Tobacco — smoked, chewed, or sniffed was a source of tremendous power to a growing capitalist culture of greed in the United States. For the slaves who would work to the bone to make this crop plentiful, whose existence was fiercely nomadic as planters moved to find fresh soil, the one sure reward of harsh dirty labor was the freedom to use a bit of tobacco that like gold was precious and hard come by.

Among enslaved black folks men and women often smoked their tobacco in pipes. No doubt smoking one’s pipe at the end of a grueling work day, sitting quietly in a meditative pose, offered enslaved Africans a way to psychically leave their concrete harsh circumstance and literally be somewhere else. The reverence for tobacco as a sacred plant that had been a central part of the African experience was sustained by both the small numbers of African explorers who came to the “new world” before Columbus and the newly enslaved Africans. Even though their work on tobacco farms was harsh and life threatening, enslaved black folk were still able to retain the ceremonial culture of tobacco that was a distinctive feature of life before exile.

These cultural retentions were carried on in black life after slavery ended. Among the elders in my family the tobacco plant had pride of place. Tobacco could be used to disinfect, to serve as a deterrent for bugs. Often braided leaves of tobacco would be placed in trunks of clothing and other linens to keep dust mites and fabric eating bugs from destroying costly cloth. Tobacco was useful and it was a source of pleasure. Even though I was not seduced by the world of smoking or chewing tobacco growing, I was seduced both by the beauty of tobacco growing, curing, hanging, or braided. In that world where women smoked, chewed, and dipped as much as men, nothing pleased me more than to be allowed to tenderly handle precious tobacco leaves and put them in Big Mama’s pipe just so, making sure not to waste. In those days smoking was not viewed as the health hazard we know it to be today. However, it must be stated that the southern black folks who harvested, and cured tobacco plants with no harmful pesticides or additives used tobacco and usually lived long lives. For them, tobacco was deeply healing. Danger from smoking came into their lives when they begin to smoke packaged tobacco and store bought cigarettes and cigars, when they became addicted to smoking. These old black folks worked and exercised; they would never have embraced a lifestyle where they simply indulged in the pleasures of smoking if that pleasure did not come at the end of a hard day of physical labor.

Nostalgia for my Kentucky childhood often focuses my mind on two distinct memories — the world of tobacco and the world of quiltmaking. Both are associated in my mind with simple living and simply abundance. Both are associated with comfort of mind, body, and soul. Big Mama, daddy’s grandmother, who loved us unconditionally was short and squat. She came wearing a perfectly ironed apron, with pockets wide enough for tobacco and pipe. Burley tobacco grew all around us. The aroma of her pipe tobacco, the clouds of smoke and most importantly the contentment surrounding her body and being would have made it difficult for the grandchildren to see tobacco as threatening. It was part of her personal magic and majesty.