Belonging: A Culture of Place (16 page)

Perhaps had I not been a sickly child constantly faced with breathing problems, smoking tobacco would have held greater allure. However, I was seduced by the aesthetics of tobacco and by its presence in our lives and in our African and Native American origins as a sacred plant. For many people of color who claim the old sacred ways of our elders, who work to restore meaningful traditions ravaged by white imperialism and colonization, it has been essential to hold to our ancient understandings of the mystical and magical power of tobacco. This has not been an easy task in a world where tobacco laced with poisons addicts, destroys and kills, where abusive use of tobacco leads to disease and death.

The system of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy that took the tobacco plant and made it into a product to be marketed solely for excess profit is continually critiqued perhaps more so than any other plant drug because it is legal. And because the tobacco industry, through seductive marketing and advertising, invites consumers to choose death. Ironically, capitalist marketing seduces consumers using the same subliminal suggestions which convey to the public that tobacco has mystical and magical power that were used more overtly in ancient time to seduce native people everywhere in the world. However, this contemporary marketing completely severs tobacco from its roots as a healing and sacred plant. Just as the colonization of Native and African peoples required that they be stripped of their language, identity, and dehumanized, the tobacco plant underwent a similar process. In
Food of the Gods
Terence McKenna describes the way the world of tobacco changed with the coming of the white man, the colonizer: “Tobacco was the first and most immediate payoff of the discovery of the New World. On November 2, 1492, less than a month after his first arrival in the New World, columbus landed on the north coast of Cuba… Scouts returned with a account of men and women who partially inserted burning rolls of leaves into their nostrils. These burning rolls were called tobaccos and consisted of dry herbs wrapped up in a large dry leaf. They were lit at one end, and the people sucked at the other and ‘drank the smoke,’ or inhaled something that was utterly unknown in Europe.”

Tobacco as a capitalist industry has been subjected to all the machinations of imperialist corruption and greed. Without a doubt, tobacco is the most widely consumed plant drug on earth. Removed from all its medicinal legacy tobacco has come to be demonized solely as a product that kills. And wrongly used, addictively used, it will indeed take users on a path that will lead to disease and ultimately death. If current smoking trends continue globally, in this century alone one billion people will die from tobacco related diseases. According to the World Health Organization, India and China now account for forty percent of the world’s smoking population. In the United States there has been tremendous consciousness raising about the dangers of tobacco and the corruption of the tobacco industry, but there has been little or not effort to separate the tobacco plant and its positive attributes from all that is negative. In the recent Al Gore documentary,
An Inconvenient Truth,
a film about global warming, he shared the heartrending story of his sister’s death from lung cancer. She smoked at an early age. The film showed his grieving father, a long time tobacco grower, facing the hard truth about the role tobacco played in causing the death of his daughter. And viewers hear commentary about his father’s decision to stop tobacco farming. There is no effort in the film to depict an alternative view of tobacco one that would separate the plant from the tobacco industry and its calculated used of poisonous additives or from addictive smoking.

The Native people in our culture who continue to regard the tobacco plant reverently have no public voice. And the tyranny of fundamentalist Christianity usually obscures the presence of sacred traditions that are not Bible based. None of the anti-tobacco pundits offer the possibility that were young folk, who are especially vulnerable to advertising and marketing that targets their desires, be taught alternative ways to think and dream about tobacco, ways that would teach respect for this wondrous yet potentially dangerous plants they would not become addicted. The public could be taught to relate tobacco use to sacred traditions. If this were the new culture of tobacco, the public would have the opportunity to choose what their relation-ship to smoke and smoking might be rather then to be led mindlessly into the culture of death created by mainstream poisoned tobacco. When imperialist tobacco producers received public sanction to go to underdeveloped countries to grow and harvest their crop, without the health regulations regarding insecticides and poisonous addicting additives that “might” be imposed in the United States, it signaled the end of major tobacco growing in this country.

Tobacco — the crop that had once called the world’s attention to the United State’s market has little meaning in cultural iconography today My home state of Kentucky once produced huge quantities of burley tobacco, bringing huge revenue into its coffers, money that primarily made the rich richer, but that day has long passed. Tobacco is no longer vital to the economy of Kentucky. The miles and miles of farmland where tobacco grew, seemingly on and on into eternity, that were visible during my childhood are no longer. Once upon a time one could walk into any small town Kentucky store and find tobacco hanging in all its glory, beautifully braided leaves to be shared as gesture of plenty and regard, nowadays tobacco has no place. Certainly this beautiful plant cannot line the walls of superstores or drive through tobacco marts.

Distinguishing, as I do, the harmful effects of smoking, of addictive use, from the tobacco plant, I mourn the loss of those tobacco fields for all that they stood for in our childhood. First and foremost, they represented the bounty of nature, the richness which the earth offers to us. And so as the elders taught we are given the beauty of smoke, the aroma or tobacco, to enhance life. When I talk with my siblings, those who worked harvesting and stripping tobacco when we were young, they remember the dust, the ache in their bones from bending, the cold air on the loosening floor. But they recall as well the culture of tobacco that freely gave us images of beauty, rows of tobacco leaves hanging in a barn, green fields and our young child voices wanting to hear the plant growing everywhere identified — tobacco. Finding words to express the aesthetics of the tobacco plant, the beauty and bounty of tobacco leaves hanging in barns is no simple matter in today’s world where tobacco is mainly viewed with disrespect and disregard, if recognized and remembered at all. In my book of love poems,
When Angels Speak of Love,
tobacco is muse. In my imagining I dream of “braided tobacco leaves twisted hung time on the loosening floor, time stripping, time drying, time turning, sheets of brown, time turning away, and all the time love, the smell of smoke between us.” Whether through simple nostalgia or meaningful cultural memory, the tobacco plant is worthy to be cherished.

Globally, from its origins to the present day, tobacco and tobacco use has been linked to freedom. Like the white Kentucky abolitionist politician Henry Clay, who neither as Gately put it “slavered nor spat,” I who will never smoke, dip, or chew understand intimately the lure of tobacco. A powerful advocate of universal human rights Clay visited Cuba and was so welcomed that in 1850 a cigar brand was named after him as a gesture of respect. When James’ Weldon Johnson’s novel
The Autobiography of An Ex-Coloured Man
was published in 1912, he included a fictive portrait of cigar making. His main character remembers that: “At first the heavy odour of tobacco sickened me, but when I became accustomed to it, I liked the smell…” In the early nineteenth century black men found they could make ready cash working in tobacco mores o than in other trades where they were cruelly discriminate against. Johnson’s protagonist associates tobacco with freedom commenting: “Cigar-making was a rather independent trade; the men went to work when they pleased and knocked off when they felt like doing so.” Southern black males working in tobacco fields and tobacco plants were able to make a better income than they could make doing other forms of service labor. Even though dominator culture made tobacco use in the Western world a patriarchal male privilege, using tobacco has been for females of all ages a way to assert independence. How life enhancing it would be if tobacco were only used by females in coming of age rituals. Sadly, as equal consumers of tobacco, females court death and disease. Because nicotine is so highly addictive, it is only the fortunate who can use tobacco nonaddictively.

Clearly, all over the world people on planet earth use tobacco. It is the most democratic of all plant drugs. It is the drug that it is legal to use and easy to attain. McKenna argues that a more stringent tax on tobacco would limit use. In the final pages of
Food of the Gods
he reminds readers that folks will always seek ecstasy (to stand outside) through the use of mood altering drugs. And he reminds us that this longing is indeed a yearning that is religious in nature. He contends: “Help from nature means recognizing that the satisfaction of the religious impulse comes not from ritual, and still less from dogma, but rather, from a fundamental kind of experience — the experience of symbiosis with hallucinogenic plants, and through them, symbiosis with the whole of planetary life… Without the escape hatch into the transcendental and transpersonal realm that is provided by plant-based hallucinogens, the human future would be bleak indeed.” McKenna suggests that survival lies not in forbidding tobacco but in creating a context for meaningful use of plant drugs, uses that could aid in restoring a non-dominating relationship to nature. Sharing this insight he explains: “The shamanic plants and the worlds that they reveal are the worlds from which we imagine that we came long ago, worlds of light and power and beauty… We can claim this prodigal legacy only as quickly as we can remake our language and ourselves. Remaking out language means rejecting the image of ourselves inherited from dominator culture… Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.” His words echo the teachings about our right relationship to nature that I received from Kentucky elders.

In my life in Kentucky today, I know no tobacco farmers. Journeying down country roads I come upon lone tobacco barns loaded with treasure and I feel again the sense of wonder and awe that this union of human and plant produces. It is for a moment of interbeing whose beauty blesses me. And I do not want to forget. I want to hold forever in my hand braided tobacco, planted by my elders, braided by the beloved hands of Baba mama’s mother. I want to cherish the tobacco plant — let its sacred appeal be the legacy that calls to me.

10
Earthbound: On Solid Ground

Kentucky hills were the place of my early childhood. Surrounded by a wilderness of honeysuckle, wild asparagus, and sheltering trees, bushes shielding growing crops, the huge garden of a black landowner. Our concrete house on the hill, a leftover legacy from oil drilling, from the efforts of men to make the earth yield greater and greater profit stood as a citadel to capitalism’s need for a new frontier. A child of the hills, I was taught early on in my life the power in nature. I was taught by farmers that wilderness land, the untamed environment can give life and it can take life. In my girlhood I learned to watch for snakes, wildcats roaming, plants that irritate and poison. I know instinctively; I know because I am told by all knowing grown-ups that it is humankind and not nature that is the stranger on these grounds. Humility in relationship to nature’s power made survival possible.

Coming from “backwoods” folks, Appalachian outlaws, as a child I was taught to understand that those among us who lived organically, in harmony and union with nature were marked with a sensibility that was distinct, and downright dangerous. Backwoods folks tend to ignore the rules of society, the rules of law. In the backwoods one learned to trust only the spirit, to follow where the spirit moved. Ultimately, no matter what was said or done, the spirit called to us from a place beyond words, from a place beyond man made law. The wild spirit of unspoiled nature worked its way in to the folk of the backwoods, an ancestral legacy, handed down from generation to generation. And its fundamental gift the cherishing of that which is most precious, freedom. And to be fully free one had to embrace the organic rights of the earth.

Humankind, no matter how powerful, cannot take away the rights of the earth. Ultimately, nature rules. That is the great democratic gift earth offers us — that sweet death to which we all inevitably go — into that final communion No race, no class, no gender, nothing can keep any of us from dying into that death where we are made one. To tend the earth is always then to tend our destiny, our freedom and our hope.

These lessons of my girlhood were the oppositional narratives that taught me to care for the earth, to respect country folk. This respect for the earth, for the country girl within, stood me in good stead when I left this environment and entered a world beyond the country town I was raised in. It was only when I left home, that country place where nature’s splendors were abundant and not yet destroyed, that I understood for the first time the contempt for country folk that abounds in our nation. That contempt has led to the cultural disrespect for the farmer, for those who live simply in harmony with nature. Writer, sometime farmer, and poet Wendell Berry, another Kentuckian, who loves our land, writes in
Another Turn of the Crank
in the essay “Conserving Communities” that: “Communists and capitalists are alike in their contempt for country people, country life, and country places.”

Before the mass migrations to northern cities in the early nineteen hundreds, more than ninety percent of all black folks lived in the agrarian South. We were indeed a people of the earth. Working the land was the hope of survival. Even when that land was owned by white oppressors, master and mistress, it was the earth itself that protected exploited black folks from dehumanization. My sharecropping granddaddy Jerry would walk through neat rows of crops and tell me, “I’ll tell you a secret little girl. No man can make the sun or the rains come — we can all testify. We can all see that ultimately we all bow down to the forces of nature. Big white boss may think he can outsmart nature but the small farmer know. Earth is our witness.” This relationship to the earth meant that southern black folks, whether they were impoverished or not, knew firsthand that white supremacy, with its systemic dehumanization of blackness, was not a form of absolute power.