Belonging: A Culture of Place (28 page)

Folks who stay away form their native place, never visiting, who then return, who come home (so to speak) inhabit a different psychic landscape from those of us who were constantly coming home, constantly conflicted about whether we will go and stay. Fortunately, I sustained ties with home and family, resisting the urge to break bonds when family was not as I wanted it to be. I felt those ties binding and holding me no matter where I traveled in the world. Since there was no violent separation between me and my past, my family, I felt no need to destroy all seeds of hope within me that might nurture a will to return home. Leaving home and staying away felt like betrayal, especially when my maternal grandmother who embodied many of the old ways would question me about how it was I could live so far from my people. While I lived far from my family in miles, they constantly inhabited the space of my dreaming. They followed me everywhere telling me how I should live. Ironically, I had no life to live. The spirit ancestors must have known this. They watched over me, guarding my way, as I struggled to find myself, to find my way home.

Even though life in the dysfunctional primary family was an endless series of hurts and heartbreaks, all the knowledge and wisdom that was shared with me by the old ones, the elders, from church and community, was empowering and amazing. From my elders I gained the strength of character to act with courage and integrity. From them I learned the importance of listening to one’s spirit guides, to see those guides as the way the ancestors speak to and through us. While I left home fleeing the soul murder that had left me feeling abandoned and lacking, I begin to realize as I wandered from place to place, trying to find myself, that I had been given these precious gifts from the elders that enabled me to survive and thrive. Talking and writing, again and again, about this received wisdom is essential for those of us who not only want to remember the old ways, who want to integrate this wisdom from the past into our present as it remains life sustaining even though many of the elder teachers are long gone.

In my family of origin both my parents were negative about the old ways. They wanted a modern life, a life structured around the principles of liberal individualism, a life where the fulfillment of material desires mattered most. They refused to acknowledge the value of oppositional ways of thinking and being black folk had created in the segregated sub-cultures of Kentucky, especially the backwoods culture. More than anything our parents wanted their children to conform. I was intrigued by the culture of non-conformity, by the outlaw culture of my maternal grandparents. They believed that being a person of integrity was the most important aspect of anyone’s life. Second, they believed that it was essential to be self-deter mining and self-reliant. Since they lived life guided by the principles of organic environmental sustainability planting flowers and growing their food, raising their animals, digging fishing worms, making soap, wine, quilts, they were never wasteful. The focus of their life was meeting basic needs, keeping the wisdom of living off the land. They believed in the value of land ownership because owning one’s land was all that made self-determination possible. Although their lives were fraught with difficulties, especially as they daily encountered a world where their values had little meaning, the essence of all they were teaching and being holds true.

All the elders in my life growing up, whether they were family or chosen kin, believed it was essential for us to have a spiritual foundation. While Christianity was given pride of place in the quest for religious allegiance, my paternal grandmother Sister Ray believed in the power of voodoo, often ridiculed as hoodoo. No matter their choice for spiritual direction, our spiritually aware elders accepted that one could have mystical experiences based on communion with divine spirit. Both in slavery and beyond individuals would often go on solitary retreats in their quest for divine guidance and intervention. In African-American history Sojourner Truth is among the most well-known anti-slavery freedom fighter who gave testimony to her spiritual visions and mystical experience. During their communion with nature, country black folks who were not consciously seeking for inner mystical experience found themselves undergoing a shift in consciousness. That shift enabled them to feel oneness with all of creation giving them a sense of well-being, bliss, and a wise understanding of the reality of impermanence. This expanded sense of spiritual awareness moved far beyond the constraints of Christian thought and doctrine. It called on believers to acknowledge both psyche power, intuition, and the power of the unconscious.

When I was growing up we would hear grown-ups talk about the individual women who could predict the future and who could make things happen for you, individuals who were seers and healers. They could tell you the meaning of your dreams. Believing in the importance of dream and dream interpretation, many of our elders, like Sister Ray, acknowledged the power of mind, the subconscious. They believed that by listening to the messages given us in dreams one could be guided in daily life. They also believed in the importance of intuition. Guided by intuitions one could foresee a future reality and be proactive in relationship to it. All of these beliefs, acceptance of the oneness of life, the necessity of spiritual awareness, and the willingness to follow divine guidance, all helped sustain the belief in transcendence, in a cosmic consciousness more powerful than humankind. It kept black folks living in the midst of racial apartheid from being overwhelmed by despair. It kept them from seeing themselves as always and only victims. To believe in transcendence gave one a concrete basis for hope, for remembering that change is always possible. These empowering aspects of African-American southern life that were commonplace in segregated black communities began to lose their appeal as folks sought to integrate mainstream society and become part of dominator culture.

While my grandparents looked at most white folks with a critical eye, seeing them as more often than not, as pathologically narcissistic, racial integration ushered in a world wherein many black folks were trying to live as white folks as lived, to be like them. Creating standards of being and becoming that were not rooted in a quest to have what white folks had (of course when black folks expressed such longings they were not talking about having what poor white people had, they were equating whiteness with privilege) was part of oppositional thinking. It allowed for the formation of a different life principle which offered different ways of thinking and being. Ironically, despite the fact that our elders who lived in segregation suffered more intense race and class based exploitation and oppression than most black folks experience today, they had a foundation for building better healthy self-esteem than those of us raised in the world of racial integration and greater economic opportunity. In many ways their lives were hard, and yet they had ways of knowing joy and peace that are not known to many black people living in present times.

Significantly, it cannot be stated enough, that the sense of oneness with nature which offered a transcendental sense of life wherein humans were simply a small part of the holistic picture helped agrarian black folk put notions of race and racial superiority in perspective. In the segregated world of my growing up, black folks did not think that whiteness was all powerful. We were raised to see exploitation and oppression of any group as a sign of moral depravity. White people were in general not admired or envied. While it was clear that they were usually better off materially or had greater access to economic mobility, they were not seen as having a better life. Consequently, most black people did not see themselves as victims with no power to choose the quality of their life. Meeting adversity with perseverance and learning how to cope with difficulties shaped the content of one’s character. And one’s character determined one’s fate.

Creating joy in the midst of adversity was an essential survival strategy. More often than not peace and happiness was found in the enjoyment of simplicity. The pleasure of ripe fruit, a good tomato, smoking tobacco that one had grown, cured, and rolled into cigarettes, hunting, or catching fish. These simple pleasures created the context for contentment. Calling to mind these earlier times in African-American life and culture is not a sentimental gesture or an expression of empty nostalgia, it is meant to remind those of us grappling with the construction of self and identity in the present that we have a legacy of positive survival skills to draw upon that can teach us how to live with optimal well-being, irrespective of our circumstance. Suppressing these insights, erasing the agrarian roots of African-American folk, was a strategy of domination and colonization used by imperialist white supremacist capitalists to make it impossible for black people to choose self-determination. Equating freedom solely with economic mobility and material acquisition was a way of thinking about life that led country black folk to seek to distance themselves from their agrarian past. Eventually, this process of forgetting the past was helped by the invention of sociology as an academic discipline which led to studies of black life that defined black identity solely in relation to urban experience. Fleeing their agrarian roots, most blacks left behind the oppositional values that had been a source of power, a culture of resistance based on alternative ways of living one that valued emotional intelligence.

Racial integration disrupted black sub-cultures by compelling conformity to mainstream dominant culture. This strategy of acculturation began with education. Prior to the integration of schools, there was a connection between the values black folks learned in our community and the values learned in schools. In the all black schools of our growing up the wisdom of elderly black folks was acknowledged. Teachers would reference life lessons taught in the home. When schools were integrated, biased teachers encouraged us to believe that only white people had access to metaphysical knowledge and under-standing. The organic metaphysics of our ancestors had no place in the “white schools.” Often times smart black children who resisted socialization in the white schools were in a constant state of psychological trauma engendered by ongoing conflict with white power. On one hand, one had to “wear the mask” to succeed while trying to hold onto the unique culture of resistance formed in all black settings.

Ironically, it was during my time away from home when I lived in predominantly white educational settings that I begin to rediscover and reclaim many of the alternative ways of thinking and being that I had learned growing up. By then much of the oppositional culture I cherished was being erased. The culture of belonging was no longer common in black sub-cultures. This giving over was a direct consequence of efforts to succeed in dominator culture and one could be successful there only if one imitated the behavior of those in power. Often times black people who could not conform saw no alternative and sought escape in addiction. The focus on white power overshadowed ancestral understanding that we were all more than “race” and that there were powers mightier than humans. The absence of this oppositional awareness led to a widespread feeling of vulnerability wherein many black people began to think of themselves solely as victims.

As a tool of brainwashing, television played a major role in the colonization of the black mind. It was television that brought the thinking of dominator culture into the homes of black folks. It imaged for us liberal individualism. No wonder then as black folks embraced the thinking of dominator culture that many of the more healthy ways of living that had been central to a culture of resistance (especially in the southern parts of our nation where racism was more overt and extreme) were no longer deemed valuable. And as black identity became more and more equated with urbane experience, the more complex and multifaceted life experiences of southern black folk received little or no acknowledgement from mainstream culture. The portrait of southern black experience that emerged during the heady years of civil rights struggle was often one wherein a dehumanizing image of abject poverty was depicted. It was only as black women writers began to receive national attention in the wake of feminist movement, writers like Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Gloria Naylor offered a more expansive vision of southern black life.

Hurston described segregated life in Florida in which artistic production flourished, especially the creation of music and dance, despite the harsh background of material lack and seemingly endless hard labor in oppressive circumstances. In her anthropological work Hurston highlighted southern black folktales and showed the ways they were used to convey alternative ways of thinking and being to dominator culture. Walker wrote non-fiction essays about the beauty of her mothers gardens, about the growing of vegetables. Contrasting southern experience with northern experience in her first novel,
The Bluest Eye,
Morrison evokes a southern culture wherein black folk find their humanity in the natural environment, a culture that is sensual and life-enhancing. The life of southern black folk as she describes it is enhanced through luminosity. In the natural landscape everything is more vivid, radiant. Morrison s character Miss Pauline remembers her life in the South through colors: “When I first seed Chollly, I want you to know it was like all the bits of color from that time down home when all us chil’ren went berry picking after a funeral and I put some in the pocket of my Sunday dress, and they mashed up and stained my hips. My whole dress was messed with purple… I can feel that purple deep inside me And the streak of green them June bugs made on all the trees… All them colors was in, just sitting there.” The relationship to nature she describes is one in which a connection is felt with everything, with the oneness of all life.

Walker’s humanization of the oppressive black male Mister in her bestselling novel,
The Color Purple,
occurs as he experiences the wonder of nature, the beauty of trees and flowers. Reflecting on the meaning of life he comments, “I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ast. And that in wondering bout the big things and asting bout the big thins, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. … The more I wonder, he say, the more I love.” Returning to nature he is able to experience “wonder” and dream and by doing so open his heart. Gloria Naylor’s
Mama Day
chronicles the return of the successful black professional woman coming back to her southern roots to find healing and happiness. Drawing on the tradition of “illumination,” she fictively explores the way alternative spiritual traditions combine with traditional Christian ritual and are passed down from generation to generation. Black, male, novelist Ernest Gaines received national attention when his novel,
A Gathering of Old Men,
was chosen as an Oprah book club selection. Fictively depicting the efforts of black folks to keep alive their agrarian legacy, their stewardship in relationship to the land, Gaines highlights the role of black farmers and the attempt by dominator culture to erase that history.