Belonging: A Culture of Place (3 page)

Conservative white Kentuckians told themselves “the blacks don’t want change — they like the way things are.” Having reduced black folks to a state of traumatic powerlessness, racist white folks saw no problem with the intimate racial terrorism that they enacted which led them to believe that they could know the mind and hearts of black folks, that they could own our desires. Efforts on the part of conservative white Kentuckians to exploit and oppress black folk were congruent with the effort to erase and destroy the rebellious sensibility of white mountain folk. The anarchist spirit which had surfaced in the culture of white hillbillies was as much a threat to the imperialist white supremacist capitalist state as any notion of racial equality and racial integration. Consequently this culture, like the distinctive habits of black agrarian folk, had to be disrupted and ultimately targeted for destruction.

Leaving Kentucky, fleeing the psycho history of traumatic powerlessness, I took with me from the sub-cultures of my native state (mountain folk, hillbillies, Appalachians) a positive understanding of what it means to be know a culture of belonging, that cultural legacy handed down to me by my ancestors. In her book
Rebalancing the World
Carol Lee Flinders defines a culture of belonging as one in which there is “intimate connection with the land to which one belongs, empathic relationship to animals, self-restraint, custodial conservation, deliberateness, balance, expressiveness, generosity, egalitarianism, mutuality, affinity for alternative modes of knowing, playfulness, inclusiveness, nonviolent conflict resolution, and openness to spirit.” All these ways of belonging were taught to me in my early childhood but these imprints were covered over by the received biased knowledge of dominator culture. Yet they become the subjugated knowledge that served to fuel my adult radicalism.

Living away from my native place I become more consciously Kentuckian than I was when I lived at home. This is what the experience of exile can do, change your mind, utterly transform one’s perception of the world of home. The differences geographical location imprinted on my psyche and habits of being became more evident away from home. In Kentucky no one had thought I had a Kentucky accent, in California speaking in the soft black southern vernacular that was our everyday speech made me the subject of unwanted attention. In a short period of time I learned to change my way of speaking, to keep the sounds and cadences of Kentucky secret, an intimate voice to be heard only by folks who could understand. Not speaking in the tongue of my ancestors was a way to silence ridicule about Kentucky. It was a way to avoid being subjugated by the geographical hierarchies around me which deemed my native place country, backwards, a place outside time. I learned more about Kentucky during my undergraduate years as I placed the portrait of a landscape I knew intimately alongside the stereotypical way of seeing that world as it was represented by outsiders.

Perhaps my greatest sense of estrangement in this new liberal college environment was caused by the overall absence among my professors and peers of any overtly expressed belief in Christianity and God. Indeed, it was far more cool in those days to announce that one was agnostic or atheist than to talk about belief in God. Coming from a Bible-toting, Bible-talking world where scripture was quoted in everyday conversations, I lacked the psychological resources and know how to positively function in a world where spiritual faith was regarded with as much disdain as being from the geographical south. In my dormitory the one student who openly read from scripture, a quiet white male student from a Mormon background, was more often than not alone and isolated. We talked to one another and endeavored to make each other feel less like strangers in a strange land. We talked scripture. But talking scripture was not powerful enough to erase the barriers created by racism that had taught us to fear and beware difference. And even though there were organized Christian groups on campus they did not speak the religious language I was accustomed to hearing.

By the end of my second year of college, I began to question the religious beliefs of my family, the way of religion I had been taught back home. In the new age spiritual environment of California, I fashioned a spirituality that made sense to my mind and heart. I worshipped in a manner that was in tune with divine spirit as I had come to know it in the hills of my Kentucky upbringing. Growing up I had always been torn between the righteous religious fundamentalism of those who practiced according to organized church doctrine and dictates and the nature worshipping ecstatic mystical spirituality of the backwoods. All through my college years, even during those times when my soul was racked by doubt, I held onto core beliefs in the power of divine spirit.

My college years began that process of feeling split in my mind and heart which characterized my life in all the places I moved to California, Wisconsin, Connecticut, Ohio, New York. At heart I saw myself as a country girl, an eccentric product of the sense and sensibility of the Kentucky backwoods and yet the life I lived was one where different ethics, values, and beliefs ruled the day. My life away from Kentucky was full of contradictions. The issues of honesty and integrity that had made life clear and simple growing up were an uneasy fit with the academic and literary world I had chosen as my own. In time the split mind that had become my psychic landscape began to unravel. As I experienced greater success as an intellectual and a writer, I felt I was constantly working to make my core truths have visibility and meaning in a world where the values and beliefs I wanted to make the foundation of my life had no meaning. Still and all, I did not feel that I could come home. The self I had invented in these other worlds seemed too unconventional for Kentucky, too cosmopolitan.

Like many writers, especially southerners, who have stayed away from their native place, who live in a state of mental exile, the condition of feeling split was damaging, caused a breaking down of the spirit. Healing that spirit meant for me remembering myself, taking the bits and pieces of my life and putting them together again. In remembering my childhood and writing about my early life I was mapping the territory, discovering myself and finding homeplace — seeing clearly that Kentucky was my fate.

The intense suicidal melancholia that had ravished my spirit in girlhood, in part a response to leaving the hills, leaving a world of freedom, had not been left behind. It followed me to all the places I journeyed. And the familiar grief which kept me awake at night, crying, longing, stayed present wherever I went bringing in its wake the experience of traumatic powerlessness. The nighttime terrors that were there in Kentucky, the wild horses that roamed my nights leaving me crazed and sleep deprived followed me. The inability to sleep that was a constant in girlhood was even more exacerbated the farther I journeyed from my childhood home. Many times I would lie in pitch dark rooms away from Kentucky and imagine all the ways I could create my own homeplace. Yet all my efforts to start over always ended up taking me back to the past, allowing it to serve as foundation for the present.

When in doubt about the direction of my life, I would imagine myself as a filmmaker, creating an autobiographical film titled
Kentucky Is My Fate.
The first frames of the film are all shots of nature, shots of tobacco fields, tobacco farms, tobacco barns. I enter this filmic narrative as a witness: Baba, mama’s mother is braiding tobacco leaves, readying them to be hung, for placing in closets and trunks to keep moths and other cloth eating pests away. Much of this imaginary film focuses on the elders whose presence dominated my childhood.

When I left my native place for the fist time, I brought with me two artifacts from home that were emblematic of my growing up life, braided tobacco leaves and the crazy quilt Baba, mama’s mother, had given me when I was a young girl. These two totems were to remind me always of where I come from and who I am at my core. They stand between me and the madness that exile makes, the brokenheartedness. They are present in my new life to shield me from death, to remind me that I can always return home. Each year of my life as I went home to visit it was a rite of passage to reassure myself that I still belonged, that I had not become so changed that I could not come home again. My visits home almost always left me torn: I wanted to stay but I needed to leave, to be endlessly running away from home.

Madness was more acceptable away from home. At the predominately white colleges I attended, it was accepted that students might feel overwhelmed by separation from their norm environment, that we might feel estranged, alienated, that we might in fact lose our minds. Therapy, I learned then, was the best way to face psychic wounds, the best way to heal. One of my younger sisters recently asked me: “how did you know you needed help.” I shared: “I knew I was not normal. I knew it was not normal to want to kill myself.” Intensely sad suicidal longings led me to therapy but in those early years therapy did not help. I could not find a therapist who would acknowledge the power of geographical location, of ancestral imprints, of racialized identity. Watching the comedy
Beverly Hillbillies
seemed to be the basis for most folks’ perceptions of the Kentucky backwoods, even therapeutic ones. And certainly in my early college years I lacked an adequate language to name all that had shaped and formed me.

Even when I felt therapy was not helping I did not lose my conviction that there was health to be found, that healing could come from understanding the past and connecting it to the present. Baba, my maternal grandmother, would often ask me, “how can you live so far away from your people.” When she posed this question I always felt it carried with it a rebuke, the slight insistence that I had been disloyal, betrayed the ancestral legacy by leaving home. The question I asked myself was “why when Kentucky means so much why can’t you go home and stay home.” In my early twenties I began to construct a narrative map of the past, to write down the experiences of childhood that I felt were vital imprints. I began by making list — thinking all the while about the stories we tell someone about ourselves when we meet and begin the process of getting to know one another. It was clear to me that I shared the same tales I thought were significant over and over again. I felt certain that if I could just put these memories on paper and order them it would help me to bring order to my life. Creating a clear detailed account of ”myself,” I felt certain that I would then be able to stand back and see myself in a new way, no longer fragmented — whole — complete.

Writing my girlhood life helped. It gave me new ground to stand on. I collected these memories and published them in the memoir
Bone Black.
Poetic in style and tone, abstract even, I read and hear these accounts of my girlhood as though the speaker is in a trance, in a state that is at once removed and yet present. Much of my life away from Kentucky was lived in a trance state, as though I was always there and not there at the same time. Working to heal, to be whole has been a process of awakening, of moving from trance into reality, of learning how to be fully present. Leaving home evoked extreme feeling of abandonment and loss. It was like dying. Resurrecting the memories of home, bringing the bits and pieces together was a movement back that enabled me to move forward. All my trance states were defenses against the terrors of childhood. When I left home I took with me unresolved traumas. Carrying the voices of my ancestors within me everywhere I called home, I carried remembered pain and allowed it to continually sweep me away. This sensation of being swept away was like spinning.

Away from Kentucky my heart was spinning and it was only when the spinning stopped that I could see clearly and heal. Initially this clarity did not lead me to return to Kentucky. Indeed, I feared that if I returned home to Kentucky I would be shattered, triggered in ways that would disrupt and fragment. I could be most adamantly a Kentuckian away form Kentucky. Since my native place was indeed the site and origin of the deep dysfunction that had damaged my spirit I did not believe I could be safe there. I could see the connection between private family dysfunction, and the public dysfunction that was sanctioned by the State of Kentucky. Wayne Kritsberg offers a useful definition of dysfunction in his book
Healing Together
clarifying that: “A dysfunctional family is one that is consistently unable to provide a safe nurturing environment. Through its maladaptive behaviors, the family develops a set of restrictions that inhibit the social and emotional growth of its members, particularly the children. The healthy family on the other hand provides safety and nurturing for its members and assists them in their development by setting firm but reasonable limits, rather than imposing rigid constraints.” The fundamentalist Christian patriarchal power that determined the public world of the State in my native place was mirrored in the structure of my primary family life and family values. Concurrently, white supremacy shaped the psyches of black and white folks in ways that constrained and deformed

Making the connections between geographical location and psychological states of being was useful for me. It empowered me to recognize the serious dysfunctional aspect of the southern world I was raised in, the ways internalized racism affected our emotional intelligence, our emotional life and yet it also revealed the positive aspects of my upbringing, the strategies of resistance that were life enhancing. Certainly racial separatism, in conjunction with resistance to racism and white supremacy, empowered non-conforming black folks to create a sub-culture based on oppositional values. Those oppositional values imprinted on my psyche early in childhood enabled me to develop a survivalist will to resist that stood me in good stead both during the times I returned home and in the wilderness of spirit I dwelled in away from home. Oppositional habits of being learned during childhood forged a tie to my native place that could not be severed

Growing up, renegade black and white folks who perceived the backwoods, the natural environment, to be a space away from manmade constructions, from dominator culture, were able to create unique habits of thinking and being that were in resistance to the status quo. This spirit of resistance had characterized much of Kentucky’s early history, the way in which white colonizers first perceived it an untouched truly wild wilderness that would resist being tamed by the forces of imperialist white supremacist capitalism. Even though the forces of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy did ultimately subordinate the land to its predatory interests it did not create a closed system, individual Kentuckians white and black, still managed to create sub-culture, usually in hollows, hills, and mountains, governed by beliefs and values contrary to those of mainstream culture. The free thinking and non-conformist behavior encouraged in the backwoods was a threat to imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy hence the need to undermine them by creating the notion that folks who inhabited these spaced were ignorant, stupid, inbred, ungovernable. By dehumanizing the hillbilly, the anarchist spirit which empowered poor folks to choose a lifestyle different from that of the state and so called civilized society could be crushed. And if not totally crushed, at least made to appear criminal or suspect.