Belonging: A Culture of Place (30 page)

Oftentimes black folks who have left southern roots have symbolically run away to escape the everyday racism that restricts, limits, and confines, a racism that seems somehow worse than the racism one encounters elsewhere because it is intimate terrorism imposed not by strangers but by those with whom one is most familiar.

When I left Kentucky more than thirty years ago, I felt like an exile, as though I was being forced to leave the landscape of my origin, my native place because it would not allow me to grow, to be fully self-actualized. Both the inner world of family dysfunction and the outer world of dominator threatened to suffocate my spirit. Writing about exile in
Pedagogy of the Heart
Paulo Freire contends: “Suffering exile implies recognizing that one has left his or her context of origin; it means experiencing bitterness, the clarity of a cloudy place where one must make right moves to get through. Exile cannot be suffered when it is all pain and pessimism. Exile cannot be suffered when it is all reason. One suffers exile when his or her conscious body, reason, and feeling — one’s whole body — is touched … To have a project for the future, I do not live only in the past. Rather, I exist in the present, where I prepare myself for the possible return.” Exile highlighted for me all that was vital and life sustaining about the Kentucky world I grew up in. It was the field of dreams I explored to uncover the counterhegemonic culture of belonging that had made me different, able to be radically open. It was on Kentucky ground that I first experienced the interplay of race, gender, and class. It was there that I learned the importance of interlocking systems of domination. That experiential learning became a vital resource when I began to write critical theory.

Even though Kentucky and our vernacular tongue was the language of my dreams, I did not imagine myself returning to live in Kentucky. Time and time again I visited and felt that so little had changed. As a grown woman I felt that there was even less room for me here than when I was child. Unchanged racism seemed to have grown more deeply entrenched. Plantation culture seemed to still be the norm. Narrow irrational fundamentalist religious thought continued to prevail. Neat justifications for domination culture were the order of the day.

To me, coming home was often like going back in time. And so many of the times that I returned were moments given over to grief that the positive old ways, the old culture, the old folk were leaving us. Throughout my work, both in visual art and writing, I have drawn on my childhood memories of life in Kentucky to evoke awareness of the power of a culture of belonging. To fully belong anywhere one must understand the ground of one’s being. And that understanding invariably returns one to childhood. In
The Hidden Wound
Kentucky writer Wendell Berry states: “I have gone back to my native place, to live there mindful of its nature and its possibilities.” Even though Berry has lived in Kentucky most of his life, his reflections on the past are part of the effort to heal and become whole that is essential to the project of self-reclamation. Living away from my native place exploring the past and writing about it critically was a constant ritual of reclamation. It was a ritual a remembering that not only evoked the past but made it a central part of the present. It was though I had not really left Kentucky as it was always there in imagination — the place I returned to — the ground of me being.

Researching return migration, the movement of AfricanAmericans from urban cities to the rural South, anthropologist Carol Stack explains that the folks she interviewed wanted to come home to reclaim aspects of “belonging’ and community they had not found in other places even as they also longed to work for change in the worlds of their growing up they seem so unchanged. She explains further: “No one is seeking timeless paradise; and no one, however nostalgic, is really seeking to turn back the clock … What people are seeking is not so much the home they left behind as a place that they feel they can change, a place in which their lives and strivings will make a difference — a place in which to create a home.” Obsessed with the project of creating home, I moved many places before making a decision to return to the South. Ultimately, I wanted to return to the place where I had felt myself to be part of a culture of belonging — to a place where I could feel at home, a landscape of memory, thought, and imagination.

For the more than thirty years I lived away from Kentucky; coming home to see my parents was always the ritual of regard renewing my sense of connection with the world of my growing up. My parents are old now. I can no longer count on them to be the force calling me home. Now the force within me demands that I stake my own claim to this Kentucky ground. The landscape of remembered belonging calls me to commune with the world of my growing, the natural wildness that remains. Communing with nature is an essential aspect of a culture of belonging. In his book,
Callings: Finding and Following An Authentic life,
Gregg Levoy reminds us that: “Nature is a proper setting for a return to ourselves, our source, our place of origin. It is the place where the world was created, where our ancestors came from …”

Seeking solitude my spirit finds solace in nature. There it can embrace the reality of things living and dying, of the passing away of the old, of resurrection. Contemplation of dying and the deaths to come is yet another path that led me to come home again. The seventeenthcentury Quaker William Penn counseled: “And this is the comfort of the good that the grave cannot hold them, and that they live as soon as they die. For death is no more than the turning us over from time to eternity. Death, then being the way and condition of life. We cannot love to live if we cannot bear to die.” And so it is the knowledge of my own dying process that allows me to choose to return to a place where I first lived fully and well.

Certainly confronting death, the experience of 9/11, strangers and loved ones dying from disease and disaster, young and old, as well as facing the limitations of my aging body all awakened in me an intense yearning to experience anew cultures of belonging, even if they exist only as fragments, or just fledging worlds trying to stay vibrant in the midst of dominator culture.

My return to my native place led me to Berea, a small town in eastern Kentucky with a progressive history and legacy. Berea College was founded in 1858 by a visionary abolitionist who believed in freedom for everyone, women and men. It was named after a biblical town in the New Testament “where people received the word with all readiness of mind.” Fee founded Berea College with the expressed purpose of educating men and women, black and white from the Appalachian regions of Kentucky, especially poor folk. He wanted them to be able to learn in an environment embodying the principles of freedom, justice, and equality. He was committed to the creation of a lasing culture of belonging. It is fitting that I choose to create home in this place, to be part of a community working to sustain a culture of belong. Berea offers much that was wondrous my life as a child.

The world of my childhood was a world of contrasts; on one hand a lush green landscape of fast horses, natural waterfalls, tobacco crops, and red birds and, on the other hand, a world of greedy exploitation of big homes and little shacks, a world of fear and domination, of man over nature, of white over black, or top and bottom. In my childhood I dreamed about a culture of belonging. I still dream that dream. I contemplate what our lives would be like if we knew how to cultivate awareness, to live mindfully, peacefully; if we learned habits of being that would bring us closer together, that would help us build beloved community. In my work rooted in my native place Kentucky and the values I learned as a child, I seek to evoke a language of healing, of hope, of possibility, a language of dreams, a language of belonging.

Awakening in the night, when I first moved to my new Kentucky home, I was startled by a familiar sound, the sound of a train, a sound evocative of my childhood. When we moved from country to city we lived only a few houses away from the train tracks. Every night I would lie in the stillness of the dark and listen to trains coming and going imagining my own life journey, the places I would go, the people I would meet. The sound of the train comforts me now as it did then, for I know I have come home. I have returned to the world of my childhood, the world in which I first sowed the seeds of my being and becoming, a seeker on the path, the contemplative intellectual choosing solitude, ideas, choosing critical thinking. Here in my native place I embrace the circularity of the sacred, that where I begin is also where I will end. I belong here.

21
A Community of Care

Writing about my Kentucky past, I often say little about Rosa Bell (my mother) and Veodis (my father), yet their presence in Kentucky also called me home. Simply put, they were and are getting older, moving closer to death, and I wanted to spend time with them during their process of descent. My father has likened the period of life when one begins to be old as the time when we are no longer walking up the mountain. “Glory,” he will say to me, “I’m never going to be walking up the mountain again, I’m going down the mountain. I’m on my way home.” His metaphor astounds me because both Rosa and Veodis wanted to turn away from mountains and hills, to turn away from the agrarian life they had been born into and to seek after the modern and the new. No farming for them, no back breaking labor on the land. They both wanted life in the city. And, as a child of the country, I have been at odds with them since my birth. Mama, sometimes jokingly and sometimes with rage, would rail against our many differences by exclaiming, “I don’t know where I got you from but I sure wish I could take you back!” And oh how much I longed to go back, to go live with my grandparents with whom I felt a greater resonance of spirit. Mama and Daddy would not allow this.

They wanted me to become a city girl, and of all my siblings they wanted me to be the one who would not be “country.” And yet in many ways I am as country as they come, more like my grandparents than them. I even speak the language of my grandparents, the language of Kentucky black vernacular dialect but I also speak the language of the city, a language that is neutral with no attention to region or place. Hearing me speak the language of city was a comfort to my parents. That is until I acquired a dissident voice, one that shocked and jarred their sensibilities, a voice that made them feel afraid. To them any speaking out against authority, what I would call dominator culture, puts one at risk. And therefore it is better to remain silent. My talking made them afraid. In some ways they were glad then when I left home and went out into a world of cities where they did not have to hear me talk. They could never grasp that I was just plain country in lots of ways and that no amount of book learning, education, or writerly fame was going to change that.

In
Citizenship Papers,
Wendell Berry boldly states: “I believe that this contest between industrialism and agrarianism now defines the most fundamental human difference, for it divides not just two nearly opposite concepts of agriculture and land use, but also two nearly opposite ways of understanding ourselves, our fellow creatures, and our world.” For me, this quote deeply evokes the schism between me and my parents. They represented the city, the culture of the new, “make more money, buy more things, throw things away, there is always more.” My grandparents, both maternal and paternal represented the country, the culture of the old, no waste, everything used, useful, recycled. Now Rosa Bell and Veodis have themselves become part of the culture of the old. Dad at eighty-eight is one of the last living survivors of the all black infantry he was part of in the Second World War. Mama is ten years younger but the loss of her memory has taken her from here to eternity. She, more so than Dad, feels that she has no real place among the living, that she does not belong. Unlike Dad, she feels it would be better to die.

Losing one’s memory, to dementia or Alzheimer’s, is a way of dying. It takes one to a place where you no longer make connections and communicate with the mind. Words no longer carry much weight. Language has little meaning. The divide between the country and the city no longer exists. Time cannot be understood in any consistent linear way. Time converges on itself; days past fall easily into the present, and years collapse upon themselves. Faces too fall into forgetfulness and relationships that were once all in all are indistinct shadows. Mama awakens and says of the husband she has been in partnership with for almost sixty years: “Who is he?” When you identify him, she just says, “Oh!” And that is where it ends for her. Later, she will call him by name and speak from that place where they know one another intimately. But this vivid awareness will not last.

Mama still knows who I am. She hears my voice and knows Gloria Jean is calling. She hears my voice and knows how I am feeling. One day I call and she says: “I was just looking at one of your books.” When I was home last, she had one of my books and kept reading the part on the back that describes the author. Repeatedly, she reads it aloud to me over and over again. When she finishes, she is satisfied to have grasped a part of who I am, her daughter who writes. And yet my writing has been a source of pain to Mama, revealing to the public world much that she would have chosen to keep private, to keep secret. Even though she told me once that my work causes her so much pain that she just has to fall on her knees and pray, she is proud of my writing. Both my parents have weathered the storm of my work. Dysfunctional though our family may be, they have maintained their care and commitment to all their children — to family. And as I have grown into mid-life, I have come to appreciate deeply the discipline it takes to maintain commitment for more than fifty years. Living alone as I have done for almost as many years of my life as I shared with a partner, seeing marriages, partnerships (straight and gay) come and go, falling apart at the slightest moment where difference is recognized and deemed irreconcilable, I appreciate the strength it takes to maintain commitment.