Belonging: A Culture of Place (29 page)

More recently art world focus on the quilts made by the all black communities of Gees Bend Alabama offer a glimpse of a culture of resistance that emerged in the midst of ongoing material deprivation and harsh circumstance both public and private. Beautiful art books highlighting the work of the Gees Bend quilters use autobiographical narratives of individual black women to convey their way of life, the culture of giving and sharing that was common in their environment, the ability to live simply, to grow one’s food, to work hard, and yet create beauty despite adversity. In all the narratives of the black women artists of Gees Bend, there is powerful testimony about the way in which spiritual awareness provided the basis for a new vision of life which first manifested in creative energy and expression. It is impossible to read their testimony and not be awed by the passion and skill these women brought and bring to artistic production even when there was or is little or no financial reward for the marvelous visions they created and create with scraps of cloth.

Significantly, when mainstream culture highlights southern black folk culture and traditions, it is usually to reveal its beauty then to announce its passing. Rarely does anyone suggest that individual black folk today might benefit from reclaiming their roots to the land, that they might find migrating from the city to the country restorative, or find emotional sustenance in alternative spiritual practices, or just basic health by returning to a diet of homegrown and homemade foods. Instead, traditional southern black folk culture tends to be viewed solely from the standpoint of what can be seen as a brand of flat sentimental nostalgia, that is usually expressed in everyday reference to how things were much better in the past, “back in the day,” but with no attempt to attempt to integrate all that was constructive and positive in the past with our lives in the present.

It has been especially difficult for black folks, whether living in the country or the city, to stop worshipping at the throne of secular economics, believing that just having access to greater material resources would or will make life grand. And even though we witness individual black people who have gained unprecedented enormous wealth yet testify to a lack of meaning and direction in their lives, the vast majority of black people (like most everyone in our culture) still cling to the assumption that economic reward is the key to a good life. The celebration of folk roots and folk traditions seemed to capture the attention of affluent radical and/or new age white folks more than any other group. Even though there remains a focus on alternative living and new age spirituality that emerged in the late sixties and continues into the present day, it does not garner the interest of masses of our nation’s citizens. It exists alongside and at times competes with a materialist worldview.

New age spirituality, alternative therapy, concern for diet and the environment are the sites wherein individuals are encouraged to go back to the land, to live a simple life. Even so, these cultural arenas are not heavily populated by people of color. While there are individual black folk who are returning from city to country, who are leaving the North to come South (these changes are documented by anthropological and sociological work on return migration) there are not many public forums where our passion for the environment, for local food production, spiritual awareness and living simply can gain a hearing. Integrating these concerns with traditional ways of knowing received from enlightened elders is important to some of us and we are trying to go back to that place of wisdom. We know that many important values of our past are in danger of being utterly lost if we do recover and reclaim them.

One of the great tools of colonization has been pushing the assumption that poor people (especially black people) have neither the inclination nor the time to be concerned about the substantive quality of their lives. Of course, this is one of the assumptions that would prove to be totally erroneous if there was more available information about our agrarian history. Mass media is certainly one forum we can use to teach and remind people. Films like Julie Dash’s
Daughters of the Dust
and John Sayles’
American Beach
call attention to black engagement with land, with environmental concerns, with the global issue of sustainability.

Hopefully, as more black thinkers, writers, and artists share our engagement with the issues of environmental protection, local food production (both as consumers and producers), land stewardship, living simply, and our varied spiritual practices, we can chart a path that others will follow. Returning to one’s native place is not an option for everyone but that does not mean that meaningful traditions and values that may have been a part of their past cannot be integrated into homeplace wherever they make it. In Bill Holm’s book,
The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere On Earth,
he recounts his own effort to return home after years of being away. For him it was the recognition that after leaving many places both home and abroad that he had a longing, “for a sense of from-ness, whatever its discomfort,” that underlying that longing “was the desire for connection.” He ends the introduction to these essays with this statement of intent about the their purpose: “…they argue first that we are sunk by greed — consumerism gone made, a mania to acquire what we neither need nor desire; by fear — of the ‘stranger’ who is only a disguise for fear of ourselves and our own history; by technology — which since we misuse it by trusting it too much, deracinates and abstracts us, separates us both from nature and each other; and finally by the mad notion that we define and invent ourselves in isolation from any sense of from-ness or connection.” Whether reading Bill Holm or the more recent work of Barbara Kingsolver,
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle,
for many of us returning to our native place does bring an end to isolation. We are connected. And those connections both past and present solace, keep us excited by mystery, bring us joy.

20
Habits of the Heart

All my life I have searched for a place of belonging, a place that would become home. Growing up in a small Kentucky town, I knew in early childhood what home was, what it felt like. Home was the safe place, the place where one could count on not being hurt. It was the place where wounds were attended to. Home was the place where the me of me mattered. Home was the place I longed for it was not where I lived. My first remembered family dwelling, a cinder block house with concrete floors on a hill, stood as though naked against the lush backdrop of a dense natural landscape, trees, honeysuckle vines, blackberry bushes, and wild strawberries all made the concrete house seem out of place, set against nature, but unable to take over the world of lush wild things since the house was fixed unchanging and the natural landscape adamantly growing.

In this wilderness where I first moved and lived and had my being, I was nature and nature was me. Nature was the intimate companion of my girlhood. When life inside the concrete house was painful, unbearable, there was always the outside. There was always a place for me in nature.

Over and over again the grown-ups would tell us to respect the wilderness around us, to understand that it could be friend or foe. Our task was to learn discernment, to be in nature as nature, to understand the limits of the natural world and of the human body in that world. Nature’s generosity made it possible for us to have the pleasure of walking through fields and fields of homegown vegetables, the pleasure of popping fresh yellow and red tomatoes into one’s mouth straight from the vine. In this early childhood I experienced firsthand all that poet Gerard Manly Hopkins evokes when he writes that “nature is never spent” that within it “lives the dearest freshest deep down things.” As a young child I believed the wilderness land around me had its own special perfume, that when I stayed outside for a long while that scent entered me and came with me indoors, the scent of a fecund world of growth reckless and without boundaries.

Roaming those Kentucky hills I dwelled in paradise. I was certain that I belonged confident of my place and purpose. In that culture of belonging, I learned the importance of divine providence. Walking behind Daddy Jerry, my father’s father, farmer and sharecropper, I was taught that man could only do so much, that man could not make the crops grow, or the rain fall. I learned that humankind were special in our differences from other animals but that we were governed by higher powers. Daddy Jerry would often say, “as long as man knows his place in nature everything will be right but when he forgets and thinks he is god trouble comes.”

This profound belief in divine order allowed Daddy Jerry to experience wholeness and integrity despite the forces of white supremacist exploitation and oppression surrounding him. His love of the soil, the solace that he found in nature enabled him to have an open mind and an uplifted heart. Despite the sufferings he experienced living in the world of Jim Crow subjected to the cruel whims of a white supremacist patriarchal regime, he found a culture of belonging in the natural world, with the earth as his witness. It was this culture of belonging he shared with me, his first granddaughter trailing behind him as he dropped seeds into the earth, as he harvested the fruits of his labor. In
Rebalancing the World
Carol Lee Flinders shares the insight that it is useful to think of the values of belonging as habits of the heart. It is fitting that in those early years of childhood I felt heartwhole.

Explaining further her understanding of a culture of belonging, Flinders writes: “The values of Belonging are, in effect, the symptoms of a particular way of being in the world. Together, they form a dynamic whole — a syndrome if you will, or an orientation or ethos. Within that whole, each value reinforces and all but implies the others, and the source of their power as a constellation is the synergy between them.” Flinders asks readers to think of the values of belonging as “points on a circle, windows onto a single reality.” Listing the characteristics of the culture of belonging, Flinders explains that: “Fundamental to the culture of belonging is a strong sense of reciprocal connection to the land where one lives, empathic relationship to animals, self restraint, custodial conservatism, deliberateness, balance, expressiveness, generosity, egalitarianism, mutuality affinity for alternative modes of knowing, playfulness, inclusiveness, nonviolent conflict resolution and openness to spirit.”

The values of belonging imprinted on my consciousness in early childhood as a child of nature were in conflict with the values and beliefs that prevailed inside our patriarchal domestic household. In the concrete house I did not belong, there my spirit was alien, there I was subjected to soul murdering assault. When our family moved from the hills, from the country, into town, it was a shift brought about by our mother’s desire to have us be more civilized, to rid us of the taint of being from the backwoods, from being country people. Coming from a backwoods family who worked the land, growing their organic food, canning, raising chickens, making soap and wine, mama wanted to get as far away from country ways as possible. That this move from country to city shattered my inner peace was all the evidence she needed to prove her argument that living in the hills was making her children strange.

For me, this move was traumatic. Trapped in my grief about leaving the natural landscape of my formative years, I became quite dysfunctional in the town, my sadness steady and constant. In the world of the town I was faced with the politics of race, class, and gender. From roaming hills and feeling free I learned in the world of the city that to be safe as a girl, and especially as a black girl, it was best to be still, enclosed, confined. I learned that to be safe within the space of blackness one had to keep within set boundaries, to not cross the tracks separating black from white. I learned that wearing homemade clothes and hand-me-downs were marks of shame. Gone was my confidence that I belonged in the world. Gone was the spirit of wildness rising in my soul each day like wind, like breath, like being. Explaining the significance of wildness in his collection of essays,
Hunting For Hope,
Scott Russell Sanders contends: “Like the trickster figure who show up in tales the world over, wildness has many guises, but chief among them are creator and destroyer … Every form that gathers into existence eventually dissolves, ever cell, every star… Each heart that beats will one day cease. Knowing this, we have the choice of judging wildness, the very condition of our being, primarily by what it snatches away of by what it gives.” It was the generosity of wildness, receiving me, allowing me to be whole that led me to lament its loss in my young life.

In a world where I did not belong, I struggled to find strategies for survival. In the world of dominator culture, both within our household and beyond, I found a place of refuge in books, ways of perceiving the world which expanded my consciousness and left me wanting more from life than I believed was possible in the changing landscape of Kentucky as black people left hills, backwoods and countryside for the promise of a better life in towns or left all together to migrate to northern cities.

Even though civil rights struggle integrated our high school, reunions were always segregated. When the time came for our twentieth reunion, it was decided that the races would be not be segregated, that the time had come for us to remember together. I sat at the table with the courageous white friends who had dared to cross the boundaries of race and class to make community. They shared with me their assumption that they always knew I would leave and not come back, that my soul was too large for the world of our growing up, for Kentucky California and New York seemed to them the places that were right for me, the places that allowed one to be different and free. Like beloved black friends, they accepted that I would come home now and then but never to stay. Ann, the white female friend I wrote about in both
Bone Black
and
Wounds of Passion,
still lives in our town. Ken, our white male buddy, has a home not far away that he lives in some of the time and sees as the place he and his family will come to retire. In their adult lives they no longer have the intimacy with black friends that was there in our growing up years. That they lead more segregated lives does not wound their spirits as it did when we were young and longed to live in community.