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180 Belonging

folks who have accepted unearned white privilege must be willing to

forego those rewards and stand down, expressing their solidarity with

those to are the most immediate victims of racist assault and domina­

tion.

In 77,e Hidden H/4i1111d, first published in 1968, Wendell Berry was

prescient in his insightful critique of whiteness, showing himself to be

among the first well known cultural critic to see and publicly name

the link between white racist domination and destruction of the earth.

He does not sugarcoat his critique boldly proclaiming:" ... the white

race in America has marketed and destroyed more of the fertility of

the earth in less time than any other race that has ever lived. In my

part of the country, at least, this is largely to be accounted for by the

racial division of the experience of the landscape. The white man,

preoccupied with the abstractions of the economic exploitation and

ownership of the land, necessar ily has lived on the country as a de­

structive force, an ecological catastrophe, because he assigned the hard

labor, and in that the possibility of intimate knowledge of the land, to

a people he considered racially inferior; in thus debasing labor, he de­

stroyed the possibility of a meaningful contact with the earth." Berry

acknowledged that agrarian subjugated black folk were able to work

the land and "develop resources of character and religion and art that

have some resemblance to the old world." Displaced African people

found working the land to be one of the few locations where ties to

their landscape of origin could be reclaimed.

In seeking freedom in the city via mass migration from the agrar­

ian South, most black people began to embrace dominator ways of

thinking about the earth. Berry contends: "The move from country to

city, moreover deprives them of their competence in doing for them­

selves. It is no exaggeration to say that, in the country, most blacks

were skilled in the arts-of-make-do and subsistence ... They knew

how to grow and harvest and prepare food. They knew how to gather

wild fruits, nuts, and herbs.They knew how to hunt and fish ... In the

cities, all of this know-how was suddenly of no value ... In the country,

Returning to the Wound 181

despite the limits placed upon them by segregation and poverty, they

possessed a certain freedom in their ability to do things, but once they

were in the city freedom was inescapably associated with the ability

to buy things." Of course, not all black folk migrated to cities. And it

the memory of a sustained oppositional living sub-culture, like the

one Berry describes that offers a glimmer of hope in the present day.

Hence the importance of both naming black folks collective estrange­

ment from our agrarian past and taking steps to uncover the true na­

ture of culture of belonging as well as the naming of the trauma that

took place when country life lost meaning and visibility.

This estrangement from our agrarian past, this rupture can only be

healed by full acknowledgement of that legacy and the functional use

of that legacy in the present. Remembering Nick Watkins and Aunt

Georgie (and folks like them) is one way to intervene on our nation's

collective forgetting. One of the silent spaces in Berry's narrative is

caused by his lack of familiarity with the more developed and articu­

lated land stewardship of Kentucky black people. He learns some of

that sub-culture of blackness from his conversations with southern

black writer Ernest Gaines. In Berry's short story "Freedom," a fic­

tionalized account of Nick's funeral, he shares accurate secondhand

knowledge of the unique way many southern black folks approach

death.

Certainly, Berry in 77,e Hidde11 rH11md shows both a keen aware­

ness and a profound respect for the humanizing culture black folks

created in the midst of adversity. Rightly, in the afterword added in

1988, twenty years after the initial publication, he still acknowledges

"the freedom and prosperity of the people" cannot be seen as separate

from the issue of the health of the land" and that "the psychic wounds

of racism had resulted inevitably in wounds in the land, the country

itself."W hile Berry can state that he believed then and now "that the

root of our racial problem in American is not racism" but "our inor­

dinate desire to be super ior." Of course were Ber ry a student of my

work, I would encourage him to think more about the ideology of