Read Online Belonging: A Culture of Place by bell hooks - Free Book Online Page A

them lived past seventy. We have yet to have movements for black self-determination that focus on our relation to nature and the role natural environments can play in resistance struggle. As the diverse histories of black farmers are uncovered, we will begin to document and learn. Many voices from the past tell us about agriculture and farming in autobiographical work that may on the surface offer no hint that there is documentation of our agrarian history contained within those pages. Anthropologist Carol Stack offers information about black farmers in Call To Home: me: African Americans Reclaim the Rural South explaining: “After the Civil War, beginning with no capital or equity of any kind, freedmen began working to assemble parcels of land. By 1920 more than 900,000 black Americans, all but a handful of them in the South, were classified as farm operators, representing about 20 percent of southern farmers… One-fourth of black farmers were true landowners, controlling a total of 15 million acres of farmland.” Stack documents the way in which black folks struggled and worked to own land, even if that land would simply a small farm, averaging, Stack reports “one-third the acreage of white farms.”
    Reading the autobiography of an African-American midwife in the deep South whose family lived off the land and were able to live well during hard times served as a catalyst compelling me to think and write about growing up in rural southern culture. Much of what we hear about that past is framed around discussion of racist exploitation and oppression. Little is written about the joy black folks experienced living in harmony with nature. In her new book, We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For, Alice Walker recalls: “I remember distinctly the joy I witnessed on the faces of my parents and grandparents as they savored the sweet odor of spring soil or the fresh liveliness of wind.” It is because we remember the joy that we call each other to accountability in reclaiming that space of agency where we know we are more than our pain, where we experience our interdependency, our oneness with all life.
    Alice Walker contends: “Looking about at the wreck and ruin of America, which all our forced, unpaid labor over five centuries was unable to avert, we cannot help wanting our people who have suffered so grievously and held the faith so long, to at last experience lives of freedom, lives of joy. And so those of us chosen by Life to blaze different trails than the ones forced on our ancestors have explored the known universe in search of that which brings the most peace, self-acceptance and liberation. We have found much to inspire us in Nature. In the sheer persistence and wonder of Creation itself.” Reclaiming the inspiration and intention of our ancestors who acknowledged the sacredness of the earth, its power to stand as witness is vital to our contemporary survival. Again and again in slave narratives we read about black folks taking to the hills in search of freedom, moving into deep wilderness to share their sorrow with the natural habitat. We read about ways they found solace in wild things. It is no wonder that in childhood I was taught to recite scripture reminding me that nature could be an ally in all efforts to heal and renew the spirit. Listening to the words of the psalmist exclaiming: “I will lift up mine eyes until the hills from whence cometh my help.”
    Seeking healing I have necessarily retuned to the Kentucky hills of my childhood, to familiar rural landscapes. It is impossible to live in the Kentucky of today and not feel sorrow about all that humans have done to decimate and destroy this land. And yet even as we grieve we must allow our sorrow to lead us into redemptive ecological activism. For me that takes myriad forms — most immediately acquiring land that will not be developed, renewing my commitment to living simply, to growing things. I cherish that bumper sticker that wisely reminds us