By Wendell Berry, 1970, 1989
“Racism versus Community”
Wendell Berry hails from Kentucky farm country, so he has had to deal with the heritage of racism in the Old South. He had ancestors who owned slaves, and in his era farm hands continued as Black. In some ways these farm hands were like family, but there were definite limits. As a boy Berry became best buddies with old Nick, who did much of the farm work, accompanied by Wendell’s grandfather, until they both died when Berry was about age 10 at the end of World War II.
The highlight of this book is Berry’s deep affection of the simple wisdom, competence, and camaraderie of Nick, along with the crazy visions and eccentricities of Aunt Georgie, also an aging Black but of a totally different character. These characters help you understand Berry’s well-known closeness to the land and community life – so close that he eventually moved back to this area from the cosmopolitan areas of high culture.
Most striking is that as a young boy the family farm was still totally horse and mule—the tractors took over only after WW II. That someone as modern as Wendell Berry was raised in a truly bygone era is something that I find hard to fathom. And it was like a thunderclap in American culture, especially for the Black race, as Berry makes very clear. They left the southern farms in droves and headed north, only to later end up in what later became urban ghettos, disoriented and unprepared, especially when the good industrial jobs melted away.
Much of the rest of the book is about Berry’s struggle to understand what slavery and Jim Crow had done not just to Blacks but to whites – a hidden wound for the whites, as the book title says. Even matter-of-fact old family stories revealed the pain, such as when a slave who resisted his slavery was sold to a brutal slave trader, a violent man who was later romanticized in a book, Kentucky Cavaliers in Dixie, about the Civil War and its aftermath.
This Gone with the Wind kind of romanticization was itself another way of covering over the pain. As Berry later says, “I don’t think the whites delt with their misery anything like so well as the blacks have. . . . the whites developed almost at once the means of disguising their misery and pretending that it did not exist” (pg. 63).
As to solutions, “The historical pressures on race relations in this country tend always to push us toward two complementary dangers: that to whites an ancestral guilt will seem an adequate motive; that, to Blacks, ancestral bondage will seem an adequate distinction.” His point is that “a man, I think, can be much more dependably motivated by a sense of what would be desirable than a sense of what has been deplorable” (pg. 62). Instead, he regards Southern society as “artificial in the extreme, both in its values and its physical appurtenances and relationships” (pg. 67), with a long list, including the focus on money, status, churches preaching belief not good deeds, marriage without love, and much more.
Berry honors those literary figures who sought to break through this artificiality, such as Thoreau, Melville, Twain, and Faulkner. Then he says, “My feeling is that there is a longing, either conscious or unconscious, to be accepted and liked by people of the other race” (pg. 91). But “No matter how friendly a given white may seem, the black man, of course, fears that he is being stereotyped and misjudged” while “whites may hesitate to offer friendliness to blacks for fear they will seem to condescend or patronize”. “We have not developed either the language or the necessary social forms by which to recognize across the division our common interest and our common humanity” (pg. 92).
Berry declares that “I believe . . . that the root of our racial problem in America is not racism. The root is in our inordinate desire to be superior – not to some inferior or subject people. . . — but to our condition” (pg. 112) — superior to the earth itself and to hard work. In conclusion (1988) he says that, “It only means that our predicament is extremely unfavorable, as the human predicament has often been” (pg. 136), but “If it fails slowly and if we have been careful to preserve the most necessary and valuable things, then it may fail into a restoration of community life” (pg. 137).
Trigger warning: Berry uses the N word for authenticity.
Find the book at the Open Library here.
