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

meeting, Native American and African people shared with one another a respect for the life-giving forces of nature, of the earth. African settlers in Florida taught the Creek Nation run-aways, the “Seminoles,’ methods for rice cultivation. Native peoples taught recently arrived black folks all about the many uses of corn. (The hotwater cornbread we grew up eating came to our black southern diet from the world of the Indian.) Sharing the reverence for the earth, black and red people helped one another remember that, despite the white man’s ways, the land belonged to everyone. Listen to these words attributed to Chief Seattle in 1854:
    How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every clearing and humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people… We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters; the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadows, the body heat of the pony, and man — all belong to the same family.
    The sense of union and harmony with nature expressed here is echoed in testimony by black people who found that even though life in the new world was “harsh, harsh,’ in relationship to the earth one could be at peace. In the oral autobiography of granny midwife Onnie Lee Logan, who lived all her life in Alabama, she talks about the richness of farm life — growing vegetables, raising chickens, and smoking meat. She reports:
    We lived a happy, comfortable life to be right outa slavery times. I didn’t know no thin else but the farm so it was happy and we was happy… We couldn’t do anything else but be happy. We accept the days as they come and as they were. Day by day until you couldn’t say there was any great hard time. We overlooked it. We didn’t think nothin about it. We just went along. We had what it takes to make a good livin and go about it.
    Living in modern society, without a sense of history, it has been easy for folks to forget that black people were first and foremost a people of the land, farmers. It is easy for folks to forget that at the first part of the twentieth century, the vast majority of black folks in the United States lived in the agrarian south.
    Living close to nature, black folks were able to cultivate a spirit of wonder and reverence for life. Growing food to sustain life and flowers to please the soul, they were able to make a connection with the earth that was ongoing and life-affirming. They were witnesses to beauty. In Wendell Berry’s important discussion of the relationship between agriculture and human spiritual well-being, The Unsettling of America, he reminds us that working the land provides a location where folks can experience a sense of personal power and well-being:
    We are working well when we use ourselves as the fellow creature of the plants, animals, material, and other people we are working with. Such work is unifying, healing. It brings us home from pride and despair, and places us responsibly within the human estate. It defines us as we are: not too good to work without our bodies, but too good to work poorly or joylessly or selfishly or alone.
    There has been little or no work done on the psychological impact of the “great migration’ of black people from the agrarian south to the industrialized north. Toni Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye, attempts to fictively document the way moving from the agrarian south to the industrialized north wounded the psyches of black folk. Estranged from a natural world, where there was time for silence and contemplation, one of the “displaced’ black folks in Morrison’s novel, Miss Pauline, loses her capacity to experience the sensual world around