Stacy, I am so honored to be part of this conversation and growing community. Like you, I am doing a lot of underlining and making margin notes in my copy. From the introduction, this sentence comes to mind - "Another difficulty that I have had to deal with is that I cannot see race prejudice and the sufferings related to it as special or isolatable problems calling for special or isolated solutions." Berry has taken on a difficult problem and will come at it repeatedly as he articulates his own positions and suggests solutions for his readers.
Yes, a great sentence and one with the depth of what is necessary for a larger conversation. The Introduction made me uncomfortable, and I had to read it a couple of times, even as I knew that the perspective would not be one of "devaluing" people. Berry is only beginning/continuing a dialogue that is long overdue, and we tread gently to bring more people to a place to try to make meaningful change.
"But the first step toward hope is to withhold approval from 'solutions' that are hopeless." (15)
I worry about the future - there I said it. I do not believe that using race/ethnicity or for that matter wealth equates to intelligence, to be the determining characteristics of how we describe a person. I, for one, do not like to be described as only a "white, tree-hugging, female." I am more than those things.
Thanks for this, Stacy and Dudley, and thanks for the invitation to comment. For me, this piece is what Substack is all about and I want to take the time to connect.
After reading your first discussion entry, my mind has raced this way and that - to places and issues closer to my home in the far north of England than Kentucky. I was thinking about the memoir Unearthed: On race and roots, and how the soil taught me I belong by Claire Ratinon, Claire has Mauritian heritage and lives in England. She also co wrote a pamphlet called Horticultural Appropriation with her partner, Sam Ayre. (I hope it’s okay to point to some of the folk/books I’ve been thinking about?)
Yesterday I was writing a piece about the lure of place (I’ll publish it here on Substack in the coming days but want to record the audio first.) Anyway, place and nature writing are what I read most and I’m anxious, so anxious, about our disconnect from natural place.
People are place, people are nature. Wendell Berry, if I'm honest I know so little about him (have read none of his fiction, have mostly read his poetry and essays and articles) but I know he writes in response to place. When I wrote a comment to your ‘One Sentence a Day,’ Stacy, I said it reminded me of my favourite poem by Thomas A Clark. It’s called Riasg Buidhe. Clark writes in response to place, too. Berry aside, other (American) writers and activists writing about place that I admire (off the top of my head) Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ursula Le Guin, Barbara Kingsolver, Richard Powers.
What resonates most is Berry’s emphasis on the loss of community and its connection to the land. As industrialism grew, as wealth and capitalism concentrated in fewer hands and people left rural areas for towns and cities something essential was lost that just can’t be replaced by modern conveniences. Berry’s nostalgic description of small-town interdependence - the butcher, the seamstress, the farmer - feels quaint, outdated, but resonates, reminds me of the importance of relationships rooted in mutual care and shared labour. In our drive for economic efficiency and technological advancement, have we severed ourselves from the very soil, literal and metaphorical, that sustains us?
Dudley, you wrote “Berry is imploring the reader to understand that prejudice is not just race relations but a prejudice of labor, of effort, of self-sufficiency to which can be firmly planted at the feet of industrialism and the economy which is not of fairness and shared wealth or even being paid a fair wage but of lining the pockets of a few and the continued ill treatment of people.”
....That’s incredibly thought-provoking, isn’t it? it underscores how systemic injustice - whether racial, economic, ecological - are interconnected. Berry’s call to see these relationships as part of a bigger picture feels urgent in today’s fragmented world.
Ultimately, Berry is asking us to engage in a conversation, a nuanced, uncomfortable and deeply personal conversation. He reminds me that we can’t leave our past behind, not if we hope to build a healthier, more equitable future. This is a call to responsibility, not just to the land or to one another, but to the…. soul of community itself. Berry is asking us to remember what it means to belong: to a place, to a people, and to a shared history, however painful that history may be.
Bee, how I appreciate you. Your attentiveness to this conversation and what it means to share ideas. So many phrases you wrote I want to highlight: "People are place, people are nature." Top of my list but also maybe what sits with me is, "what it means to belong" because I lean towards this part of the discourse most heavily. Is systemic injustice a result of or a reason for a loss of belonging. How might we work towards rebalancing the scale - can we, do we, should we? I think we should, and we should try harder, speak with our dollars, embrace our neighbors, lend a hand/a tool, share a loaf of bread/a cup of tea/our time.
Economics cannot grow indefinitely, I mean at some point the resources no longer exist but before that happens might we think about how to be more considered about our land?
Please, continue to share reading resources - we all need to add to our bookshelf 😉.
I wrote my grad school long craft essay on Robin Wall Kimmerer. Her and Kingsolver have given attention to the environmental conversation.
Agreed - I am happy to know about Claire Ratinon, she is a new voice for me. And Kimmerer and Kingsolver are some of my favorites. I will add Sarah Smarsh as a crucial current voice in the conversation about what it means to be a dispensable body in a rural American community. She also admires Berry. Her book Heartland gets at all of this from the perspective of white daughter of impoverished teen mother - it's a slightly different take than Berry's, just based on that positioning. But they adjoin on the topic of work and the value placed on it:
"Work can be a true communion with resources, materials, other people. I have no issue with work. Its relationship to the economy—whose work is assigned what value—is where the trouble comes in. My family’s labor was undervalued to such an extent that, while we never starved or went without shelter in a chronic way, we all knew what it felt like to need something essential—food, shoes, a safe place to live, a rent payment, a trip to the doctor—and go without it for lack of money."
"The worse danger is not the job itself but the devaluing of those who do it. A society that considers your body dispensable will inflict a violence upon you. Working in a field is one thing; being misled by a corporation about the safety of a carcinogenic pesticide is another. Hammering on a roof is one thing; not being able to afford a doctor when you fall off it is another.”
I need to go find my notes on Sarah Smarsh's Heartland, I only have vague memories, but for the part of this conversation, what rings true is that as on small rural farms, the work and effort of others is degraded. As an example, why is it that we ask for coal miners to dig the resource, to risk their lives, to pay little, to avoid the truth of the dangers and health risks and then blame them for being a coal miner. The same goes for loggers or gas line workers. Generalization statement alert - as a society we want, but we want to be a step above those that can fulfill our want.
Bee, thank you so much for your thoughts, and for connecting the dots between various forms of systemic injustice. It's important to understand where they come from, and in that sense remember the past as containing seeds for rebuilding, but I think equally important to be able to let go of any personal attachment to the toxicity of past racist and economic inequalities.
I also love Kingsolver, Kimmerer and LeGuin. And of course, Berry's fictional accounts of Port William. If I may recommend a starting point, his collection of short stories, Fidelity, is a great introduction to the generations and interconnections of the Port William membership.
Thank you for initiating this conversation. I am 74 year old white man. I grew up in a small city in eastern North Carolina where my father and uncle ran a general merchandise store catering to and dependant upon farmers, both white landowners and mostly black aharecroppers and tenant farmers.
I started working at the store in the late 1950's when I was about eight years old and continued until I went to college in 1968. So, I had a front row seat to the decline of the small farm economy. I saw the decline in our family business and watched as neighboring merchants closed their doors. Our family hung on until 1978, by then the store and the street it was located only bore a ghostly resemblance to what it was when I was a kid.
As the small farm economy faded away there was not just economic loss, there also a corresponding social loss. In my case it was the loss of a gathering place where the racial divisions seemed to disappear, where black tenants sat down next to white landowners around a hot stove and shared stories as the drank soft drinks and ate salted peanuts.
None of this to deny the harsh realities of jim crow segregation. I attended segregated schools and I saw the whites only signs on restaurants, white and colored signs on restroom doors and water fountains, but when I was in the store, through my white eyes, all that seemed to fade away.
Dan, thank you for a poignant remembrance of small town life in the South. So much of what you say is familiar to me as well, as Lexington was also a small city when I was growing up. Life in those days was layered - the gatherings around the wood or coal stove were taken for granted, and went on side by side with our awareness of the restrictions of segregation that had I thought about it then, would have seemed mandated by some remote legislation, and that I also took for granted until Brown v Board of Education.
I spent my formative years in Little Rock, Arkansas, in a school where I have no recollection of race being a part of the school day conversation. Interestingly, it was when my family moved to Houston, Texas that I remember (very vividly) the conversation of class though.
Dan, so honored to have you as a part of this conversation and for your willingness to share what it was like in a time when small communities cared for and, in their own way, looked out for one another. What it means to be able to sit next to one another and listen to stories, to know a person, and their family's history. I can see what you are drawing in your writing - I hear laughter, snorts, and even the appropriate tisk-tisk when needed.
Thank you so very much for sharing your memories. What do you think might have been if the small communities might have continued.
"What might have been if small communities continued?" The answer to that from a personal stand-point is that I probably would have continued the family business instead of setting out on a corporate career after college. Others of my my high school friends may have done the same. I did come back home in my late forties and have remained. When I came back I had changed and the community had gotten poorer as agricultural economy wilted away and the jobs provided by textile manufacturing had moved off shore. The divisions that have always existed along race and economic fault lines are now more obvious. When the small farm economy was booming those divisions, especially for more affluent whites, were covered with a veneer of politeness. Poor people, especially poor black people, had to bend to the economic and social standards of the white power structure. When the vested power of local interests was broken and the local economy ebbed and flowed based on decisions made in corporate board rooms, white political power was diminished Demographic changes that started in the 60's after the passage of Civil Rights legislation led to the city council becoming majority black, and as a result, social, economic, and racial divides deepen as white flight to surrounding rural communities continues. Back to your question "what might have been if... I can only say, I have no idea.
But division prevailed. How hard it is to hang on when so many factors begin to build and provide pressure. Blame is an incendiary device and there is plenty of that to go around, I suspect.
"When the small farm economy was booming those divisions, especially for more affluent whites, were covered with a veneer of politeness." In this place, whites moved out, but I gather the sense of community had already frayed?
I am so enjoying what the rest of you have shared here, and again want to echo my gratitude to Stacy for beginning the conversation – it’s vital. Dan, your remembrance of your father’s business reminds me most of my own situation, though I am a few decades behind you. Here is my collection of quotes. They say a lot about what draws my attention in this Introduction. (They are transcribed from audio, so apologies for missing punctuation and any other flaws):
“…we have always treated the land, and the people of the land, with the same abuse. By the people of the land, I mean all who have needed and wanted to be settled and permanently at home. First, the previous inhabitants as we came into their tribal homelands. And then, not the frontiersmen or pioneers, but the settlers, the agrarian smallholders, the would-be homemakers, willing to do the land’s work, and knowing how. And then, the freed slaves. Who also knew both the land’s work and their need for land. But who then entered their second bondage, sharing the fate of poor white people in subservience to merchants and landlords. And finally, the small farmers, of whatever race, who were told in the middle of the last century to get big or get out. And, nearly all of whom by now, have got out.”
“In 1940, in the United States there were 6,102,417 farms, of which the average size was 175 acres. In 2012, there were 2,109,303 farms, containing and average of 434 acres. If we consider that on every one of those four million lost farms there would have been a farmer and family, or a tenant farmer and family, and on some of them one or more hired hands and maybe another family, we see that we are reckoning with a movement of many millions of people off the farms and into the cities, or into city work, in about a single lifetime.”
“From the rural point of view, the view from ground level, those of us who still have it can see consequences that are rural, equally troubling, and in some ways permanently damaging to the country. The removal from the land of so many people removes from the land also those people’s love, care, skill, and work. And it removes the same love, care, skill, and work from those people. This is an enormous, and enormously consequential loss to both the land and the people, which is not something that will be said, because it cannot be said, because it is carefully not seen by the professors and other urban professionals of agriculture. But mere arithmetic tells us that if so many people who have the most direct and practical reasons to love the country are removed from the country, then the country will be less loved.”
“And it does not require a committee of advanced experts to surmise that a small rural town would be better supported economically by a lot of small farms than by a few big ones. It is important to understand that this drastic reduction of the farm population had the approval and encouragement of the agricultural powers that be. It has been, in effect, our farm policy since World War II. The ruling doctrine was that the inefficient and otherwise dispensable farmers could be replaced, along with their love, care, skill and work, by the technologies of war. In 1967, as I have been careful to remember, a presidential commission declared that this country’s biggest farm problem was a surplus of farmers. Probably for every effect there is more than one cause, and there were several reasons for people to leave farming. Some were directly replaced by technologies. Some could not survive one of the recurring farm depressions caused by high costs and low prices. Some preferred city work or city life. The most effective way to get rid of farmers and to enrich the corporations that supply the expensive inputs, and purchase the cheapened harvests, is by policy to permit and even encourage overproduction. So long as farmers do not control any part of the farm economy they cannot mutually thrive, they can only compete against each other. Increasing production ot take advantage of high prices or to compensate for low prices, and so driving one another and themselves into bankruptcy.”
“With the same justice, it could be said that for far too long, the United States has deemed acceptable a large number of farm bankruptcies every year. We are here speaking of preventable catastrophes, death in the mines and farm failure often leading to suicide, as acceptable costs of production.
“It is true, and much noticed only lately, that more black farmers have failed in proportion to their total numbers than white farmers, and that this is largely attributable to racial discrimination in the agencies of the United States Department of Agriculture. That is a correctable wrong, and it ought to be corrected. But it would be wrong also to assume that the decline of the black farm population is the result only or mainly of racial discrimination. It is necessary to see operating beyond race prejudice, a prejudice against farmers, and particularly against small farmers. And to see operating beyond those prejudices the fundamental dependence of industrialism and the industrial economy upon the dispensability of human workers. This principle we know as labor-saving, and because we ignore the heartlessness of its application, we classify it as progress. When we’re obliged to acknowledge its cruelty, we call it creative destruction. But for whatever reasons, the cultural and economic bond between land and people has been broken.”
“Because I write as a rural American from the point of view of the land and the land communities, I am obliged in honesty to worry about that point of view as possibly a limitation. But I am equally obliged to take it as a responsibility and even within limits as an advantage.”
Glad to have you sharing here, Mary Beth. In full agreement with how Berry talks about the loss of small farms and the impact those losses have on the community in which they are located (I underlined many of these same quotes).
The last quote - obligation and responsibility - part of this conversation.
I’m a white, American woman, age 46, who grew up on a small dairy farm in upstate New York. The farm my father farmed with his father, and carried on after his father died. A farm that was a farm for many years prior. The farm that seemed eternal to me had not been this way forever; it is the traditional unceded land of the people of the hills known as Onondagas (Onundagaonoga), one of the six nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
My dad tells stories of picking potatoes on his grandfather’s farm alongside Black migrant workers. This would have been in the 1950s. To me, it’s hard for Wendell not to sound a bit like my dad, though he has a decade of age on Dad, who is now 80 and has continued to work the land and his body very hard, though he sold our dairy herd in 1999. Both Dad and Wendell sound like “I know some Black people,” and therefore are both able to minimize the abject dehumanization of the practice of slavery, or migrant work, and equate these far too easily with any other hardship a human might face. I have done a little bit of reading from my privileged white woman perspective (to define what I mean by privilege: I have a master’s level education and a government job – I no longer live off the land, and no longer live near the farm I grew up on, though I do live in a small rural fishing community), and the lives of the enslaved, particularly of enslaved women, is not something any of us can actually relate to. And the lives of their descendants are absolutely affected by what their ancestors lived through, at the hands of some of our ancestors. We are right to be uncomfortable talking about this, and right to question the text, especially with none of them here in conversation with us, that I know of yet, though I would love to hear a Black woman’s take on Wendell Berry, and would understand if she/they had no time for him or his longwinded prose.
So I’ll be the first to say that I am not letting him off the hook about this. I’ll be the noisy feminist in the room that says, just because you know bell hooks a little bit doesn’t mean you can minimize what that all was. And also, I see his reasoning and understand where he is going with it, and trust his mind enough after all the years of being my favorite curmudgeon, that I will continue and not just set the book down.
About that – I’m “reading” the audio, which is pleasant to listen to, and I’ve sped up the narrator to 1.2X which I’m sure would make Wendell cringe, as it does nothing at all in the spirit of his slowing down, back to the land, ethics. However, it’s getting me through the book. I’ve been adding audio bookmarks, and when I took a look back at what I marked in the Introduction, all of them had to do with small farms. I believe this is my niche in the community conversation here, having been a small farm person, when the small farm was still a working farm. The farm is still land my father owns, that he rents to a larger farm for haying. There is a side of what Wendell is saying here that yanks hard on my heartstrings, and that I don’t think most readers give more than a passing thought to. I know many here want folks to have a stronger connection to the land, etc, but to have been in the precarious position of not knowing who we would even be without a herd and without a working dairy? Wendell mentions some of the tolls that took on the humans involved. I don’t see a lot of discussion of that here so far. So those are some quotes I will share, in separate comments.
And I did a little looking at what bell hooks might have thought in return toward Berry, who obviously admired her. She obviously very much admired him as well. They both returned to Kentucky to live on land, both having left the land to live in cities for a time. It was not a one-sided admiration. I wanted her side of that. I saw several articles about their friendship, and this essay in Orion magazine by bell hooks where she quotes Wendell Berry.
Finally, while the same passage made me gasp, Stacy, and I’ve said much here already about how I beg to differ about any equivalency drawn between the experience of White and Black people in our nation, yet I see his point about what we do have in common. Slavery was not good for any of us, though we must not lose sight of for whom it was far worse. And I think this quote by Maya Angelou gets at it a little bit.
“The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free.” - Maya Angelou
I should hope that none of us are giving Berry a pass but are also interrogating how our own generalizations and prejudices impact how and what we read. Interestingly, earlier today I wrote a few draft passages for an upcoming essay where I say how some of what Berry writes feels very much like an elder man sitting in the rocking chair and speaking to the void, lecturing in the memory of a bygone time while understanding there is no hope for anything different and wanting to cleanse his soul.
Is memory fallible - completely. Where is the whitewashing of recollection? Is a memory ever true or ensconced in a layer of light fog almost imperceptible the moment the memory is being framed and constructed?
>>>>>… that white people’s part in slavery and all the other outcomes of race prejudice, so damaging to its victims, had also been gravely damaging to white people, a damage too little acknowledged and probably less understood. (1)
I do not (yet) fully equate that Berry intends to represent that "white and black damage is an equal damage" but that slavery/racial prejudice has damaged everyone. A spiral that has/had impact - we have traveled down the road and can now see or at least interpret some of the results.
The passage still makes me gulp, and I suspect I will read it over-and-over again. White women will never know what it means/meant to be a slave, to be beholden to a hierarchy of a time, but we do have an inkling what is means to lose our voices, to feel threats, to worry for our safety and to jab a bit at that line - it is damaging. Is it equal, no. Nevertheless, these conversations are necessary because we want to stave off the reoccurrence of any people being a part of a new history (or a continuing history) that involves anything less than equal. Can we get there? My gut, despite a desire to be optimistic, says we cannot but we still must try if in no other setting than in our own day-to-day interactions.
I might be jumping ahead (not sure if it was said yet in the introduction) but there is a spot (maybe when we get to Kentucky chapter) where he says something I'll badly paraphrase about how it would not have been economically a good idea to *really hurt their slaves, so probably most of them did not do that? And I thought he might be forgetting a lot there. Forgetting the psychological injury of enslavement, forgetting how many masters felt it in their interest to make more slave babies by impregnating enslaved women, etc. I think maybe it's true that slaves in Kentucky had it "better?!?" than slaves farther south, due to the nature of the work possibly? But that seems like a thing Berry ought to also know. He is a learned man with access to all the books. This is where I'm seeing "minimizing" done, so I may have started that conversation before its appropriate chapter and I hope I will find a bookmark when we get to it. I guess it just made me think of others who still state things like enslavement wasn't that bad and that many slaves likely did not want all that scary freedom but just to continue their enslavement? I'll never buy it. Berry is *not saying that, to be clear, he is just reminding me of some of those reimagined historical ideas. I guess I think his history might be a tad reimagined.
Another yardstick for me is that he really isn't giving any words to women. The experience of women in all of these contexts is also far from equivalent to whatever the men experienced. Guess who never owned *any of this land he's very nostalgic about? And guess who also might not have been as grateful to be kept and cared for? I mean, he is a feminist and I *know that he is, he lives and breathes it, and I believe his daughter is likely to inherit some of his farm, etc. I just don't hear him remark on the way women fared during enslavement in Kentucky, which is not the chapter called "Introduction" Ok I'll sit down now. ;)
But no, I don't think he thinks the damage was equal to White and Black people... only that I don't think he is giving a clear signal of how wide that gap is, how damaging that damage is. I agree with him all were harmed and continue to be. But it's treading way closer to "all lives matter" than I'm comfortable with. And yet the conversation about the land, about farms, is* more complicated, and I do believe he is right to encourage us to let those complications breathe and be and to acknowledge them, and to say we can't separate all these threads if we want to solve the deep issues.
The quote I added about how the wrongs to modern Black farmers should be corrected, but that they cannot be corrected only by eliminating race prejudice - we also need to modify farm policy HELL YES to that. So I guess what I'm saying is he has points and I see why he is taking us this path to the points. And I'm also not satisfied with muddying any part of the truth about the racism involved in order to get there.
This - "But no, I don't think he thinks the damage was equal to White and Black people... only that I don't think he is giving a clear signal of how wide that gap is, how damaging that damage is."
Completely agree, and probably the reason why we continue to feel an ache in our backs as we read. Because, while jumping ahead, while race is to be a recurring theme in The Need to Be Whole, I do feel that it falls behind a bit in that regard. I feel the conversation about slavery/race is rather dropped onto the page like a small bomb left for me to figure out and all I have is my experiences and history to sort a belief (which is also what Berry is falling upon and those of us in this conversation). Which is maybe what makes this so very hard.
Two quotes (I can't yet find the exact one you reference): "Whatever there may have been in kindness in slavery does not excuse it, and whatever was most cruel does not typify it. What is terrible about it is that its worst was inherent in it." (59)
"And we have the politically correct history of slavery in which slavery means only wealth and ease for the owners and only remitting cruelty and horror for the slaves." (61) This second quote is where I again grumble at Berry because he could and should be more assertive about the wrongness. He is probably attempting to persuade that not all slave owners were bad as a mutually beneficial relationship when I really want him to come out and outright condemn.
As for women - I did not enter this read believing that would be a theme. Though, I appreciate that grandma saves grandpa. 😊
If you can, explain this a bit to me - There is a side of what Wendell is saying here that yanks hard on my heartstrings, and that I don’t think most readers give more than a passing thought to.
This is my chip on my shoulder speaking, I think. I'm closer to the reality of loss of a small farm, or loss of a way of life of being a farmer, than a lot of readers - because there aren't a lot of people who carry this experience anymore at my age, because during the time I was growing up the farms were all being sold/abandoned/subsumed by larger farms, etc. Our herd was sold when I was in college - this timing to live all my childhood there and then have it end at that age, probably played a role in how hard I felt it/how deeply I internalized it. So I have a lot of baggage about it, about how it changed and ruined good people, how it did lead to suicides, depressions, loss of life meaning, how unfair and hopeless and desperately sad it all felt. I'm pretty sure that is not a sense or experience shared by most readers, was all I meant. When I walk through life, not many people seem to reflect this same level of chip on their shoulder about loss of small farms. But I know Berry feels/experienced/is trying to have us feel/experience it, and that is what is pulling me most of what he writes about, hence all my bookmarks are about that topic of loss of small farms. Does that help? I should caveat all my comments to say they are written at 4 am :).
I don't like the word "baggage." I believe you have a truth of experience, and it is not something that will ever be pushed to the side as irrelevant. Of course, it is relevant and has constructed your worldview which is very much appreciated in this conversation.
I was not raised on a farm; I am still bitter that I was not a part of the era when women lived a hard life on a farm in the prairie barely scrapping out life. Nevertheless, what I most appreciate is that my life has steered me into a direction of ruralness while not shielding the difficulties. For the past year I have been on the Town Planning Commission - hard, so very hard to balance perspectives - but I do find myself asking the questions dairy farmers (because we are dairy up here) don't want to consider, "What happens to the farm when your kiddo does not want to farm?" And I have a lot to say about BIG dairy farms. Generalization alert - big farms treat their stock, their employees, and the land similarly. Small farms might name their heifers using an alphabetic process 🤗 and have a knowing relationship.
Stacy, I am so honored to be part of this conversation and growing community. Like you, I am doing a lot of underlining and making margin notes in my copy. From the introduction, this sentence comes to mind - "Another difficulty that I have had to deal with is that I cannot see race prejudice and the sufferings related to it as special or isolatable problems calling for special or isolated solutions." Berry has taken on a difficult problem and will come at it repeatedly as he articulates his own positions and suggests solutions for his readers.
Yes, a great sentence and one with the depth of what is necessary for a larger conversation. The Introduction made me uncomfortable, and I had to read it a couple of times, even as I knew that the perspective would not be one of "devaluing" people. Berry is only beginning/continuing a dialogue that is long overdue, and we tread gently to bring more people to a place to try to make meaningful change.
"But the first step toward hope is to withhold approval from 'solutions' that are hopeless." (15)
I worry about the future - there I said it. I do not believe that using race/ethnicity or for that matter wealth equates to intelligence, to be the determining characteristics of how we describe a person. I, for one, do not like to be described as only a "white, tree-hugging, female." I am more than those things.
Thanks for this, Stacy and Dudley, and thanks for the invitation to comment. For me, this piece is what Substack is all about and I want to take the time to connect.
After reading your first discussion entry, my mind has raced this way and that - to places and issues closer to my home in the far north of England than Kentucky. I was thinking about the memoir Unearthed: On race and roots, and how the soil taught me I belong by Claire Ratinon, Claire has Mauritian heritage and lives in England. She also co wrote a pamphlet called Horticultural Appropriation with her partner, Sam Ayre. (I hope it’s okay to point to some of the folk/books I’ve been thinking about?)
Yesterday I was writing a piece about the lure of place (I’ll publish it here on Substack in the coming days but want to record the audio first.) Anyway, place and nature writing are what I read most and I’m anxious, so anxious, about our disconnect from natural place.
People are place, people are nature. Wendell Berry, if I'm honest I know so little about him (have read none of his fiction, have mostly read his poetry and essays and articles) but I know he writes in response to place. When I wrote a comment to your ‘One Sentence a Day,’ Stacy, I said it reminded me of my favourite poem by Thomas A Clark. It’s called Riasg Buidhe. Clark writes in response to place, too. Berry aside, other (American) writers and activists writing about place that I admire (off the top of my head) Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ursula Le Guin, Barbara Kingsolver, Richard Powers.
What resonates most is Berry’s emphasis on the loss of community and its connection to the land. As industrialism grew, as wealth and capitalism concentrated in fewer hands and people left rural areas for towns and cities something essential was lost that just can’t be replaced by modern conveniences. Berry’s nostalgic description of small-town interdependence - the butcher, the seamstress, the farmer - feels quaint, outdated, but resonates, reminds me of the importance of relationships rooted in mutual care and shared labour. In our drive for economic efficiency and technological advancement, have we severed ourselves from the very soil, literal and metaphorical, that sustains us?
Dudley, you wrote “Berry is imploring the reader to understand that prejudice is not just race relations but a prejudice of labor, of effort, of self-sufficiency to which can be firmly planted at the feet of industrialism and the economy which is not of fairness and shared wealth or even being paid a fair wage but of lining the pockets of a few and the continued ill treatment of people.”
....That’s incredibly thought-provoking, isn’t it? it underscores how systemic injustice - whether racial, economic, ecological - are interconnected. Berry’s call to see these relationships as part of a bigger picture feels urgent in today’s fragmented world.
Ultimately, Berry is asking us to engage in a conversation, a nuanced, uncomfortable and deeply personal conversation. He reminds me that we can’t leave our past behind, not if we hope to build a healthier, more equitable future. This is a call to responsibility, not just to the land or to one another, but to the…. soul of community itself. Berry is asking us to remember what it means to belong: to a place, to a people, and to a shared history, however painful that history may be.
Bee, how I appreciate you. Your attentiveness to this conversation and what it means to share ideas. So many phrases you wrote I want to highlight: "People are place, people are nature." Top of my list but also maybe what sits with me is, "what it means to belong" because I lean towards this part of the discourse most heavily. Is systemic injustice a result of or a reason for a loss of belonging. How might we work towards rebalancing the scale - can we, do we, should we? I think we should, and we should try harder, speak with our dollars, embrace our neighbors, lend a hand/a tool, share a loaf of bread/a cup of tea/our time.
Economics cannot grow indefinitely, I mean at some point the resources no longer exist but before that happens might we think about how to be more considered about our land?
Please, continue to share reading resources - we all need to add to our bookshelf 😉.
I wrote my grad school long craft essay on Robin Wall Kimmerer. Her and Kingsolver have given attention to the environmental conversation.
I’ll reply soon, Stacy. It’s 5 in the morning here, couldn’t sleep but too fuzzy to write.
I feel like I am wading in the muck and not sure if I will reach the other side still wearing both of my boots.
Agreed - I am happy to know about Claire Ratinon, she is a new voice for me. And Kimmerer and Kingsolver are some of my favorites. I will add Sarah Smarsh as a crucial current voice in the conversation about what it means to be a dispensable body in a rural American community. She also admires Berry. Her book Heartland gets at all of this from the perspective of white daughter of impoverished teen mother - it's a slightly different take than Berry's, just based on that positioning. But they adjoin on the topic of work and the value placed on it:
"Work can be a true communion with resources, materials, other people. I have no issue with work. Its relationship to the economy—whose work is assigned what value—is where the trouble comes in. My family’s labor was undervalued to such an extent that, while we never starved or went without shelter in a chronic way, we all knew what it felt like to need something essential—food, shoes, a safe place to live, a rent payment, a trip to the doctor—and go without it for lack of money."
"The worse danger is not the job itself but the devaluing of those who do it. A society that considers your body dispensable will inflict a violence upon you. Working in a field is one thing; being misled by a corporation about the safety of a carcinogenic pesticide is another. Hammering on a roof is one thing; not being able to afford a doctor when you fall off it is another.”
- Sarah Smarsh, Heartland
I need to go find my notes on Sarah Smarsh's Heartland, I only have vague memories, but for the part of this conversation, what rings true is that as on small rural farms, the work and effort of others is degraded. As an example, why is it that we ask for coal miners to dig the resource, to risk their lives, to pay little, to avoid the truth of the dangers and health risks and then blame them for being a coal miner. The same goes for loggers or gas line workers. Generalization statement alert - as a society we want, but we want to be a step above those that can fulfill our want.
Bee, thank you so much for your thoughts, and for connecting the dots between various forms of systemic injustice. It's important to understand where they come from, and in that sense remember the past as containing seeds for rebuilding, but I think equally important to be able to let go of any personal attachment to the toxicity of past racist and economic inequalities.
I also love Kingsolver, Kimmerer and LeGuin. And of course, Berry's fictional accounts of Port William. If I may recommend a starting point, his collection of short stories, Fidelity, is a great introduction to the generations and interconnections of the Port William membership.
Excellent, Fidelity is where I’ll start, thank you Dudley.
Thank you for initiating this conversation. I am 74 year old white man. I grew up in a small city in eastern North Carolina where my father and uncle ran a general merchandise store catering to and dependant upon farmers, both white landowners and mostly black aharecroppers and tenant farmers.
I started working at the store in the late 1950's when I was about eight years old and continued until I went to college in 1968. So, I had a front row seat to the decline of the small farm economy. I saw the decline in our family business and watched as neighboring merchants closed their doors. Our family hung on until 1978, by then the store and the street it was located only bore a ghostly resemblance to what it was when I was a kid.
As the small farm economy faded away there was not just economic loss, there also a corresponding social loss. In my case it was the loss of a gathering place where the racial divisions seemed to disappear, where black tenants sat down next to white landowners around a hot stove and shared stories as the drank soft drinks and ate salted peanuts.
None of this to deny the harsh realities of jim crow segregation. I attended segregated schools and I saw the whites only signs on restaurants, white and colored signs on restroom doors and water fountains, but when I was in the store, through my white eyes, all that seemed to fade away.
Dan, thank you for a poignant remembrance of small town life in the South. So much of what you say is familiar to me as well, as Lexington was also a small city when I was growing up. Life in those days was layered - the gatherings around the wood or coal stove were taken for granted, and went on side by side with our awareness of the restrictions of segregation that had I thought about it then, would have seemed mandated by some remote legislation, and that I also took for granted until Brown v Board of Education.
I spent my formative years in Little Rock, Arkansas, in a school where I have no recollection of race being a part of the school day conversation. Interestingly, it was when my family moved to Houston, Texas that I remember (very vividly) the conversation of class though.
Dan, so honored to have you as a part of this conversation and for your willingness to share what it was like in a time when small communities cared for and, in their own way, looked out for one another. What it means to be able to sit next to one another and listen to stories, to know a person, and their family's history. I can see what you are drawing in your writing - I hear laughter, snorts, and even the appropriate tisk-tisk when needed.
Thank you so very much for sharing your memories. What do you think might have been if the small communities might have continued.
"What might have been if small communities continued?" The answer to that from a personal stand-point is that I probably would have continued the family business instead of setting out on a corporate career after college. Others of my my high school friends may have done the same. I did come back home in my late forties and have remained. When I came back I had changed and the community had gotten poorer as agricultural economy wilted away and the jobs provided by textile manufacturing had moved off shore. The divisions that have always existed along race and economic fault lines are now more obvious. When the small farm economy was booming those divisions, especially for more affluent whites, were covered with a veneer of politeness. Poor people, especially poor black people, had to bend to the economic and social standards of the white power structure. When the vested power of local interests was broken and the local economy ebbed and flowed based on decisions made in corporate board rooms, white political power was diminished Demographic changes that started in the 60's after the passage of Civil Rights legislation led to the city council becoming majority black, and as a result, social, economic, and racial divides deepen as white flight to surrounding rural communities continues. Back to your question "what might have been if... I can only say, I have no idea.
But division prevailed. How hard it is to hang on when so many factors begin to build and provide pressure. Blame is an incendiary device and there is plenty of that to go around, I suspect.
"When the small farm economy was booming those divisions, especially for more affluent whites, were covered with a veneer of politeness." In this place, whites moved out, but I gather the sense of community had already frayed?
Oh Dan, what a tender piece, have to say you write beautifully.
I am so enjoying what the rest of you have shared here, and again want to echo my gratitude to Stacy for beginning the conversation – it’s vital. Dan, your remembrance of your father’s business reminds me most of my own situation, though I am a few decades behind you. Here is my collection of quotes. They say a lot about what draws my attention in this Introduction. (They are transcribed from audio, so apologies for missing punctuation and any other flaws):
“…we have always treated the land, and the people of the land, with the same abuse. By the people of the land, I mean all who have needed and wanted to be settled and permanently at home. First, the previous inhabitants as we came into their tribal homelands. And then, not the frontiersmen or pioneers, but the settlers, the agrarian smallholders, the would-be homemakers, willing to do the land’s work, and knowing how. And then, the freed slaves. Who also knew both the land’s work and their need for land. But who then entered their second bondage, sharing the fate of poor white people in subservience to merchants and landlords. And finally, the small farmers, of whatever race, who were told in the middle of the last century to get big or get out. And, nearly all of whom by now, have got out.”
“In 1940, in the United States there were 6,102,417 farms, of which the average size was 175 acres. In 2012, there were 2,109,303 farms, containing and average of 434 acres. If we consider that on every one of those four million lost farms there would have been a farmer and family, or a tenant farmer and family, and on some of them one or more hired hands and maybe another family, we see that we are reckoning with a movement of many millions of people off the farms and into the cities, or into city work, in about a single lifetime.”
“From the rural point of view, the view from ground level, those of us who still have it can see consequences that are rural, equally troubling, and in some ways permanently damaging to the country. The removal from the land of so many people removes from the land also those people’s love, care, skill, and work. And it removes the same love, care, skill, and work from those people. This is an enormous, and enormously consequential loss to both the land and the people, which is not something that will be said, because it cannot be said, because it is carefully not seen by the professors and other urban professionals of agriculture. But mere arithmetic tells us that if so many people who have the most direct and practical reasons to love the country are removed from the country, then the country will be less loved.”
“And it does not require a committee of advanced experts to surmise that a small rural town would be better supported economically by a lot of small farms than by a few big ones. It is important to understand that this drastic reduction of the farm population had the approval and encouragement of the agricultural powers that be. It has been, in effect, our farm policy since World War II. The ruling doctrine was that the inefficient and otherwise dispensable farmers could be replaced, along with their love, care, skill and work, by the technologies of war. In 1967, as I have been careful to remember, a presidential commission declared that this country’s biggest farm problem was a surplus of farmers. Probably for every effect there is more than one cause, and there were several reasons for people to leave farming. Some were directly replaced by technologies. Some could not survive one of the recurring farm depressions caused by high costs and low prices. Some preferred city work or city life. The most effective way to get rid of farmers and to enrich the corporations that supply the expensive inputs, and purchase the cheapened harvests, is by policy to permit and even encourage overproduction. So long as farmers do not control any part of the farm economy they cannot mutually thrive, they can only compete against each other. Increasing production ot take advantage of high prices or to compensate for low prices, and so driving one another and themselves into bankruptcy.”
“With the same justice, it could be said that for far too long, the United States has deemed acceptable a large number of farm bankruptcies every year. We are here speaking of preventable catastrophes, death in the mines and farm failure often leading to suicide, as acceptable costs of production.
“It is true, and much noticed only lately, that more black farmers have failed in proportion to their total numbers than white farmers, and that this is largely attributable to racial discrimination in the agencies of the United States Department of Agriculture. That is a correctable wrong, and it ought to be corrected. But it would be wrong also to assume that the decline of the black farm population is the result only or mainly of racial discrimination. It is necessary to see operating beyond race prejudice, a prejudice against farmers, and particularly against small farmers. And to see operating beyond those prejudices the fundamental dependence of industrialism and the industrial economy upon the dispensability of human workers. This principle we know as labor-saving, and because we ignore the heartlessness of its application, we classify it as progress. When we’re obliged to acknowledge its cruelty, we call it creative destruction. But for whatever reasons, the cultural and economic bond between land and people has been broken.”
“Because I write as a rural American from the point of view of the land and the land communities, I am obliged in honesty to worry about that point of view as possibly a limitation. But I am equally obliged to take it as a responsibility and even within limits as an advantage.”
Glad to have you sharing here, Mary Beth. In full agreement with how Berry talks about the loss of small farms and the impact those losses have on the community in which they are located (I underlined many of these same quotes).
The last quote - obligation and responsibility - part of this conversation.
I’m a white, American woman, age 46, who grew up on a small dairy farm in upstate New York. The farm my father farmed with his father, and carried on after his father died. A farm that was a farm for many years prior. The farm that seemed eternal to me had not been this way forever; it is the traditional unceded land of the people of the hills known as Onondagas (Onundagaonoga), one of the six nations of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.
My dad tells stories of picking potatoes on his grandfather’s farm alongside Black migrant workers. This would have been in the 1950s. To me, it’s hard for Wendell not to sound a bit like my dad, though he has a decade of age on Dad, who is now 80 and has continued to work the land and his body very hard, though he sold our dairy herd in 1999. Both Dad and Wendell sound like “I know some Black people,” and therefore are both able to minimize the abject dehumanization of the practice of slavery, or migrant work, and equate these far too easily with any other hardship a human might face. I have done a little bit of reading from my privileged white woman perspective (to define what I mean by privilege: I have a master’s level education and a government job – I no longer live off the land, and no longer live near the farm I grew up on, though I do live in a small rural fishing community), and the lives of the enslaved, particularly of enslaved women, is not something any of us can actually relate to. And the lives of their descendants are absolutely affected by what their ancestors lived through, at the hands of some of our ancestors. We are right to be uncomfortable talking about this, and right to question the text, especially with none of them here in conversation with us, that I know of yet, though I would love to hear a Black woman’s take on Wendell Berry, and would understand if she/they had no time for him or his longwinded prose.
So I’ll be the first to say that I am not letting him off the hook about this. I’ll be the noisy feminist in the room that says, just because you know bell hooks a little bit doesn’t mean you can minimize what that all was. And also, I see his reasoning and understand where he is going with it, and trust his mind enough after all the years of being my favorite curmudgeon, that I will continue and not just set the book down.
About that – I’m “reading” the audio, which is pleasant to listen to, and I’ve sped up the narrator to 1.2X which I’m sure would make Wendell cringe, as it does nothing at all in the spirit of his slowing down, back to the land, ethics. However, it’s getting me through the book. I’ve been adding audio bookmarks, and when I took a look back at what I marked in the Introduction, all of them had to do with small farms. I believe this is my niche in the community conversation here, having been a small farm person, when the small farm was still a working farm. The farm is still land my father owns, that he rents to a larger farm for haying. There is a side of what Wendell is saying here that yanks hard on my heartstrings, and that I don’t think most readers give more than a passing thought to. I know many here want folks to have a stronger connection to the land, etc, but to have been in the precarious position of not knowing who we would even be without a herd and without a working dairy? Wendell mentions some of the tolls that took on the humans involved. I don’t see a lot of discussion of that here so far. So those are some quotes I will share, in separate comments.
And I did a little looking at what bell hooks might have thought in return toward Berry, who obviously admired her. She obviously very much admired him as well. They both returned to Kentucky to live on land, both having left the land to live in cities for a time. It was not a one-sided admiration. I wanted her side of that. I saw several articles about their friendship, and this essay in Orion magazine by bell hooks where she quotes Wendell Berry.
https://orionmagazine.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/bellhooksarticle.pdf
Finally, while the same passage made me gasp, Stacy, and I’ve said much here already about how I beg to differ about any equivalency drawn between the experience of White and Black people in our nation, yet I see his point about what we do have in common. Slavery was not good for any of us, though we must not lose sight of for whom it was far worse. And I think this quote by Maya Angelou gets at it a little bit.
“The truth is, no one of us can be free until everybody is free.” - Maya Angelou
I should hope that none of us are giving Berry a pass but are also interrogating how our own generalizations and prejudices impact how and what we read. Interestingly, earlier today I wrote a few draft passages for an upcoming essay where I say how some of what Berry writes feels very much like an elder man sitting in the rocking chair and speaking to the void, lecturing in the memory of a bygone time while understanding there is no hope for anything different and wanting to cleanse his soul.
Is memory fallible - completely. Where is the whitewashing of recollection? Is a memory ever true or ensconced in a layer of light fog almost imperceptible the moment the memory is being framed and constructed?
>>>>>… that white people’s part in slavery and all the other outcomes of race prejudice, so damaging to its victims, had also been gravely damaging to white people, a damage too little acknowledged and probably less understood. (1)
I do not (yet) fully equate that Berry intends to represent that "white and black damage is an equal damage" but that slavery/racial prejudice has damaged everyone. A spiral that has/had impact - we have traveled down the road and can now see or at least interpret some of the results.
The passage still makes me gulp, and I suspect I will read it over-and-over again. White women will never know what it means/meant to be a slave, to be beholden to a hierarchy of a time, but we do have an inkling what is means to lose our voices, to feel threats, to worry for our safety and to jab a bit at that line - it is damaging. Is it equal, no. Nevertheless, these conversations are necessary because we want to stave off the reoccurrence of any people being a part of a new history (or a continuing history) that involves anything less than equal. Can we get there? My gut, despite a desire to be optimistic, says we cannot but we still must try if in no other setting than in our own day-to-day interactions.
I might be jumping ahead (not sure if it was said yet in the introduction) but there is a spot (maybe when we get to Kentucky chapter) where he says something I'll badly paraphrase about how it would not have been economically a good idea to *really hurt their slaves, so probably most of them did not do that? And I thought he might be forgetting a lot there. Forgetting the psychological injury of enslavement, forgetting how many masters felt it in their interest to make more slave babies by impregnating enslaved women, etc. I think maybe it's true that slaves in Kentucky had it "better?!?" than slaves farther south, due to the nature of the work possibly? But that seems like a thing Berry ought to also know. He is a learned man with access to all the books. This is where I'm seeing "minimizing" done, so I may have started that conversation before its appropriate chapter and I hope I will find a bookmark when we get to it. I guess it just made me think of others who still state things like enslavement wasn't that bad and that many slaves likely did not want all that scary freedom but just to continue their enslavement? I'll never buy it. Berry is *not saying that, to be clear, he is just reminding me of some of those reimagined historical ideas. I guess I think his history might be a tad reimagined.
Another yardstick for me is that he really isn't giving any words to women. The experience of women in all of these contexts is also far from equivalent to whatever the men experienced. Guess who never owned *any of this land he's very nostalgic about? And guess who also might not have been as grateful to be kept and cared for? I mean, he is a feminist and I *know that he is, he lives and breathes it, and I believe his daughter is likely to inherit some of his farm, etc. I just don't hear him remark on the way women fared during enslavement in Kentucky, which is not the chapter called "Introduction" Ok I'll sit down now. ;)
But no, I don't think he thinks the damage was equal to White and Black people... only that I don't think he is giving a clear signal of how wide that gap is, how damaging that damage is. I agree with him all were harmed and continue to be. But it's treading way closer to "all lives matter" than I'm comfortable with. And yet the conversation about the land, about farms, is* more complicated, and I do believe he is right to encourage us to let those complications breathe and be and to acknowledge them, and to say we can't separate all these threads if we want to solve the deep issues.
The quote I added about how the wrongs to modern Black farmers should be corrected, but that they cannot be corrected only by eliminating race prejudice - we also need to modify farm policy HELL YES to that. So I guess what I'm saying is he has points and I see why he is taking us this path to the points. And I'm also not satisfied with muddying any part of the truth about the racism involved in order to get there.
Almost time to pick up the phone ...
This - "But no, I don't think he thinks the damage was equal to White and Black people... only that I don't think he is giving a clear signal of how wide that gap is, how damaging that damage is."
Completely agree, and probably the reason why we continue to feel an ache in our backs as we read. Because, while jumping ahead, while race is to be a recurring theme in The Need to Be Whole, I do feel that it falls behind a bit in that regard. I feel the conversation about slavery/race is rather dropped onto the page like a small bomb left for me to figure out and all I have is my experiences and history to sort a belief (which is also what Berry is falling upon and those of us in this conversation). Which is maybe what makes this so very hard.
Two quotes (I can't yet find the exact one you reference): "Whatever there may have been in kindness in slavery does not excuse it, and whatever was most cruel does not typify it. What is terrible about it is that its worst was inherent in it." (59)
"And we have the politically correct history of slavery in which slavery means only wealth and ease for the owners and only remitting cruelty and horror for the slaves." (61) This second quote is where I again grumble at Berry because he could and should be more assertive about the wrongness. He is probably attempting to persuade that not all slave owners were bad as a mutually beneficial relationship when I really want him to come out and outright condemn.
As for women - I did not enter this read believing that would be a theme. Though, I appreciate that grandma saves grandpa. 😊
If you can, explain this a bit to me - There is a side of what Wendell is saying here that yanks hard on my heartstrings, and that I don’t think most readers give more than a passing thought to.
This is my chip on my shoulder speaking, I think. I'm closer to the reality of loss of a small farm, or loss of a way of life of being a farmer, than a lot of readers - because there aren't a lot of people who carry this experience anymore at my age, because during the time I was growing up the farms were all being sold/abandoned/subsumed by larger farms, etc. Our herd was sold when I was in college - this timing to live all my childhood there and then have it end at that age, probably played a role in how hard I felt it/how deeply I internalized it. So I have a lot of baggage about it, about how it changed and ruined good people, how it did lead to suicides, depressions, loss of life meaning, how unfair and hopeless and desperately sad it all felt. I'm pretty sure that is not a sense or experience shared by most readers, was all I meant. When I walk through life, not many people seem to reflect this same level of chip on their shoulder about loss of small farms. But I know Berry feels/experienced/is trying to have us feel/experience it, and that is what is pulling me most of what he writes about, hence all my bookmarks are about that topic of loss of small farms. Does that help? I should caveat all my comments to say they are written at 4 am :).
I don't like the word "baggage." I believe you have a truth of experience, and it is not something that will ever be pushed to the side as irrelevant. Of course, it is relevant and has constructed your worldview which is very much appreciated in this conversation.
I was not raised on a farm; I am still bitter that I was not a part of the era when women lived a hard life on a farm in the prairie barely scrapping out life. Nevertheless, what I most appreciate is that my life has steered me into a direction of ruralness while not shielding the difficulties. For the past year I have been on the Town Planning Commission - hard, so very hard to balance perspectives - but I do find myself asking the questions dairy farmers (because we are dairy up here) don't want to consider, "What happens to the farm when your kiddo does not want to farm?" And I have a lot to say about BIG dairy farms. Generalization alert - big farms treat their stock, their employees, and the land similarly. Small farms might name their heifers using an alphabetic process 🤗 and have a knowing relationship.