Belonging: A Culture of Place Read Online Free PDF Page A

on each of us being people of worth and dignity. Acknowledging one’s worth meant that one had to choose to be a person of integrity, to stand by one’s word. In my girlhood I was taught by my elders, many of whom had not been formally educated and lacked basic skills of reading and writing, that to be a person of integrity one had to always tell the truth and always assume responsibility for your actions. Particularly, my maternal grandmother Baba taught me that these values should ground my being no matter my chosen place or country. To live these values then, I would, she taught, need to learn courage — the courage of my convictions, the courage to own mistakes and make reparation, the courage to take a stand.
    In retrospect I have often wondered if her insistence on my always being dedicated to truth, a woman of my word, a woman of integrity was the lesson learned by heart that would ultimately make it impossible for me to feel at home away from my native place, away from my people. Striving to live with integrity made it difficult for me to find joy in life away from the homefolk and landscape of my upbringing. And as the elders who had generously given of their stories, their wisdom, their lives to make it possible for me, and folks like me, to live well, more fully, began to pass away, it was only a matter of time before I would be called to remembrance, to carry their metaphysical legacy into the present. Among illiterate backwoods folk I had been taught values, given ethical standards by which to live my life. Those standards had little meaning in the world beyond the small Kentucky black communities I had known all my life.
    If growing up in an extremely dysfunctional family of origin had made me “crazy,” surviving and making home away from my native place allowed me to draw on the positive skills I had learned during my growing up years. Kentucky was the only place I had lived where there were living elders teaching values, accepting eccentricity, letting me know by their example that to be fully self-actualized was the only way to truly heal. They revealed to me that the treasures I was seeking were already mine. All my longing to belong, to find a culture of place, all the searching I did from city to city, looking for that community of like minded souls was waiting for me in Kentucky, waiting for me to remember and reclaim. Away from my home state I often found myself among people who saw me as clinging to old fashioned values, who pitied me because I did not know how to be opportunistic or play the games that would help me get ahead.
    I am reminded of this tension causing duality of desire when I read Lorraine Hansberry’s play A Raisin in the Sun. In the play she dramatizes the conflicts that emerge when the values of belonging, the old ways, collide with the values of enterprise, and career opportunism. Sad that her son wants to take the insurance money they have received at the death of her husband, Mama declares: “Since when did not money become life.” Walter Lee answers: “It was always life mama. We just did not know it.” No doubt masses of black folk fleeing the agrarian South for the freedom from racist exploitation and oppression they imagined would not be their lot in the industrialized North felt an ongoing conflict of values. Leaving the agrarian past meant leaving cultures of belonging and community wherein resources were shared for a culture of liberal individualism. There is very little published work that looks at the psychological turmoil black folks faced as they made serious geographical changes that brought with them new psychological demands.
    Certainly when I left Kentucky with its old fashioned values about how to relate in the world, I was overwhelmed by the lack of integrity I encountered in the world away from home. Most folks scoffed at the notion that it was important to be honest, to be a person of one’s word. This lack of integrity seemed to surface all the more