Americans in particular find
it hard to grasp that there’s no “better place” left to run toward,
geographically or economically. No new frontier, other than the present, upon
which we can begin to build a more resonant and meaningful place in the world.
Joe Bageant -- World News Trust
In
gathering material for his next book, Joe Bageant, author of Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's class war, has been traveling his native hills
of Virginia
and West Virginia. Below is a short excerpt from his ongoing road journal.
April 21, 2009 -- Driving Shanghai Road
on the way to visit my childhood church in Unger Store, Morgan County, West Virginia, I crest the hill just above
our old family farm. And I spot something that makes me stop and turn off the
truck motor, lest the moment be interrupted. Ahead of me in the Sunday morning sun is an old farmer I've known all my life and most of his, Ray Luttrell,
who is meditating on his hayfield. Standing on the very roadside spot where I’ve
seen his late father Harry stand countless times. Ray is just looking at that
hay field, motionless for many minutes.
Before him is his most familiar place on earth, his native ground. And I feel
that for a moment at least I once again know that same home ground, again feel
the personal sense of eternity in its very “itness.” A tableau profoundly
exclusive to that place and its people, so specific in its fabric of detail and
history that it cannot exist anywhere else on earth.
When you are born and raised in one ancestral place, and, like Ray, accept that
you’ll probably die there, you know it intimately, specifically and forever.
Just as those before you knew it. All your early memories, all the voices
inside your head, they come from there, and you know it and its community
in a way other people never will. The geographic arch and trajectory of a life
can be so specific as to know its precise beginning and ending spot. Once while
squirrel hunting Pap stopped in the woods at a pile of leaf buried stones
that had once been a chimney and said, “Right there, right there was where I
was born.” And all his life he knew exactly where he would be buried. In the cemetery
where I am headed, where we may find him today, should
we care to dig deep enough, right next to Maw and his children.
On this late April morning in 2009
the sun raises steam from the dewy lawn of Greenwood Methodist Church, high on
the hillside bend in the road near Unger Store, West Virginia. Inside
about fifty people, most of them above that same number in age, listen to the
minister, a young woman in her thirties, tell about how the lord does
provide. First comes the group recitation: “Be guided by God’s word, that
you may bear good fruit…” Then as living proof of that good fruit, farmer Ray
Luttrell’s fresh faced 10-year-old granddaughter is called up front to be
recognized for her recent accomplishment -- a prize-winning school social
science essay titled “Why We Are In Iraq.” For that she earned a story and full
color picture in the local newspaper, The Morgan Messenger.
This is followed by a lilting
version of “Easter People Raise Your Voices.” The window tinted rays of colored
light flash on the spectacles of the congregation and choir. I count four
people not wearing glasses, which says something about the aging congregation.
Toward the end comes the time when church members express any “Joys and
Concerns,” as the moment is called. A tall fellow about seventy stands
up, looking firmly into the congregation's eyes, and in an accent similar to
that of many who’ve retired here from Washington D.C., says, “Did you all know
that California
has passed a law against children using the words mother or father in the
public schools? They must now use the word “parents.” And the ACLU (American
Civil Liberties Union) says it will sue any community that observes The
National Day of Prayer. Wake up America!”
As background for foreign readers, America
has had several National Days of Prayer since the Continental Congress called
for the first one in 1775, and has been a national formal observance sing
Harry Truman signed a bill formalizing it in 1952. Since then America’s
most powerful evangelical forces have pretty much commandeered the holiday for
their own political purposes, through the National Prayer Committee, focusing
on events specifically for the evangelical committee. Hence the ACLU’s
objections.
When it comes to waking up America,
the little church at Unger Store may not have been the best place for him to
start. Only one woman nodded in agreement, and then a bit too fervently,
leading me to think she might have be his wife.
Personally I am having serious
doubts about California
schools outlawing the words mother and father, which sounds too much like far
right Internet propaganda Yet, having known many California
gay and lesbian parent activists, such a ridiculous agenda is not out of the
question. And though I grew up observing the National Day of Prayer in
the public schools, the observance has soured for me over the years. I’d guess
however, that I am the only person in the churchhouse who feels this way.
Several expressions of concern and
calls for friendship prayers follow, mostly regarding sick members, people
about to undergo cancer surgery, a family that had suffered the death of an
elder…
“Anyone have any joys they would
like to express?” asks the minister. This elicits the heartfelt testimony of an
82-year old woman: “I was 40 when I got saved. When I found Christ. So by now
I’ve spent more than half my life in His service. It has been a happy life and
a better life. And I don’t need anything more in this life than what He
has given me. But I would like to ask for one little thing, for Cindy Hill (the
pianist) to play ‘Oh How I love Jesus.’ Would you do that Cindy?” And she sat
down.
While Cindy played “Oh How I love
Jesus” I thought about my father, grandparents, uncles and the other family
members buried just outside those thick stained glass windows. The past
became present, and I found myself looking around me for a girl, certainly an
old woman by now, who I’d had a crush on in the little one-room school house we
attended then. Up front is Ray Luttrell again, this time in a green and gold
choir robe. His son Dallas stands beside him in the choir, and in the pew in
front of me I see the back of the Luttrell grandchild’s head, the precisely
parted white scalp hairline down the middle with its odor of peach scented
shampoo.
The Doxology rolls around signaling
the end of the service. Perhaps for the first time in my life I hate to leave a
church. It is so peaceful here. I see what we rarely see anymore -- a
humble willingness to abide by the forms that have held their society together
for generations. Each person an individual, by but traveling together like a
flock of arrows toward a mutual destiny, but always somewhere over home.
Because abidance in the form has
been so continuous, it’s hard to walk a few steps in any direction here without
bumping into a reminder of previous abiders. Folks once here, but now gone. You
remember its dead, and in doing so you have access to all they ever did that
was right and all that was wrong -- what worked or did not work for those
people and that community -- you know that. Even if you don’t know you know
it. In that way, places own us and we belong to places. A community with no
memory of its dead is no real community, because it has no human connectivity
grounded in time --- just interaction. It’s merely a location populated by
disassociate beings. A community’s inherited memory from its dead provides its
spiritual and moral animation, its posterity. Simply because we are humans, not
aggregations of marketing or employment demographics, and are more than just a
bunch of people who happen to be in the same place.
Not that most of us have a
choice in the matter. We cannot escape most of what was already set in motion
before our birth, such as being moved around by larger forces, for necessary
employment, or alleged opportunity, or for “quality of life” as measured
by consumption (a corporate yardstick if ever there was one). We find
ourselves living in an unfamiliar land, ungrounded and psychically uncounseled
by our ancestors through the living memory of a native community. Through
deeper long term association with familiar people’s lives and work, their
grieving and their joy.
The solution to this void
is simple, yet impossible to our minds. Stop moving. Reduce or eliminate
mobility. Grow in situ. Send down roots through the pavement and send branches
out through the people around us. Teach children the value of same. The
fact that this sounds so untenable and absurd is proof of the industrialization
of our comprehension and the commoditizing of our aspirations.
We can “think globally.”
But for better or worse, we exist locally. And some pain and loss come with
existence, regardless of where we choose to exist. Americans in particular find
it hard to grasp that there’s no “better place” left to run toward,
geographically or economically. No new frontier other than the present, upon
which we can begin to build a more resonant and meaningful place in the world.
Which is what endures in Ray Luttrell and a few
remaining others along Shanghai Road.
Watching Ray makes me feel fortunate to be part of a known and knowable human
chain of lives lived entirely in a distinct place, even if mine has not been.
And I like to believe, vainly perhaps, that as long as they endure, I endure,
even as do departed friends and ancestors endure in me. All I can do in
testimony is wind-row these words like hay, and with providence, they will be as orderly, and make as much earthly sense as Ray’s long wind-rows of
clover hay under next June's sun.
Joe Bageant is the author of
the best selling Deer Hunting With Jesus:
Dispatches from America’s
class war (Random House, 2007) and a frequent contributor to the BBC and
other international media. A selection of his writings and commentary from
working class Americans may be found at joebageant.com.