The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Cond Nast. The tobacco stalks were cut down with a hatchet, pierced with a spear, then slid onto a stick, before being hung in a tobacco barn to dry. Appearances, scheduling, live and virtual event fees to book Wendell Berry and other motivational speakers. and strives to provide the most comprehensive catalog of thought leaders and industry experts to consider for . Slate is published by The Slate Group, a Graham Holdings Company. An earlier version of this article misstated HerbE. Smiths role in the creation of Appalshop. Aghast, Beshear asked, But youre on city water, arent you? Handshoe said recently that the Governor meant well, but was no match for the coal lobby: After he left, nothing much happened., Berry puts his faith in citizens who are committed to restoring their communities. Whats curious to me is that, once started, youre interested, youre into it, youre doing your work, and youre happy, he said. And he took up organic gardening. he Wendell Berry Farming Program, a tuition-free college degree program that started in 2019 graduated its inaugural cohort of 12 students on May 15, 2021 at. On top of one stack was a note Berry had made, and crossed out, about Marianne Moores poem What Are Years? Above a small safe, curling photographs were taped to a wall: Wallace Stegner, Ernest Gaines, Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon, Thomas Merton. Leah Bayens, the programs dean, told me that the students spend much of their time working outside. Thats it, he said. Last October, Berry showed me the camp, asking only that I not say where it is. The highest aim of the school was to produce a perfectly obedient, militarist, puritanical moron who could play football, Berry writes in The Long-Legged House. His greatest lesson from those years: Take a simpleton and give him power and confront him with intelligenceand you have a tyrant. Each year, when school let out for the summer, Wendell headed to his great-uncle Currans camp with an axe and a scythe, to mow the wild grass and horseweed. What HBOs Chernobyl got right, and what it got terribly wrong. It cant be hostile, or gossipy. She suggested that Berrys storytelling grew naturally from long hours of working with other farmers: Stripping tobacco, for instance, is hard, tedious labor, and a group gets through it by telling jokes and stories., When Wendell and his three siblings were young, Henry County was famous for a light-leafed, unusually fragrant crop known as burley tobacco. Despite Berrys veneration of his ancestors, he can be unsparing about their sins. . Its not worth continuing to enumerate Berrys historical errors, nor is ones time well spent rebutting them. I am forever being crept up on and newly startled by the realization that my people established themselves here by killing or driving out the original possessors, by the awareness that people were once bought and sold here by my people, by the sense of the violence they have done to their own kind and to each other and to the earth, he wrote in his 1968 essay A Native Hill. He saw the rapacious practices of modern agribusiness, Big Coal, the military-industrial complex, and Wall Street as the perpetuation of some intransigent destructiveness that drove the European settlers in America. But it has become such a pleasure., In the early sixties, the Berrys seemed to be launched on a very different life. Mason cited Miss Minnie and Ptolemy Proudfoot, a couple she found particularly endearing. In the centers library, Mary said that the project began a decade ago, when she went to talk with her father about how the local-food movement, so popular among urbanites, wasnt doing enough to support small farmers in their region. Jeffrey Bilbro. Most readers first discovered his fiction and poetry, then his essays, where they found a lyrically rendered view of a peril-stricken world. Wendell E. Berry (born August 5, 1934) is an American novelist, poet, environmental activist, critic of culture, and farmer. Eventually, it became uninhabitable, and he pried off some poplar and walnut boards to use in building his own cabin, on higher grounda satisfactory nutshell of a house, he wrote. Critics see him as a utopian or a crank, a Luddite who never met a technological innovation he admired. But this is not just history; it offers insight into the land, culture and neighbors that made Wendell Berry, now 87, who he is and why he is what he is. There he was. Though Berry is careful to state that slavery was indefensible, his hottest anger is reserved for industrialism, whose triumph, he maintains, loosed a virulent racism across the nation. Though we have thoroughly rejected slavery, Berry writes that the nations dominant ambition, to never dirty our hands, increasingly from the Civil War until now, was set by the slaveowner. The results have been ruinous: For the sake of freedom from certain kinds of work, we have seriously degraded the creaturely commonwealth of earth, water, and air, and ourselves along with it., This is damage, Berry writes, that cannot be legislated away (though enlightened agricultural policy favoring small farmers and redistributing land to Black agrarians would help). Which is why the imperialistic Mexican-American War was fought: Slavery needed new lands, preferably in a cotton-growing climate, like Texas, so that the plantation owners could become ever richer. The exploiters only ever stick around in one place as long as theres easy profit to be made, but the nurturers stay put. Another way to describe what Berry is doing is that hes casting American history as a conflict between capitalism and something more social, communal, and rooted in the earthwhat he calls agrarianism. . He studied creative writing with Robert Hazel, a charismatic poet and novelist with a gift for shaping raw talents, including Ed McClanahan, James Baker Hall, Gurney Norman, and Bobbie Ann Mason. Most readers who know Berry know him for The Unsettling of America, which begins: One of the peculiarities of the white races presence in America is how little intention has been applied to it. When the time came to harvest tobacco, Berry and his neighbors swapped work, in what he called a sort of agrarian passion.. The University of Notre Dame has awarded its 2022 Richard H. Driehaus Prize to architect Rob Krier. Always productive, by the 1970s Berry was publishing almost a book a year, a pace that has only just started to slacken. Smith told me that in the past half century, as coal jobs have disappeared, Appalshop has grown. Mom and Dad were producing eighty to eighty-five per cent of what we were eating. She thought that they were poor: We didnt live in a ranch house, drink Coke, or have a TV. A friend, taking pity on her, got on the phone each week to offer a running narration of popular shows. He especially loved Meb, who on Sunday afternoons took him through the countryside, on foot and horseback, teaching him about the wildlife and telling him stories about his parents and grandparents, whod lived entirely off the land. There were a million of them in 1920; today, there are fewer than fifty thousand. Berrys critics see him as a utopian or a crank, a Luddite who never met a technological innovation he admired. And since, in his view, the Civil War was a battle between industrialism and agrarianism, and since he has long held that agrarianism is the path to a virtuous human place on earth, the history he ends up telling feels uncomfortably like Gone With the Wind. So, when I saw that Mr. Berry would be speaking at the Hindman Settlement School in Kentucky as part of their Appalachian Writer's Workshop, I signed up for a ticket (which was FREE!!). The Fords used a team of horses or mules to pull a jumper plow, with a vertical blade called a coulter. Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter (Shoemaker and Hoard, 2004) 1-59376-078-7 $16.95 190. February 26, 2022. And it named Wendell Berry the recipient of its 2022 Henry Hope Reed Award. The sticks were jobbed upright into the ground at even intervals in stickrows between rows of tobacco. With its homely brown jacket and yellowing pages, it looked its age, yet it spoke urgently to our current compounding crises. The small farmers of the burley beltincluding parts of Kentucky, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, and West Virginiasaw themselves as part of a centuries-old culture that produced the most labor-intensive agricultural product in the world. We can take our stand either on the side of life or on the side of death. What he means is that each of us needs to decide if were going to live according to the rules of nurture or exploitation. We get the old myth of Robert E. Lee as a tragic gentleman soldier who hated slavery but fought for his love of Virginia, and the canard that however bad Southern chattel slavery was, the true horror of America came into view only after the war, when capitalism made slaves of us all, turned us all against one another, and ravaged the earth. An essay by Toni Morrison: The Work You Do, the Person You Are.. In one story, Andy Catlett, Wendells fictional counterpart, tells a young helper, If you dont have people, a lot of people, whose hands can make order of whatever they pick up, youre going to be shit out of luck., I had always associated tobacco with lung cancer. She replied, In a small community, humorous banter has to affirm energy and purpose. As a boy, Wendell tagged along with Nick on his daily rounds, talking about Nicks old foxhound Waxy, about how to judge a good saddle horse, and about the prospect of camping together in the mountains. Every resident of the Village Landais has dementiaand the autonomy to spend each day however they please. Ashland Tann, a 2021 graduate of the farming program, who is Black, is clear-eyed about the difficulties. Both sides had slaveowners among their ancestors. It was some instinctive love of wilderness that would always bring me back here, he wrote, but it was by the instincts of a farmer that I established myself., He turned himself around at the University of Kentucky, where he earned undergraduate and masters degrees in English. One of the people at the sit-in was his friend HerbE. Smith, from a family of miners in Whitesburg. By his definition, a corporation is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance. Objecting to Supreme Court rulings that treat corporations as persons, Berry argues that the limitless destructiveness of this economy comes about precisely because a corporation is not a person. In other words, It can experience no personal hope or remorse, no change of heart. The first is that, contrary to Berrys assumption, the North and the South, the factory and the plantation, were never mutually exclusive systems, but intricately linked, as much recent scholarship has shown. As Liz ran into the pasture, Wendell and I went into the barn. We recently caught up with founding member CJ Cain to discuss his love for J.D. How an unemployed blogger confirmed that Syria had used chemical weapons. In the long-legged house, a remote cabin with no plumbing or electricity, Berry has written fifty-two books, during breaks from farmwork and teaching. Meb recalled, It was the tiredest my daddy ever got.. Berry has found a kind of salvationand a lifelong subjectin his stewardship of the land he farms in Kentucky. I wrote him a noteDear Thief, if youre in trouble, dont tear this place up. The ducks, I learned, belong to their partners, Caleb and Kelly Fiechter, who live across the road. Wendell spent the party with him, bringing out ice cream and cake to share. Wendell Berry was warned. February 22, 2022 Wendell Berry, advocate of the largely rural fundamentals that formed humanity before the Industrial Revolution, gets a big write-up in the Feb. 28 issue of The New Yorker, from none other than the magazine's executive editor, Dorothy Wickenden. Wendell said to her, It sounds like youre starting a center. Mary had no idea how to run a nonprofit, but, she told me, I had what was left of a pretty good farm culture and a well-watered landscape.. Now he has tried again. 2023 Cond Nast. He presents Lee as a white supremacist and a slaveholder, but also as a reluctant soldier who opposed secession and was forced to choose between conflicting loyalties: his country and his people. She quotes from the book: Lee said, I cannot raise my hand against my birthplace, my home, my children. For him, the words birthplace and home and even children had a complexity and vibrance of meaning that at present most of us have lost., Wickenden writes, If readers were incredulous about Berrys [1977] claim that a pencil was a better tool than a computer, its not hard to imagine how many will react to his plea that we extend sympathy to a general whose army fought to perpetuate slavery in America. On a summer night near the end of the war, Lucinda saw men in uniform making off with her husband on horseback, and set out behind them on foot, in her nightgown. And so the wound has lived beneath the skin.. He grew particularly close to Ernest Gaines, another Stegner Fellow. Wendell Berry, a quiet and humble man, has become an outspoken advocate for revolution. Thats community journalism. Most U.S. farmers, regardless of scale, receive off-farm incomeworking other jobs to stay afloat. With it, he told me, you can deliver a blow of tremendous force to a stake or a splitting wedge. Thinking about a modern sledgehammer, I asked how the handle was inserted into the head. He is an elected member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers, a recipient of The National Humanities Medal, and . The Berry Center, with a staff of eight and a board of ten, attracts visitors from around the world who share many Americans sense of deracination. These days, Den, a master woodworker, raises cattle and hay with his wife, Billie, at their farm nearby. Tanya once told him that his knack for repeating himself is his principal asset as a writer. The two couples sell the vegetables and much of the pork and beef at Louisvilles two farmers markets, to the local Community Supported Agriculture organization, and to a recently opened restaurant, the New Castle Tavern. By Dorothy Wickenden February 21, 2022 Berry has. He has written many novels, short stories, poems, and essays.. His father, Leonard Wickenden, a chemist, had been writing for decades about the dangers of fertilizers and pesticides. I think what gives us the most hope is collaborating with others. The second point is that the horrors of exploitation dont need to be weighed against one another. After visiting Berry at his Kentucky farm, Wickenden wrote, From this sliver of vanishing America, Berry cultivates the unfashionable virtues of neighborliness and compassion. The impeded stream is the one that sings.". (Tanya looks back on the controversy with amusement: Did I tell you several women have greeted me with Oh, youre the one who types!) Berry responded that he preferred his admittedly old-fashioned view of marriagea state of mutual helpto the popular idea of two successful careerists in the same bed, and a sort of private political system in which rights and interests must be constantly asserted and defended.. A book by the celebrated author, poet, and farmer that takes on racism, the Civil War, and his life's work. Beshear agreed to visit a few particularly afflicted towns. Slate receives a commission when you purchase items using the links on this page. All those Northern factories, those cotton mills, were dependent on the South for their raw supplies, and as cotton became king in the mid-19th century, its sale and transformation into cloth made vast fortunes for a very few powerful people, North and South alike. His New York friends, imagining him surrounded by moonshine-swilling hillbillies and feuding clans, were sure he had consigned himself to intellectual death. I really loved taking this for a three-week joyride in my backpack., Cartoon by Sophie Lucido Johnson and Sammi Skolmoski, The Agitators: Three Friends Who Fought for Abolition and Womens Rights. FB Twitter Linkedin Google+ Youtube Instagram. Wendellrangy, with a slight writers stoopstood on the porch, holding the door open with a wide smile. 0. But, as he puts it in The Need to Be Whole, he and Gaines had a shared sense of origin in the talk of old people and our loyalty to the places and communities that nurtured us. bell hooks liked to quote a line of Berrys about Gaines: He has shown that the local, fully imagined, becomes universal. She saw the same gift in Berry. Mary told Wendell that she imagined a liberal-arts program that would teach students how to raise livestock and grow diversified crops, and encourage them to pursue farming as a lifes work. The Rural Blog is a publication of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues based at the University of Kentucky. -. It enabled farmers to free themselves from the grip of the trust by establishing production controls and parity prices, and by selling their tobacco directly to manufacturers. Thinking that the elderly Berry might like to reacquaint himself with the young Berry, I mailed a letter to introduce myself. Lucie, already full of the Berry hospitality, let me hold her stuffed bunny as Virginia conferred with her grandmother about who would host Thanksgiving, and about friends in the church who hadnt been well. Several of Berrys friends urged him to abandon the book, anticipating Twitter eruptions and withering reviews., My friends, I think, were afraid, now that I am old, that I am at risk of some dire breach of political etiquette by feebleness of mind or some fit of ill-advised candor, Berry writes. For instance, he writes early on that slavery would have been a relationship of mutual affection between owner and owned, that an enslaved person would emerge from the abstraction of market value to become a known person, known moreover as a member of the farms community of humans and other creatures. 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