The Hidden Wound by Wendell Berry

Author:Wendell Berry
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781582436678
Publisher: Catapult
Published: 2018-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

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If my pattern here has been to depart from my main subject and go back to it, that is because I am attempting to trace, from the influence of two black people I knew as a child, the development of my understanding of the damages of racism, and such an understanding does not grow in a straight or a logical progression from its source. My understanding of the influence of Nick’s and Aunt Georgie’s minds has been advanced and clarified, as that influence was at first permitted, by the influence of other minds. Also in the last few years my understanding of the general problem of the relations of blacks and whites has been considerably advanced by my own intensified effort to make myself at home in my native place—a task that, past a certain point, is not as easy as might be supposed.

Another difficulty I am aware of is that, by concentrating so exclusively on Nick and Aunt Georgie, I have given the impression that theirs was either the main, or nearly the only, influence which conveyed into my childhood the sense of the countryside and its life—when in fact theirs was only one of many which came to me from blacks and whites. That I have thought to ponder at such length over the lives and the influence of two black people is due largely to my growing sense that, in the effort to live meaningfully and decently in America, a white man simply cannot learn all that he needs to know from other American white men. That is because the white man’s experience of this continent has so far been incomplete, partly, perhaps mostly, because he has assigned certain critical aspects of the American experience to people he has considered his racial or social inferiors. In my part of America at least racism has made a crucial division between the two races which has produced, as it was bound to do, a crucial difference between them. As the white man has withheld from the black man the positions of responsibility toward the land, and consequently the sense of a legally permanent relationship to it, so he has assigned to him as his proper role the labor, the thousands of menial small acts by which the land is maintained, and by which men develop a closeness to the land and the wisdom of that closeness. For the lack of that closeness and wisdom the white man has suffered and is suffering more than he has admitted, more probably than he knows. It may be the most significant irony in our history that racism, by dividing the two races, has made them not separate but in a fundamental way inseparable, not independent but dependent on each other, incomplete without each other, each needing desperately to understand and make use of the experience of the other. After so much time together we are one body, and the division between us is the disease of one body, not of two. Even

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