What Are People For? - Wendell Berry

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Like thousands of men of his generation, white and black, his great pride was in his teams and in his ability as a teamster. Some of the finest parts of his book are about his mules. Memories of the good ones carry him away: “O, my mules just granted me all the pleasure I needed, to see what I had and how they moved.”

      He had a fierce loyalty to his own country and to the investment of his own labor in it. He would not consider going north or to the city. He would not even use city water, though at the end of his life a new water line went right by his door: “I ain’t livin in no city. I ain’t too lazy to step outside and help myself . . . and the water ain’t fit for slops.” For his people, he is mistrustful of welfare (“since the government been givin em a handdown,” he says of certain people he knows, “they wouldn’t mind the flies off their faces”) and of the city jobs that leave “the possession and the use of the earth to the white man.” His loyalty to his place made him a conservationist, and one of his most indignant outbursts is against polluters.

      By the time of his imprisonment, Shaw’s values were solidly proven in his life. He was a self-respecting and an accomplished man, and he was by no means the only one who knew it. Twelve years later, when he was released from prison, he had not only lost much that he had earned, but he had become an anachronism as well. A new kind of farming had come in: “I knowed as much about mule farmin as ary man in this country. But when they brought in tractors, that lost me.” By the time he tells his story, he realizes that for his deepest knowledge—the knowledge that made him a man in his own sight—he has no heir. An antique collector has come to buy his tools: “There’s people decorates their homes with things that belong to the past.”

      Mr. Rosengarten says in his preface that Shaw’s language is “enriched here and there by words not found in the dictionary.” I collected several examples of what I assume he is talking about. All that I found are in the dictionary; Mr. Rosengarten failed to recognize them because he was unfamiliar either with Shaw’s dialect or with farming. He spells hames “haines,” backband “backbend” and “backhand,” Duroc Jersey “Dew Rock Jersey.” He has Shaw say that “the old horse went backin on off,” when he obviously could only have meant racking.

      This is more than a trifling editorial inadvertence. It is the up-cropping in Shaw’s own sentences of the cultural discontinuity that troubled his old age. Instead of coming in its live meaning to the ears of his children’s children, his story has come to print through the hands of people who do not know the names of the substantial things that ruled his life, much less the use or the cultural importance of those things. The book that has saved him for readers, most of whom also will not know these things, thus shows how near we have come to losing him.

       1975

       HARRY CAUDILL IN THE CUMBERLANDS

      On July 15, 1965, a friend then living in Hazard gave me my first look at the strip mines of eastern Kentucky. The strip miners at that time were less “regulated” than they are now, and under the auspices of the notorious “broad form deed” they frequently mined without compensation to the surface owners. The result was wreckage on an unprecedented scale: the “overburden” was simply pushed off the coal seam onto the mountainside to go wherever gravity would take it; houses with their families still in them were carried down the slopes by landslides, wells polluted by acid from the exposed coal seams, streams poisoned and choked with rubble; and the whole establishment of the people on the land was treated simply as so much more “overburden.” There could have been no better demonstration of the motives and the moral character of the business of energy.

      That night we attended a meeting of the Appalachian Group to Save the Land and the People in the courthouse at Hindman. The occasion of the meeting was the arrest the day before of Dan Gibson, a respected farmer and lay preacher who had gone onto the mountain with a gun and turned back the strip miners’ bulldozers. He was acting on behalf of a younger member of his family then in the service; he was past eighty years old, he said, and had nothing to lose by dying. Thirteen state police, a sheriff, and two deputies had been sent to rescue the thus-threatened free enterprise system, and a shooting was averted only by the intervention of several members of the Group, who persuaded the police to allow them to take the old man before the local magistrate. The magistrate, an employee of the mining company, placed Mr. Gibson under a bond of $2,000. He did not stay long in jail, but the whole affair was so clearly an outrage as to give a vivid sense of injury, identity, and purpose to the assemblage in the Knott County courtroom the following night.

      Review of Harry M. Caudill, The Mountain, the Miner, and the Lord, The University Press of Kentucky, 1980.

      The meeting was called to order, the events of the preceding day were described by various witnesses, and then Harry Caudill was called upon and came to the front of the room. I had read Night Comes to the Cumberlands perhaps two years before, and was full of respect for it, but until then I had never seen its author. I do not expect to forget him as I saw and heard him that night. He spoke with the eloquence of resolute intelligence and with the moral passion of a lawyer who understood and venerated the traditions of justice.

      They are destroying our land under our very households, he said. They are going to drive us out as the white men drove out the Indians. And they have prepared no reservation to send us to. The law has been viciously used against us, and it must be changed. We have been made fools of for sixty years, and now at last maybe we are going to do something about it. And he spoke of “the gleeful yahoos who are destroying the world, and the mindless oafs who abet them.” It was a statement in the great tradition that includes the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. And it was a statement, moreover, to which Harry Caudill had dedicated his life; he had outlined it fully in Night Comes to the Cumberlands, and in the coming years he would elaborate it in other books, in many speeches, articles, and public letters. The statement—the indictment, the plea for justice—has, I think, remained essentially the same, but the case has been relentlessly enlarged by the gathering of evidence, by thought, reading, and research. For twenty years his has been an able public voice recalling us to what, after all, we claim as “our” principles.

      In that same twenty years, hundreds of spokesmen in the same cause have come and gone, hundreds of protests have flared and burned out, hundreds of “concerned” officials have made wages or made hay and gone on. Harry Caudill is one of the few who have endured. As recently as January 5, 1981, a long letter to the editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal set his argument yet again before the people of his native state. A few quotations from it will suggest the quality both of the argument and of the man.

      First, the indictment:

      The state taxes coal in the ground at the rate of 1/10 cent per $100 of value—a mere 315th part of the rate levied on houses and farms. The severance tax is 4½ percent as compared to rates ranging from 12½ percent to 30 percent in the western fields, and most of it returns to the coalfields to build and repair coal roads. The coal industry enjoys low taxes, public esteem, political power, and immense profits. The people generally carry all the burdens growing out of ruined roads, silted rivers and lakes, polluted water, inadequate housing, poor schools, and low health standards.

      And then he calls the roll of the beneficiaries of this curious welfare state:

      . . . Kentucky River Coal, Occidental Oil, Gulf Oil, Ford Motor, Neufinanze AG (of Lichtenstein), KyCoGo Corporation, Stearns Coal and Lumber, U.S. Steel, Royal Dutch Shell, National Steel, Koppers Corporation, Columbia Gas, Equitable Gas, Big Sandy Corporation, Tennessee Valley Authority, Harvard University, Southern Railway, Diamond Shamrock, International Harvester, Howell Oil Company . . .

      And he concludes with the obvious question:

      Why should Kentucky be the nation’s leading coal-producing state if all we get out of it is crippled and dead miners, silted streams and lakes, torn up roads, uprooted forests and holes in the ground?

      Harry Caudill’s frustration has been that this question has never been satisfactorily answered. His triumph is that he has kept asking it, has kept making the same good sense, invoking

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