bred. What a trial, in fact, that is for us, and how guilty it proves us: we think it ordinary to spend twelve or sixteen or twenty years of a person’s life and many thousands of public dollars on “education” —and not a dime or a thought on character. Of course, it is preposterous to suppose that character could be cultivated by any sort of public program. Persons of character are not public products. They are made by local cultures, local responsibilities. That we have so few such persons does not suggest that we ought to start character workshops in the schools. It does suggest that “up” may be the wrong direction.
IV
This is the book of a black man; Shaw keeps a deliberate faith with his responsibilities as a spokesman for his race. But it is also, almost as constantly, a farmer’s book. When he speaks as a farmer, Shaw steps beyond the limits of his racial experience—and enters into another kind of tragedy.
Shaw’s book is full of the folk-agrarianism that undoubtedly lay behind the agrarianism of Jefferson, that survived in small farmers and even field hands and sharecroppers of both races until well into this century. It is the agrarianism of “forty acres and a mule,” the frustrated hope of emancipated slaves, but nevertheless one of the few intelligent and decent social aspirations that our history has produced. Shaw’s book, by either his fault or his editor’s, does not say how this tradition came to him or who his teachers might have been. Evidently it did not come to him from his father, whom Shaw held in some contempt as a free man with slavery ways, who “couldn’t learn nothin from his experience.” But however it came to him, Shaw did inherit the aspiration, the attitudes, and the know-how of this old agrarianism, and his exemplification of it is one of the values of his book.
His understanding of the meaning of land ownership is complex and responsible, as is his understanding of the relationship between property and labor. He knows that for men such as himself, ability is futile if it has no title to land; it simply comes under the control of whoever does own the land. He knows the dangers implicit in a man’s willingness to own more land than he can work. It is exactly because of this knowledge that Shaw cannot be said to speak only about the experience of black people; the notion belittles him. When he “stood up” to oppose his neighbor’s —and ultimately his own—dispossession, he had generations of his people’s history behind him, and he knew it. But in that act an important strand of white people’s history also reached one of its culminations, and in a different way he knew that.
Shaw’s standing up stated and clarified a principle that his life worked out in detail. His ideal was independence, and that carried his mind to fundamentals. He was not a “consumer.” The necessities of life were of no negligible importance to him. Provisioning, with him, was not just a duty, but a source of excitement, a matter of pride. He knew that his hopes depended on a sound domestic economy. He raised a garden, kept a milk cow or two, fed his own meat hogs and so reduced his family’s dependence on the stores. “I was saving myself a little money at the end of each year, gettin a footin to where I wouldn’t have to ask nobody for nothin.”
As a consequence, he began “to rise up,” not to “the top,” but to a sufficiency of ability and goods. There are exultant passages in which he tells of buying his own mules, new wagons, and harness. 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
