The Hidden Wound
by Wendell Berry
A Review by Dwight A. Moody
In her new, best-selling book The Sum of Us, Heather McGhee devotes chapter nine to what she calls “The Hidden Wound”—by which she refers to the damage racism does to the soul of white folk. Actually, it was not McGhee who called it that—the hidden wound—but Wendell Berry; and in that chapter McGhee recounts how she met Berry, secured a copy of his book, and read it straight through during one night in a Kentucky hotel.
Berry’s book—The Hidden Wound—was written in 1968 and published in 1970; it was reissued with a new Afterward in 1989; my paperback copy carries the publication date of 2010.
Three things were on Berry’s mind as he wrote this book during a Christmas holiday in California. The presenting issue was race: “… 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….” (77). Those two black people were a hired hand on the family farm named Nick and a woman who lived with him whom he called Aunt Georgie. He describes them numerous times in the book and recounts endearing episodes with each. He caught on pretty quick that they occupied a different place in the structure of things on the farm; and it was through his reflection about them, 25 years later, that he sought to understand what it meant to be black and what it meant to be white in the rural Kentucky region of his upbringing.
He writes frankly, and in a way that would describe almost every adult in my life, growing up as I did, like Berry, in Kentucky:
“For a long time after I was grown the question of racism remained passive in me. I subscribed to the principles of political equality and civil rights. I had not knowingly mistreated or insulted any black person because he was black. I hoped, in a general way, that the ‘race situation’ would be solved in a manner that would be acceptable and beneficial to the Negroes. On the other hand, I was not really dealing with the question. I think I lacked any clarifying or critical sense of my own involvement in the problems and the costs of racism” (86).
He confesses that the “problem seemed to me more difficult when I reached the end of the book than when I began, and I am sorry that it is not more clearly informed by my growing awareness of the difficulty” (111).
Perhaps the reason he failed to reach a satisfying resolution to his own race issue is because his real interest is land: dirt, work, the farm, and the farming task. Yes, he encountered the land through the eyes and hands of those two “niggers” as he calls them throughout the book, a phrase immediately shocking and eventually perceptive, especially as he describes “nigger work” and how that has impacted the white work force: whites are reluctant to pick up the “nigger work” after the black folk move to town or joined the migration North. But no, he finds no answer to the perplexities of race and slides effortlessly into ruminations on the land.
Berry grew up on the farm, moved away for university study and work, traveled here and there to write, speak, and learn; but after a decade of life as an itinerant public intellectual, he returned to his roots: “…I have gone back to my native place, to live here mindful of its nature and its possibilities….” (61).
Nick and Aunt Georgie helped him access and embrace the “nature and possibilities” of the land, as did his father, a farmer-turned-lawyer who always remained, primarily, a farmer. Berry, then, has spent more than fifty years as an active farmer, paying attention to the soil, the weather, the crops, and the animals, but also the flowers, the neighbors, and the regular interruption by insects, birds, and creepy, crawly things. And it is this contemplation of life on the land, this existential and spiritual fulfillment, this vocation that comprises the core of this book.
Yes, toward the end, this meditation turns into a jeremiad on modern life, that way of living occasioned by flight from the land to the cities, from community life to professional life, market life, sterile life, segregated life. All of which he detests. Without common cause with the land, he asserts, there can be little common life with people, black or white. And without common life, there is no answer to the racial and economic issues that plague the country today (whether that “today” is 1970, 1989, 2010, or 2021).
Berry is a wonderful writer, and one of the few who embraces the semi-colon! He reminds me in numerous ways of C. S. Lewis: his beautiful prose, his counter-culture perspective, and the sense that he was a man born out of time, a man better suited for life in the 18th century perhaps, with his hero Henry David Thoreau. Lewis also detested modern times and felt himself a holdover from an earlier epoch, a “specimen” to be studied, he calls himself. I have this sense about Berry after reading this book. You may also; but the reading of it, like reading Lewis, will do you much good.
(May 2021)
