Thoughts on Buying into the Local

Kentucky is a strange place. I say that not to be negative but as a description of a historical and cultural puzzle I have been trying to piece together for almost six years.

My first few years living here, I mostly felt invisible.

Then I would have these reminders of how visible one is when you are new to a place where class, race and social boundaries are so settled. How my disruption of these old lines made an impression. I am here 6 months and a woman standing in front of me in the line to buy tickets at the movie theater turns around and smiles with recognition. When you are born in a pair and have someone who lives an independent life in tandem with your own, you know that smile within millimeters of lips parting. The woman sees and says, “you don’t know who I am?” I ask if she is a professor on campus. She reminds me she is the new gynecologist I had only seen once months before. I ask if she remembers all her patients clothed and standing up and she, without condescension or hostility states the facts of the new place where I live, says I don’t get a lot of black women law professors in my office. This kind of coming-to-mind because of being out of place in space where place matters continues in large and small ways, especially when I am alone.

But I am mostly not alone… now. The birth of my son has completely changed the way I experience Kentucky and Kentuckians. His birth in this state gives me a lasting connection to this place where I have, at times, felt so disconnected. He is, I think, what my colleague Frank Walker calls an Affrilachian when I am still Texan wherever I go. In truth, he has made me more than connected. He has made me visible.

From the minute I took those first short walks in the cold of January to stave off cabin fever, strangers have stopped us in our path. “How do, baby? How do?” repeated in mountain twang, country talk cleaned up for the city, and the musical rhythms of Kentucky Black English. Men and women would rush ahead to get doors. They guffawed out loud at his sweet baby, now boy, smile and fat dimpled hands. They engaged him in conversation even when he only responded in toddler patois. His adorableness was heralded as we move through grocery stores. Two years of watching this and it has just occurred to me that he has, in some ways, made a new part of Kentucky visible to me.

I once discussed with an old man who sat on the aisle while James and I were in the center seat of a flight from St. Louis to Louisville how much Kentuckians seem to love babies. He said, “When you ain’t got much, your babies is all you have.” He said this in an accent that I now readily identify from the area east of Lexington. I immediately understood what he meant. My mother raised us with little of nothing. Yet, she invested everything she had in us. We are lasting evidence of her hard work and love. There are a lot of poor people in Kentucky particularly in the Eastern part of the state. Coming up on the rough side of the mountain or the hard scrap of the inner city, may only leave you with love to give your babies, but this is something more than love.

It is a pride of love for children. An identity based in a richness of heart when all the world sees is poverty. It reminds me of the sociological writings on poor black women and sexuality I read in grad school that discussed the power that arises from controlling your own body and reproduction when everything else in your life seems beyond your control. You love and make children because you can, they are yours and you are theirs. I don’t want to romanticize the difficulties of parenting under financial stress by making love more than it is. An emotion that fuels but does not feed open mouths. But, I have seen the tenderness that all babies are owed in the eyes of men whose visage might make me nervous under other circumstances.

Tonight when my son and I left the grocery store, there was burly white man whose face had the ruddiness of a lifetime of outdoor work parked in a Chevy Silverado blasting Johnny Cash parked next to our car. I could see him watching us as we approached the car. It was dark, we are not post-racial, and this is Kentucky, which like Texas has a history that puts black women negotiating the night with children on notice. As I lifted my son to put him in the car, the man in the truck turned down his music. He started real slow. “Enjoy every minute.” Once he caught my eye and understood he had my ear, he went on. “I would love to have me another one of them. Mine are old and when they was babies, I was working and living hard. If I could do it over now when I have more time. Oh how good it would be.” This is what babies do to Kentuckians. In that moment, he could have been my father who also missed the growing up of his older children only later to father a young son with all the love he had, but didn’t give, to the dozen or so children born before. He said other sweet things about children and growing up. I am recounting tonight’s event in this writing, but I can’t tell you how many times my own racial constructs have been demolished by such interactions. For a long time I have wondered how different my life would be in this state if I moved through it at all times with a baby on my hip.

Although I know a lot about the sociological descriptions of Eastern Kentucky, I have never been East of I-75. I have not been, in part, because I don’t wonder in rural areas. My urban eye has no landmarks in natural landscapes. Too many trees uninterrupted by strip malls, tall buildings and gas stations make me anxious. But mostly, I haven’t been because I was warned not to go beginning with new faculty orientation. I was not just warned about the landscape but also the people. I was led to believe that I would only encounter parochialism and hostility from the students who ventured out of their hollers and made it to the University. This has not been the case.

In fact, it has been the exact opposite. Some of my best students have been young white people from the mountains. When you teach about exclusion and marginality, they come to class with a ready understanding and ability to articulate what it means to be an outsider and judged for aspects of your identity you were born with. I have been watching one of these students chronicle the arrival of her first child on facebook. I think about her a lot in the way social media makes people you have had limited and/or specific interactions with years ago present in your everyday. When she updates about doctor’s visits there is a little extra joy because I know this child will be how-do-ed to death and loved by a community that believes children are its important resource. Her story takes my evidence beyond my experience. My most vivid memory of this student is made techincolor by the way I have come to see the attitudes about babies in this state. While she was in my class, she from time-to-time had weak moments and used a cane. It was beautiful and artistic and one-of-a-kind. I asked her where she got it. Without a beat, she said, “Oh! This is just some old stick my Daddy whittled up for me.” Then and now, I think about how with something others may have discarded and his love and care he propped her up as she made her way through law school. Now she will carry that love forward.

Babies also make you sentimental. I am not saying that cuddly balls of new humanity remove the biases that lead to skepticism across race and class lines. I’m just saying that Kentuckians love babies and it is nice to see the sweeter side.