What Are People For?. Wendell Berry
finally the intelligence of his speech, and makes it memorable.
I do not see how anybody could consider the depth and range of Shaw’s intelligence, the power, sensitivity, and precision of his speech, and doubt the superiority of this man. And yet, though Shaw knew his superiority, had carefully assembled and pondered its evidence, in a part of his mind he seems to have remained half in doubt of it. This uneasiness springs from his lack of formal education. The book has two themes—counter-themes—that will show what I am talking about.
Shaw’s pages are full of evidence that he was a farmer, not just by necessity of birth and condition, but by choice as well. It is luck, of course, when one loves to do what one has to do. But the fact remains that Shaw loved to farm. He had an exultant interest in it. He says so directly, and there is an implicit joy in all the passages about his work. And yet his lack of education obviously nags at him, forcing him to suspect that his farmer’s life was his limitation: “My boyhood days was my hidin place. I didn’t have no right to no education whatever. I was handicapped and handicapped like a dog.” And he says that the educational opportunities that followed the civil rights movement “brought light out of darkness.”
I assent wholeheartedly to the first theme and at least in principle to the second. But I feel an uncertainty, perhaps a conflict. This is one of the rare instances when Shaw exemplifies a problem that he does not illuminate. A powerful superstition of modern life is that people and conditions are improved inevitably by education. Within the limits of the life he lived, and of the evidence he gives, this proposition certainly seems to apply to Shaw: he would have been less at the mercy of employers, landlords, and creditors, for example, if he had been able to read. Or he might, maybe, have been a better farmer if he had had some schooling. Suppositions of this sort are blind, of course, but one has to suppose also that if Nate Shaw had been well enough educated, he might long ago have become a spokesman, perhaps for his race, perhaps for small farmers of his sort of both races.
My skepticism on this question comes from two directions. On one hand, I am aware of a powerful cultural inheritance—part of which Nate Shaw’s story represents and now joins—that rises from long before the civil rights movement or even emancipation, and that is perhaps not so much light out of darkness as light in darkness. A fact too easy to ignore in our climate of conventional pity for the “disadvantaged” is that Nate Shaw is not potentially admirable; he is admirable as he is. And to assume that he could have become so admirable without drawing on a strong, sustaining culture would be as fantastical as to pity him in light of what he might have been.
On the other hand, I am aware that such a man as Nate Shaw stands outside the notice, much less the aim, of the education system. From the standpoint of our social mainstream, the idea of a well-educated small farmer, of any race, has long been a contradiction in terms, and so of course our school systems can hardly be said to tolerate any such possibility. The purpose of education with us, like the purpose of society with us, has been, and is, to get away from the small farm—indeed, from the small everything. The purpose of education has been to prepare people to “take their places” in an industrial society, the assumption being that all small economic units are obsolete. And the superstition of education assumes that this “place in society” is “up.” “Up” is the direction from small to big. Education is the way up. The popular aim of education is to put everybody “on top.” Well, I think I hardly need to document the consequent pushing and trampling and kicking in the face. My point is that if the reader joins Nate Shaw in wishing that he might have been educated, he cannot safely assume that he is wishing only for an improved Nate Shaw; he may be wishing for a different kind of human creature altogether. With education—given his intelligence, his strong character, his local fidelities, and a good deal of luck—Shaw might have become a well-educated small farmer. But he might also have become a “farm expert,” and thus the natural enemy of his economic class. Or he might have become another big cat, “only lookin for money.”
What I am working toward is a definition of this book as a burden. It is a burden—in addition, of course, to being multifariously informative and delightful. At first I thought the burden would be Shaw’s indictment of racism and economic oppression. His testimony on these subjects is fierce and eloquent—and burdening too, Lord knows. But on these subjects Shaw is only one of many witnesses. His response to those conditions—his stand —is what is rare. And he made his stand “with the full consent of his mind.” I have called it an act of principle, but that is to give it the shallowest definition. It was the action of his character: it was prepared by his whole life up to that time. It was, as much as himself, native to his place in the world.
And that brings me in sight of what I want to say: Shaw burdens us with his character. Not just with his testimony, or with his actions, but with his character, in the fullest possible sense of that word. Here is a superior man who never went to school! What a trial that ought to be for us, whose public falsehoods, betrayals of trust, aggressions, injustices, and imminent catastrophes are now almost exclusively the work of the college 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