Shared Allegiance
A good many years ago, when I heard that bell hooks was speaking favorably of me and some of my work, I thought that was remarkable. It seemed remarkable, of course, because the racial division is so prominent and so much in the way. [End Page 38]
But then I met bell hooks. We sat down and talked, unseriously with some laughter, and also seriously. This was a friendly conversation, which means that as we talked our points of view freely converged and diverged as honesty required. And I realized that her approval of me–which I think was somewhat limited, for it was intelligent approval–though it probably was rare, was not remarkable.
The two of us, as she had seen, belong to a kind of people who can speak to one another with understanding across even the headline divisions of race and sex. This is a kind of people rapidly disappearing at present, but a kind nonetheless valuable and needed: country people, agrarian people, who come from places they conscientiously know, suffer and love as "home." It is because of this that I so often read bell hooks with the sense of being, not only spoken to, but spoken for.
To affirm publicly in our time, as she did, the value of our shared culture and allegiance required courage. It required, I think, the same courage by which she spoke always as and for herself. My respect and my gratitude for this give the measure of my sorrow for her absence and my sense of loss. [End Page 39]
Wendell Berry, an essayist, novelist, and poet, has been honored with the T. S. Eliot Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern American Poetry, the John Hay Award of the Orion Society, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Achievement Award, among others. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama, and in 2016, he was the recipient of the Ivan Sandrof Life Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle. Berry lives with his wife, Tanya Berry, on their farm in Henry County, Kentucky.
