“Times that call for uncommon courage”
The Institute for Southern Studies [which publishes Southern Exposure] is an organization I passionately believe in because it is a vessel of struggle, a ragged band of true believers, and a kick-ass resource that gave me an understanding of the true breadth of my heritage growing up white and poor in the hills of Kentucky. From this experience I was clued in to the beloved community of the civil rights movement, the deep American wellspring of the blues, and the roots solidarity ethos of the labor movement — Miles Horton, Langston Hughes, Hazel Dickens, B.B. King, Stokely Carmichael, Carl Perkins, Muhammad Ali, Tina Turner, MLK, Al Green, John Brown, Ronnie Dugger, thank you so much, god bless.
I know that all we have of these three traditions that is tangible in these days of cut-throat global capitalism and retro-Jim Crow ignorance is the blues, which is survival. But the other two — civil rights and labor strength — are not done and gone. They are the two things that have redeemed the history of the United States, and as long as we breathe, live, work, and love, they will find resurgence and carry us forward to the realization of our potential.
As a traveling poet and publisher of Tilt-A-Whirl Press, my burning desire is to bring together a family and thrust beautiful voices onto the airwaves because poets are the legislators of the world. Of course, the flip side of being a poet is working-class exile. In September, I got hired by a barn builder who, on my second day, lent me out to work at a sporting clay club in Owen County called Elk Creek Hunt Club. The two guys who run the club turned out to be New Jersey retail kingpins, so for the last two months, I’ve been driving all over Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio setting up Halloween and Christmas stores.
Let me tell you, life in the labor force is nothing glorious. By the time my generation came of age, the fabled blue collar jobs with good wages and lifelong job security were long gone. I think the job I work is probably pretty typical: long hours with no over-time compensation and, of course, no union representation. Going without a break for food for sometimes six hours at a time. No job security. As for health coverage, the joke amongst workers and bosses alike is that as soon as you fall off your ladder you’re fired; if you get back up again, you’re re-hired. You work the hours you can when they need you, then be ready to hit the ground running when things slow down.
And there is definitely a lot of hostility towards black and Latino workers at play. Racism continues to be the crippling hurdle in the struggle of working-class survival. These are dire times, times when you suck up the pain and grief because you have no choice. These are times as dark and misguided as the Jim Crow years, times that call for uncommon courage.
Some signs of these times: The general store on my road now has a sign in Espanol which reads, “Por Favor, Paga Por Tu Comida Antes De Comer,” officially bringing Kentucky into the Chicano Diaspora. The second harbinger of the coming millennium is that NASCAR is building a hotel and car racing facility in nearby Gallatin County, ushering in the service economy in rural Kentucky and the death of traditional agriculture.
In light of that, these are my firmest convictions and the best my foresight can determine: black liberation and Chicano political assertion will be brought to bear on a scale not even imagined in the 1960s and they will either deliver those of us who call ourselves white or we will destroy ourselves fighting the inevitable. Secondly, we will emerge as a real roots people with insight into our past and present in the earthy, physical essence of things: musical, hardworking, intelligent, spiritual, sexual, and above all, proud. Our biggest heroes are the civil rights workers and the Beat poets. The fruits of their passions will ripen. No amount of Republican starvation and punishment policy can turn that around.
