It's more than that Grandma is in
her 90s and can't negotiate the fields. The problem is that in my ancestral
part of Kentucky small farms with hedgerows that used to separate fields have
been absorbed into very large farm businesses, and the new corporate farmers
are not the rabbit-hunting type so they just don't care that when they bulldoze
the old field boundaries they wipe out habitat, which is another name for
blackberry thickets. The fact is that my part of Kentucky has gotten cleaned
up, neatened, sprayed to death, channelized and leveed, paved over, and
generally ticky-tack-sprawled to death in the name of Wal-Mart and the right of
people to be fat, have hypertension and buy big-screen TVs.
I can visualize the white-flowered
blackberries in Grandma's fading memory, for they survive in full glory here
with me now, healthy and spectacular at this very moment out in the field
between here and the Hunters' Camp as I type these words.
If you could see Laurel Hill
Plantation from the air, you'd see a large rectangle of forest surrounded on
three sides by encroaching fields, pastures and suburban sprawl reaching out
from Natchez 12
miles to the north. (St. Catherine Wildlife Refuge keeps swamp forest on the
western boundary.) And it's funny to think why this island exists, why I'm able
to live the life I have here with blackberries flowering just spitting distance
away.
At the root of the reason is
slavery, which enabled the plantation's first owner to prosper and pass on his
property to many generations. And the reason now is that selling hunting rights
is very important to the current plantation's owner, and my blackberry thicket
makes fine deer browse and cover, and that makes the hunters happy, who pay to
hunt here.
I owe my presence here, then -- and
my nights of good sleep, my accomplishments on the Internet, my current
writings, this Newsletter and the friends I've met because of it -- to the
enslavement of Black folks, and to hunting.
As I have written before, The
Creator has a fine sense of humor.
*****
GRANDMA TAYLOR
Those of you who have been with me
for years know that when I lived out of state and made my yearly visits to Kentucky it was to see and stay with my Grandma Taylor in
Calhoun, in western Kentucky.
Last Sunday morning Grandma died. Though that little corner of Kentucky is thickly
populated with uncles, aunts and cousins, Grandma was my last close relative.
It's only recently
that I began realizing one way Grandma contributed to my being the kind of
person I have become. Her contribution escaped me for a long time