The
late 1980s. Sid and I are on something of a road trip to southwestern Virginia,
Norton and Wise. Sid has been invited to give a talk at Clinch Valley College,
now the University of Virginia at Wise. At the time it was a small four-year
liberal arts college serving mainly first generation students from the region.
Norton was the small city, birthplace of my father, with the family sustaining
ties to the region and the young college through to the end of the century.
Sid’s presentation will be on sugar, food, and culture. He speaks to a large
audience of students, faculty, community members, about anthropology the
discipline, about his own field-work, about Haiti, Puerto Rice,, about his
relationship with Taso, about taste, about the history of sugar production and
consumption, about commodities, global markets, and slavery, about the fates of
who we are and can be which are tied to what we eat and how it is produced and
marketed. His remarks touch people closely. All in an hour to an audience that
had perhaps never experienced a lecture on any of these topics, much less one
that did such exquisite integration. These were people whose lives are tied
closely into the deep histories of Appalachian poverty, into histories of
hunger, exploitation of workers, labor organizing, and the vagaries of the
regional coal producing economy.
One
member of the audience is a local Lutheran Minister who also heads the Norton
Food Bank, and he invites us for a visit. We found him at the Food Bank the
next day and we observed a few people picking up food. In just a few minutes,
with Sid asking questions about hunger in the area, and about the people using
the food bank, we learned a lot. Two remarks by the Minister struck me as
especially memorable, remarks that Sid and I discussed in the aftermath. The
first was that the really poor did not access the Food Bank. Their poverty left
them none of the resources needed to access the Food Bank, that there was
unfortunately a layer of poverty well beyond what the Food Bank could reach,
touch. In a way, he was saying that a visit to the Food Bank was not a point of
observation of the reality of poverty in the area. The second was, and I
remember the words of the Minister pretty well: “You both are from Baltimore?
Here, in southwest Virginia, you have to appreciate that our ‘Black People’ are
‘white’.” He was trying, I have thought, to help us understand the depth of
poverty and also about class, difference, culture, and race in America. There
were, he pointed out a number of ‘Black people’ in the area but they were
earning sufficient income that they did not need or care to seek out the Food
Bank. The truly poor were not poor as a consequence of race, but rather the
victims of an economic system that had left them out of the economy generations
before.
Before
we left for Baltimore, we did a few more things, but I remember especially a
visit to the home of Charlie Daniels, not the country singer but rather the
plumber. . .owner of a large interstate plumbing contracting business, rather
industrial scale, based in Norton. Charlie was equally renowned for his trips
to Moscow, Paris, and Teheran, on missions to free US captives, from Francis
Gary Powers, U-2 pilot, to the USS Pueblo detainees and others. (Powers was a
local boy). Over some home-brewed moonshine—he said brewed up on the
mountain--Charlie told us how in a hotel elevator in Moscow he had met a young
American boy, Bill Clinton, an Oxford University Rhodes Scholar on a school
break, and how they had begun a life-long correspondence, including photographs.
As we continued to accept the pours of moonshine, he brought out a book of
letters and photos reflecting how their relationship had developed. . .Daniels
noted that Clinton had developed such relationships with hundreds or thousands
of people he met. It seemed a humble claim to a relationship more than a claim
to importance.
And
these were 48 hours of thick engagement with Sid, a sharing of a range of
connections and intersections with the world in all its layered-ness. I cherish
them. . .with recognition that this was Sid’s everyday life of teaching,
learning, and connecting across more than eight decades.
