Well, here we are - back in Irmo, jobless and slightly shamed. Much to my chagrin, I left my home for the past eight months on Friday - an eight months in which I felt more part of a community than I ever have before, college and home life included. I yet again face a pit of aimlessness and self-pity and CLUELESSNESS and am trying to keep a level head as to how to avoid falling in. I feel as if a thousand doors of really captivating and really core-shaking thought opened (thanks to the wonderful convergence of minds known as the Ammons-Breedlove-Evans-Koppa family - and -Taylor-Lewis-Hernandez-etc.) and I fear I'm losing my hold on them. I can easily say the most rewarding part of my experience as an apprentice were family dinners - and lunches and moments and afternoons - with my community boss, her partner, and a fellow apprentice. While I am not much of a talker, I am certainly a thinker - and those conversations pushed me to consider the wonderfully humble and grounded and empowered ways in which food can and should and does happen. In sitting down to apply for a job (wahh, real world), I find myself at a loss. What does food have to do with MLK again? How does grassroots food justice happen without a fancy .org or .edu to foot the bill and call the board meeting? At this point I know fully well that non-profits and academia only play a peripheral role in what I see as food justice, what I see as my albeit-undefined greater Goal. Let's be real, though: how do you find a job that way? Food (and me) are so vulnerable to our deeply painful bourgeoisie tendencies that I'm not sure how to get through it.
Another thing I know from the past 8 months: I want to learn from the south I know - not the mountainous, banjo-strumming one I was infatuated with in college, but the one that seeped into my childhood - cotton belted, slightly trashy to others but home to me, swampy and unpretentious and holding its fair share of abandoned storefronts. That's my south. That's where I want to be making a change, and that's where I'm most capable of doing it.
My last few days in Goldsboro were spent doing three things: saying farewells, not packing, and saying farewells instead of packing. Many of the dear friends I've made there are understandable, and it makes sense to say goodbye - a loyal volunteer at the farm, for instance, or the superintendent for the research station. Some, however, I was not so regularly exposed to: Shorlette's SWARMers, for one. The reason I loved the culture, the south I know which is the south in Goldsboro, is because I said goodbye to some rando dudes on my last day in town. These were the guys who worked for maintenance and spent every morning shooting the shit until Alice and I drove by, waved our morning hellos to these nameless guys, and opened the gate to go to work. The fact that they wanted to say goodbye to us - and us to them - indicates something so much larger that I can't even begin to put into words, but I know it means that that's the kind of place where I belong. I belong in a place where I can say 'folks' and people don't look at me funny, or I can listen to country and gangsta rap on the same trip to the library, or I can look forward to those friendly (and let's be real, joking around like champions) faces saying hello every morning.
For now, though, I'm not able to have that small-town southern life. For now, I have to look to bigger places, to figure out how I fit into the groove that makes so many cogs of this country turn - I have to get a job. I have to get a job and a crappy apartment and hate some part of that just a little, and that's okay. I hope hope hope to be able to remember all these pushings of my buttons, to remember what justice really is (instead of just the blue-caped superhero in my head) and that its face looks like Larsene Taylor's (one of my church-lady friends who also heads up a union for mental health care workers).
Ohhh man, I miss Goldsboro. I can only hope to learn how to recreate that in my own life and my own space somehow.
Another thing I know from the past 8 months: I want to learn from the south I know - not the mountainous, banjo-strumming one I was infatuated with in college, but the one that seeped into my childhood - cotton belted, slightly trashy to others but home to me, swampy and unpretentious and holding its fair share of abandoned storefronts. That's my south. That's where I want to be making a change, and that's where I'm most capable of doing it.
My last few days in Goldsboro were spent doing three things: saying farewells, not packing, and saying farewells instead of packing. Many of the dear friends I've made there are understandable, and it makes sense to say goodbye - a loyal volunteer at the farm, for instance, or the superintendent for the research station. Some, however, I was not so regularly exposed to: Shorlette's SWARMers, for one. The reason I loved the culture, the south I know which is the south in Goldsboro, is because I said goodbye to some rando dudes on my last day in town. These were the guys who worked for maintenance and spent every morning shooting the shit until Alice and I drove by, waved our morning hellos to these nameless guys, and opened the gate to go to work. The fact that they wanted to say goodbye to us - and us to them - indicates something so much larger that I can't even begin to put into words, but I know it means that that's the kind of place where I belong. I belong in a place where I can say 'folks' and people don't look at me funny, or I can listen to country and gangsta rap on the same trip to the library, or I can look forward to those friendly (and let's be real, joking around like champions) faces saying hello every morning.
For now, though, I'm not able to have that small-town southern life. For now, I have to look to bigger places, to figure out how I fit into the groove that makes so many cogs of this country turn - I have to get a job. I have to get a job and a crappy apartment and hate some part of that just a little, and that's okay. I hope hope hope to be able to remember all these pushings of my buttons, to remember what justice really is (instead of just the blue-caped superhero in my head) and that its face looks like Larsene Taylor's (one of my church-lady friends who also heads up a union for mental health care workers).
Ohhh man, I miss Goldsboro. I can only hope to learn how to recreate that in my own life and my own space somehow.
No comments:
Post a Comment