(This column first ran in the Sunday Brew newsletter. To receive more articles like this one, subscribe here to Hoptown Chronicle’s newsletters.)
Four years ago, when I contacted Wendell Berry and asked that he come to Hopkinsville to speak at the memorial service for bell hooks, I was prepared to hear that he couldn’t make the trip from his home in Henry County.
I was certain that the number of requests he received for speaking engagements and interviews made it impossible for him to oblige them all.
So when Berry agreed to come, I could not have been more surprised or grateful. For a brief moment or two, I imagined I had accomplished something quite noteworthy, securing a legendary writer to speak for a local gathering. Then I settled down and recognized that Wendell Berry was coming to Hopkinsville not because I had asked — but because he thought so much of bell hooks, a fellow Kentucky writer whose stories were also informed by a rural upbringing.
Since hearing about Berry’s death early this week, I’ve been thinking about that day in April 2022 when he traveled to Hopkinsville with his daughter, Mary Berry, to share a remembrance of bell hooks during the memorial service at the Alhambra Theatre.
Berry spoke about their affection for each other in spite of differences in race, age and gender.
He said: “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 of the racial division that is so prominent and so much in the way.
“And then I met bell hooks. We sat down and talked, un-seriously with some laughter, and also seriously. This was a friendly conversation, which means that as we talked, our voices freely converged and diverged as honesty required … The two of us, as she had seen, belonged to a kind of people who can speak to one another with understanding, across the divisions of race and sex. This is a kind people rapidly disappearing … but a kind nonetheless valuable and needed. Country people. Agrarian people. …
“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 gives the measure of my sorrow for her absence and my sense of loss.”
Now there is a great sense of loss with the death of Wendell Berry.
You can read more about Berry in a story here by Al Cross for the Henry County Local. And here in an article about Berry as a “steward of Kentucky.”
Jennifer P. Brown is co-founder, publisher and editor of Hoptown Chronicle. You can reach her at editor@hoptownchronicle.org. Brown was a reporter and editor at the Kentucky New Era, where she worked for 30 years. She is a co-chair of the national advisory board to the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues, governing board past president for the Kentucky Historical Society, and co-founder of the Kentucky Open Government Coalition. She serves on the Hopkinsville History Foundation's board.
