Privilege and the Privy

This past week I’ve been reading a collection of essays called Whiteness is Not An Ancestor. I know what the title means, but I still find it somewhat confusing.

The essays describe these women writers’ noble attempts to dig up the past errors of their birth families, such as a lynching in Owensboro, Kentucky of a black man, attended by the author’s great-grandparents. The issue is fraught; are far distant descendants responsible for the sins of their family’s past?

I hesitate to answer that since the sins of my own family’s past would then fall heavily on my shoulders. But it’s worth remarking that all the essays are by women. I don’t think a comparable collection exists, written by men, although by and large in generations past the men had the power to present such atrocities their women folk lacked.

We women are perhaps too ready to accept blame, although I think these writers would insist they want to understand the past, not to accept blame for it.

By the association we writers love and that other people may find bewildering, I am now considering my privy.

I had it built some years ago near the Hogan that is one of my writer retreats—the Hogan design copied from Navajo tradition; and that raises another question. At least here in Santa Fe, we have perhaps obliviously borrowed from Native sacred traditions: drumming, sage burning, rattles and so forth. While I think we use them respectfully, I doubt that any Natives would approve our takeover of rituals they have struggled for generations to protect and practice.

But back to my privy. I thought of it first as a small concession to our drought condition here: the BioLet uses no water and is remarkably efficient—and it doesn’t smell or draw flies. Beyond that, my privy is a bow to my southern ancestors who probably would have admired the BioLet as an unimaginable luxury compared to the traditional hole in the ground with a board across it and old newspapers as toilet paper.

My privy even has the traditional quarter moon cut out of the door. It also features a glamorous black and white photo from the 1930’s of my aunt Henrietta Bingham, dressed for her presentation to the king and queen in London. I doubt if she would have admired my privy.

But of course privilege allowed me to build the privy. In the end it probably cost as much as a more conventional arrangement. It allows me the privilege of imagining I live off the grid—I don’t—or at least of returning periodically to a half-tamed fragment of the wilderness.

My privilege gives me access to all of this, and my constant grousing about our now overcrowded trails reminds me that I do think I own them and the mountains they thread…

So does it count in this ominous equation that I’ve preserved almost thirteen hundred acres of arid mesa-top land here in New Mexico and more than three hundred acres, in conservation easements, of an old dairy farm east of Louisville, Ky?

I don’t know. Privilege assured me of this investment although the investment in these darkening times is for our future.

If we have one.

And if there is any excuse for privilege—and I don’t think there’s any hope of eliminating it in the near or long future—it’s that inheritors have an obligation to preserve land.

That’s true, even though the old adage, “Land rich, money poor” is likely to become true if not for us then for our children’s and grandchildren’s generations.

Something more to chew on.

In New Mexico Henrietta Bingham BioLet