Tanya Amyx Berry - For the Hog Killing, 1979

T HE N EIGHBORLY A RT OF H OG K ILLING

Wendell Berry

T hese photographs show a traditional art in use for the traditional purpose of sustaining the people who practice it. People may wonder about the usefulness of art, but that becomes clear when order and self-respect are at stake. Art then becomes understandable as opposite to ignorance and carelessness and blundering. Art comes with knowing how. Its usefulness is to keep human work from becoming a mess and a disgrace. Art that performs well under such pressure is a fine art.

The traditional neighborly work of killing a hog and preparing it as food for humans is either a fine art or a shameful mess. It requires knowledge, experience, skill, good sense, and sympathy. The work pictured here is taking place in the fall of 1979, not in an industrial slaughterhouse, but in the barn lots and outbuildings of a farm in Henry County, Kentucky, where several of us met to kill hogs once a year. For this we needed two days, usually in November, when we would hope the daylight hours would be comfortable for outdoor work, and when the intervening night would be cold. None of the several tasks was determined by mechanical routine. The workers did not function as machine parts. Mainly they were neighbors and friends who knew one another well and had often worked together. Above all, the hogs to be killed were not considered as raw material to be transformed into merchandise. The people for whom the work was being done, several of whom were doing the work, were not customers. With the exception of a few minor innovations that I will get to later, this was a premodern, preindustrial day. As I look back across forty years to the days recorded in these pictures, it seems to me that we were mostly enclosed still within our traditional culture of self-sustenance and neighborly work, a hog-and-pork culture, probably already old when our forebears brought it over the mountains and down the rivers.

At least half of our crew that day were familiar with the work, and so you can say that as a bunch we pretty well knew what we were doing. Even so, we were not professionals or experts. People dont become accustomed to work they do once a year, and the younger members of our crew had come to learn as well as help. We were unrehearsed, working outdoors, in the weather, doing our best with what we had. A lot could go awry.

This had been Owen Floods farm, the farm on which James Baker Hall took the photographs for the book Tobacco Harvest: An Elegy, and some of us neighbors had begun killing hogs there several years before Owens death in 1974. Owen was a man extraordinarily particular about work. He had high standards, and high expectations. He wanted things to be doneright and do other small odd jobs of getting ready. And then maybe we would just be waiting, sitting on upturned buckets and along the stripping room bench, passing the time until it would be light enough to shoot the first hog.

And then, having completed his own early-morning tasks, Owen would step in among us. He would be pretty tightly wound, the form and cadence of the whole day to come fretting in his mind. To nobody in particular, as if thinking aloud, he would say, If theres anything I cant stand, its a damned nasty hog killing. You could feel that statement coming in through your ears to spend the day. And it stayed with us after he was gone.

T he primary, the premier, artist of this day would be the shooter. In our crew, on the day pictured as on all the others, that was Marvin Ford, known as Mob. In an industrial slaughterhouse, living animals are treated as if they are already dead.