Like most people, I came to know and admire Barbara Kingsolver first as a novelist, initially as author of that rollicking, lyrical, passionate quasi-trilogy starting with The Bean Trees in 1988 and continuing with Animal Dreams (1990) and Pigs in Heaven (1993). With The Poisonwood Bible five years later, Kingsolver sustained the lyricism, humor, moral compass and fine characterization of her earlier three novels, and added a new depth and range of human struggle as well as a new geography. In Prodigal Summer (2000), the most recent of her novels, she returned to her own birthing ground of Appalachia, her love of--and our need for intimacy with--the natural world, and in particular to one of my totem animals, coyote. (Read it as well, if you haven't, for Lusa Landowski's devotion to moths.)
While better known for those novels, it is her poetry, and one essay drawn from her most recent volume of essays, Small Wonder (2002), that I want to highlight on this page of Reckonings, because of their moving eloquence, their graceful melding of the political and the personal, their passionate oneness with the land, their offering, in the words of her fellow writer Sandra Cisneros, of palabras del corazon, words of the heart. Although I have--perhaps misleadingly--responded to her poetry as if it is manifestly autobiographical, it doesn't, in the end, make any difference. The poems, the novels, stories and essays are hers, of her life.
Kingsolver says to the reader of any of her books:
"What you hold in your hands right now, beneath these words, is
consecrated air and time and sunlight and, first of all, a place.
Whether we are leaving it or coming into it, it's here that matters, it
is place. Whether we understand where we are or don't, that is the
story: To be here or not to be. Storytelling is as old as our need to
remember where the water is, where the best food grows, where we find
our courage for the hunt. It's as persistent as our desire to teach our
children how to live in this place that we have known longer than they
have. Our greatest and smallest explanations for ourselves grow from
place, as surely as carrots grow in the dirt. I'm presuming to tell you
something that I could not prove rationally but instead feel as a
religious faith. I can't believe otherwise.
"A world is looking over my shoulder as I write these words; my censors
are bobcats and mountains. I have a place from which to tell my
stories. So do you, I expect. We sing the song of our home because we
are animals, and an animal is no better or wiser or safer than its
habitat and its food chain. Among the greatest of all gifts is to know
our place."
Click below to read some exemplary passages from the works of Barbara Kingsolver.
Kingsolver begins a section of her book of poems (called "The Believers," or "Los Creyentes,") with these lines of Sharon Olds:
somewhere in me too is the path
down to the creek gleaming in the dark, a
way out of there.
Barbara Kingsolver is one-quarter Cherokee. Her grandfather, as portrayed in the following poem, married a Cherokee woman. The name Kingsolver, even if her grandfather did make it up, is (as she later discovered) rooted in the hollows of Appalachia.
NAMING MYSELF
I have guarded my name as people
in other times kept their own clipped hair,
believing the soul could be scattered
if they were careless.
I knew my first ancestor.
His legend. I have touched
his boots and moustache, the grandfather
whose people owned slaves and cotton.
He was restless in Virginia
among the gentleman brothers, until
one peppered, flaming autumn he stole a horse,
rode over the mountains to marry
a leaf-eyed Cherokee.
The theft was forgiven but never
the Indian blood. He lost his family’s name
and invented mine, gave it fruit and seeds.
I never knew the grandmother.
Her photograph has ink-thin braids
and buttoned clothes, and nothing that she was called.
I could shed my name in the middle of life,
the ordinary thing, and it would flee
along with childhood and dead grandmothers
to that Limbo for discontinued maiden names.
But it would grow restless there.
I know this. It would ride over leaf smoke mountains
and steal horses.
Before or after you read the short essay below, I suggest you do two things: first, return to the lines of Kingsolver about the relationship of place and story, and linger over them; second, read the excerpt of Annie Dillard's essay, "Living Like Weasels," in the Reckonings post devoted to her writing. Kingsolver and Dillard, though their ways of writing are distinctively their own, share a passion for wildness, for its radical otherness, and for its necessity in our lives. Kingsolver puts it this way:
"We need to be able to taste grace and know once again that we desire it. We need to experience a landscape that is timeless, whose agenda moves at the pace of speciation and glaciers... Wildness puts us in our place. It reminds us that our plans are small and somewhat absurd. It reminds us why, in those cases in which our plans might influence many generations, we ought to choose carefully. Looking out on a clean plank of planet earth, we can get shaken right down to the bone by the bronze-eyed possibility of lives that are not our own."
Knowing Our Place
I have places where all my stories begin.
One is a log cabin in a deep, wooded hollow at the end of Walker Mountain. This stoic little log house leans noticeably uphill, just as half the tobacco barns do in this rural part of southern Appalachia, where even gravity seems to have fled for better work in the city. Our cabin was built of chestnut logs in the late 1930s, when the American chestnut blight ran roughshod through every forest from Maine to Alabama, felling mammoth trees more extravagantly than the crosscut saw. Those of us who'll never get to see the spreading crown of an American chestnut have come to understand this blight as one of the great natural tragedies in our continent's his tory. But the pragmatic homesteaders who lived in this hollow at that time simply looked up and saw a godsend. They harnessed their mule and dragged the fallen soldiers down off the mountain to build their home.
Now it's mine. Between May and August, my family and I happily settle our lives inside its knobby, listing walls. We pace the floorboards of its porch while rain pummels the tin roof and slides off the steeply pitched eaves in a limpid sheet. I love this rain; my soul hankers for it.
Through a curtain of it I watch the tulip poplars grow. When it stops, I listen to the woodblock concerto of dripping leaves and the first indignant Carolina wrens reclaiming their damp territories. Then come the wood thrushes, heartbreak ers, with their minor-keyed harmonies as resonant as poetry. A narrow beam of sun files between the steep mountains, and but terflies traverse this column of light, from top to bottom to top again, like fish in a tall aquarium. My daughters hazard the damp grass to go hunt box turtles and crayfish, or climb into the barn loft to inhale the scent of decades-old tobacco. That particular dusty sweetness, among all other odors that exist, invokes the most reliable nostalgia for my own childhood; I'm slightly envious and have half a mind to run after the girls with my own stick for poking into crawdad holes. But mostly I am glad to watch them claim my own best secrets for themselves.
On a given day I may walk the half mile down our hollow to the mailbox, hail our neighbors, and exchange a farmer's evaluation of the weather (terrible; it truly is always either too wet or too dry in these marginal tobacco bottoms). I'll hear news of a house mysteriously put up for sale, a dog on the loose, or a memorable yard sale. My neighbors use the diphthong-rich vowels of the hill accent that was my own first language. My great-grandfather grew up in the next valley over from this one, but I didn't even know that I had returned to my ancestral home when I first came to visit. After I met, fell in love with, and married the man who was working this land, and agreed to share his home as he also shares mine in a distant place. I learned that I have close relatives buried all through these hollows. Unaccustomed as I am to encountering others with my unusual surname, I was startled to hear neighbors in this valley say, "Why, used to be you couldn't hardly walk around here without stepping on a Kingsolver." Something I can never explain, or even fully understand, pulled me back here.
Now I am mostly known around these parts by whichever of relatives the older people still remember (one of them, my father's uncle, was a physician who, in the early 1900s, attended nearly every birth in this county requiring a doctor’s presence). Or else I'm known as the gal married to that young fella that fixed up the old Smyth cabin. We are suspected of being hard up (the cabin is quite small and rustic for a family of four) or a little deranged; neither alternative prevents our being sociably and heartily welcomed. I am nowhere more at home than here, among spare economies and extravagant yard sales glinting with jewel-toned canning jars.
But even so, I love to keep to our hollow. Hard up or deranged I may be, but I know my place, and sometimes I go for days with no worldly exchanges beyond my walk to the mailbox and a regular evening visit on our favorite neighbor's porch swing. Other wise I'm content to listen for the communiqués of pileated woodpeckers, who stay hidden deep in the woods but hammer elaborately back and forth on their hollow trees like the talking drummers of Africa.
Sometimes I stand on the porch and just stare transfixed, at a mountainside that offers up more shades of green than a dictionary has words. Or else I step out with a hand trowel to tend the few relics of Mrs. Smyth's garden that have survived her: a June apple, a straggling, etiolated choir of August lilies nearly shaded out by the encroaching woods, and one heroic wisteria that has climbed hundreds of feet into the trees. I try to imagine the life of this woman who grew corn on a steeper slope than most people would be willing to climb on foot, and who still, at day's end, needed to plant her August lilies.
I take walks in the woods, I hang out our laundry, I read stories to my younger child, I hike down the hollow to a sunnier spot where I look after the garden that feeds us. And most of all, I write. I work in a rocking chair on the porch, or at a small blue desk fac ing the window. I write a good deal by hand, on paper, which--I somehow can't ever forget—is made from the macerated hearts of fallen trees.
The rest of the year, from school's opening day in autumn till its joyful release in May, I work at a computer on a broad oak desk by a different window, where the view is very different but also remarkable. In this house, which my predecessors constructed not from trees (which are scarce in the desert Southwest) but of sun baked mud (which is not), we nestle into what's called in this region a bosque-- that is, a narrow riparian woodland stitched like a green ribbon through the pink and tan quilt of the Arizona desert. The dominant trees are mesquite and cottonwood, with their contrasting personalities: the former swarthy with a Napo leonic stature and confidence, the latter tall and apprehensive, trembling at the first rumor of wind. Along with Mexican elder, buttonwillow, and bamboo, the mesquites and cottonwoods grow densely along a creek, creating a shady green glen that is stretched long and thin. Picture the rich Nile valley crossing the Saharan sands, and you will understand the fecundity of this place. Picture the air hose connecting a diver's lips to the oxygen tank, and you will begin to grasp the urgency. A riparian woodland, if it remains unbroken, provides a corridor through which a horde of fierce or delicate creatures may prowl, flutter, swim, or hop from the mountains down through the desert and back again. Many that follow this path—willow flycatchers, Apache trout—can live nowhere else on earth. An ill-placed dam, well, ranch, or subdivision could permanently end the existence of their kind.
I tread lightly here, with my heart in my throat, like a kid who's stumbled onto the great forbidden presence (maybe sex, maybe an orchestra rehearsal) of a more mature world. If I breathe, they'll know I'm here. From the window of my study I bear witness to a small, tunnelish clearing in the woods, shaded by overarching mesquite boughs and carpeted with wildflowers. Looming over this intimate foreground are mountains whose purple crowns rise to an altitude of nine thousand feet above the Tucson basin. In midwinter they often wear snow on their heads. In fall and early spring, blue-gray storms draw up into their canyons, throwing parts of the strange topography into high relief. Nearer at hand, deer and jackrabbits and javelina halt briefly to browse my clearing, then amble on up the corridor of forest. On insomniac nights I huddle in the small glow of my desk lamp, sometimes pausing the clicking of my keys to listen for great horned owls out there in the dark, or the ghostly, spine-chilling rasp of a barn owl on the hunt. By day, vermilion flycatchers and western tanagers flash their reds and yellows in the top of my tall window, snagging my attention whenever they dance into the part of my eyesight where color vision begins. A roadrunner drops from a tree to the windowsill, dashes across the window's full length, drops to the ground, and moves on, every single day, running this course as smoothly as a toy train on a track. White-winged doves feed and fledge their broods outside just inches from my desk, oblivious to my labors, preoccupied with their own.
One day not long ago I had to pull myself out of my writerly trance, having become aware of a presence over my left shoulder. I turned my head slowly to meet the gaze of an adolescent bobcat at my window. Whether he meant to be the first to read the story on my computer screen or was lured in by his own reflection in the quirky afternoon light, I can't say. I can tell you, though, that I looked straight into bronze-colored bobcat eyes and held my breath, for longer than I knew I could. After two moments (his and mine) that were surely not equal—for a predator must often pass hours without an eyeblink, while a human can grow restless inside ten seconds—we broke eye contact. He turned and minced away languidly, tail end flicking, for all the world a cat. I presume that he returned to the routine conjectures and risks and remem bered scents that make up his bobcat-life, and I returned to mine, mostly. But some part of my brain drifted after him for the rest of the day, stalking the taste of dove, examining a predator's patience from the inside.
It's a grand distraction, this window of mine. "Beauty and grace are performed," writes Annie Dillard, "whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there." I agree, and tend to work where the light is good. This window is the world opening onto me. I find I don't look out so much as it pours in.
What I mean to say is, I have come to depend on these places where I live and work. I've grown accustomed to looking up from the page and letting my eyes relax on a landscape upon which no human artifact intrudes. No steel, pavement, or streetlights, no architecture lovely or otherwise, no works of public art or private enterprise—no hominid agenda. I consider myself lucky beyond words to be able to go to work every morning with something like a wilderness at my elbow. In the way of so-called worldly things, I can't seem to muster a desire for cellular phones or cable TV or to drive anything flashier than a dirt-colored sedan older than the combined ages of my children. My tastes are much more extreme: I want wood-thrush poetry. I want mountains.
It would not be quite right to say I have these things. The places where I write aren't actually mine. In some file drawer we do have mortgages and deeds, pieces of paper (made of dead trees—mostly pine, I should think), which satisfy me in the same way that the wren yammering his territorial song from my rain gutter has satisfied himself that all is right in his world. I have my ostensible claim, but the truth is, these places own me: They hold history, my passions, and my capacity for honest work. I find I do my best thinking when I am looking out over a clean plank of planet earth. Evidently I need this starting point—the world as it appeared before people bent it to their myriad plans—from which to begin dreaming up my own myriad, imaginary hominid agendas.
And that is exactly what I do: I create imagined lives. I write about people, mostly, and the things they contrive to do for, against, or with one another. I write about the likes of liberty, equality, and world peace, on an extremely domestic scale. I don't necessarily write about wilderness in general or about these two places that I happen to love in particular. Several summers ago on the cabin porch, surrounded by summertime yard sales and tobacco auctions, I wrote about Africa, for heaven's sake. I wrote long and hard and well until I ended each day panting and exhilarated, a marathon runner. I wrote about a faraway place that I once knew very well, long ago, and I have visited more recently on research trips, and whose history and particulars I read about in books until I dreamed in the language of elephants. I didn't need to be in Africa a as I wrote that book; I needed only to be someplace where I could think straight, remember, and properly invent. I needed the blessed emptiness of mind that comes from birdsong and dripping trees. I needed to sleep at night in a square box made of chestnut trees who died of natural causes.
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