Wendell Berry’s “Jayber Crow”

A barbershop in a small town is less about the cutting of hair and more about community, one of those places where people (usually men) congregate to talk, observe, and plan hunting trips. Or that’s what barbershops used to be.

And “used to be” is what is at the heart of Wendell Berry’s novel Jayber Crow, originally published in 2000. Jayber Crow is a barber in the town of Port William, Kentucky, the place around which so many of Berry’s stories and novels center. Port William is a “used to be” place, a town in decline as economics and what we consider progress passes it by, its life gradually siphoned away.

Jayber is telling his story, and the town’s story, from the perspective of old age. He was left orphaned at a very young age by his parents succumbing to influenza; he’s taken in by an elderly couple, and it is there that he begins to fall in love with the place he lives in. Orphaned again after their deaths, he’s sent to an orphanage and a bible college. And while he should have ended up in ministry or working in a city, he doesn’t. The pull toward the place of his youth is too strong. Along the way he’s picked up barbering skills, and so he returns to Port William. And people remember him, remember the orphaned boy.

When he’s telling his story, he’s an old man, retired from barbering, officially at least. The state regulatory authorities have cited his shop for numerous violations, even if it’s in the same place and Jayber doing the same things he’s done for almost half a century. But he tells his story, his story of community and place and people – and the woman he falls in love with, the woman he cannot have because to do so would violate all of what place and community are about. He never speaks of his love, but, in a small town, some things people just know.

The novel encompasses most if not all of Berry’s beliefs and philosophy about land, agriculture, progress (including interstate highways), faith, and community. In the hands of a lesser writer, the story would have degenerated into ideological diatribe. In Berry’s hands, it doesn’t. He maintains a tight control, even over what he most wants to say.

Jayber Crow is a novel about many things, and about one thing, the idea that place, history, and memory are what bind people to each other, and to loosen those binds is to unravel something much larger that a small town. It is also a novel of love and redemption, and how redemption is inseparable from place and community. 

Mourning the Sheep

I’ve been reading Wendell Berry lately – That Distant Land: The Collected Stories (see the post immediately before this one); A Timbered Choir: Poems; and Leavings: Poems. And this has all put me in mind of – a sheep.

From the time I was roughly 8 or 9 to 12 or 13, I spent time each summer with my paternal grandmother in Shreveport. I never knew my grandfather; he died when I was nine months old. But these visits were special, for a number of reasons. I was able to spend time with a grandmother I adored, away from my parents, and, either coming or going, I got to fly in an airplane. This was the time when air travel still had something glamorous about it, and you dressed up to fly.

My grandmother lived in a two-bedroom house in western Shreveport, right across the street from my aunt and uncle. The house had been built by my grandfather for their retirement. The front yard by the road was edged with crepe myrtle bushes; I loved popping the buds open. There was a pecan tree in the front yard and a pear tree on the side.

A frame house painted dark tan, it sat on piers and had a combination garage and workshop out back. The garage side of the structure contained an old Ford that my grandmother tooled around in (and our escapades in that vintage automobile should be and likely will one day be a separate post); the workshop side was largely unused but left almost exactly how it had been when my grandfather still used it.

It was a large yard, close to an acre, and part of it was fenced. To keep maintenance costs down, my grandmother kept a sheep in the enclosed area that grazed the grass. Once a year, she had a man come by to sheer the wool. And my job, whenever I was there in the summer or for Christmas or holiday visits, was to throw stale bread over the fence to the sheep.

I don’t recall if it was a male or female, but I think it was a male. I seem to recall it being generally disagreeable, downright ornery, in fact, unless you had something to feed it.

It was that sheep that kept coming to mind as I read Berry’s stories and poems. That sheep was part of a place, a time, of people long gone, and on a piece of land anchored in my memory.

Berry writes a lot about place and land and memory. He also rails against “industrialized aliens” who have forgotten the land and are severed from it – those aliens largely being commercial interests or people with overbearing commercial proclivities or, worse still, people ignorant of what the land truly means (in contemporary society, that's most of us). In one story, he has a character named Wheeler Catlett, an attorney, look at the main street of the town of Port William, and see how much decline there had been, how much there had been that had disappeared, deteriorated and not replaced. It is a kind of mourning scene, mourning at the loss of what once was.

My grandmother died in 1984. My uncle had died before then and my aunt several years later. Both properties were sold. The last time I saw my grandmother’s house, the neighborhood was in serious decline; her house was boarded up and had graffiti sprayed on one side. The fence that had enclosed the sheep was gone, as were the pear and pecan trees and the crepe myrtles.

And I find myself mourning that ornery sheep.


Related:

There must be something in the air. Rod Dreher at BeliefNet blogged Monday on “The Impermanence of Things.”

Sheep image courtesy of Martin Junius via Flickr; used with permission.