Late Migrations
Page 15
There is nothing to fear. There is nothing at all to fear. Walk out into the springtime, and look: the birds welcome you with a chorus. The flowers turn their faces to your face. The last of last year’s leaves, still damp in the shadows, smell ripe and faintly of fall.
Holy, Holy, Holy
On the morning after my mother’s sudden death, before I was up, someone brought a basket of muffins, good coffee beans, and a bottle of cream—real cream, unwhipped—left them at the back door, and tiptoed away. I couldn’t eat. The smell of coffee turned my stomach, but my head was pounding from all the tears and all the what-ifs playing across my mind all night long, and I thought perhaps the cream would make a cup of coffee count as breakfast if I could keep it down.
When I poured just a drip of cream into my cup, it erupted into volcanic bubbles in a hot spring, unspooling skeins of bridal lace, fireworks over a dark ocean, stars streaking across the night sky above a silent prairie.
And that’s how I learned the world would go on. An irreplaceable life had winked out in an instant, but outside my window the world was flaring up in celebration. Someone was hearing, “It’s benign.” Someone was saying, “It’s a boy.” Someone was throwing out her arms and crying, “Thank you! Thank you! Oh, thank you!”
So much to do still, all of it praise.
DEREK WALCOTT
Works Cited
Not all allusions in Late Migrations are cited in the text. Here is a list of those that aren’t:
p. 2: The title is a paraphrase of “Nature, red in tooth and claw” from “In Memoriam” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
p. 9: The phrase “Life piled on life” appears in “Ulysses” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
p. 30: The final two sentences of “The Snow Moon” are an echo of “mon semblable,—mon frère!” from Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal.
p. 45: Barney Beagle Plays Baseball, a beginning reader by Jean Bethell, was first published in 1963.
p. 51: “Operation Apache Snow” was a US offensive launched on May 10, 1969, against the North Vietnamese that resulted in massive casualties on both sides.
p. 54: The title is a quotation from the poem “Tell Me a Story” by Robert Penn Warren.
p. 58: In the first sentence, “heavy bored” is an allusion to “Dream Song 14” by John Berryman.
p. 58: The Bible passage that closes the first paragraph is Mark 11:23.
p. 69: The “Beatitudes” commonly refers to a set of teachings delivered by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount.
p. 72: “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye” is a song written by Cole Porter and recorded by Ella Fitzgerald, among others.
p. 78: “The world is too much with us” is an allusion to William Wordsworth’s sonnet of the same title.
p. 80: The title of this essay alludes to a line from W. H. Auden’s poem “Musée des Beaux Arts.”
p. 85: The description of my mother as someone who never prepared for gardening is an echo of E. B. White’s description of his wife, Katharine S. White, in an introduction to her book, Onward and Upward in the Garden.
p. 95: Annie Dillard’s essay is “Total Eclipse,” first published in 1982.
p. 96: The song I mention in the penultimate paragraph of this essay is “Ring of Fire,” written by June Carter and Merle Kilgore and made famous by Johnny Cash.
p. 98: The short story we read in class, I later learned, is “Brandenburg Concerto” by Lawrence Dorr.
p. 110: In the final paragraph, “goldengrove unleaving” is an allusion to “Spring and Fall,” a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
p. 114: “Shaking the caked red dirt from my sandals” is an echo of Matthew 10:14.
p. 116: The title of this essay is an allusion to a line from William Shakespeare’s “Sonnet LXXIII.”
p. 116: “Nothing gold can stay” is an allusion to Robert Frost’s poem of the same title.
p. 118: “Heart of Greyhound darkness” is an allusion to Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness.
p. 129: “The fog comes on little cat feet” is an allusion to “Fog” by Carl Sandburg.
p. 131: The title refers to an observation commonly attributed to Aristotle.
p. 132: “Two by Two” refers to the way the animals entered Noah’s ark in Genesis 7:9.
p. 138: The title of this essay quotes a line from W. H. Auden’s poem, “Musée des Beaux Arts.”
p. 151: “He Is Not Here” is a quote from the Biblical Easter story.
p. 159: “You Can’t Go Home Again” echoes the title of a novel by Thomas Wolfe.
p. 163: The title of this essay echoes repeated exhortations throughout the Bible.
p. 166: “Dust to Dust” echoes Ecclesiastes 3:20.
p. 175: “Homeward Bound” echoes the title of a 1993 film about three family pets making their way home after an unexpected separation from their people.
p. 187: “No Exit” echoes the title of a play by Jean-Paul Sartre.
p. 195: “Nevermore” is the word the bird repeats throughout Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven.”
p. 219: “Holy, Holy, Holy,” is the title of a Christian hymn published in 1826 by Reginald Heber.
A final note: “In Which My Grandmother Tells the Story of the Day She Was Shot” is an edited version of an essay my grandmother wrote in 1983 that was never published. All the other essays in her voice are transcripts of interviews my brother conducted with her in 1990. The excerpts are faithful to the original recordings except where slight changes—adding names, for example, or omitting repetition—contribute significantly to understanding.
Publications
These essays appeared, often in significantly different form, in the following publications:
“Separation Anxiety” (as “Motherhood and the Back-to-College Blues”)
The New York Times, August 20, 2018
“Gall” (as “What to Expect”)
O, The Oprah Magazine, October 2018
“Homeward Bound” (as “What It Means to Be Loved by a Dog”)
The New York Times, June 18, 2018
“Howl” (as “The Pain of Loving Old Dogs”)
The New York Times, February 25, 2018
“Babel” and “Thanksgiving” (as “It’s Thanksgiving. Come On Home”)
The New York Times, November 23, 2017
“A Ring of Fire” (as “In Nashville’s Sky, a Ring of Fire”)
The New York Times, August 21, 2017
“Holy, Holy, Holy”
River Teeth, July 27, 2017
“The Unpeaceable Kingdom” (as “Springtime’s Not-So-Peaceable Kingdom”)
The New York Times, June 4, 2017
“Masked” (as “What Dying Looks Like”)
The New York Times, February 26, 2017
“Late Migration”
Guernica, December 6, 2016
“Nevermore” (as “Quoth the Vulture ‘Nevermore’”)
The New York Times, October 31, 2016
“Recompense”
Proximity, September 13, 2016
“Red in Beak and Claw”
The New York Times, July 31, 2016
“No Exit” (as “Caregiving: A Burden So Heavy, until It’s Gone”)
The New York Times, August 8, 2015
Acknowledgments
It takes a village to raise a child. It takes a multigenerational nation to publish a first book at the age of fifty-seven.
I am grateful to the writers who helped shape these essays from an embryonic stage: Ralph Bowden, Maria Browning, Susannah Felts, Carrington Fox, Faye Jones, Susan McDonald, Mary Laura Philpott, and Chris Scott. Extra thanks to Maria, who read the whole book—twice—while it was still trying to become a book.
I am unendingly thankful for the writers at Chapter 16 and for the Tennessee authors, librarians, and independent booksellers whose work gives Chapter 16 its mission. I will never find enough words of thanks for Serenity Gerbman and Tim Henderson at Humanities Tennessee. For ten years their fle
xibility and unflagging support made it possible for me to be both an editor and a writer.
At The New York Times, I’m profoundly grateful to Peter Catapano, whose genius makes my words better every single week, and to Clay Risen, whose offhand remark in a conversation at the Southern Festival of Books—“Would you ever want to write about that?”—led to the first essay I wrote for both the Times and this book.
Joey McGarvey plucked an incomplete manuscript of Late Migrations out of the slushpile at Milkweed Editions and somehow saw what it could become. Her gentle guidance and brilliant editing turned a jumble of essays into an actual book. And after it finally became a book, the rest of the team at Milkweed—Meagan Bachmayer, Jordan Bascom, Shannon Blackmer, Joanna Demkiewicz, Daley Farr, Allison Haberstroh, Daniel Slager, Mary Austin Speaker, Abby Travis, and Hans Weyandt—worked unceasingly to help it find its way. Thank you, all of you.
Writing Late Migrations has brought home to me how vast the literary ecosystem truly is. I send my heartfelt thanks to Kristyn Keene Benton of ICM Partners for her expansive understanding and expertise; to Carmen Toussaint of Rivendell Writers’ Colony for building the haven where this book could grow; to Mary Grey James, who came out of retirement to help me understand the book business from a side I’d never seen before; and to Karen Hayes and everyone at Parnassus Books for creating a crucial “third place” for Nashville’s readers and writers, and for believing in this book from the very beginning.
All my life I have been wholly fortunate in teachers and mentors, especially Ruth Brittin, James Dickey, John Egerton, Sharyn Gaston, Ann Granberry, and R.T. Smith. Most of them didn’t live to read this book, but their influence can be found in every paragraph. Teachers everywhere, thank you. You are planting seeds for the ages.
In eighth grade, having exhibited no competence in middle school biology, I abandoned my plan to be a large-animal veterinarian. When I told my parents I’d decided to be a writer instead, they bought an ancient manual typewriter at a garage sale and brought it home. I wrote all my high school, college, and grad school papers on that Underwood Noiseless Portable, and probably a thousand poems, too. That’s the kind of parents I had.
It’s the kind of family I still have: part safety net and part trampoline. I am grateful to Shannon Weems Anderson and Max Weems III, the cousins who shared so much of my childhood. I am grateful to our Nashville family—the Hills, the Baileys, the Michaels, the Tarkingtons, and all the dear friends who make our entire neighborhood a home. I am grateful to my brilliant siblings, Billy Renkl and Lori Renkl, who are my constant inspiration. I am grateful to Sam Moxley, Henry Moxley, and Joe Moxley, the greatest gifts of my life. Most of all, I am grateful to Haywood Moxley, who is life itself to me.
In the end, this book is for my people. For my parents and my grandparents and my great-grandparents. For my husband and our children and, someday, for the families our children will make. For my brother and my sister. For my husband’s parents and siblings. For all our beloved nieces and nephews on both sides. If there’s anything that living in a family has taught me, it’s that we belong to one another. Outward and outward and outward, in ripples that extend in either direction, we belong to one another. And also to this green and gorgeous world.
Heidi Ross
MARGARET RENKL is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, where her essays appear weekly. Her work has also appeared in Guernica, Literary Hub, Proximity, and River Teeth, among others. She was the founding editor of Chapter 16, the daily literary publication of Humanities Tennessee, and is a graduate of Auburn University and the University of South Carolina. She lives in Nashville.
Founded as a nonprofit organization in 1980, Milkweed Editions is an independent publisher. Our mission is to identify, nurture and publish transformative literature, and build an engaged community around it.
We are aided in this mission by generous individuals who make a gift to underwrite books on our list. Special underwriting for Late Migrations was provided by Mary and Keith Bednarowski.
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Interior design by Mary Austin Speaker
Text typeset in Century; display set in Filosofia.
Century is a Scotch typeface originally cut by Linn Boyd Benton for master printer Theodore Low De Vinne for use in Century magazine. Later and more widely used iterations of Century were redesigned by Benton’s son, Morris Fuller Benton, who devised the invention of type families.
Filosofia was designed by Zuzana Licko for Emigre in 1996 as a contemporary interpretation of Bodoni.