By 1928, Virginia Woolf had established herself as a leading novelist experimenting with both form and content.  Rejecting Victorian plots that were linear explorations of characters’ lives, Woolf had published Mrs. Dalloway in 1925 and To the Lighthouse in 1927.  Both of these instant masterpieces utilized what would become known as “stream-of-consciousness,” a literary technique that insisted that our lives and thoughts do not proceed from year to year but rather jump around from past to present and even into future time.  Perhaps she was exhausted from the effort it had taken to break so completely from the traditional ideas of novels, so she sought release in fantasy, for surely Orlando, her next creative achievement, was seen as pure fantasy.  The title character begins life as a most definite “he” as we learn in the opening words of the novel:  “He–for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it–was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.”  The “time” in question here is the late 16th century in England:  Elizabeth I has been on the throne a long time though Orlando is only seventeen as the story begins.  His swash-buckling behavior is inherited, since the Moor’s head was severed from its dark brown body by Orlando’s father (or perhaps grand-father as our narrator tells us, giving us a clue at the outset that time will not be calculated in the usual fashion in this novel).  That ancestor was in Africa fighting “barbarians” in his undoubtedly racist understanding of the black inhabitants of that continent.  The adolescent Orlando catches the aging Queen’s eye and so begins a remarkably fast-moving life of courtly service and love-sick fascination with a young Russian girl whom he sees skating on a frozen pond.  Woolf wants us to understand the force of gender roles in her own world in writing about this scene because she says “When the boy, for alas, a boy it must be–no woman could skate with such speed and vigour–swept almost on tiptoe past him, Orlando was ready to tear his hair with vexation tha the person was of his own sex, and thus all embraces were out of the question.”  But Woolf is all about gender confusion in this romping tale, so she continues the scene this way:  “Legs, hands, carriage, were a boy’s but no boy ever had a mouth like that; no boy had those breasts; no boy had those eyes which looked as if they had been fished from the bottom of the sea.”  Then this tantalizing skater stops and Orlando sees the truth:  “She was a woman” with whom he can safely fall in love, so he does.

For Woolf’s own audience in 1928, this kind of playfulness about gender identification and presentation surely came as something of a shock.  Reviews of the book didn’t know quite what to make of it.  Reviewers had expected another novel in the same serious experimental vein of Mrs. Dalloway or To the Lighthouse, though many reviewers of these novels hadn’t known what to make of them either.  But the grounds of confusion in the previous cases were solid because they concerned narrative method; here this burgeoning woman novelist was presenting a world in which sex and gender were slippery and elusive.  As Orlando moves through the 17th century, he matures into a handsome young man about town who keeps having feelings that don’t “fit” with his outward presentation.  Then, about a fourth of the way into the story, the young handsome lad falls strangely ill into trance that lasts over a week.  As doctors try to determine the cause of his malady, Orlando is visited by three female voices who perform a typical 17th century masque.  The actors speaking to our hero lost in his deep sleep are our Lady of Purity, our Lady of Chastity, and our Lady of Modesty.  After each delivers her words about how life in England has no more room for them, some trumpeters who have announced each of their appearances to the sleeping Orlando “blow one terrific blast” and our narrator proclaims “THE TRUTH!”  Orlando suddenly wakes and we read “He stretched himself.  He rose.  He stood upright in complete nakedness before us, and while the trumpets pealed Truth!  Truth! we have no choice left but confess–he was a woman.”  Surely there is no way to understand this amazing scene if we read it in 2018 except to say that Virginia Woolf is presaging a world in which a person of one anatomical sex can undergo a radical transformation into another anatomical sex.  

That she could presage our own trans moment shouldn’t come as such a shock if we look at certain details of her own life.  Her most serious intimate relationship surely was with Vita Sackville-West, the aristocratic woman with whom Virginia was in love and with whom she spent long and happy periods of her life, never mind that both had husbands.  Vita liked nothing more than to dress as a tall handsome man and on more than one occasion, she and Virginia attended plays and concerts as a heterosexual couple.  Woolf writes of one such escapade, sharing her delight at having fooled an older heterosexual couple who actually knew both women but didn’t recognize Vita in her male disguise.  In various essays, Woolf would explore “androgyny,” asserting that all humans combine in ourselves certain aspects of what society labels “masculine” and “feminine” traits, and that the most interesting of us are those who inhabit both worlds.  So in her putative fantasy novel, she creates a single human being who lives from the late 16th century until October 11, 1928, the date registered in the last words of this romping story of Orlando who is boy/man until that no longer “works,” so “he” becomes needs to become “she” in order to express some “truth” that has played around the edges from those opening scenes full of gender confusion.

Once Orlando becomes a woman, she has adventures beginning with running away to live with a group of Romany people until they help her understand she has to return to her own world.  She is able to adapt to the centuries until she got to 19th c.  Conformity to what a young woman was supposed to be wore her spirit down because she’d always been able to stand against the norm and still be accepted.  The most oppressive aspect of her culture at that time was the pressure to find a heterosexual mate and stop being single as Orlando had chosen to remain for a few hundred years.  But the universe turns towards her and as she is roaming in Turkey, a man on a horse approaches her because he thinks she is a damsel in distress.  Sensing her distress, the stranger leaps from his large horse and declares “Madam, you’re hurt.!”  Orlando’s reply is “Sir, I’m dead!”  Woolf collapses time and engagement with her next sentence:  “A few minutes later, they became engaged.”   This magical man’s name is Marmaduke Bonthrop Shelmerdine, Esquire–“Shel” for short.  Just as they are pledging eternal love, both sense the deep truth of the matter–“You’re a woman, Shel!:  she cried.  “You’re a man, Orlando!” he cried.  This grasp of the trans nature of each half of this strange equation solves all their dilemmas and they live happily ever after–until they come to the present moment (1928).   As Woolf so wisely writes  “For what more terrifying revelation can there be than that it is the present moment?”  Orlando stops her whirligig life to consider who she really is in that present moment and concludes that each of us is composed of multiple selves–“some say two thousand and fifty-two”–and her job after all the centuries s/he has lived is to.  Woolf, in an act of authorial comfort, lets her character experience a unifying moment when s/he feels s/he is a true self.  As this fabulous tale ends, Orlando keeps having very old memories both of when she presented as a young man and when she tried to live as a maturing woman.  The last thing s/he sees is “her husband’s brig, rising to the top of the wave!  Up it went! and up and up.  Oh rash, oh ridiculous man, always sailing, so uselessly, round Cape Horn in the teeth of a gale!  But the brig was through the arch and out on the other side; it was safe at last!”  S/he sees Shel coming towards her/him in all his/her glory and she shouts out so Shel will see where s/he is.  They meet as a single wild goose flies over them and the curtain falls on this very early experiment in trying to escape gender binaries.  

Rereading this amazing novel that Woolf calls a “biography,” I feel excited to discover again just how prescient she was about human existence in all its profound and mysterious aspects.  And, who knows, she may see it as a life story not only of Orlando but of her own complicated relationship with Vita Sackville-West.  Surely it is no accident that she dedicates the novel “To V. Sackville-West” who loved every minute of the tale as she told Virginia in a letter after having read an early draft.  And surely both of them understood, perhaps nonverbally, what it means to feel fluidity rather than certainty about gender identity.

Two years after publishing her gripping novel, Salvage the Bones, Jesmyn Ward gave us a memoir entitled Men We Reaped.   This arresting and disturbing title comes from the writings of Harriet Tubman who said:  “We saw the lightning and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.”  Tubman may well have been speaking about the Civil War.  Certainly Ward is speaking about the world of her youth in which black men were being lost to police violence, street gangs, or drugs and alcohol used to help ease the pain of living as throwaways in a world ruled by white supremacists.  For Jesmyn Ward, the men she reaped included her beloved brother Joshua, who was killed in a car crash in 2000 when very young, a black boyfriend, and three other young black males who mattered significantly to her.  All five deaths occurred within a tiny window in time, between 2000 and 2004.

The book speaks about each of these untimely and traumatic losses in chapters that alternate with ones in which the author traces her own development from early childhood to the present.  What distinguishes this memoir about maturation and growth is the ordering of its alternating chapters.  While she traces her own life in logical chronological order, her writing about the black men she loses begins with the last of the five losses and ends with the death of her brother.  In talking about this book with a good friend, I came to see the wisdom of her explanation for the reverse ordering of the deaths:  Ward can’t face the loss of her brother first because it’s just too searing.  So she saves his going out of her life for last and gains the emotional strength to speak about that loss only after confronting the deaths that come later in time but which involve men a little more distant from her.

The chapters about her are centered in DeLisle, Mississippi, a small town formerly called Wolf Town.  Ward tells us in illuminating detail about just how “wild” it was for her ancestors, one of whom–her great-great grandfather–was shot near his stills by white Revenuers who left his body to rot in the cold until some family members went into the woods to retrieve it.  Violence didn’t just come to her in stories about her town’s past, however.  When she was a child, her father’s new white pit bull, Chief, mauled her badly, making the centerpiece relationship in Salvage the Bones especially significant for those of us who’ve read both books.  Current theorists are writing about how intergenerational trauma can deepen damage caused by individual trauma happening to members of groups like black or Native Americans.  Ward presents this theory in her memoir in which she describes all the ways in which she and her black family and community are subjected to constant and loud assault by racist institutions and individuals.  What amazes me as a reader, however, is the beauty of her language used to describe these horrors.  I’m reminded of Toni Morrison’s similar use of gorgeous prose to write about the most destructive aspects of slavery.  In her masterpiece, Beloved, she has her character Sethe wonder why it can be that when she thinks about her childhood on the slave plantation, she  remembers running through a field of thorny plants that scratch her legs and arms before she reaches a stand of sycamore trees.  She then lapses into beautiful words about how lovely those trees seem to her before feeling puzzled and confused to think of their beauty rather than the fact that black slaves had been hanged from the trees’  branches.  If I try to unravel Ward’s own metaphors and descriptive details both of her own life and especially of the violent and senseless deaths of those five young men who mattered to her, I come to understand that she honors the resilience and potential of people snatched away from her but nonetheless carrying major value and, yes, beauty in her memory world. One example may show what I’m talking about:  Ward is writing about her friend Demond who was making his way home from the factory where he worked until late at night. He is almost home, “tired and grimy with dried sweat, wanting a shower, maybe a beer.”  He won’t get either because “someone stepped out of the bushes in front of Demond’s house and shot him as he walked up to his door.”  The total senselessness and terrorism of this shooting reminded me of tiny entries in the daily paper I read in my own white childhood in Fairfield, Alabama.  Often it reported in a few dry words about the discovery of a body in some shallow river near town.  Those reports never had names attached since nothing was ever done to find out who the “someone” might be, but we all knew the body was of some “Negro” just as I know reading Ward that the “someone” who shoots Demond is some “white man.”  Where my newspaper report was flat, Ward’s words give light and humanity to the horrid moment.  She goes on in the same vein, speaking about Demond’s fiancée’s discovery of her beloved’s body:  “She walked out on her porch, her small feet making the wood creak, and saw someone asleep on the lawn.  Why was asleep in the yard?”  Tenderness pervades this description, thereby giving Demond the proper respect and love deserved by anyone trying to make his or her way in a world that can’t or won’t see them as human.  And this attitude persists throughout the memoir, making the horrible losses all the more intimate for us readers even as it allows the author gradually to find meaning if not solace in her losses.

Finally, then, Ward comes to Joshua, her younger brother–three years separated their births–with whom she has spent so many intimate hours inside their house and out in their world, the brother she admires as much as she loves, the brother she tried to protect from some of the white scorn and danger surrounding him.  To prepare us and perhaps herself for the story of his death, Ward tells us she made a decision after completing her work at Stanford to move back to Mississippi, saying “…I was tired of being away:  I was tired of being small in the big world.  I was tired of  being perpetually lonely.”   Deciding to stop off in New York City before going on to DeLisle, she decides to spend time with her boyfriend who meets her at his apartment door to tell her to call her father who tells her first “Josh was in an accident last night,” only to say minutes later “He didn’t make it.”  Ward felt her life alter fundamentally at that moment, even as she recounts the details of how the fatal accident happened.  At one point, Ward writes just what many people who have lost loved ones have felt:  “Years later, I would be grateful my family waited until October 3 to tell me Josh died:  I’d had seventeen more hours wherein, for me, Joshua was still alive” (italics mine). The chapter about losing her closest connection is markedly short.  We watch as she walks to the podium to read a poem she wrote for the occasion but subsequently lost.  The only thing she remembers from that elegy is:  “He taught me love is stronger than death,” said as much to the four black youths “who would later lie in caskets, but who stood alive on that day at the back of the church.”   The rest of this chapter is about the man who killed Joshua.  We’ve already heard her tender and not so tender memories, so I know her and Josh’s relationship in clear details.  What she wants to force me to face is the injustice of what happened to his killer because that person was white and Joshua was black.  That white driver was in his forties and indisputably drunk.  He hit Joshua’s car going eighty miles an hour–another indisputable fact.   Eight months after the funeral, Ward gets a call from her sister, Nerissa, reporting the outcome of the court case against the drunk white driver:  “they sentenced [him] to five years…  They didn’t charge him with vehicular manslaughter.  They charged him with something else.  Leaving the scene of an accident.”  I am outraged because this man CAUSED the accident from which he then fled, and the white justice system refused to act of that causality.  He got a “pass” while Joshua lost his future.

I spoke earlier in this blog about the dramatic contrast between Ward’s subject matter and her language.  I want to end this response to her moving story by thinking about the language of racism.  It is blunt and ugly.  It is intended to silence, debase, terrorize, and erase anyone who is not “white.”  So Jesmyn Ward triumphs over all that dross by insisting on bringing her elaborate sense of the beauty of language to bear on the hard stories she must recount.  That’s a sign of her deep faith in the power of words not just to help us survive but to help us see that a special kind of linguistic love really is stronger than the death wish that underlies so much of what white supremacists yearn for.                                                                                                                       

That is the first line of a short poem by William Wordsworth, the English romantic poet.  What follows is “when I behold/A rainbow in the sky.”  Two magical happenings in my life recently have called Wordsworth to mind.  A close friend and I have gone first to Crex Meadows in WI and then to the Sherburne Wildlife Refuge in MN to watch as thousands of sand hill cranes have returned to their temporary home after a day of eating corn and other grasses (the WI trip) and waked up, talked over breakfast, and eventually taken off for the day eating corn and other grasses (the MN trip).   These events have let me know just what William experienced when he looked up to see color arcing across his sky.  Another poem of his has also been rustling around in my brain as I recall all those graceful birds coming and going.  On April 15, 1802, William and his devoted sister, Dorothy, were on a walking tour in their beloved Lake District.  Again, all of a sudden Nature surprises him and he writes “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.”  The line from that poem that I keep playing is “All at once I saw a crowd,/A host of golden daffodils.”

My friend and I surely watched a huge bunch of sand hill cranes, but I felt pretty sure “host” was not the correct venereal word for such a large number of them.  So I consulted my trusty book that tells me the proper venereal term for all manner of beings–An Exaltation of Larks by James Lipton.  There I learned that many cranes may be termed a “construction,” a “dance,” a “sedge,” a “siege,” or a “swoop.”  (My playful self decided I’d hold “swoop” in reserve until I might witness the fly pattern of whooping cranes–a swoop of whoops.)  What I saw in those skies feels like a dance since as one flock after the other came within binocular range, they seemed to make patterns of movement like aerial dancers given complete free reign over body movements and group formations.

At Crex Meadows, I stood looking up to watch some flocks flying away from the sunset.  These looked like horizontal black lines because their long, thin necks and even longer, thinner legs, both of which extremities were extended but compressed in order to promote swiftness, I suspect.  If I twisted about 90 degrees, the cranes overhead were flying directly into the setting sun.  As the fading rays touched their underbellies, I gasped in amazement.  Suddenly creatures I’d thought were dark or mottled gray with the signature little red dot atop their heads and the rather pronounced black bills glowed like magic lights.  It seems sand hill cranes have golden chests and undersides of the gray wings.  Because I felt immediate contact with something profoundly spiritual, I tended to keep looking at the thousands of birds that flew at that angle, marveling at their iridescent splendor.  I also felt humbled before such imminent beauty that was being offered to me with no restraints.  My mind flashed to Loren Eisley’s beautiful writings about the powerful mysteries he found in nature.  He often reflected, as has Annie Dillard, on just how extravagant Nature so often is, forming trees that drop tens of thousands of seedlings that will never become even a tiny stick in someone’s yard.  Both of these writers keep telling us to pay attention to this plenitude, and try not to be stingy in our own giving patterns.  That’s how I felt standing with a small assortment of other people equally entranced by all the cranes flying over us in wave after wave.  Nature was being hugely generous in sharing the cranes’ homing instincts with the motley group standing in the road, eyes upward, senses on alert.

Watching the slow lightening of the skies over the huge pond at Sherburne Wildlife Refuge, I felt a similar wonder and humility.  The mood of the cranes was quite different from that of the returning birds in Wisconsin.  As light slowly manifested, more and more cranes waked and began making quiet but persistent sounds.  Our excellent guide, Cody, told me they were “talking to each other,” ta concept that charmed me.  I know how sweet such first words of a morning can be for us humans, so I listened with interest, imagining how pleasing it was being for each waking crane to connect with her or his fellows before gathering enough energy to take flight and go find the corn fields.  It was cold in the early light and some folks went back to their cars to warm up, but I just stayed, not wanting to lose a moment of this magical experience.  It wasn’t until I was back in my car that I began to shiver, realizing that I was thoroughly chilled.  Audre Lorde has a trenchant essay titled “Uses of the Erotic:  The Erotic as Power.”  In it she defines what eroticism used to mean before too many men tarnished the notion.  Lorde says the erotic is any activity in which we engage where we lose ourselves.  She went on in her wry way to posit that, if we’re lucky, a few times in our lives that will happen while we are being sexual with someone.  But she asked readers to look closely inside ourselves and discover what it was in our lives that had this capacity to lift us out of our usual routines.  My immediate response the first time I read her essay was to say “it’s gardening,” because in my yard I lose track of time, forget terrible events in the world, and feel intimate connections with some life force far greater than myself.  As I kept training my binoculars on the next group of cranes, I realized I was having what Lorde would describe as an erotic experience.

So now my friend and I have completed a circle in relation to the “host” of cranes on the brink of migrating southward.  I feel profound gratitude to be open to mystery–on the wing, in the sky.  All I have to do is close my eyes, think “sandhill cranes,” and the experience washes back over me and my heart leaps up all over again.

During the Kavanaugh hearings, much was made of his heavy drinking during high school and college.  I am a recovering alcoholic who will mark 44 years of sobriety on October 23rd of this year.  My antennae are quick to pick up tell-tale signs of other people’s proclivity for alcohol; I am sure that Brett Kavanaugh could tick off lots of the boxes on any diagnostic questionnaire about whether one is alcohol dependent.  In fact, he could “ace” that particular test.   Many investigators into the language patterns of alcoholics point out that we often volunteer revealing information about our drinking behaviors.  During his testimony “under oath,” recall the repeated references about his relationship to beer:  “I like beer; I still like beer…1 beer, 3 beers…sometimes I have too many beers.”  If you listen to those statements, you’ll detect a certain bravado in his tonality, as if to say “so what, I have no problem, I could stop any time I chose.”  

But it was when I watched his rebuttal of Professor Christine Blasey Ford’s humble yet powerful words about the sexual assault she remembers by Kavanaugh that I became convinced of his alcohol dependency.  Her words were spoken first, in the morning, while his were reserved for the afternoon.  Over lunch, I suspect two things obtained:  he was instructed in what words to speak that would endear him to the president’s “base”; he was told not to drink one of his beloved beers because someone in the hearing room might smell alcohol on his breath.  During most of my own nineteen years of alcoholic drinking, I never lost a day of work and was a pretty good lecturer about English literature.  But I always requested morning classes, since I could perform easily before lunch.  But by mid-afternoon, sitting perhaps in one of innumerable boring meetings at my university, I began to fray at the edges.  I also had to be sure I had a Kleenex on my person to get rid of the sweat beads that began to form on my forehead and upper lip, no matter what I did to try and remain calm.  Finally, if a colleague or intrepid student engaged me in conversation, I could feel my nerves on edge, requiring me to work hard not to fly off the handle about the relative merits of some early modern poet.

As Kavanaugh began his afternoon delivery that swung between outrage and tearful self-pity, I turned off the sound for a while and just watched his facial expressions and hand gestures.  Sweat began to form on his forehead and upper lip but he must have felt it would be too revealing to try and wipe them away with a tissue, so they just stayed there.  His cheeks grew ever redder, attributed by many perhaps to the force of his denial of Dr. Ford’s accusations, but another sign to me of his body’s simple chemical response to not having a little alcoholic booster with his sandwich.  Alerted by these familiar markers, I turned the sound back on and heard the increasing anger and agitation as Kavanaugh came closer and closer to losing control completely of what was coming out of his mouth.  And his hand gestures, while again mimicking his commander-in-chief, also reminded me of my own skewed movements as I tried both to accent whatever point I was making at 3 p.m. and to do something with the “fidgets” overtaking me as the shakes came ever closer to the surface.

So I remain certain that the man who has just become the newest member of the highest court in the land was suffering from initial and inevitable early on-set withdrawal because he had not been allowed to feed the monkey on his back with a couple of those liked beers that usually let him maneuver his way to the cocktail hour when work was over.  So as I get ready to feel tremendous gratitude for having stopped my own alcoholic drinking so long ago, I shudder to think what may ensue unless Kavanaugh can admit his own dependence and get help.