In 1770 Oliver Goldsmith published “The Deserted Village,” a lamentation over the loss of an agrarian ethos in England.  In April, 2016, I found myself back in Birmingham, AL, my birthplace.  I’d made the trip to help my college roommate mark her 80th birthday, a bittersweet occasion since she’d recently lost her beloved husband.  As usual when I’m back South, I drove out to Elmwood Cemetery where my maternal grandparents, parents, sister, and brother-in-law are buried.  This cemetery is the largest in Birmingham and was once the premier place to bury important white citizens.  Until fairly recently the grounds were beautifully maintained by the corporation that owns the site.  Its graves were also lovingly tended with live flowers and many family members visiting to pay respects or feel closer to loved ones interred there.  But the demographics surrounding the cemetery have changed over the last 3 decades, as more and more whites have fled the city to live in established suburbs or to create new ones that never existed when I lived there.  That means black Alabamians moved into the abandoned homes and streets, and racist panic began to eat away at people with dead family member inside Elmwood’s ornate fences.  In the past 10 years, I’ve watched as fewer and fewer lots show any signs of visitors, thought for a time some upright monuments were topped by bouquets of artificial flowers, lending a little color to the surroundings.  But the corporation leveled all the once-raised mounds to their big mowers could do their work more quickly and cheaply.  Then they stopped watering the grass even as climate change brought even hotter summers than I’d experienced as a child/teenager.

      My mother and father bought 8 lots (2 for them, 2 for my mother’s parents, 2 for my older sister and her husband, 2 for me and my husband).  Six of those lots are in use, though on this visit I found the head-stone of my sister’s grave sinking into the earth.  The remaining 2 places will never be used by me, the husband I never chose to acquire or any woman partner with whom I shared my life.  Some of my fondest memories are of driving out to Elmwood with my mother on Sundays after church.  We’d pack cold fried chicken, bread and mayonnaise sandwiches, and lots of iced tea.  We’d also take along trowels, shovels, buckets, and clippers to let us dig up undesired weeds or plant desired flowers.  Sometimes Mamie even took Dutch Cleanser and a Chore Girl or two so she could scour her mother’s and father’s grave stones.  My memories are fond ones because these jaunts were a time I had my mother all to myself and we were outside in the sunshine (or rain, if that happened while we were garnishing those two lone graves).  Once my sister died, I took up the mantle of hiring someone to provide special care to our lot.  Now a very kind man plants pansies to last through the winter months and then a hardy annual that can survive in the hot summers.  He also waters these, though I’m not sure how that occurs now that the cemetery has decided to save even more money by turning off all water spigots that used to be at the disposal of caring visitors who needed it.

     How I felt as I stood in the eerie silence was how I suspect Oliver Goldsmith felt when he saws his beloved villages being left behind in the name of “progress” and economic profit for an 18th century version of agribusiness.  If I lived in Birmingham, I’d take my lunch, my gardening tools, and containers of water so I could defy the forces of racism that had led to the destruction of a solace-giving space.  But I do not live there and could not live in Alabama.  I also wondered, looking down at my mother’s and father’s stones, how all the people who used to tend their dead relatives’ graves feel now when most of them never visit the signposts that stand in for those relatives.  As I was walking back to my car, I spotted one lone monument with live flowers in a big vase in front of it.  Someone refuses to let stereotypes of “those people” win out over their love for whomever is under the ground at that spot.  My last thought as I drove out of Elmwood was this:  Racism isn’t always about men in white robes burning crosses in front yards of black people or white sympathizers.  Sometimes it is profoundly banal as it is all over the deserted graves at my old cemetery.

The recent publication and popularity of Stacy Schiff’s biography of Cleopatra has brought back memories of productions I’ve seen of this moving play about adult heterosexual love experienced in a Roman world unconducive to playfulness and passion.   When I was in my early twenties, I took my mother for see a production by the Shakespeare company in Connecticut.  Kathryn Hepburn played the Egyptian queen while Robert Ryan acted the part of Antony.  Hepburn was able to bring to this demanding role both the coquettishness, sensuality and jealousy of Cleopatra in the early acts and the majesty and strength of this same woman in the closing scenes.  But what lives most vividly in my memory is a 1974 television production staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC).  And of those memories, the strongest is of the costume Cleopatra wore as she prepares herself for death.  Once Antony is dead, she sees no reason to stay alive since the world has lost its luster for her. She also refuses, as the political animal she is, to be humiliated by Caesar who plans to parade her through the streets of Rome.

Just before she begins to clad herself for death, Cleopatra says that she is “marble constant,” no longer under the sway of a changing moon.  As her women help her into her robes, she claims only fire and air as her elements, shedding her essential human nature composed so bountifully as it has been of earth and water.  The RSC accented this fundamental shift in personality through costuming and camera work.  Focusing directly on her face as she enrobes, the camera withholds the effect of that robe until the words are delivered.  Only then do we “see” the garment, though its opulence has been hinted at by letting us glimpse the design.  The camera pans away from Cleopatra’s face until she stands, alone and magnificent, fully clothed to meet and overcome her final adversary, Death.  Dominated by the blue that has emblemized Egypt in all former costumes and jewelry, the robe encases her body.  The actor stands utterly straight and still with arms outstretched, creating the geometric impression of an inverted pyramid.  The robe is studded with jewels and sewn with thread of gold; its richness corresponds to Cleopatra’s own unstaleable variety,  but its heavy formality works to remind us that this time, thought she goes once more to meet her love, the game is for keeps, the setting more thoroughly royal than any earthly court of bedchamber can hope to be.  

The fact that the costume stands apart from her body serves both as contrast to previously worn garments, all of which accentuated her sensuality and physicality by their looseness and clinginess.  Now she appears statuesque, splendidly preserved while still alive.  Once we see her in her final armor, the details of placing the asp to her breast and of becoming the crown of her own tomb are just that—details which complete the required action of the play.  But the wench of the Nile is lost to us from the moment that blue robe touches her flesh.  That she chooses to die as Queen serves to raise her sensuous playfulness  to a level appropriate to someone who “has immortal longings” in her.  That the director of this production costumed her so colorfully yet so abstractly only affirms one of Shakespeare’s major themes in this play—the sacred and the profane still merge in Egypt, though Rome has split them asunder.  

Marilynne Robinson is producing serious fiction about major questions confronting us today.  Now that her trilogy about a seemingly sleepy Iowa town is complete, we can begin to assess her contribution to 20th and early 21st century literature.  When her first work, Housekeeping, appeared in 1980, I felt excited to see what would come next.  I waited twenty-four years before I could plunge into Gilead (2004), the first in the trilogy.  Though Housekeeping and the excellent film adaptation had shown her agility with prose and her deep understanding of human beings, it in no way had prepared me for what was being attempted in the later novel and its successors, Home (2008) and Lila (2014).  Working slowly allows Robinson to refine her characters and her intentions, as she insists on returning discussions of serious spiritual and religious writing to American literature.  An avid reader of both the Hebraic prophets and the Christian Gospels, she is impatient with some contemporary Christian denominations that have uncoupled themselves from the Hebrew Bible.  Robinson insists that doing this erases the basis and need for Christianity, since Jesus was himself a devout Jew and since his earliest followers believed he fulfilled all the criteria for the Messiah laid done in the Torah and by the likes of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel.

So in the Iowa trilogy, she brings us two elderly pastors, John Ames and Boughton, both of whom have preached in their churches and worried theological arguments between themselves for decades.  While sharing many general tenets, they diverge in significant ways, with Ames being more willing to admit what he still does not comprehend about God’s mysterious ways while Boughton adheres more strictly to a fairly rigid fundamentalism.    She also gives us the powerfully realized characters of Jack and Glory Boughton and Lila who becomes Ames’ second wife.  While I keep turning pages and rereading these three novels because they weave such arresting plot lines, it is Robinson’s insistence that life is much more complicated than most of us want to admit, that there is a bigger and wider universe inhabited by a divine being she names God, and that we are our best selves when we extend ourselves to love others even if or when they do not conform to our particular standards.  Robinson believes in the existence of grace, even in today’s accelerated and highly materialistic world, so her novels have scenes that move me because what’s happening to a character is so unwarranted or even deserved.  For instance, in Gilead, Ames is out walking when he se young heterosexual couple walking in front of him.  They come to tree that she shake and, because its has recently rained, water showers down upon them.  Ames understand this as a grace-filled moment.  In Home, Jack asks his sister Glory to sit with him and make some kind of conversation until it’s the time local bars close so he can’t revert to his alcoholic drinking.  She does and the scene is infused with a kind of love that enhances both people.  And in Lila, she lends her coat to a young boy she finds sleeping in the same shack she herself lived in before she let herself accept Ames’ protective love.  As she covers the stranger, I feel what Robinson calls grace coming from Lila who has herself so often needed someone to do for her what she is now doing for the boy.

Our world is so full of discordant events and comments that some of us, certainly I, sometimes are tempted to despair.  But in traditional sacramental religions, despair is human’s worst sin because it is predicated on a sense that “God” has abandoned us.  Reading Marilynne Robinson’s trilogy coaxes me from this spiritual and emotional abyss.  Surely that is a tremendous gift for any author to give to any readers.

In the tanakh section of the Hebrew Bible, we meet the great prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and others.  They share an ability to consider  the past, look squarely at the present, and predict or imagine a future.  Listening to or reading these men’s words stirs something inside me that is part poetry, part history and part recognition of the truths embedded within their prophesies and predictions.  In the history of Christendom, we find holy men like the Desert Fathers who withdrew from society and creature comforts in order to be alone with their meditative spirits which whispered truths most often rejected or shunned by a society geared toward luxury and an easy credo that did not interfere with important things like commerce and personal success.  Some of us believe that every age has its prophets, often quite without honor in their own countries, but nevertheless intent on proclaiming what they are sure is the path of a culture unless its members make radical changes.

Today, I consider a middle-aged black man named Ta Nehisi Coates to be such a contemporary prophet.  In a series of long articles published in the Atlantic magazine, and now in a book-length letter to his adolescent son, Coates is limning a clear worldview centered on his understanding of what it means to be a black man in America at this moment in history.  Reminding and more often informing his readers of the centuries-long pattern of denigration and overt harm visited upon people in this country of African descent, Coates spells out in specific terms what needs to be done to avert the disastrous course upon which this country continues to travel.  In a long essay on incarceration of blacks in America, he leaves no historic stone unturned under which lurk hideous examples of the dominant white culture’s defining of all blacks as criminal, hence paving the way for things like the seemingly unending string of murders primarily though not exclusively of black men by police who believe the only way to interact with such individuals is by using excessive and fatal force, i.e., shooting them or choking them or physically abusing them and then refusing to offer medical assistance when its need is completely obvious.

In an earlier article about the need for this country to make financial reparations if we are ever to begin to escape the debilitating ghosts of slavery days, Coates argues with razor-sharp logic that, since the United States is the prime capitalist country on the globe, our best way to take responsibility for the financial rip-off of blacks by virtually every one of our institutions is in terms of money.  So, for instance, college educations could be offered to any black person who qualifies for admission, since it was originally against the law to teach a slave to read.  Another simple way to address history’s tangible wrongs against blacks would be to pay descendants of documented slaves a lump sum prorated to be the equivalent of lost wages incurred during slavery when labor by such individuals was never “paid,” or wages lost over the last 2 centuries because of unfair hiring and advancement practices.  (Jamaica recently did precisely this, by the way.)

And, in his latest book, Between the World and Me, a heart-wrenching letter from Coates to his son, trying to help that young man come to terms with the simple fact that his physical body, seen by Coates as the most precious thing belonging to any of us, can be taken from him any second of any day on any street in America.  Toni Morrison has said, in a blurb she wrote at the time of publication, that this book is “compulsory reading” and I agree completely.  If I had unfettered funds, I’d stand on a street corner in Minneapolis and hand out copies to all and sundry.   Combining deep love and a natural sense of protectiveness with absolute clarity about what is going on in our towns and cities just now, Coates prophesies that entire generations are being erased and that, if our towns and cities and political leaders do not act soon to begin to change this devastating arc, our culture may well find itself no longer viable in relation to the platitudes we claim define us as distinct from  many other countries.  

At night, after I’ve read myself into hopeful sleepiness, I pray for certain people who seem to me central to recovery for this country and world.  The Obamas, including their dogs, are first, as they have been since the night of Barack’s first election to the presidency.  They used to be the only people I named specifically, but since his elevation Pope Francis comes next for me since I believe his refusal to be silent about how far his particular institution, and now the whole political structure that refuses to be good stewards of the planet, has gone to stifle kindness and inflict unnecessary pain puts him in danger from those within the Roman Catholic hierarchy who find his policies entirely to their dislike.  So I pray that no one shoots him.  Finally, after reading Between the World and Me twice, I now name Ta Nehisi Coates in my nightly orizons, asking that he remain safe and alive so that he may continue being my/our prophet in this sometimes heartless and confused country/world.