Wendell Berry’s Genealogy of Place
A family genealogy will not persist for long separated from the place where it was loved into being. This assertion permeates the thought of Wendell Berry, the Kentucky-based philosopher-farmer whose writings affirm the necessary connection of human beings with the soil supporting them. Over the course of dozens of novels and short stories written over the last several decades, Berry explores the interconnected lives of the families and residents of his fictional town of Port William, Kentucky, tracing the town’s history from its first days in the mid-1800s to the community’s decline in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Many of Berry’s stories deal with the theme of modernity’s growing alienation from the earth and human communities, but his 2004 novel Hannah Coulter explicitly addresses this problem through the lens of genealogy. In the eponymous character’s recitation of her own life’s story, uneventful by the world’s standards, Berry proposes that the cure for the woes afflicting our modern lives—especially the constant search for a “better place” away from where we are now—is to return to the place where our families have come from. For Berry, place and genealogy are inseparable. Reconnecting ourselves to our past requires reconnecting ourselves to the soil that sustained our genealogy, which contains the stories of our past and the eschatological hope of our future, of a new earth where we will be reunited with all those who have gone before us.
On its surface, Hannah’s story is simple. Born in 1922 to a poor farming family, Hannah Steadman excels in school despite losing her mother at a young age. After graduating high school, she moves to Port William and becomes a typist for the town lawyer, Wheeler Catlett. Though at first an outsider, Hannah feels herself drawn into the membership of Port William and its community of tightly knit farming families. Hannah solidifies this connection by marrying Virgil Feltner, Wheeler’s nephew. Less than a year after their marriage, Virgil is called to serve in the second World War and becomes missing in action, leaving Hannah a widow pregnant with their daughter, Margaret. Three years later, Hannah marries Nathan Coulter, a young farmer returned from war, and bears him two children, Mattie and Caleb. The family works on their farm for several years, with Hannah and Nathan saving enough for all three children to attend college. As they pursue higher education, however, Margaret, Mattie, and Caleb distance themselves from Port William. After Nathan dies, Hannah, now an old woman, is left alone on the farm, uncertain of the land’s future, as she has no one to whom she can pass it down.
While Hannah herself embodies a central place in the novel’s treatment of genealogy (examining the interwoven family tree of the Port William membership, which Berry includes in the novel, reveals that Hannah connects the town’s major families), it is in Hannah’s examination of her children’s lives that Berry’s connections between genealogy and the soil come to the fore. Hannah’s children are each lured away from their family, the farm, and Port William’s community and history by some aspect of modernity which breaks them. Margaret leaves after marrying Marcus, her college sweetheart, and moves to Louisville, where she teaches fifth grade, enjoys the upscale social circle of a young urban professional, and gives birth to a son, Virgie, who loves farm life. When Virgie becomes a teenager, Marcus reveals to Margaret that he cheated on her with another woman in their social circle and divorces Margaret to marry his mistress. Virgie, attempting to spite his father, seeks solace in drugs.
Hannah Coulter’s Genealogical Tree
Mattie pursues a career in communications technology and becomes the CEO of a Silicon Valley company. He sires several children with two wives. Although he pays perfunctory visits to Port William, Mattie and his children are strangers to Hannah. Despite Hannah’s attempts to engage her grandchildren with the Coulter land, “they don’t much like any of it. By no fault of theirs, they don’t know enough to like it.” Hannah mournfully remarks: “My love for Mattie’s children was made in my love for Mattie, but it was also made in Port William. It doesn’t fit the children, who had their making elsewhere, and they don’t fit. It is a failed love, and hard to bear. For me, it is hard to bear. The children don’t notice, of course, and don’t mind.” When Nathan dies, Mattie barely makes it to the funeral because of an urgent business trip to China. Hannah sees her son as
a man snarled in a tangle, helpless to get free. I knew he didn’t have the strength to get free. His life was being driven by a kind of flywheel. He had submitted to it and accepted it . . . He is in a way given over to machines, but he is not a machine himself . . . He could not bear the thought of coming back to stand even for a few hours by his dead father in the emptiness he once had filled.
However, Caleb saddens Hannah most. As a young man, Caleb naturally takes to farming, so much so that Hannah and Nathan allow themselves to hope that they could pass the farm to him. When he goes to college, Caleb studies agriculture and begins to do “too well.” His mentors instruct him that he could do more good for farming through research than by working on the land. He is “tempted” by research and chooses to leave Port William behind to pursue academia. Despite this choice, Caleb continues to visit home often even after he marries, “always trying to make up the difference between the life he has and the life he imagines he might have had.” Hannah knows, as does Caleb himself, that he is “incomplete.”
The estrangement of Hannah’s children from the farm serves as a microcosm for the larger social changes taking place in Port William. Hannah sees the genealogy of the plots of land, stewarded by farming families for generations, becoming increasingly “wayward.” “The ideal,” she supposes, “would be for every farm to be inherited by a child who grew up on it, and who then would live on it and farm it and care well for it in preparation for the next inheritor,” but that ideal is long gone. What replaces this ideal is the modern allure of “a better place”: cities and suburbs encroach on Port William as commuters flood the town, renting houses as vacation homes or short-term residences—“temporary lodgings by people who temporarily, as they think, can do no better.” Always, these lost souls are looking for “a better place, which means that a lot of them will end up in a worse one.” Land moguls seek to capitalize on this misplaced ideal, snapping up land throughout Port William to repurpose into temporary housing. Hannah herself is forced to contend with an enterprising would-be real estate tycoon after Nathan’s death, but she refuses to sell her land. She believes that Nathan, who had seen “a lot of places” during the war, “gave up the idea that there is a better place somewhere else. There is no ‘better place’ than this, not in this world. And it is by the place we’ve got, and our love for it and our keeping of it, that this world is joined to Heaven.”
Berry challenges us to consider that perhaps we can find happiness not by pursuing an ephemeral good always on the horizon but by reconnecting ourselves with where we come from, both in terms of place and genealogy. The land, for Hannah, is as familiar “as my body. I have lived from it all these years.” It contains her history: every tree, rock, and structure on her farm has a story, binding her to the soil and the Port William membership, which is itself wrapped up in these stories. It is a place that she has loved into being and that has loved her into being, a place where past and future converge into one. Port William, for Hannah, is “eternal, always here and now, going on forever.” Her great hope is that “some day there will be a new heaven and a new earth and a new Port William coming from heaven, adorned as a bride for her husband, and whoever has known her before will know her then,” that the membership’s genealogy will carry on into the new heaven and the new earth.
Wendell Berry, Henry County, Kentucky, 1970s. (James Baker Hall)
Hannah ends her story with hope: Virgie returns, realizing that he was only ever happy on the farm. Hannah hopes without expectation that Virgie will carry on her love for her place. She realizes that she must love him with “no terms . . . as finally I care for Port William and the ones who have been here with me.” To be connected to a place, to a genealogy, to a community, to a person, requires unconditional love, God’s love; only in this can modernity find what it is truly looking for.
John-Paul Heil is an adjunct professor at Mount St. Mary’s University and a PhD candidate in early modern history at the University of Chicago.