It is true that one is always aware of the lake in Fingerbone, or the deeps of the lake, the lightless, airless waters below.

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary

Housekeeping is a story about leaving and being left behind, and what happens to the echoes of our souls when our centers are disrupted. Our protagonists are a pair of sisters, Ruthie and Lucille, but we're closer to Ruthie because she's narrating the story. They are young girls who are abandoned by their mother and left to be raised in their grandmother's home in Fingerbone, Idaho. (To be fully transparent, I don't know if she ever explicitly places Fingerbone in Idaho, but according to the interwebs this is where it is. It makes sense since I had it somewhere between Washington and Montana in my brain.)  Ruthie and Lucille's mother, Helen, drives her neighbor Bernice's car off a cliff after dropping the girls off at her mother's house (with graham crackers, of course). Sylvia, their grandmother, looks after the girls fairly well, having raised three daughters of her own (Helen, as mentioned; Molly, a missionary; and Sylvie; hold, please). Sylvia's husband died in a railroad accident (the train went straight into the lake) so she has no one but herself to rely on. Sylvia eventually dies, being no spring chicken, and her sisters-in-law Lily and Nona, a pair of equally old ladies, come to care for the house (and the girls). They are not interested in this life at all, considering they had a cozy home at a hotel with no little girls before, and so they are constantly hoping for Sylvie to return, assuming her youth will make her more fit to raise her nieces. 

Eventually, Sylvie does indeed return, and as the aunts had hoped, she agrees to take over the duties of the house and the girls. Ruthie and Lucille grow up somewhat wild, having such a wide variety of caretakers and often very little (or no) supervision. Ruthie doesn't particularly mind not having other friends or not doing well in school, but Lucille wants increasingly to be 'normal' and fit in. The girls grow apart, and Sylvie, though still physically present (most of the time) is increasingly absent. Ruthie moves out to live with the school's home economics teacher, and after an incident involving a stolen boat and a frozen night spent outside, the sheriff comes to let Sylvie know there will be a hearing about Ruthie's care. Sylvie tries briefly to clean up her caretaking act, but it's too little, too late, and Ruthie and she both know it. They make a rather haphazard attempt at lighting the house on fire (hoping everyone will assume they died in it) but it doesn't really take, so they make a precarious escape by walking across the railroad bridge over the lake in the dead of night and catching the morning train out of town. No one thinks they could have survived, so they are presumed dead, and they become a pair of itinerants, caroming from town to town for short spells at a time, lost but also found.

Spoiler Over: Continue Here

Dear blobbists,

How are you? I know things have been nuts lately, and not in a good way. I hope you have a moment of comfort today, tonight, this week - something that brings you hygge in the midst of this strange world we're living in. 

I'm not sure how I felt about this book. I mean, I didn't love the experience of reading it (though there were many parts I very much enjoyed) but when I was writing about it to summarize the plot, there were many things I realized I liked. So maybe it's the kind of book that grows on you? I'll speak from the "I" perspective and say it grew on me. Here are some reflections for you. 

On mothering

Even though Sylvie is sort of 'mothered out' by the time Ruthie and Lucille make it to her, I love this description of her with her three daughters. It reminded me of so many things my mother did that did, indeed, seem like grace. 

She had always known a thousand ways to circle them all around with what must have seemed like grace. Her bread was tender and her jelly was tart, and on rainy days she made cookies and applesauce. In the summer she kept roses in a vase on the piano, huge, pungent roses, and when the blooms ripened and the petals fell, she put them in a tall Chinese jar, with cloves and thyme and sticks of cinnamon. Her children slept on starched sheets under layers of quilts, and in the morning her curtains filled with light the way sails filled with wind. 

On knowing people

I loved this line of Ruthie's, as she thinks about what she wishes Sylvie would tell her about her mother, Helen. 

• Did she tell lies? Could she keep secrets? Did she tickle, or slap, or pinch, or punch, or grimace? 

It reminded me of Le Petit Prince, and the way he chastises grown-ups for not asking the right kinds of questions of their new friends: 

Quand vous leur parlez d'un nouvel ami, elles ne vous questionnent jamais sur l'essentiel. Elles ne vous disent jamais: <<Quel est le son de sa vois? Quels sont les jeux qu'il préfère? Est-ce qu'il collectionne les papillons?>>

When you last told an adult about a new acquaintance, did you lead with the sound of their voice? Their laugh? Their face? Did you talk about how they collect butterflies and think about their favorite games? I like the idea of us shifting to this new method of introduction: "Here is my new friend, XYZ - she loves the smell of a campfire and playing Hearts, and her voice sounds like wind chimes."

On remembering their mother as two different people

I loved the way that Ruthie and Lucille reflected on the loss of their mother, as painful as it was. 

We would have known nothing of the nature and reach of her sorrow if she had come back. But she left us and broke the family and the sorrow was released.

She talks about how she and Lucille have two different versions of their mother, and that they are not at all the same. It's so true that when we reflect back our memories of someone, they rarely conjoin in their entirety. 

My mother was happy that day, we did not know why. And if she was sad the next, we did not know why. And if she was gone the next, we did not know why. It was as if she righted herself continually against some current that never ceased to pull. She swayed continuously, like a thing in water, and it was graceful, a slow dance, a sad and heady dance. Admittedly, one of the things I loved about this book was the way it captured mental health. It's not given any clear names, but it's apparent from Helen's suicide, Sylvie's behavior, and Ruthie's habits that there's a strain of something - depression, bipolar, OCD - floating in their family line. I thought this description Ruthie wrote about her mother was one of the closest written descriptions of how I sometimes feel as I navigate the world. 

It was a relief to go to Latin class, where I had a familiar place in a human group, alphabetically assigned. Ruthie has a very difficult time with school (and socializing in general) but I loved that she felt at home in Latin class, alphabetically assigned, especially since my mom is a beloved Latin teacher, and her alphabetical class (half on blue days, half on grey) is probably one of the only familiar places in a human group for many children these days. 

On looking after each other

I loved the circularity of the fact that first Ruthie and Lucille's upstairs neighbor Bernice tries to keep an eye on them - She looked after us by trying to sleep lightly enough to be awakened by the first sounds of fist fights, of the destruction of furniture, of household poisoning.

And then later Ruthie and Lucille find themselves keeping tabs on Sylvie - But as surely as we tried to stay awake to know for certain whether she sang, or wept, or left the house, we fell asleep and dreamed that she did.

On sisters

• We stayed awake the whole night because Lucille was afraid of her dreams. I loved this line. The bond of sisterhood was something that really resonated with me, too. 

On Nona and Lily

The description of Nona and Lily was one of my favorite things about this book. Here's how she describes their communication style: 

They shouted, for the sake of the other's comprehension and because neither of them could gauge her voice very well, and each of them considered her sister's hearing worse than her own, so each of them spoke a little louder than she had to. 

It seemed then and always to be the elaboration and ornamentation of the consensus between them, which was as intricate and well-tended as a termite castle. 

And they had lived all their lives together, and felt that they had a special language between them. So when Lily said, with a glance at Nona, 'What a lovely dress', it was as if to say, 'She seems rather sane! She seems rather normal!' And when Nona said, 'You look very well', it was as if to say, 'Perhaps she'll do! Perhaps she can stay and we can go!'

Here's a hilarious sampling of their dialogue: 

'A pity!'

'A pity, a pity!'

'Sylvia wasn't old.'

'She wasn't young.'

'She was old to be looking after children.'

'She was young to pass away.'

'Seventy-six?'

'Was she seventy-six?'

'That's not old.'

'No.'

'Not old for her family.'lololololz. I love it. 

On Sylvie

I love that even though Sylvie ends up being a bit of a loose cannon, she seems like perfection to Ruthie and Lucille. 

• We were prepared to perform great feats of docility to keep her.

Here are some things Sylvie likes: eating cold food, dining in the dark. Not exactly selling herself, eh?  ;)

Sylvie did not want to lose me... She could speak to herself, or to someone in her thoughts, with pleasure and animation, even while I sat beside her - this was the measure of our intimacy, that she gave almost no thought to me at all.

On the house

I loved the way the house figured in the novel. It reminded me of Beloved and To the Lighthouse, and stories where the house is as much a character as the people who inhabit it. 

What could it matter? It seemed to me that the fragility of our household was by now so great that the breach was inevitable, and so it was futile to worry whether there was wisdom or sense in any particular scheme to save it. One thing or another would put an end to it soon.

Absolutely Fabulous Lines

Marilynne Robinson is a master of the writing craft. Here are some of her most spectacular turns of phrase. 

• He held this post for two years, when, as he was returning from some business in Spokane, his mortal and professional careers ended in a spectacular derailment. I'm not sure if this counts as zeugma, but that's probably part of why I love it so much. ;)

• The train, which was black and sleek and elegant, and was called the Fireball, had pulled more than halfway across the bridge when the engine nosed over toward the lake and then the rest of the train slid after it into the water like a weasel sliding off a rock.

• Bernice, who lived below us, was our only visitor. She had lavender lips and orange hair, and arched eyebrows each drawn in a single brown line, a contest between practice and palsy which sometimes ended at her ear.

• It was our custom to prowl the dawn of any significant day.

• Lucille saw in everything its potential for invidious change.

• Dawn and its excesses always reminded me of heaven, a place where I have always known I would not be comfortable. I love this line so much.

Referents and Reverberations

This book reminded me of many books:

• To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson
• Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury
• Hotel New Hampshire, John Irving
• I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
• The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
• Mandy, Julie Andrews

Speaking of growing on me, I realize looking at this list that they are some of my all-time favorite books. Not a complete list, by any means, but still. Perhaps that's why I wanted to like this book?

I loved this line:

• For whatever reason, our whole family was standoffish. This was the fairest description of our best qualities, and the kindest description of our worst faults. 

It reminded me of this line from Hotel New Hampshire: 

'You see,' Franny would explain, years later. 'We aren't eccentric; we're not bizarre. 'To each other', Franny would say, 'we're as common as rain.' And she was right; to each other, we were as normal and nice as the smell of bread, we were just a family.

I'll leave you with a few of my favorite lines that I found particularly fitting for the present times. 

They had no reason to look forward, nothing to regret. Their lives spun off the tilting world like thread off a spindle, breakfast time, suppertime, lilac time, apple time. 

Goodness, don't you feel like time has felt this way lately? All the days and moments blurring together, but also somehow spinning off kilter? 

Sometimes it seemed to me my grandmother saw our black souls dancing in the moonless cold and offered us deep-dish apple pie as a gesture of well-meaning and despair. 

This is such a fantastic image, and it makes me want to dance in the moonless cold and then demand deep-dish apple pie. 

I'll leave you with this last one, from Ruthie, at the end of the book: 

 

Someday when I am feeling presentable I will go into Fingerbone and make inquiries. I must do it soon, for such days are rare now.

That's about how I feel on the regular; someday when I'm feeling presentable I'll join the real world again. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but we'll get there. ;) 

Keep each other safe, keep faith, and keep on reading! 

Henry had always said that he wanted to be a better master than any white man he had ever known.

 The Known World  by Edward P. Jones

Spoiler Alert: Plot Summary

The Known World is a story of duality. Slaver and owner. Love and pain. Freedom and capture. It chronicles the plantation owned by Henry and Caldonia Townsend in Manchester County, Virginia, in the mid-19th century. Henry and Caldonia are both Black; Henry was a former slave, Caldonia was born free. How Henry comes to own slaves himself is a complex and yet also simple path; the emotional weight of the decision is heavy, but the economy of the South makes it almost natural that he would become a slaveowner himself, once free. His parents, Augustus and Mildred Townsend, former slaves who are now free (Augustus worked to buy each one's freedom), don't approve of Henry owning slaves, but Henry decides to move forward with his own life plan, and eventually amasses a plantation and collection of slaves. The book opens with Henry's death from an unknown illness, and we follow Caldonia in the days and weeks to come as she attempts to keep the plantation up and running. The book is written from a variety of viewpoints, so we hear from Henry's previous owner (William Robbins), the overseer of Henry's plantation, Moses, other slaves living there (Elias, Celeste, Zeddie, to name a few), children of a slave and an owner (Dora and Louis, born to Philomena and William Robbins), and slave patrollers, who come into being around the time this all takes place (Skiffingtons - John and Counsel, Harvey Travis, Oden Peoples).  The story comes to a close many years after Henry's death, as Caldonia's brother Calvin encounters three escaped slaves from the plantation now living in New York. 

Spoiler Over: Continue Here

Dear blobbists, 

Greetings! I hope this message finds you well. I must admit I finished this book some time ago, but I find that in writing about books about slavery, I need a little emotional respite in between the steps of finishing the book, taking notes for the blob, and actually blobbing. On the whole, I think I wanted to like this book more than I actually liked this book. It has a nuanced conceit; exploring Black slave ownership isn't something I've spent much time thinking about, to be honest. But I got a little lost in the sheer number of viewpoints that Jones was speaking from, and eventually I found the constant shifting made it hard to really connect with the characters on a deeper level. To be clear, this novel won a Pulitzer Prize, so this is just one gal's opinion, and definitely not representative of the critical sphere. Here are some of my thoughts!

Cognitive Dissonance

I kept coming back to this idea as I was reading, because it was a real mental twist to process the idea of Black people who had been enslaved now owning slaves. Here are some lines I thought captured this well. 

In 1855 in Manchester County, Virginia, there were thirty-four free black families, with a mother and a father and one child or more, and eight of those free families owned slaves, and all eight knew one another's business. 

It took Moses more than two weeks to come to understand that someone wasn't fiddling with him and that indeed a black man, two shades darker than himself, owned him and any shadow he made. Sleeping in a cabin beside Henry in the first weeks after the sale, Moses had thought that it was already a strange world that made him a slave to a white man, but God had indeed set it twirling and twisting every which way when he put black people to owning their own kind. Was God even up there attending to business anymore? 

Fern Elston, a free Black woman - "'I did not own my family, and you must not tell people that I did. I did not. We did not. We owned...' She sighed, and her words seemed to come up through a throat much drier than only seconds before. 'We owned slaves. It was what was done, and so that is what we did."

The same Fern Elston, in dinner conversation - I realized all over again that if I were in bondage I would slash my master's throat on the first day. I wonder why they all have not risen up and done that.

Slave Patrollers

Obviously given current events I've been doing a lot of reflecting on the police force in America, and reading the section of this work about the early days of slave patrolling really drew that through line. 

Despite vowing never to own a slave, Skiffington had no trouble doing his job to keep the institution of slavery going, an institution even God himself had sanctioned throughout the Bible.

Putting Rita in a Box

There were some crazy scenes in this book, but one of the craziest was when Augustus and Mildred end up packing Rita, their friend and former slave, into a box with some of Augustus's walking sticks that were going to be shipped to a seller in New York, to get her to freedom. I can't even begin to imagine the number of similar scenarios and unthinkable things that helped slaves get to the North (or try to, at least). 

Augustus moved a stick just where her head would be. He was surprised at the ease of how he worked, no trembling of the hands, as if he had been born just to put a woman in a box and send her to New York.

Augustus and Mildred visiting Henry

When Augustus buys his freedom, his wife and son are still enslaved, and he has to decide whose freedom he wants to purchase first. He decides to buy his wife, Mildred, first, and then save up to buy his son, but in later years he wonders if his decision to leave his son longer in slavery contributed to his 'normalization' of the enterprise. I loved the tenderness in Augustus and Mildred's visits to Henry:

Augustus turned and walked across the road to the wagon. The wagon had a thick burlap covering, something he had come up with not long after the first cold visit. The mother and her child soon followed him across the road and the three settled into the wagon under the covering and around the stones Augustus and Mildred had boiled. They were quite large stones, which they would boil for many hours at home on Sunday mornings before setting out to see Henry. Then, just before they left home, the stones were wrapped in blankets and placed in the center of the wagon. When the stones stopped giving warmth and the boy began complaining of the cold, they knew it was time to go.

What emotional trauma to a family to not only suffer enslavement but to share such small snippets of time together, stolen here and there. 

Foreshadowing

Jones was a big fan of the foreshadowing, but he sort of took it one step beyond Dickens. Which I found interesting at first, but then very confusing as time went on. The novel was already written in a non-linear fashion, with a variety of times happening concurrently that were actually chronologically discrete, and reading things like "but little did he know he wouldn't feel this way 90 years later on his deathbed" was just jarring, especially when we never followed up with those people. Why do I care how he felt when he died if we're not even going to be there when he does? Ultimately, just felt a little too trippy for my taste.

Moses

He was the only man in the realm, slave or free, who ate dirt, but while the bondage women, particularly the pregnant ones, ate it for some incomprehensible need, for that something that ash cakes and apples and fatback did not give their bodies, he ate it not only to discover the strengths and weaknesses of the field, but because the eating of it tied him to the only thing in his small world that meant almost as much as his own life. 

I admit I loved the opening, where we come in on Moses, the overseer, a slave, and we see him tasting the dirt.  

Is he really dead?

I loved this exchange between two of the slaves after news of Henry's death came to them:

"Tell Celeste that Henry be dead."

"You stick a needle in him to make sure?' Elias said. "You poke him and poke him to make sure?"

I'm sure it was actually not a laughing matter to make sure one's master was really dead, but it made me think of putting down my cat, Suzy, and me asking my friend Phyllis to 'make sure she was dead' before we could leave the room. Her eyes were still open and she looked just the same, so how was I to be sure? ;)

Travis eating Augustus's free papers

It's a bit too long to capture in full here, and there's a lot that builds to this moment, but the scene where Harvey Travis, one of the slave patrollers, eats Augustus's free papers (yes, you read that right) just to spite him and sell him back into slavery was epic in its poignancy. It spoke to the impermanence of freedom, the total impotence of the Black person at that time, and the deeply arbitrary bigotry and hatred that some of the white folk leveraged with the power of the 'law'. Again, echoes of every police brutality incident caroming around in my brain.

Referents and Reverberations

While I wasn't much for Caldonia as a character overall, I liked this moment she shared with Henry, just before he died:

'Shall I sing?' Caldonia said, and reached over and touched his hand resting at the side of the bed. 'Shall I sing till the birds wake up?'"

It reminded me of this exchange, from Fahrenheit-451, when Faber offers to read to Montag: 

"Would you like me to read? I'll read so you can remember. I go to bed only five hours a night. Nothing to do. So if you like, I'll read you to sleep nights. They say you retain knowledge even when you're sleeping, if someone whispers it in your ear."

Terms I Learned

hobbling (a slave) - I can't find an exact definition, but the way Jones describes it, it's slashing the Achilles Tendon of a slave (one or both feet) so that they can never run away again. It happens to Moses at the end of the book. There's nothing that isn't barbaric about slavery in America, but this feels especially brutal.

Lines I Liked

• For the moment, death was giving all the orders.

• It seemed to Loretta that Maude rose each and every morning with the heat under her blood and a sword in both hands, and even her own children had to make known their loyalty to her all over again. I love this line.

• Better open your eyes or you'll fall off Texas.

• I give yall the work I done and my foot for free.

• It was the kind of day made for running away.

I'll close with an exchange between Augustus and his son, Henry, just after he has purchased his freedom.

Augustus, to his son, Henry: "You feelin any different?"

Henry: "Bout what?"

Augustus: "Bout bein free? Bout not bein nobody's slave?"

Henry: "No, sir, I don't reckon I do." He wanted to know if he was supposed to, but he did not know how to ask that. 

Augustus: "Not that you need to feel any different. You can just feel whatever you want to feel." 

Then later:

Augustus: "You can just go on and do whatever it is you want to feel. Feel sad, go on and feel sad. Feel happy, you go on and feel happy."

Henry: "I reckon."

Augustus: "Oh, yes. I know so. I've had a little experience with this freedom situation. It's big and little, yes and no, up and down, all at the same time."

I know it's no comparison to being enslaved and then being freed, but it felt like an apt description of life in the current moment. So blobbists, feel what you need to feel, whenever you need to feel it. We'll keep riding the waves, big and little, up and down, all at the same time, together. 

Keep each other safe. Keep faith. Keep reading. I'm off to Housekeeping.