Wendell Berry (1934 – 2026)
By Kentucky Squirrel
When I first saw news of the passing of Wendell Berry last night, I wept. I wept for a man whom I had never had the privilege of knowing personally. A man whom, nevertheless, I had to come to know through his words, and through his actions. A man who loved place, who loved community, who loved people. Particularly, his place, his community, his people.
Wendell Berry was born in 1934, to a farming family of multiple generations in Henry County, Kentucky. His father, John Berry, is perhaps most well known for founding the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association. An organization which benefited my family directly, as my great-grandfather were tobacco farmers. At only just the beginning of August, I had a lengthy conversation with my own father about tobacco farming. He shared many stories of harvesting tobacco with his grandfather, the hard work and long hours that it entailed. Of taking it to market, of sleeping overnight with the crop. He shared stories of how my great-grandfather’s profit changed for the better once the Burley Tobacco Cooperative formed, protecting the interests and profits of the small tobacco farmers.
That was the beginning legacy for Wendell Berry. A man who would carry that sense of hard work ethic, love of place, and dealing fairly with others throughout his life. He would go on to graduate from the University of Kentucky. Berry was definitely not uneducated. He was a farmer, and he was not ashamed of that. But he was most assuredly a man of letters. After graduating from UK, he and his wife would then live for a year in Europe, teach for a time in New York, before moving back to Lexington, Kentucky, to teach at UK. Then, in 1965, Berry surprised everyone. He moved back home, to Henry County. Purchasing a small farm near to where he had grown up, he began to put into practice what he would spend the next 50 years writing about.
I will wait here in the fields to see how well the rain brings on the grass.
In the labor of the fields longer than a man’s life
I am at home. Don’t come with me. You stay home too.
I will be standing in the woods where the old trees
Move only with the wind then with the gravity.
In the stillness of the trees I am at home. Don’t come with me.
You stay home too.“
— “Stay Home,” in A Part (1980)
My first encounter I had with his work was through his novel Jayber Crow. First published in 2000, it is simultaneously the perfect entry point to Berry’s novels and his masterpiece of storytelling. Here in one literary work, we have encapsulated all of Berry’s philosophy. His notion of loving the land versus exploiting it – a central theme to all of his works – is present through the conflict between Athey Keith and his opportunistic son-in-law Troy Chatham. Here also we see the love of community so iconic to Wendell Berry’s way of thinking, most especially expressed through the beloved “Uncle Burley” Coulter and his interactions with the protagonist. And finally with Jayber himself.
For those new to Wendell Berry’s novels, they are unique to a certain degree in that all of his fictional work grows out of the soil of Port William, Kentucky, a fictionalized version of Berry’s own hometown of Port Royal. Here we have living and breathing men and women growing, working, and dying in a real town. The Membership of Port William, as Burley Coulter described it.
The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything.
The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t.”
— That Distant Land: The Collected Stories (2004)
Jayber, though, is an outsider to Port William. Through the course of the novel, through his conversations with the other men and women of Port William, he learns this Membership. He slowly enters into this sacred community. And we do so with him. For Jayber Crow is an everyman. He is the reader, especially the brand new reader freshly starting the Port William stories. Through his eyes and his conversations as the town barber, we are also invited to walk through Port William. To experience this Membership, this community. To love our homes, our native soil.
So, thank you, Wendell Berry. Thank you for creating such a real, earthy world for us to walk in with your stories. Thank you for helping us to reshape our thinking, to help us think of others and of the land before our own selfish desires. We will miss you, even those of us who never had the pleasure of making your acquaintance.
Rest now. Your work is done. May your memory be eternal!
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