Late Migrations by Margaret Renkl

Author:Margaret Renkl
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 2019-07-12T16:00:00+00:00

Babel

PHILADELPHIA, 1984

I thought I had escaped the beautiful, benighted South for good when I left Alabama for graduate school in Philadelphia in 1984, though now I can’t imagine how this delusion ever took root. At the age of twenty-two, I had never set foot any farther north than Chattanooga, Tennessee. By the time I got to Philadelphia, I was so poorly traveled—and so geographically illiterate—I could not pick out the state of Pennsylvania on an unlabeled weather map on the evening news.

I can’t even say why I thought I should get a doctorate in English. The questions that occupy scholars—details of textu-ality, previously unnoted formative influences, nuances of historical context—held no interest for me. Why hadn’t I applied to writing programs instead? Some vague idea about employability, maybe.

When I tell people, if it ever comes up, that I once spent a semester in Philadelphia, a knot instantly forms in the back of my throat, a reminder across thirty years of the panic and despair I felt with every step I took on those grimy sidewalks, with every breath of that heavy, exhaust-burdened air. I had moved into a walkup on a main artery of West Philly, and I lay awake that first sweltering night with the windows open to catch what passed for a breeze, waiting for the sounds of traffic to die down. They never did. All night long, the gears of delivery trucks ground at the traffic light on the corner; four floors down, strangers muttered and swore in the darkness.

Everywhere in the City of Brotherly Love were metaphors for my own dislocation: a homeless woman squatting in the grocery store parking lot, indifferent to the puddle spreading below her; the sparrows and pigeons, all sepia and brown, that replaced the scolding blue jays and scarlet cardinals I’d left behind; even deep snow, which all my life I had longed to see, was flecked with soot when it finally arrived. I was so homesick for the natural world that I tamed a mouse who lived in my wall, carefully placing stale Cheetos on the floor beyond me, just to feel the creature’s delicate feet skittering across my own bare toes.

If I was misplaced in the city, sick with longing for the hidebound landscape I had just stomped away from, shaking its caked red dirt from my sandals, oh, how much more disrupted I felt in my actual classes. The dead languages I was studying—Old English and Latin—were more relevant to my notions of literature than anything I heard in the literary theory course. The aim of the course, at least so far as I could discern it, was to liberate literature from both authorial intent and any claim of independent meaning achieved by close reading. “The text can’t mean anything independent of the reader,” the professor, a luminary of the field, announced. “Even the word ‘mean’ doesn’t mean anything.”

To a person who has wanted since the age of fourteen to be a poet, a classroom in which all

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