Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry

Author:Wendell Berry
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Counterpoint Press
Published: 2011-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

Joe Banion’s was the first death. Oftentimes I think of him and of his people, never very numerous in Port William, but here with us from the beginning, members of us, though now entirely gone. Their story here is a sorrow. It was always incomplete, and its ending did not complete it.

Joe died suddenly of a heart attack in 1951. Nettie and Aunt Fanny could have stayed. They would have been welcome, and they knew it. But with Joe gone, they chose to go. They gathered up their belongings and, with Mr. Feltner’s and Nathan’s help, moved to Cincinnati to be near Nettie’s sister, who had moved up there when she married, a long time before. They thought it would be a comfort to be with kinfolks, and maybe there was some charm for them in going north of the great river that had divided slavery from freedom.

I remember the Feltners’ grief and my own when Joe died, and again when Nettie and Aunt Fanny went away, and again when Mr. and Mrs. Feltner visited them in their apartment in Cincinnati and found them there but not at home there, and not to be at home again in this world.

If they were going to be at home anywhere it would have had to be in Port William. The Banions belonged to the Feltner place by the same history as the Feltners, going back a hundred and fifty years. The two families belonged to each other. The Banions had been faithful to the place, and their work had gone into it, year after year, generation after generation. The Feltners had been faithful in return, and had favored them beyond the custom. The two families had the same history, they remembered the same things, they knew the same things, there was affection and loyalty between them, and love. And yet the story is incomplete. Its ending was not satisfactory. Nettie and Aunt Fanny had too little to take with them when they left. It was too easy for them to leave. And yet when they left, they were leaving home.

We learned these things by our grief. By our loss too.

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