Fire and Stone

Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

Priscilla Long, John Griswold

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780820350424
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Essays
• Index: Literature

The questions that drive Priscilla Long's Fire and Stone are the questions asked by the painter Paul Gauguin in the title of his 1897 painting: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? These questions look beyond everyday trivialities to ponder the essence of our origins.

Using her own story as a touchstone, Long explores our human roots and how they shape who we are today. Her personal history encompasses childhood as an identical twin on a dairy farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland; the turmoil, social change, and music of the 1960s; the suicide of a sister; and a life in art in the Pacific Northwest. Here, memoir extends the threads of the writer's individual and very personal life to science, to history, and to ancestors, both literary and genetic, back to the Neanderthals.

Long uses profoundly poetic personal essays to draw larger connections and to ask compelling questions about identity. Framed by four distinctive sections, Fire and Stone transcends genre and evolves into a sweeping elegy on what it means to be human.

II Fire

A winding stair, a chamber arched with stone, A grey stone fireplace with an open hearth, A candle and written page.

YEATS, “My House”

6

Throwing Stones

It is our fate and misfortune that we live in history. There is nothing we can do about it. We should learn to swim in history.

VITALY KOMAR AND ALEX MELAMID

I once had visions of becoming one of the Great Minds of the West. This was in the late 1950S at Moravian Seminary for Girls in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. At Moravian Seminary we wore uniforms with white anklets and saddle shoes. We attended chapel every morning, and we also prayed before breakfast, dinner, and study hall. In our eleventh-grade history class, taught by Miss Fanny Costello, we studied the French Revolution.

It was exciting becoming one of the Great Minds of the West. I would go to the library, an oak-paneled room lined with books and furnished with refectory tables. I would spend an hour puzzling through two or three paragraphs of Hegel in one of the Great Books of the Western World. I intended to read every Great Book of the Western World. The librarian, Miss Hartman, had never known another Moravian Seminary girl to do such a thing, and she liked me. I was drawn to thick books. I would read them and keep score, rather like counting laps in a swimming competition. At seventeen I had long since read War and Peace (1,483 pages), Les Misérables (1,463 pages), The Hunchback of Notre Dame (688 pages), and The Three Musketeers (555 pages). Miss Hartman encouraged me to read books based on factors other than number of pages. I read every book she suggested, including The Bridge over the River Kwai, Archy and Mehitabel, and Till We Have Faces.

In our history class, the unit on the French Revolution was especially exciting. I scorned our textbook; possibly I didn’t read it. With happy anticipation, I tackled both Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and Thomas Carlyle’s three-volume The French Revolution: A History. Carlyle was thrilling! Of some desperate finance minister he wrote: “What could a poor Minister do? . . . A sinking pilot will fling out all things, his very biscuit-bags, lead, log, compass and quadrant, before flinging out himself. It is on this principle, of sinking, and the incipient delirium of despair, that we explain likewise the almost miraculous ‘invitation to thinkers.’ ”And so on.

Already I had made July 14—the day the Mob liberated the Bastille— my own personal holiday. I made Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité my own personal motto. I fervently believed every word of the Declaration of the Rights of Man. I could almost feel the cold blade of the guillotine on the hot neck of Marie Antoinette.

I arrived at class each day full of excitement, and often raised my hand to offer a comment or to answer a question. I was Miss Costello’s favorite eleventh-grade girl, I was pretty sure.

I fancied myself a thinker.

The day of the test arrived. I entered the old wood-floored classroom filled with a sense of expectation and impending triumph. On the test I wrote and wrote, pouring myself forth on the French Revolution. I finished with a feeling of pride, imagining how pleased and possibly even excited Miss Costello would be.

The next day we were to get back our tests. We entered the classroom and took our seats, fifteen girls wearing pastel uniforms with round white collars and white anklets and white-and-brown saddle shoes. Miss Costello entered. The girls stood. Miss Costello said, “You may be seated.” The girls sat and folded their hands on their desks. Miss Costello put her briefcase on the desk and drew out the tests. The class waited in silent anticipation. Without a word, Miss Costello went from desk to desk, returning the tests.

I looked at my test. I could not believe my eyes. On the test Miss Costello had drawn a large red F. I was in shock. I kept looking at the F to make sure it was really an F. I turned the test over to see if there was a mistake. Then I turned it back to the front. Miss Costello had written a single comment next to the F: How can you write about the French Revolution without mentioning Voltaire? Voltaire. I had forgotten about Voltaire.

Miss Costello was speaking to the class. She was a small-boned woman with straight black-and-gray hair, which she parted on one side and barretted on the other. She wore a sweater set and a pleated plaid skirt and stockings and polished brown loafers. She had a thin mouth and pale papery skin and she wore granny glasses and idolized Arnold Toynbee. Now she was talking on and on about something, but I did not hear her. When the bell rang, I rose and trooped out of the classroom along with the other girls. I did not look at Miss Costello, nor did I speak to her.

I stopped reading books on the French Revolution. Instead, I memorized the textbook. The next test was a True/False test and I answered all the questions correctly. I finished the questions twenty minutes before the end of the class and sat among the busy test-takers with my hands folded on my desk, in scornful silence. On that test, I got an A.

So that proved it. The conventional ones, the little minds, the obedient ones, the ones that studied for grades and learned by rote, the ones that couldn’t care less about the French Revolution, or about Hegel or about Tolstoy, they were the ones who got the stamp of approval. I proved to Miss Costello that I could do that too, if I wanted to. But it was beneath me, and it was too late for Miss Costello. I never spoke to her again.

I graduated from Moravian Seminary and went to college and shortly after that I entered into the shadowy realm of American rebellion, into the sixties of pickets and protests and street marches and flag burnings, and I wore blue jeans and black turtlenecks and sandals and grew my hair long and smoked dope and read Gregory Corso and Allen Ginsberg and played bongo drums and danced all night and marched against the war and read Gramsci and Marx and Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf and hawked newspapers on street corners and waited on tables and learned how to throw stones at the plate glass windows of American banks and how to laugh at police officers and dodge their lobs of tear gas and yell Oink! at the top of my lungs.

7

Autobiography

An A– Z

There is rust in my mouth, the stain of an old kiss.

ANNE SEXTON

Is autobiography a fiction, a delusion, a defense to the jury? To what extent does it reflect our era, our notions of what ought to be, our conventions, our common assumptions whether conscious or unconscious? To what extent does it deviate from what did happen? Does our autobiography shift as we age, becoming more sanguine if we are happy, more despairing if we are unhappy? Whatever the case, here’s my stab at my own autobiography. It’s ordered by way of the alphabet, for what better way to set a limit on the random and continuous movie that is memory.

Arrests. Gwynn Oak Amusement Park. Baltimore, Maryland. July 4, 1963. We are black and white together and we shall not be moved. At the locked gate, screeching hecklers, cops everywhere. White faces bleed hate. Our group announces, “Let’s go back to the bus.” We walk back toward the bus along a narrow creek lined with trees, the boundary of the amusement park. No fence. Voila! We cross the creek. We find ourselves in a flat grassy field, hot sun, carnival rides in the distance. We are shocked, without plan. We had not expected to get into the park. We say, “Let’s go to the merry-go-round.” We link arms and inch forward, one multilegged creature. White thugs materialize. They surround us, take off their belts. Shouts—distant—from the direction of the entrance gate. Our arms link tight. If one falls, we’re all down. We begin singing “O Say, Can You See.” Fear cracks our voices. But these racist thugs are patriotic. They won’t start beating us till we stop singing the National Anthem. We don’t stop singing. We sing and we sing. Will the cops ever come? Do they even know we are here? At last they arrive. We sink to the ground. In the paddy wagon we sing at the top of our lungs, “And before I’ll be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord, and be free.”

Bottle-fed baby. I’m an identical twin, the third child born in ten months to my teenaged parents. “One time,” my mother said, laughing, “Pammy got two bottles and you didn’t get any!”

Coal. Coal is the rock that burns. But what burned in me, what engine drove me to twenty years of research into the American coalfields, carried out after work and on vacation? Was it the memory of Pennsylvania anthracite rattling down the chute into Gran’s Bucks County, Pennsylvania, cellar bin?

Dithering. How much time do I spend dithering? Plowing through e-mail. Going to Facebook to read about nothing. Surfing the Internet to see if I can track down an old lover I haven’t seen for forty years. Reading a chapter in a book and then reading a different chapter in a different book. Sweeping the floor. Washing dishes. Sorting through piles of photos, wondering which baby this is, whether I should keep this snapshot, wondering what will become of these hundreds of snapshots when I’m gone.

Elvis. Elvis was king. And after Elvis, Chubby Checker, doin’ the twist. Then the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Mamas and the Papas. Back to Little Richard, the one and only. And after Little Richard, Jerry Lee, also the one and only. And after Jerry Lee Lewis, the great Appalachian fiddler Tommy Jarrell. Then Dolly Parton—composer of three thousand songs. The immortal Otis Redding. The immortal Bob Marley. Back to Bill Monroe. Back to Ralph Stanley. On to Jim Morrison. On to Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Coltrane. Back to Ben Webster.

First love. He played guitar. He sang “Laughin’, Free, and Gone” and “Oh, Miss Mary.” He talked politics long into the night. He was a student leader in the Student Peace Union. Thick kissable lips. He dropped out of school, moved back to New York, got into computers. He wrote me disquisitions about the test ban treaty, about the Cuban Missile Crisis, about the flotilla of traffic winding below his night window, about getting laid and sharing a smoke after getting laid. I dropped out of school and went to New York. We shacked up. Then we broke up.

Getting up to write. I get up to write. I write in my journal. I write to wake up. I write to drink espresso by. This autumn I am writing in Journal No. 304. I write about nothing. But nothing can come to something just as something can come to nothing. Every morning I draw letters with my fountain pen. I make letters make words. Words about nothing.

Hero. Peter refused to go to Vietnam. He went instead to jail. As soon as he got out, we got married. He went to graduate school, got a PhD, went to law school, got a JD. He began writing books. There were the Boston years, the San Diego years. After twenty years, we got a divorce. After that we talked on the phone every day for five years. Our friends praised our divorce as if we’d remodeled our house or won the lottery. Now we’ve been divorced for as long as we were married. Now we’re just old friends.

I. Who am I? Who am I when I’m sleeping? Who am I when I’m dreaming? Am I still the third child born to my parents during the war year of 1943? Am I still a reader? Am I a writer when I’m sleeping? Am I a twin? Am I a Seattleite? Am I still descended from Scottish and English and Pennsylvania Dutch immigrants? Am I still 2.9 percent Neandertal? When I am sleeping, what happens to my opinions? Am I still a woman? Am I anybody?

Jay. Jay wears red and yellow shirts printed with birds or flowers, as if he were on vacation in Hawaii. Jay loves his jalopy. Jay carries a water bottle and wears an earpiece to talk on his cell phone without getting brain cancer. Jay writes a haiku every day. Jay writes books about spiritual seeking. Jay jogs. Jay goes to jazz-dance class and Jay dances.

Kids. We “Three Big Kids” built forts, went swimming in the Chester River, read books, rowed our rowboat, rode our bikes, played Cowboys and Indians, ignored Susanne, played Monopoly.

Learning. What am I learning today? I’m learning the plants. I am learning a few of the 310 species of trees growing in Seattle. I am learning the cascara tree, its roundish leaf with a little point, its bark harvested, traditionally, for use as a laxative. I’m learning serviceberry and huckleberry and the cherries—sweet cherry and bitter cherry and cherry plum and chokecherry. I’m learning the conifers—Doug fir, grand fir, western hemlock, western red cedar, redwood, sequoia. I’m a slow learner, but I’m learning.

Music. That year, 1973, I practiced my clawhammer banjo, sold records at bluegrass festivals in the Deep South, filled orders at Rounder Records, marched against the war, sang “Trouble in Mind” and “Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye” and “House of the Rising Sun,” read “Kaddish” by Ginsberg, posed for art classes, wrote poems, made love to Jony.

Narcissism. I am staring into the pool to see if I can find my own rippling image. I see nothing but minnows. Are these minnows me? Am I minnows mixed with water and stones? Do I have minnows in mind? Is my mind a matter of minnows?

Oneiric Autobiography. What if we each wrote an autobiography consisting only of our dreams?

Printer. You lift cartons of stock, cut the stock, set up the press, and run the press. You bring the stock down the steep basement staircase. You cut the stock, set up the press, run the press. You set up for envelopes and run the press. You set up for a two-color job and run the press. You’ve got your loupe. You pull a sheet, hold it up, peer into the loupe to check if the ink is lying down. “It’s lying down good, no emulsification.” You pull another sheet, check the registration. The owner hired you out of desperation for more labor. He was a kindly man who believed women should cook and clean. He was surprised that you could print. He was surprised that you could bring the paper down. He was surprised that you could run your hot-rod press fast. Vroom!

Quantities. Height, 5 feet 4.5 inches. Weight, 143 pounds. Amount of water used per day, 48 gallons. Amount of electricity consumed per day, 4.46 kilowatts. Amount of natural gas consumed per day, 1.66 therms. Amount of caffeine consumed per month, 65 mugs. Number of words written per day, 500. Number of TV programs watched per day, 0.

Rape. Every Monday evening for two years I attend the PTSD group at the Harborview Center for Sexual Assault and Traumatic Stress. This is in Seattle. One week our kindly and perceptive therapist asks us what we think of the idea of men therapists sitting in on the group. Alma says, “Do whatever you want, but I will just lie.” I say, “It’s fine with me as long as they’re not rapists.” The therapist looks a bit startled. “Oh,” she says. “No. They wouldn’t be rapists. Definitely not.” The subject never comes up again.

Susanne. Susanne was an ethereal and rather stunning beauty. She was funny and creative. She joined the Peace Corps. She took photographs, made homemade yogurt, tie-dyed T-shirts, played the recorder, knit scarves and sweaters, painted the sumi-e way, made watercolors, and taught English as a Second Language. She loved her students and her students loved her. And we loved her. And she committed suicide.

Twins. We twins rode our old draft horse, went out to get the cows, fed the calves, washed the milking machines, did the ironing, made the school lunches, walked down the mile-long dirt lane to the school bus, rode the bus to Chestertown Elementary School, rode the bus home, walked back up the dirt lane, fed the calves, did our homework, ate raisins, hated arithmetic, played with our dolls, read Cherry Ames, Student Nurse, went barefoot, brushed our 4–h calves, mowed the front yard, read books, read the Bible, drove the tractor during haying time, weeded the garden, picked string beans, helped Mummy freeze string beans, picked peaches, helped Mummy can peaches, put out the garbage, practiced public speaking for the 4–h club, refused to dress alike, climbed up and down the wooden fire escape to our attic room, whispered to each other, “gave each other confidence,” picked strawberries, learned to make change, sold strawberries door to door in town, stayed away from Daddy’s bees, helped put labels on the honey jars, sold honey door to door in town, wrote letters to Grandma, watched our brother beat up Susanne, ignored Susanne, collected plastic elephants, collected stones, won third and fourth prizes at the county fair, prided ourselves on not being city slickers, read How to Be Tops in Your Teens, took a bath once a week, went to Sunday school, went to church, did the wash, hung out the wash, did the ironing, read every old book in the old house, went to the library, read The Power of Positive Thinking, complimented the string beans, complimented the cow roast, complimented the po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• In the Beginning
• I Inheritence
• II Fire
• III Stone
• IV Spirit
• Note
• Acknowledgments