Wendell Berry and Not Me

Several months ago, I finished the final draft of my new book, Not Just for Kings: Cultivating a 500-Year Vision for Your Family, parts of which have a definite Wendell Berry feel.

I write about place and a strong sense of place here in Northern Fairfax County, Virginia. In Berry’s Hannah Coulter, the residents of Port William call themselves “the Membership.” For the same reason, I use the term Kith, an older term that hasn’t been degraded like the word “community.” You know, how everything is a “community.” 

In our Kith, there are Mark and Katy, Kathleen and Andrew, George and Becka, Rigg and Denise, Kimberly and Ian, Paul and Meg, Molly and Matt. I could go on and this Kith would include only those within a mile or so. Cast yourself out further, slightly further, and there are others, many others. Tim and Katie, Jack and Becka, Mariano and Becka, Julie and Tyson. We are bound in Membership of the Great Northern Virginia Catholic Clan.

Cross the mighty Potomac, and there is a similar Kith in Montgomery County, Maryland. They are gathered around schools and churches. We know them. We cross pollinate. 

I argue in the book, like Wendel Berry’s fictional Port William, that we stay here. We do not move. We stay. We resist that almost irresistible American urge to leave. Sadly, only 10% of current residents in Fairfax County, Virginia, are native. I am one of them, though that is a bit of a fib: I was born here but grew up in Missouri. I came back in marriage. And I intend never to leave —I want to be buried on Trappist land out at Berryville —and I pray my two daughters stay here and marry local boys or marry boys from elsewhere and come back to this Kith.

This place is magical because of the Kith and also because of Kin, another of the ten secrets to a 500-Year family I explore in the book. Grandparents, aunts and uncles, sisters and brothers, cousins, and cousins and cousins and cousins. The nuclear family of mom and dad and two kids has proven to be fragile. What society and family need is this extended, multigenerational marvel we see here in Fairfax County, Virginia.

So, here are three Wendell Berry secrets: Place, Kith, Kin. My book has more secrets. There is Saga. This is discovering your family story. This may take some work, not in dusty courthouse books but on the World Wide Web where the Mormons have gathered practically everyone’s information: births and children, marriages and deaths. There is even a website where you can find graves; it’s catchily called Find-a-Grave. By finding these names, you can uncover the family saga, a word I use rather than the more prosaic “story.” The family Saga is heroic no matter how small it may seem. Your Civil War grandfather survived long enough for your line to continue. So did your grandfather from the Revolutionary War and beyond. Where did this happen? How did he do this? And you can go back even further than that. Your story can even cross the Atlantic. And what you do with this family Saga is pass it forward into the misty future, like a baton in a race. 

I did not know my father well. I was 18 when he died at 43. All I have are some photos, some vague memories, and some of his college textbooks with marginal notes, plus some business letters. Oddly, I treasure these messages from my family’s past. Your job is to formalize this Saga so that your great-great-great-great-great grandson knows these stories. He will treasure them.

The secret of Saga is closely tied to the Compact. Whether you know it right now or not, you are part of a family Compact that goes back hundreds of years, even centuries, and stretches forth for hundreds of years, even centuries. The Compact is between and among generations; even if they do not know each other, the Compact is that you will continue the Saga; you will continue the family as best you can.

I argue in the book that it is not enough to marry and form a family. You must do something much more heroic: found a family. Founding a family is a grand vision that stretches back to your ancestors and stretches forward to your descendants. This is how our families survive and also how we resist the cultural storm we are living through. A strong, multigenerational family rooted in place is a mighty thing that cultural snipers will have a hard time picking off.

My daughter Gigi told me months ago, when I finished the book, that there were striking parallels between the ideas in this book and the ideas in the work of Wendell Berry, and she said you have to send him the manuscript, and I bet that he would write you back. I went through the process of figuring out how someone would do that. I figured I could send it to general delivery in Port Royal, Kentucky, and hope it got to him, but then it never did. And we woke up a few weeks ago, and Wendell Berry was dead. And then, all of a sudden, the most remarkable things happened; I saw all these photographs of people I know standing on Wendell Berry’s front porch with his arm around their shoulders. And I saw references by people I know who wrote to Wendell Berry and Wendell Berry wrote back!

Wendell Berry would have liked this book. Alas. Rest in peace, Master.