"Jaber Crow" by Wendell Berry
My Bookshelf
Wendell Berry is one of my favorite authors and one I can highly recommend. He deals with the human realities of life. Most of his books are about a fictional town named Port Williams in Kentucky. These books are about real people and real life in Port Williams. They are about a history of the community and map some of the changes that occur over time. In these books we meet a series of people with a variety of differences and the many ways that the community embraces them. I cannot think of any other writer who is so humanizing about the people and the community.
“Jayber Crow” is one of these books. This book traces the life of a character who becomes a barber in Port Williams but who has gone through a series of adventures getting there. The story clarifies life in that area, in the 1930s and moving forward. It shows how Jayber’s attitudes and his approach to life were formed. It is a story of wandering through a life that eventually deposits him in Port Williams and, in some ways, determines his destiny.
His adventures are about what life brings to him, things he tries and people along the way who help him.
It is a story of humble beginnings, of the power of the river with its ice and flooding, of loss and of finding a peaceful Eden with Aunt Cordie and Uncle Othy.
After the loss of that Eden, it becomes a saga of wandering, of trial and error, of confronting the harshness of the world and discovering the kindness of strangers. It is about what Jayber does to survive. It is about learning about the world and himself. It is about resilience and creativity. It is about necessity. It is a story of how events occur that lead us to what later feels like destiny. He describes how he fell into barbering and how, eventually it becomes his life’s work.
Along the way we meets a series of people, all of whom he learns from. We watch him learning about religion and about education, about how to deal with people and how to learn to trust again. Jayber learns about relationships and responsibilities, about how to be there for someone and how and when to help others. He learns about the power of acceptance,
Many of the best parts of the book are the stories others tell that connect the community and have become part of their shared history. We learn about the unique characters and the acceptance of the community. We learn about marriages that work and those that don’t but somehow continue. We learn about the quiet strength of those who persevere. Finally, this is a book about love and loss, grieving for the loss of a world that once had been so wonderful and connected.
As with all of his writing it is closely tied to a way of life strongly connected to the land and nature, to the web of life. Those connections form the basis of the rhythm of that community and clarify much of why people act as they do, driven by the necessities of life. Although world events determine some parts of the environment that they must acknowledge and deal with, they are not political or more than tangentially tied to that outside world. They acknowledge those outside influences but continue to deal with their lives as nature, the community, and the rhythms of nature require.
That community is full of acceptance and love, compassion and neighborliness, and an amazing patience. There is a sense of a kind of folk wisdom and intuitive goodness. Somewhere in this community is an unspoken code that helps the cohesiveness of the community and allows for recovery and healing. It reminds me of small towns in which I, and I am sure many other readers, grew up.
Wendell Berry has written an entire series of books about the people of Port Williams, many of which I have read with pleasure. He has also written some poetry as well as a series of essays about American society, the land and the people, all of which are worth reading.
Ultimately Wendell Berry presents a humanizing picture of life in this nation. Although times have changed, at heart it is the kind of acceptance and goodness we would all like to revive to help rediscover our unity and common purpose. That, by itself in my mind, is enough reason to recommend this book or any of his others.