High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [16]
For days I nursed my baby and basked in hormonal euphoria, musing occasionally: all this—and I’m a novelist, too! That, though, seemed a slim accomplishment compared with laboring twenty-four hours to render up the most beautiful new human the earth had yet seen. The book business seemed a terrestrial affair of ink and trees and I didn’t give it much thought.
In time my head cleared, and I settled into panic. What had I done? The baby was premeditated, but the book I’d conceived recklessly, in a closet late at night, when the restlessness of my insomniac pregnancy drove me to compulsive verbal intercourse with my own soul. The pages that grew in a stack were somewhat incidental to the process. They contained my highest hopes and keenest pains, and I didn’t think anyone but me would ever see them. I’d bundled the thing up and sent it off to New York in a mad fit of housekeeping, to be done with it. Now it was going to be laid smack out for my mother, my postal clerk, my high school English teacher, anybody in the world who was willing to plunk down $16.95 and walk away with it. To find oneself suddenly published is thrilling—that is a given. But how appalling it also felt I find hard to describe. Imagine singing at the top of your lungs in the shower as you always do, then one day turning off the water and throwing back the curtain to see there in your bathroom a crowd of people, rapt, with videotape. I wanted to throw a towel over my head.
There was nothing in the novel to incriminate my mother or the postal clerk. I like my mother, plus her record is perfect. My postal clerk I couldn’t vouch for; he has tattoos. But in any event I never put real people into my fiction—I can’t see the slightest point of that, when I have the alternative of inventing utterly subservient slave-people, whose every detail of appearance and behavior I can bend to serve my theme and plot.
Even so, I worried that someone I loved would find in what I’d written a reason to despise me. In fact, I was sure of it. My fiction is not in any way about my life, regardless of what others might assume, but certainly it is set in the sort of places I know pretty well. The protagonist of my novel, titled The Bean Trees, launched her adventures from a place called “Pittman, Kentucky,” which does resemble a town in Kentucky where I’m known to have grown up. I had written: “Pittman was twenty years behind the nation in practically every way you can think of except the rate of teenage pregnancies….We were the last place in the country to get the dial system. Up until 1973 you just picked up the receiver and said, Marge, get me my Uncle Roscoe. The telephone office was on the third floor of the Courthouse, and the operator could see everything around Main Street square. She would tell you if his car was there or not.”
I don’t have an Uncle Roscoe. But if I did have one, the phone operator in my hometown, prior to the mid-seventies, could have spotted him from her second-floor office on Main Street square.
I cherish the oddball charm of that town. Time and again I find myself writing love letters to my rural origins. Growing up in small-town Kentucky taught me respect for the astounding resources people can drum up from their backyards, when they want to, to pull each other through. I tend to be at home with modesty, and suspicious of anything slick or new. But naturally, when I was growing up there, I yearned for the slick and the new. A lot of us did, I think. We craved shopping malls and a swimming pool. We wanted the world to know we had once won the title “All Kentucky City,” even though