It was the perfect icebreaker. “My hands smell like sheep right now,” announced author Tiffany Eberle Kriner during a recent interview about her new book, In Thought, Word, and Seed, Reckonings from a Midwest Farm. Kriner is also Wheaton’s associate professor of English and also owns a farm with her husband, Josh. It sounded like she was keeping busy.
Among its many reflections of In Thought, Word, and Deed, Kriner writes a series of letters to the late writer James Baldwin in 2020. The first was written the day George Floyd died and she begins by describing her surroundings. It’s important to her. This isn’t some rural idyll, weekend retreat. It’s a working farm.
I’m writing this letter, though, not from that office, but from a field on our farm, a field we call the Hidden Five. “Often I am permitted to return to a meadow,” as Robert Duncan says, and this field’s just such a stage on the yearly pilgrimage of the sheep. There’s no road access here — hence the hiddenness — and it’s barely growing anything by way of pasture. A few flowers, mostly chicory and thistle, “whose flowers are flames lit to the Lady,” as it were.
The farm, with its land scarred by others, being tended by Kriner, isn’t a backdrop as she wrestles with these issues; it permeates everything. It’s beautiful, but it’s not ethereal. Sheep are the reason her hands smell like sheep. Thorns draw blood. She notes that Josh was suffering from debilitating long Covid during the busiest time of their year. Livestock don’t allow for days off and losing half of your labor on a labor intensive farm is almost unimaginable. It doesn’t add up. “The other day, when I was complaining about the farmwork I was doing while he’s sick, Josh said, ‘I don’t want you to help me. When I think of how much I will owe …'” It’s a theme she explores head on, this life accounting. She’s not afraid to use decimal points:
Sin and responsibility always felt like ledger items to me, like those hardbound books of pale green accounting paper, the school district’s hard copy of the budget, that my dad would bring home to work on.
We thought all people had their own ledgers, and the trick was to ask Jesus to get us in the black, the irony of which phrase I acknowledge. God’s love for the whole world is God’s ability to carry all those books home and work on them. I remember people testifying to the feeling of burdens lifted.
He paid a debt he did not owe
I owed a debt I could not pay
I needed someone to wash my sins away
And now I sing a brand-new song:
Amazing Grace
’Cause Jesus paid a debt I could not payBut I wanted to not need the grace of canceled sin. I kept and keep calculating, hoping to find myself not as guilty: yes, I freely admit that I am guilty of 32.736 percent of the injury done in whatever case we’re talking about, but the rest belongs to someone or something else. I’ll ask forgiveness for only this much and will pay only for what I am responsible for.
There is something James Baldwin said during a conversation with the poet Nikki Giovanni from a 1971 episode of WNET’s Soul that rings just as true 50 years later. Earlier in the same conversation, Baldwin talked about leaving the church at 17. Even still, a bit later on he remarks, “One cannot be romantic about Human nature. One cannot be romantic about our own nature.” Baldwin’s non-romantic anthropology is on display again in his 1985 talk at Hampshire College.
I’m not interested in anybody’s guilt. Guilt is a luxury that we can no longer afford. I know you didn’t do it, and I didn’t do it either, but I am responsible for it because I am a man and a citizen of this country and you are responsible for it, for the very same reason.
You can see why Baldwin makes a good person for Kriner to do some internal accounting in front of. Just don’t start off being unrealistic about human nature. Kriner is talking about race, and yet you could pick from any of the other ways humans are awful to each other. Numbers all lead to the same blind alley.
There was no way to be justified here; there was no way for me to be right. He was dead, George Floyd — and so many were dead, and I was part of a church painting selectively applicable welcome signs. There is no way to arrange the numbers in the ledger that makes up for the fact that debts have been incurred and dues are owed.
At the church, I tried to pull myself together as the welcome team huddled up — my mask covered most of my distress. As we were gathering and laying out instructions for the day, the pastor called me. This was nice of him — it’s a large church, and he was trying to be kind, to see if I was ok after hearing about me from my friend, his wife.
I couldn’t receive it that way, though. “Don’t worry,” I told him, “I won’t make a scene.” That was mean of me, especially to a guy who has actually and faithfully prayed for my livestock when I’ve texted him in a panic that the pigs were out and missing. He just takes it whenever I speak cruelly about the church he represents, which has happened more than once — more entries in the ledger.
Later she adds, “Sometimes in this field, so alone, I hear voices, dream dreams. Song sparrows? My mom says it’s Satan accusing me. I have no doubt of this. But as my spiritual director Rhonda says, often Satan’s accusations are just true things said mean.” Kriner’s accounting of Baldwin’s view of responsibility in his novel, Another Country forces a personal reckoning with a view to the ultimate. Simply feeling guilt doesn’t get you a discount on the cost. It still costs. Someone. And you.
In Another Country, when Cass, white woman, is talking to Ida, Black woman, about the racial ledger, it hits the reader just this same, breathtaking way.
“Maybe,” said Cass, with a sudden flash of anger, and
very close to tears, “it happened to all of us! … Maybe we’re worse off than you.”
“Oh,” said Ida, “you are. There’s no maybe about that.”
“Then have a little mercy.”
“You’re asking a lot.”
Mercy. Mercy.
Hardly a surprise for you, all the white people looking for absolution. It’s so tedious and tiring. I can hardly do anything else, though I don’t ask mercy of you, I guess. Or not only. If I say, Son of David, have mercy on me, a sinner!, I mean the both of you. From you, the truth that doesn’t turn away from a fellow human. From the Other, that too, and more.
On the eve of her 41st birthday, Kriner’s son found an owl in a clearing for some farm paths. The rain soaks her and the owl. It sits silently, with its injured wing, facing her, and any other potential threats. It was a young owl, and may have poorly navigated the trees. Kriner quotes Plotinus, Wadsworth, and Wallace Stevens as she is telling the story. It feels like an attempt at a summation, an almost-parable. She tries to shelter the owl under an umbrella, but it retreats from her help, fearing her intentions. She didn’t break the wing, but the injury happened under her stewardship, on her land. She bears some responsibility for what happens there. She discovers the color of the owl’s eyelids as she sits vigil in the rain with the owl for the next three hours. Until rescue comes. The scene of vigil was described in rich loving detail, I can still hear the rain dripping off the branches, see the wet feathers. In contrast, the rescue was handled quickly and without drama, both in the act and the telling. That part of the story belonged to someone else, and the owl.
The journey through Thought, Word, and Seed was not the aimless stroll through a slightly overgrown sheep meadow I thought it might be. The sheep meadow was the scene of a deeply personal battle with guilt and responsibility, in front of literary witnesses of the past, so epic, I’m surprised it didn’t flatten the grass around her, them.
By the end of the book, Kriner’s decimal pointed percentages of guilt have faded away; accounts need to be settled up.
On the page after the epilogue, these are the only words.
“Christ have mercy.”
I’m glad Christ did and does.
