My Father the Farmer
Wendell Berry
Wendell Berry is an author, poet, activist, essayist, and farmer. He was born in Henry County, Kentucky, in 1934 and has written more than forty books, including novels, collections of poetry, and his seminal work, The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture. In 2010, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama. Berry lives with his wife, Tanya, in Port Royal, Kentucky, and has two children, Mary and Den.
i was born in lexington, kentucky (not too far from where I live now), but for much of my childhood, my family lived all around the world. When I was two years old, in 1960, we moved to Mill Valley, California, where Daddy spent the year on a writing fellowship at Stanford University. We then returned to Henry County, Kentucky, and spent a year at the Home Place, the farm where my grandfather and great-grandfather had been born. Then my father got a Guggenheim Fellowship that allowed us to move to Europe for a year. My most vivid memories of that period are of our time in a little stone house in Fiesole, just north of Florence, where we lived for six months. I remember my mother cutting doll clothes out of paper bags and Daddy working at his Royal Crown typewriter. When the fellowship was over, we moved to New York City for a time—Daddy taught at NYU—and we lived in what is now Tribeca, in a loft outfitted with a swing and a trapeze. I loved it.
In 1963, my father was offered a job teaching English at the University of Kentucky. We moved to Lexington and bought a small farm in Henry County as a weekend place. It was my city-born mother who encouraged him to return to Henry County, then made a home for them on that farm, which they’ve now lived on for fifty-five years. Up until that point, no one of influence in my father’s life had said he could be a writer and live in Henry County, except for his family. In fact, he was told that leaving New York would ruin his literary career.
During all that moving around when I was young, I wasn’t miserable, but I was homesick for Kentucky. I used to play Flatt & Scruggs records and cry for home. My great-grandfather, when he got back from the one and only trip he ever took in his life, said that he had seen nothing he liked better than the field behind his barn. Like my grandfather and my father, I am his heir in that sentiment.
Daddy is a born teacher. He was always pointing out to my brother and me how a farmer plowed his field or what he’d done with his hay. He taught us that farming was a high calling and that a good farmer must have an incredible amount of sense, intelligence, and cultural knowledge. Daddy has a practice of splitting his day between working outside and writing. When I was young, he wanted my brother and me to work with him, and there was plenty to do: rocks to pick up, fences to mend, trees to prune, neighbors to help. I was grumpy as hell about it. Nevertheless, I grew up believing there were only three ways to make a decent living: to be a farmer, to be a writer, or to be a lawyer (like my grandfather and uncle).
I never really disagreed with my father. But in my teens, I did just want to be a regular Henry County Kentuckian. My parents had no interest in that. They demonstrated against war, against dams, against airports. We drove a VW camper van whereas most of our neighbors had pickup trucks. Author and Merry Prankster Ken Kesey, a dear friend of my father’s, would come by with his hippie friends. When we put a composting privy in when I was thirteen or fourteen, I thought it was the biggest humiliation that could happen to a young person. My father used the compost to fertilize the tomatoes, and when my dates would come pick me up, he would point out the volunteer tomato plants and say, “Mary ate that tomato.” My father was well-known enough then that he was frequently interviewed, and during interviews, he talked often of the toilet. We must have had the most famous bathroom in the state of Kentucky.
My father and mother have lived interesting, useful, beautiful lives full of friends from around the world—and our dear Henry County neighbors, too. My father made sure I understood that the importance of the arts of farming, gardening, and cooking was equal to that of the “high” arts of writing, painting, and music. I was fully grown before I heard anyone called “just a farmer.”
I’m sure Daddy could have continued to travel around the world. But the greatest gift he gave to me was coming home.
Mary (age three) with Wendell on their farm near Port Royal, Kentucky, 1961