Growing Up

"She was a steady and self-reliant woman, and when I think of her after all the years she has been dead, I think of her brown hands...back then it never crossed my mind that she would ever be dead" (68).

It is in this moment that I feel we get the greatest sense of a time lapse through this story, Blackberry Winter by Robert Penn Warren. It is in this moment that Seth acknoledges his innocence at nine-years-old in a way that nearly all children who have grown up can--he finally grasped that things end and change. This story is about the loss of innocence and the realization that every person is not as steady as Seth's mom, or stoic like Seth's dad, or wise like Old Jebb, or hardworking like Dellie. These are the examples Warren gives us of a child's view of his adults. Most children grow up trying to emulate the older people in their lives, seeing them as pristine and infallible. But, as Seth sees first-hand, Dellie is not perfect as she slaps Little Jebb across the face. All adults do not fit this ideal, especially when the stranger--who never does receive a name--comes to town. This is Seth's first encounter with a bad man, and it colors all of the other events that occur that one day. It is as if in meeting the stranger, the wool was pulled from Seth's eyes and he saw that people in his town were starving enough to want to eat a drowned cow, that maybe Dellie was not the perfect "white-Negro," and that men who emerge from the woods without a name or manners are not going to be good news.

Question: What effect did these revelations have on the course of Seth's life? What did he mean when he said he "did follow him, all the years" (87)?

The Unexpected

“When you are a boy and stand in the stillness of woods, which can be so still your heart almost stops beating and makes you want to stand there in the green twilight until you feel your very feet sinking into and clutching the earth like roots and your body breathing slow through its pores like the leaves—when you stand there and wait for the next drop to drop with its small, flat sound to a lower leaf, that sound seems to measure out something, to put an end to something, to begin something, and you cannot wait for it to happen and are afraid it will not happen, and then when it has happened, you are waiting again, almost afraid” (65).

Although Seth is a callow, reluctant nine-year-old boy, he has a premonition (above) that he cannot live in his childish unchanging world forever. The drops from leaves are representative of events that will interrupt time and the order of Seth’s life. The strange man, the cold weather, and the flood are some of “drops” that teach Seth about the unexpected interruptions in life.

The contradictory phrase, "blackberry winter," is used in the South to describe a brief period of cold weather in June that coincides with the blooming of blackberries. What purpose does this contradictory phrase serve in the story (besides just being a title and weather pattern)?

"The Change of Life and Time"

"What's woman-mizry?
Hit is the change, he said. Hit is the change of life and time...

Will everything die?
Everything and everybody, hit will be so...

What was he doing down there in the storm?
The good ones and the bad ones, they comes and they goes. Storm or sun, light or dark. They is folks and they comes and they goes lak folks." Pg. 82-83

The moment, when young Seth is talking to Old Jebb by the stables and asks him a series of questions regarding all the strange things going on that day, is very important to understanding the story's meaning. There is still many things that a child does not understand at the age of nine. He has limited understanding of menopause, death, and bad people. In one day he has seen animals (the cows and chickens) die from the storm, he has seen Dellie strike Jebb with an awful slap that he does not understand, and he has witnessed the stranger coming on a blackberry winter flashing a switchblade. All these things including cold in June make no sense to nine year old Seth, and perhaps this is why he remembers this blackberry winter day so vividly. It is a change in the way he sees and understands life.

Does Seth remember this blackberry winter because it symbolizes his loss of innocence?

If blackberry winter symbolizes change, does the end of the story mean that since then he has experienced bad things or that since then he has become bad folk like the stranger?

"But for those obstinate questionings of sense and outward things, fallings from us, vanishings;"

The moment I chose is sort of a large one, occuring on pages 82-83, and is the entire interaction of Seth and Old Jebb in the crib. A highlight of the moment:

"what you shiver fer?" he asked me.

"I'm cold. I'm cold because it's blackberry winter," I said.

"Maybe 'tis and maybe 'tain't," he said.

"My mother says it is."

"Ain't sayen Miss Sallie doan know and ain't sayen she do. But folks don't know everything."

Old Jebb seems to be not only a source of knowledge to Seth, but also a symbol of wisdom. The emphasis on Jebb's physical strength, despite his advanced age, effectively adds mass to the character of Old Jebb; he seems to have a larger hand in Seth's emotional growth than do the characters of his mother and father, and his words have a kind of density about them. What Old Jebb presented to Seth was the inability of a person to truly know something. Old Jebb even questions the month of June itself, ""June," he replied with great contempt. "That what folks say. What June mean?"". Musing on mankind's illusion of control over the natural world, Old Jebb explains to Seth the ease at which the earth my decide to "take a rest", causing "everybody and everything" to die. This idea of impermanence, human fragility, and the "unknowable" clashes with Seth's previous resolution: "When you know something you know it. You know how a thing has been and you know you can go barefoot in June."

The reader sees the breakdown of Seth's "knowledge"; going barefoot in June freezes Seth's feet! Seth's conception of reality, the blackberry winter itself and whether it is occuring at all, is questioned, quite rightly actually (a true blackberry winters occurs in May). The fact that the short story itself is titled "Blackberry Winter" suggests a similar breakdown in "knowing", in the narrator's case, the ability for a person to accurately capture the significance of a memory. Many years separates the adult narrator and the nine year old Seth. Old Jebb's prediction of a tired earth that would stop offering nourishment can be read as the human mind's inability to produce and "grow" in the manner in which it did in younger years. Inevitably, a cold spell comes, and it stays. We end up losing our ability to remember how our youth shaped us. The narrator's statement that he has been following the tramp all these years is just as false to me as Seth's earlier statement about being able to go barefoot in June. Instead, the narrator has been following Old Jebb, who is still alive and present in his life, and who "lived forever" in the story, and in the mind of the narrator.

Question: To what extent is the narrator lamenting his youthful ignorance? Or is the narrator thankful for the "eternal" feelings of childhood, when "what you remember seems forever"?

note: the title is from Wordsworth's Intimations ode

Good Beginnings

My favorite part, and also the part that spoke to me the most, happened on the first page of the story: "Nobody had ever tried to stop me in June as long as I could remember, and when you are nine years old, what you remember seems forever; for you remember everything and everything is important and stands bigs and full and fills up Time and is so solid that you can walk around and around it like a tree and look at it. You are aware that times passes, that there is a movement in time, but that is not what Time is. Time is not a movement, a flowing, a wind then, but is, rather, a kind of climate in which things are, and when a thing happens it begins to live and keeps on living and stands solid in Time like the tree that you can walk around (Warren, 63)." I related to young Seth, especially in terms of his confidence in his knowledge and how he saw manners as the law.  And so the story began with a strong start.  I loved the narration of the older Seth, clearly recanting his past in this novelette/short story.  The narrative was colloquial and rich in description while relating to the reader. The story contained such great dialect which accurately depicts a small southern town... which made it that more surprising when the story reached its conclusion... Maybe I missed the point, but what was the point of ending the story so abruptly? 

A better question for the class: How does the conclusion actually conclude the story? Does it?

disillusionment

That was what he said, for me to not follow him. But I did follow him, all the years. (87)

The narrator, Seth, is recounting this story thirty-five years after the fact. He is now forty-four and has experienced loss and death. It seems to me that Warren's "Blackberry Winter" is a story of disillusionment. The man that comes to the farm opens Seth's eyes to the evils in the world. From then on he experiences the deaths of the chickens, the death of the cow, the dirtiness outside Dellie's house, etc. Since the man comes to work, Seth is exposed to reality. His awakening or disillusionment towards reality or away from ideality follows him throughout his life. He remembers "still [being] a boy, but a big boy" (86) when his father died. The man opened Seth's eyes to the real world and "Blackberry Winter" is a memory of Seth's naivete.

Was the man using scare tactics to help Seth maintain his innocence for a little while longer? If the man symbolizes disillusionment and the bad things in Seth's world is he innately good for telling Seth to not follow him?

Barefootedness

"When you are nine, you know that there are things that you don't know, but you know that when you know something you know it. You know how a thing has been and you know that you can go barefoot in June." (64)

In Warren's, "Blackberry Winter", the story begins with the narrator's resistance to put on shoes. This moment struck me as important because not only does the narrator go on about how odd it was to have to put on shoes in June, but he emphasizes it in such a way that indicates more strange things to come. His confusion on the subject foreshadows an important change in his life. He knew he should be able to go barefoot in June, yet he could not. Furthermore, he would not stress this lack of clothing if it did not mean something. Since the story is written in retrospect, the shoes symbolize something significant to the adult as it did the child. It sets up the idea of losing one's innocence, for it was that day that he was told not to go barefoot anymore, even though "you know you can go barefoot in June".

Do you think the narrator's lack of shoes could represent something greater? How do you think the outcome of the story would have changed if he had put on shoes in the beginning?