We Have Been Carrying This

This novel speaks in nine voices.



The first eight are the voices of landscapes: the Appalachians, the Mississippi, the Great Lakes, the bayou, the Great Plains, the Pacific Coast, the Arctic, and Chicago. The ninth is the Mahoning Valley, where this series is set and where this telling has been moving all along.

Each landscape speaks in its own grammar. The Appalachians speak slowly, with the weight of four hundred and eighty million years beneath every sentence. The Mississippi speaks forward, in the grammar of the current. The Great Lakes return. The bayou refuses to choose between grammars. The grass repeats. The Pacific approaches and withdraws. The Arctic holds and releases. Chicago speaks in layers. The Mahoning Valley speaks in the specific: one woman, one garden, one valley.

These are not metaphors. The landscapes speak as themselves, as the living witnesses they are, carrying what the human record forgot to keep or chose not to keep. Each chapter contains both the landscape's voice and at least one human life: the people doing the specific work of the conscious carrying, the seeing, the staying. A data point from the monitoring system sits alongside each landscape's account, because the systems are real and the data is real and the relationship between the data and the living world is one of the things this novel is about.

Three characters move through multiple chapters: Ida Beaumont-Crow, who begins in the Appalachians; her grandson Marcus, who drives the continent in her wake; and Akilah Johnson, whose mural begins in the Mississippi chapter and finishes in Chicago. Their movement is intentional. The pattern they are tracing is the same pattern the land has been holding.

The novel ends in the Mahoning Valley because the series begins there. This is the ground the whole telling has been circling. The woman in the garden in the final chapter is not a symbol. She is a person doing what the person does: putting her hands in the soil, tending what she can tend, looking for the beauty.

The earth speaks first because the earth was here first.

The rest follows.