Wendell Berry is known to most of us as a man whose boots are often heavy with worry about what in the name of God is going to become of our tribe, in all its evermore civilized savagery. Berry has demanded, and got, a higher standard of living than the rest of us have, partly from an insistence on due diligence about human connection and habitat. We enter his books and we remember, what it was like when it was possible to be more human, before the world had blown us off-course, off-center, off-path.
And though the majority of Berry's published words are addressed to the grownups, his boots get lighter when he speaks directly to children, and we can eavesdrop on those conversations in little treasures such as the book Whitefoot: A Story from the Center of the World, now out in paperback from Counterpoint, illustrated by Davis Te Selle.
From long habit, Berry addresses children as honored company, as intellectual equals deserving equal access to Linnaean taxonomy and the sum total of what we know about living. This is why the book is stunning. Berry knows, from long habit, the secret to a good story for a kid: sometimes the story we are hungriest for is one that is quietly told, without any gimcrack trickery. This story is the kind that you'd make up as you tell it in the dark to a child, praying for that child to sleep, only that child would listen intently as if being fed something most magnificent and satisfying, and then insist that you tell it again, the same exact way, every night thereafter, no deviations.
Her name was Peromyscus leucopus but she did not know it. I think it had been a long time since the mice around Port William spoke English, let alone Latin. Her language was a dialect of Mouse, a tongue for which we humans have never developed a vocabulary or grammar. Because I don't know her name in Mouse, I will call her Whitefoot.
The name fits because her four small feet and all the underside of her were a pure, clean white. Her coat, above, was a reddish brindly tan. She had a graceful tail, a set of long elegant whiskers, perfect ever-listening ears, a fastidious nose, and black profound eyes shining with sight. She took a small feminine pleasure in being beautiful.
Wherever she was, she was at the center of the world. Put that line in the wrong hands of the wrong writer, and it'd be worthless, an invitation to tribal trouble many decades out. Put that line in Berry's hands, to describe the situation of a certain little gray mouse, and you've got a quiet little line that can situate a mouse (or a child. . . not to mention all us older eavesdroppers) adequately in this world without requiring them to wear the same damn angsty existentialist boots we are all so weary of, so de riguer once, and so passe now.
Davis Te Selle's unsentimentalized charcoal illustrations have a taxonomist's accuracy to them, capturing both the whimsy of mouse genetics and the scale of mouse life in the vicinity of rivers prone to flood. What's stunning about this as a children's book is the degree to which Berry and Te Selle can evoke the mouse's world without remaking her in our human image. We see her separate world as she experiences it, broken glass, floodtide, uncertainty and all; we learn from her, but she is not a stand-in for us. A child could come away from this story seeing a mouse as having about as legitimate a claim of "dominion" on this earth as a human has.
This is a wily book, meant to send a child out into the world with a sense of proportion, staring back at fate and chance with a certain equanimity. There is no purer writerly impulse than that, to set down a useful, quiet story that a child will always carry with her, long after all us eavesdroppers are returned to dust.
