Haworth, England
Genius can grow in barren soil
Age 24
I am in the village of Haworth, Yorkshire.
A narrow and winding street, still cobbled for tourist effect, leads up to the parsonage, church, and cemetery known by literati
around the world.
I have been to the childhood home of
the Bronte Sisters many times. It is a pilgrimage for those who respect woman artists, the phrase in itself not so respectful.
I like to think about the sisters, so
marked by family, by love, by illness and death, and genius.
For they did have love, and a great
deal of it; their father surely loved them, to allow them even the time and the paper to write their many books. Physical
illness, not sexist bias, was their greatest enmy, and they watched their mother and their siblings die in rapid succession
of the lung diseases that wasted so many Britons in centuries past.
The rooms are tiny, yet more of them
than I expected. Those who call this family have not studied the lives of other poor very carefully. They are
middle-class, lower middle-class perhaps - though a clergyman was respected by all in his town. The people who inhabited
them were smaller than ten or twelve year old children: the dresses on display and the handwriting in their diaries hints
at dwarf-like figures.
Like black people in the Caribbean,
I think perhaps they only came inside to eat, to clean, and to sleep; they roamed the fields and towns around them, making
goodwill visits, exploring nature.
The square shaped rooms downstairs
imply no gestating genius. The bedrooms upstairs give not clues, and I am stunned by the noise a group of Japanese tourists
make as they descend upon this holy place.
The Japanese, I deduce, are fascinated
by the idea of women who walked the northern plains alone, the wind blowing through their hair, and who wanted also to do
something great all on their own. They like Anne of Green Gables, the storybook girl of Canadian literature, becuase
she is so opposite to them It is the denied that is most charismatic.
I visit the cemetery before rejoining
my friends for tea and scones. What would British tourists would do without cream teas?
Yet I am not quite satisfied as I sit
in the church, thinking about the sermons they all endured. The spirit has gone, and remains more in the hands of readers
around the world.
