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532 The Kentucky Anthology Barbara Kingsolver “Rose-Johnny” Barbara Kingsolver, one of Kentucky’s most distinguished contemporary authors, was born in Annapolis, Maryland, in 1955, but she moved when she was two with her family to Carlisle, Kentucky, where she grew up. She holds degrees in biology and English from Depauw University and the University of Arizona. She became a celebrated author with the publication of her first novel, The Bean Trees (1988), which is the story of a young Kentucky woman, Taylor Greer, who moves west to Tucson and acquires an unusual family that includes an orphaned baby girl she names Turtle, a Guatemalan refugee couple, a single mother, and several elderly neighbors. She soon becomes involved in the sanctuary movement in support of undocumented aliens. This was only the beginning of a lifetime of work and writing in support of liberal causes as a writer and activist. In her acknowledgments in Small Wonder (2002), a book of essays, she thanks her mother, who “never once told me not to stick my neck out.” Sticking her neck out has earned her and her books a fiercely dedicated following. The Poisonwood Bible (1998) is a cautionary tale told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a devout evangelical Baptist who takes his family with him on a mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959 and learns a thing or two about cultural values. Her other books include Animal Dreams (1990), which involves an environmental catastrophe; Another America (1992), a collection of poems; Pigs in Heaven (1993), a novel about the risks of love that moves from rural Kentucky and the southwest to Heaven, Oklahoma, and the Cherokee Nation; High Tide in Tucson (1995), essays on family, community, and the natural world; Holding the Line:Women in the Great Arizona Mine Strike of 1983 (1996); and Prodigal Summer (2000), which weaves together three love stories in the mountains and small farms of southern Appalachia. In this novel a character speaks of a theme that runs throughout all Kingsolver’s wise and important books: “Everything alive is connected to every other by fine, invisible threads. Things you don’t see can help you plenty, and things you try to control will often rear back and bite you, and that’s the moral of the story.” If we are to survive, we all may have to learn this lesson. Another related theme is that if we humans are in right relationship to nature, we are likely to be in right relationship to each other and treat each other decently and fairly. “Rose-Johnny,” from Homeland and Other Stories (1989), is a poignant story about love and acceptance and fairness as it is played out in a small Kentucky town. h 532 Barbara Kingsolver 533 Rose-Johnny wore a man’s haircut and terrified little children, although I will never believe that was her intention. For her own part she inspired in us only curiosity. It was our mothers who took this fascination and wrung it, through daily admonitions, into the most irresistible kind of horror. She was like the old wells, covered with ancient rotting boards and overgrown with weeds, that waited behind the barns to swallow us down: our mothers warned us time and again not to go near them, and still were certain that we did. My own mother was not one of those who had a great deal to say about her, but Walnut Knobs was a small enough town so that a person did not need to be told things directly. When I had my first good look at her, at close range, I was ten years old. I fully understood the importance of the encounter. What mattered to me at the time, though, was that it was something my sister had not done before me. She was five years older, and as a consequence there was hardly an achievement in my life, nor even an article of clothing, that had not first been Mary Etta’s. But, because of the circumstances of my meeting Rose-Johnny, I couldn’t tell a living soul about it, and so for nearly a year I carried the secret torment of a great power that can’t be used. My agitation was not relieved but made worse when I told the story to myself, over and over again. She was not, as we always heard, half man and half woman, something akin to the pagan creatures whose naked torsos are...

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