Lois Lenski’s “Strawberry Girl”: Love is embodied and particular

“To know him is to love him” is an expression that applies to anyone and everyone. This is hard to believe when you encounter people out in the great wide world, people being dirty and gross, selfish and ignorant. But it remains true. To know someone as he or she is, there is a person worthy of your love.

A marvelous example of examining the details to grow in love is seen in Lois Lenski’s 1945 Newbury Winner Strawberry Girl. In the foreword, Lenski wrote about the Anglo-Saxon settlers of the Florida peninsula, called “Crackers.” She observed that in the early 1900s when the story is set the Crackers were “living in a frontier community, with all its crudities, brutalities and cruelties.” This makes it sound like the book will be rather dismal and unbecoming. On the contrary, Lenski explains that the book is part of a series of regional books for American children in which “I am trying to present vivid, sympathetic pictures of the real life of different kinds of Americans against authentic background of diverse localities.”

Despite their lack of civilization, there is something Lenski seems to see as worth observing and preserving in the unique way of life of frontier Florida. Elsewhere in the introduction, she explains, “The Florida Crackers have preserved a flavorsome speech, rich in fine old English idiom—word, phrase and rhythm. Many old customs, folk songs and superstitions have been handed down along with Anglo-Saxon purity of type, shown in their unusual beauty of physical feature, and along with their staunch integrity of character.”

The purpose of capturing the specific way of life of these people, Lenski suggests, is to love. She wrote, “We need to know our country better; to know and understand people different from ourselves; so that we can say: ‘This then is the way these people lived. Because I understand it, I admire and love them.’” Often, in post-modern parlance “loving” people is thrown around as a fuzzy, feel-good sentiment that most involves squinting at groups of people in the distance and imagining that they are basically good people who want and care about the same things you do deep down inside. Truly to love, however, is brutally specific, and this, rather than ignoring the complex, embodied, messy reality, is what Lenski is after.

Lenski earned the ability to write about it, because she experienced it. She wrote about Strawberry Girl, “My material has been gathered personally from the Crackers themselves, and from other Floridians who know and understand them. I have visited in Cracker homes. I have made many sketches of people, animals, the natural surroundings, their homes—plans, furnishings and details. I have come to know, understand and respect many of these people, and to number them among my friends.” In order to love friends, or our own children, we have to learn to be at peace in the presence of dysfunction, which is ever present in the fallen world. Love is not a generalized feeling but a specific response to the good in someone.

Just as love originates in the particular, it results in particular actions and attentive care. In her poem “Filling Station,” Elizabeth Bishop captures this well. She writes about the dirty station “oil-soaked, oil-permeated / to a disturbing, over-all / black translucency.” In other words: disgusting, perhaps on a route running through the frontier of the Florida Crackers a couple decades after the automobile.

Amidst the mess and grime, however, is evidence of care and attention:

Somebody embroidered the doily.

Somebody waters the plant,

or oils it, maybe. Somebody

arranges the rows of cans

so that they softly say:

esso—so—so—so

to high-strung automobiles.

Somebody loves us all.

The expression of love elevates the mundane scene, elevating the simple furniture and plant to the grandiose language Bishop uses, the “taboret” and “hirsute begonia.” The touch of human love transforms. As for the “somebody” who loves us all, it should surely begin with our mothers. There are, sadly, those instances when such love and care are absent or cut short, but mothers are the people primed to love the squalling, wrinkled, toothless child coming into the world. When that love is unleashed, a mother’s care for her child can transform the world. It’s not simply nature and instinct. This love must be painfully refined, as it is not love for an abstraction or living doll, but for this particular child who is loud and smells and is terribly impatient and peckish.

For the mother who thinks glumly that’s all well and good for someone else but it just doesn’t suit her personality, we would do well to leave room for exploration. As Rilke noted, “If your daily life seems poor, do not blame it; blame yourself, tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches; for to the creator there is no poverty and no poor indifferent place.” Love is embodied and particular. The mother with her care for her child is a poet of the particular, transforming a dingy corner of the world. This is not the only way to love, but it is the beginning for everyone, because everyone had a mother.