Writing By Ear: Jo Ann Beard, "Cousins," The Boys of My Youth

Here’s something about language and structure in creative nonfiction. Jo Ann Beard opens her essay “Cousins” with a scene in which she and her cousin are both embryos in the womb of two sisters fishing on a small boat. At one point in the narrative the narrator’s aunt catches a fish. This is the scene:

            It is five a.m. A duck stands up, shakes out its feathers, and peers above the still grass at the edge of the water. The skin of the lake twitches suddenly and a fish springs loose into the air, drops back down with a flat splash. Ripples move across the surface like radio waves. The sun hoists itself up and gets busy, laying a sparkling rug across the water, burning the beads of dew off the reeds, baking the tops of our mothers’ heads. One puts on sunglasses and the other a plaid fishing cap with a wide brim.

            In the cold dark underwater, a long fish with a tattered tail discovers something interesting. He circles once and then has his breakfast before becoming theirs. As he breaks from the water to the air he twists hard, sending out a cold spray, sparks of green light. My aunt reels him in, triumphant, and grins at her sister, big teeth in a friendly mouth.

            “Why, you dirty rotten so-and-so,” my mother says admiringly. (17)

One of the things we can say to people who worry about the issue of truth in creative nonfiction, since Beard’s writing is strongly narrative and fiction-like, is that, no, Jo Ann Beard isn’t reporting what she knows from direct observation here—she was, after all, an embryo—but everything she presents here is retrievable information: she may have seen dated photos of that particular outing, which would give one set of details; she may have heard reminiscences of the day by her mother or aunt; she may have observed similar days herself and have direct knowledge of the behaviors of ducks and fish and sunshine on water and reeds. There is a felt truth about the scene, an imaginative recreation of an actual moment that the writer invests with metaphysical weight.

            But the reason I bring the scene up at all is to say something about the way Beard’s crafting of the scene here is important for later scenes in the essay. The narrator describes a community parade of children that she, her cousin Wendell, and their sisters are in. The younger girls walk alongside their bicycles with carefully-dressed dolls in the baskets; the older girls are dressed like baton twirlers and have been warned not to throw their batons into the air. Beard writes:

            The street is brilliant in the sun, and the children move in slow motion, dresses, cowboy hats, tap shoes, the long yellow teeth of the mean ponies. At the count of four, one of our sisters loses control, throws her baton high in the air and stops, one hand out to catch it when it comes back down.

            For a long, gleaming moment it hangs there, a silver hyphen against the hot sky. Over the hectic heads of the children and the smooth blue-and-white blur of crepe-papered spokes and handlebar streamers, above the squinting smiles and upturned eyes, a silver baton rises miraculously, lingers for a moment against the sun, and then drops back down, into the waiting hand. (24)

These two paragraphs repeat the pattern of the two from the opening of the essay, the first preparing us for the second, the separation giving emphasis and force to the image at the center of each second paragraph, the fish and the baton, both in mid-air. In the second paragraph about the baton, the first sentence establishes the idea that the baton “hangs there.” The second sentence, by holding off the main clause with two long prepositional phrases (“Over the hectic heads of the children and the smooth blue-and-white blur of crepe-papered spokes and handlebar streamers, above the squinting smiles and upturned eyes), keeps the baton suspended, as does the main clause with its compound predicate (“rises miraculously, lingers for a moment against the sun, and then drops back down” and the comma after “down,” which gives an additional pause before the baton fall “into the waiting hand.” This is one of those instances where a sentence doesn’t simply tell what happened (“One of our sisters threw a baton high into the air and caught it when it came back down”) but in effect replicates the experience, makes us live through the experience.

            For me that sentence alone is worth the price of admission to the essay, but Beard isn’t simply showing off her virtuosity in that passage. It harkens back to the first scene of the essay, with its air-borne fish, and to the final scene of the essay, a parallel moment when the sisters of the opening scene are alone in the hospital room of the narrator’s mother. (Both segments begin with the words: “Here is a scene.”) The two converse, the aunt knitting while the mother grows groggy from an injection and starts imagining things: “She’s drifting now, floating upward, her shot is taking effect. She gets a glimpse of something and then loses it, like a fish swimming in and out of view in the darkness under water. She struggles to the surface” (43-44). The water images link ambiotic fluid and lake and hallucination:

Her father bends over the bed to kiss her, as substantial as air; he’s a ghost, they won’t leave her alone. She moves slowly through the fluid and brings a thought to the surface. “We carried ours low and look what we got.” They swim through her lake, gray-eyed sisters, thin-legged and mouthy. They fight and hold hands, trade shoes and dresses, marry beautiful tall men, and have daughters together, two dark-eyed cousins, thin-legged and mouthy. A fish splashes, a silver arc against the blue sky, its scales like sequins. She startles awake. (44)

The fish imagery and silver imagery continues throughout the segment and the essay ends with this depiction of the mother’s dreams.

            My mother sleeps silently while my aunt thinks. As the invisible hands tend to her, she dives and comes up, breaks free of the water. A few feet over a fish leaps again, high in the air. Her arms move lazily back and forth, holding her up, and as she watches, the fish is transformed. High above the water, it rises like a silver baton, presses itself against the blue August sky, and refuses to drop back down. (45)

The essay, which is a long one, has been exploring the relationships between the two sisters over the course of their two daughters’ lives. This paragraph links central images of both the sisters’ relationship and the cousins’ and this motif running through the essay creates a network out of disparate and widely varied scenes. The narrator doesn’t need to explain what’s happening, only to narrate events and invoke in the reader emotional responses to certain moments. The fish and the baton may be artifacts of their lives but the narrator has given them symbolic weight, has made sense of them as emblems of certain elements of life. The images have energy, vitality, eboulience; they suggest irrepressibility, aspiration, liberation, transformation.

            This essay of commonplace experiences is elevated by the writer’s ability to discover the reverberations generated by the images of her life. Getting it into the language of the essay reproduces the reverberations in her readers.