The Berry Family’s Founding Myth

Wendell Berry, the agrarian novelist and poet, has long played with the line between fiction and autobiography. In the collection of essays and stories The Art of Loading Brush (2017), for instance, Berry included two stories that explicitly blended his fictional world of Port William with Port Royal, the Kentucky town in which the past several generations of Berry’s family have lived and farmed. In the short story “The Order of Loving Care,” in particular, Andy Catlett, Berry’s fictional counterpart, meets several of Berry’s real friends. Marce Catlett (2025), Berry’s new Andy Catlett novel, brings this interplay of fiction and history to a new level. Though the novel ostensibly remains in Port William, it reads like a memoir, albeit one written in third person and cast in fictional form. As Berry lives into his tenth decade, he meditates on the way a simple story – one held in place and handed down from one generation to another – can shape our lives beyond all expectation.

The novel opens with Marce Catlett, Andy’s paternal grandfather, waking in the wee hours to catch a train into Louisville to oversee the sale of his 1906 tobacco crop. Thanks to the monopolistic practices of James B. Duke and his American Tobacco Company, only one buyer bids at the auction, and thus the price fetched by the crop isn’t even enough to pay for its transport and warehouse fees. In other words, Marce returns home not making but owing money on his year’s labor.

This story plays a seminal role both in the fictional world of Port William and in Berry’s own family history. It sets the trajectory, for instance, of his earlier novel Remembering and his 2012 Jefferson Lecture, “It All Turns on Affection.” The recurrence of the story in Berry’s writings makes sense as this traumatic experience altered the lives of all those who suffered it. And it wasn’t just the Berry family; James B. Duke’s shady business dealings caused trauma and violence throughout the tobacco growing states and sparked the Black Patch Tobacco Wars. Because Berry’s grandparents, Pryor and Martha Berry, subsisted from their farming and had other produce to sell, they barely managed to keep their farm.

Their son John Berry (Wendell Berry’s father, fictionalized as Wheeler Catlett) realized he’d have a difficult time making a living from this farm. His life took a dramatic turn when a candidate for the House of Representatives (Virgil Chapman, who ended up serving as a congressman and, later, a senator) heard John make an impressive speech and asked him to come work for him in Washington, DC. John agreed on the condition that he’d be able to attend law school. He worked for Chapman during the day and studied at night. When John graduated, Chapman helped line up a good job for him in Chicago. But – much to Chapman’s chagrin – he turned this down and returned to Kentucky, where he practiced law and helped lead what became the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association. (The Kentucky Historical Society has a wonderful interview with John Berry Sr. that covers much of his life story, though it doesn’t cover John’s role as a defense attorney in one of the most sensational murder trials of the 1930s.

John married Virginia Perry in 1933, and a year later they had Wendell, whom they named after John’s older brother. A year after that, John Berry Jr. (Henry Catlett in the Port William stories) joined the family. Like his father, John Jr. was a lawyer and served for a time as president of the Burley Tobacco Growers Cooperative Association. He was a Kentucky state senator from 1974 to 1981, and part of that time he was the majority floor leader. (There’s also an excellent oral history interview with John Berry Jr.) The tobacco program that both John Berrys led set allotments for farmers and guaranteed them a “parity price” for their crop. This, along with the 1911 Supreme Court ruling United States v. American Tobacco Company, which held that James B. Duke’s company violated antitrust law and ordered it broken up into smaller pieces, gave farmers in Henry County a steady, dependable source of income. Because of the tobacco program, the Port Royal community in which Wendell grew up had an economic stability and cultural coherence.

Over the decades, however, globalizing markets, technological advances, and a growing awareness of tobacco’s health problems contributed to the demise of the program and undermined the financial health of the Berrys’ rural community. When Wendell’s daughter Mary started The Berry Center in 2011, her aim was to find new ways to stabilize the farming economy as the tobacco program had once done. And she points to her great-grandfather’s story as the inspiration for her efforts. It wouldn’t be a stretch to summarize the efforts of both Johns, Wendell, and now Mary as seeking to give farmers the economic and cultural dignity that James Duke’s tobacco monopoly threatened to steal from John Berry Sr.

As it stands, most farmers must pay whatever prices the chemical, seed, and implement companies set and then sell their crops at whatever prices the global commodity markets offer. Not only do they have almost no leverage in these transactions, but they also have little foresight into what the prices will be, and this lack of predictability makes it hard to know what crops to plant or animals to raise. The tobacco program, for all its limitations, gave small farmers a dependable economy. And while tobacco became an indefensible crop once its carcinogenic properties became known (Wendell has written about this in the past; see “The Problem of Tobacco”), its production sustained a particular kind of community. In Marce Catlett, Andy calls it a “family crop” and a “convivial crop” because of the handwork it required, work often done by family members and neighbors while sharing conversation, songs, and laughter. Over the course of thirteen months, an acre of tobacco in 1949 might require 460 hours of labor while an acre of wheat would take only five. This was a labor-intensive, high-value crop, and its loss has diminished the social bonds of rural communities across the tobacco-growing states.

I’ve summarized this story with historical names and dates, but Berry’s novel recounts it within the terms of his Port William fiction. The details match Wendell’s own history, down to Andy’s education at a military academy and the tragic murder of the uncle for whom Andy is named. The differences between Berry’s history and its rendition in Marce Catlett are mostly minor. Andy goes straight from college to working for a farming magazine before returning to purchase a farm near where he grew up. In real life, however, Wendell attended graduate school and went to Europe on a Guggenheim fellowship before teaching briefly at New York University and then, over two separate stints, the University of Kentucky, working for Rodale’s farming magazines in between. The major difference between Wendell and Andy – Andy’s loss of his hand in a 1975 farming accident – doesn’t come up in Marce Catlett. I’ve written some about that difference elsewhere, and it’s interesting that while Berry returns to this amputation in his 2015 short story “Dismemberment,” he doesn’t mention it in this new novel.

What are we to make of Berry’s choice to write a memoir of sorts in fictional form? Berry himself has already written eloquently about this choice – most notably in his essay “Imagination in Place.” All his fiction inhabits a tension between life and imagination, between the needs of his place and community and his desire to imagine an aesthetic, literary whole. Berry is a morally serious writer, and while even some of his friends find his art too didactic, he makes no apologies for prioritizing the life and health of his place over what Yeats calls “the perfection of the work.” Berry is interested in the difference that stories make in particular places. Casting this one in fictional form highlights its status as myth; not myth as unreality but as a story that orients a community.

Repeatedly in Marce Catlett Berry returns to what the novel’s subtitle calls “the force of a story,” and particularly the force a story like Marce’s devalued tobacco crop has when it’s remembered in the place it occurred. After detailing the story in the opening pages, the narration turns to the theme pondered in the rest of the novel – the afterlife this story has over the next hundred and ten years: “So Marce remembered it to Wheeler, who told it to Andy, who in a world radically changed needed a long time and great care to imagine what he heard, but as he has imagined it he has passed it on to his children, for the story has been, as it is still, a force and a light in their place.”

At times it seems this story’s life will fade as its inheritors are drawn to other places. When Wheeler goes to work in Washington, DC, Andy prays a strange, time-warp prayer for his father to return, knowing that “in Wheeler’s absence, the story of his family’s loss and suffering in 1907, so strong a memory and motive as it has been in his mind, and in other minds following his, would not have been told again to anybody to whom it would have mattered.” But Wheeler does return, and the story is remembered in the family and community where it happened. And when Andy too returns after his time away at college and writing for the farming magazine, he discovers that in coming home “he came again into the story and the stories of his family’s life in that place.” Outside of this context, the danger is that Andy would recall “‘typically country’ fragments of his story to entertain his urban friends. Like a host of predecessors, he was selling his birthright for laughs or ‘shock value’ – a danger escapable perhaps only by going home.”

Is it to escape this fate that Berry casts his family’s story into fictional form when telling it in public, outside the community where it resonates palpably? Perhaps. For if Berry doesn’t want to exploit his family, mining their stories for social or literary plaudits, he does want the stories of his people to have a public life and inspire the political, economic, and social reforms that might better value the work of people like Pryor Berry. The narrator seems to rue the lack of public concern about Marce’s story, noting, “If it has at present no public life, it continues to live locally, to inspire local work, and to produce local benefits. So far, it has not ended.” As refracted in his Port William fiction, the Berry family stories have gained a public life and have inspired many readers to take up healing work in their own communities and on their own land.

Yet as Marce Catlett makes clear, even the local life of this story about a stolen year’s work ramifies in diverse ways: different members of the family and community inherit and react to it differently. In particular, Andy, his father, and his grandfather all respond in their own ways. All three men, Andy comes to see in his old age, have been “made brothers by their shared vision of a life permanently settled in a place chosen and beloved” but also “by their failure” to realize this vision for their own community. Yet they all respond to this failure with slightly different attitudes. Marce exhibits a stoic acceptance of whatever hardships “Old Marster” sends. He resigns himself to the vagaries and injustices of the market in the same fashion that he accepts the weather, good or bad. According to farmers with this posture, cussing the weather or the price a crop fetches is about the worst thing you can do.

Wheeler, however, is a man of boundless energy, of dissatisfaction with anything out of place or wrong, and of a passion to right these wrongs. He applies himself to his legal studies and later to his law practice and his work with the tobacco program because he wants to do all he can to stem his community’s economic and ecological and cultural disintegration. Wheeler is a demanding man, and his high expectations can set him at odds with his sons and his tenants and his neighbors.

Andy inherits parts of both men’s character, but his bedrock conviction that the world is beloved transmutes Marce’s stoic acceptance and Wheeler’s rage to fix what is unjust into an eschatological hope. The story of the 1906 tobacco crop propels Marce to work relentlessly his whole life despite having no hope. It propels Wheeler to work relentlessly for a hope that is seen. And it propels Andy to work in the light cast by a given hope:

His remembering and his thoughts have carried him by now far outside the matter of fact of this world’s present age. He stands now with his father and his father’s father, and with others dear to them, in the presence of a longed-for beautiful land that they have desired as if seen afar, that yet is the same, the very land that they have known and that they know, a love-made land, dark to them until by their own love they came to see it.

This posture enables his lifelong advocacy for seemingly losing causes – the cause of small farmers, rural communities, and just economies – to eventuate not in bitterness but in gratitude:

Andy’s grief for the things that are lost affirms his love for them, as even the loss of them affirms the bounty by which they once existed, for in this world grief goes hand in hand with gratitude…. The history of the Port William countryside, like that of the world since 1492, has included so much disgrace and destruction that the continuation so far of the life of it, and of the beauty still of so much of it, seems to Andy to be a wonder almost equal to the wonder of its creation in the beginning. It is a wonder to him that he and his people have been spared so far the just consequence of their folly. He thinks that a great patience and a great forgiveness must so far have been in force, and he gives thanks.

A story remembered in its place exerts a moral force. This is what Berry’s new novel shows us. But its inheritors must decide how they will respond to this force. As this novel narrates the history of this story’s life in this place, the Berry family myth takes on a public life and force, requiring its readers to decide how we will respond. May it inspire the local work that produces local benefits, but even more profoundly, may it inspire gratitude for the divine patience and forgiveness that scripts all our stories, even when they are marked by the loss of beloved goods.