Claiming the Broom

There was an old woman tossed up in a basket
fifteen times as high as the moon,
and where she was going, I couldn’t but ask it,
for in her hand she carried a broom.

“Old woman, old woman, old woman,” quoth I,
“Oh whither, oh whither, oh whither so high?”
“To sweep the cobwebs out of the sky.”
“May I go with you?”
“Yeah, by and by.”

This long-forgotten and apparently history-less nursery rhyme came to me in pieces early this morning on a cold, windy Kentucky April day. I loved the illustration in The Big Book of Fairy Tales because the old woman looked not particularly old but full of the excitement of her experience, sailing above the clouds in her basket. I didn’t wonder who tossed her. Perhaps she tossed herself.

Many of the old nursery rhymes carry dismaying messages to little girls: a woman who swallowed a fly—“I don’t know why she swallowed a fly”—or lived in a shoe crammed with a dreadful number of children. But the old woman tossed up in the basket was different; she had taken her life in her hands and seemed the better for it.

I don’t like traveling—I miss Pip—but I have to admit to myself that it does open the mind. Or at least it can. Having chosen, at the Rubenstein Library at Duke, the thirty photos that will be published in my biography of Doris Duke, due out next spring, and done some digging in my own archive there (my, how much I have sent them over the years!) for some rich mulch for my next memoir, Little Brother: The Short Life and Strange Death of Jonathan Worth Bingham, and having endured, with dear friends, another big book fair—these fairs now celebrate how much more we want contact with writers than we want to buy their books—I am now in my cabin at Wolf Pen Mill Farm on this blowy day… thinking of brooms.

“To sweep the cobwebs out of the sky.”

And perhaps also to sweep the cobwebs from men’s minds.

This is Trump country, or is supposed to be. Louisville, ten miles away, is a pocket of liberalism, as is my home city, Santa Fe, but Kentucky is a poor state, also like New Mexico, and both depended for decades on extractive industries which are dying if not dead: coal, natural gas, oil. A stout broom, like the one I bought last fall at Berea College, is needed to sweep the particular cobwebs away that obscure that fact.

Coal is never coming back and its death has nothing to do with Mexico. Automation and cheaper forms of energy killed it. And it’s worth remembering that those generally well-paid, union protected jobs came with at a terrible price: black lung and other horrors. The old coal camps were full of twisted, broken men and the over-worked wives who held everything together. Women coal miners had a terrible time underground with angry men.

Now I need my broom to sweep my own eyes, if such an image is tolerable. I never thought Hillary Clinton would lose. And yet I was troubled, always, by remembering the jokes that pop up all around us, and not only in locker rooms. Jokes that are built, solid, on a foundation of hatred, which means that friends of people I know are still repeating that Mrs. Clinton is a crook and a criminal.

Based on what?

They don’t say, and they don’t need to say, because the rock of their hatred is so familiar, so accepted, even by me—now and then smiling, dimly, at one of their jokes.

So now I take my broom in hand to sweep some personal cobwebs away and then possibly a few that blur all our eyes. I’ll restore its magic to the rough-handled broom, made by a student from a mountain town paying for her college tuition at Berea with her skill. I’ll remember that the witch with her broom is also the woman tossed up in a basket—the high flyer, the visionary, terrifying to many… and more necessary now than ever.

04/28: Many other brooms are joining in!

In Women, Politics, Kentucky The Silver Swan Hillary Clinton Little Brother: A Memoir