A Memoir-like Novel: Beyond Mud and Vines, by Jacqueline Jorgensen A Review, by Christopher Mahon copyright 2003 All Rights Reserved

I’ve always admired those writers — and educators, critics, and thinkers — who believe that one of the primary duties of writers is to provide a voice for the voiceless.

Often the literary transaction occurs when an educated and able writer leaves his or her own world and ventures into the world of the less fortunate, the voiceless, and comes back with their story, and his or her own telling of it. I’m thinking of The Grapes of Wrath and, even, perhaps, George Orwell’s tale of the Spanish Civil War, Homage to Catalonia.

Then there are those tales where someone comes out of the world of the voiceless with their own story, and tells it in his or her own voice. No one speaks for them, really. They speak for themselves, sometimes in a kind of prose whose very style can, perhaps, metaphorically represent the struggle of the writer. It’s a style filled with determination and concern for the fundamental aspects of writing (not to mention life). I’m thinking now of the Jewish immigrant tale, The Breadgivers, by Anzia Yezierska. And I’m thinking now, too, of this tale of a Puerto Rican’s escape: Beyond Mud and Vines, by Jacqueline Jorgensen.

Here’s the story:

A young girl lives in the jungles of Puerto Rico in the 1940s. The terrain is marked by hills and creeks and one major river. Her family lives on a farm, which consists of a shack built on stilts, some farm animals, and simple crops like beans and corn. There’s no plumbing, no electricity, not enough silverware or dishes for everyone in the family at the same meal. It’s an isolated place in which not even the hand of the law can reach. A school is a long walk away, but the children in this particular family don’t attend much more than a year or two of it. The father is mean. The mother is hard-working but scared. The kids are hard-working but scared, too. The father beats kids, threatens them, lords his power over those less powerful than he.

Jorgensen’s description of this family in that far away place: it’s rather like a description of hell. You see that family in that little shack, you see how mean and angry and violent the father is, and you see that the kids and the wife have no other place to go. They have to live inside those small walls, on that little jungle farm. You think that another family, over the hill, may actually be happy. May actually contain parents that are affable and loving despite their poverty and that their own home is a little bit like heaven, for all its frugality.

But not in Sabina’s home (Sabina is the name of our heroine).

Sabina lives in hell.

And when her father threatens her young life, she has the courage to run away from him. He thinks she’s died, swallowed up by the river, like other children who have been swallowed up, but she hasn’t been. She’s begun a perilous journey through the jungle, through the night, to civilization. She takes her skill as a sewer — before she escaped, she had worked at home, sewing gloves to make money for the family — and begins a new life, in a city far from the jungle farm.

She’s only twelve.

There’s a lot to this story: a lot of events that might seem unbelievable if we didn’t know they were true. We know they’re true because of a simple sentence on the back cover of the book: "Jacqueline Jorgensen’s [novel] depicts the dramatic details of her escape from slavery and brutality in the hills of Puerto Rico in 1947." The story presents many facts of life that I certainly could never have imagined had I not read about them in Jorgensen’s book.

Take this for example: Sabina’s teacher at school tells the kids to have their parents buy them toothbrushes. Sabina’s father would not.

Every page of this 433-page novel brings a detail of life that is aeons away from the life of, say, someone who grew up in suburban America. That’s part of what makes this book unforgettable. The other part is that it’s a well-constructed story, moving with an inexorable power, carrying the reader along.

But there’s something else going on.

Beyond Mud and Vines is a heroic tale, a mini-myth.

Students in grade school, high school and college can debate over what the word "hero" — or "heroine" — means. Scholars and cultural critics can write books about the meaning of the word, too. For me, at the moment, a hero is someone who faces deeply adverse circumstances — circumstances in which you could easily die, or must struggle through to survive — and meets them with the best of human attributes: love, courage, willingness to work.

Sabina is heroic in the way she embraces the obligations of life as if they were a feature of love. Her ability to embrace life allows her to meet some very good people and some very good fortune in the city to which she escapes. And she returns to help her family once she improves her own situation. It’s not a romantic tale. But it is a tale of love (by that I mean, a tale of a generous spirit); a tale about a young girl who has an unselfconscious ability to love people, to be grateful, and to work hard as an automatic response to life.

It’s also a tale that has many profound passages, that arise from Jorgensen’s precise command of the language, her ability to combine narration with reflection, and her ability to know the truth of her own — or, perhaps, her young heroine’s — feelings.

When Sabina’s beloved godfather dies, and Sabina must go to his house to complete "the crown of nine virgins for the wake," she reflects: "I guessed that grownups were weird. They stopped being mad at each other just because some people died."

As she makes her way through the jungle on her escape, through "bushes and vines," up steep hills, and "into a swarm of buzzing wasps," looking for shelter in the night away from "the scorpions, spiders, and centipedes," she reflects: "I should have been terrified, but I had done enough shaking in the past two days to last me a lifetime. My heart had pounded so hard so many times that I knew it had to be cracked and bruised."

Regarding her father, she writes: "What if Papa knows more about the mountains and this city than I think he does — and somehow figures out that I didn’t drown, but ran away instead?"

"The thought was so painful I could hardly breathe. ... I would still be careful, and I would look around and over my shoulders. But I would not allow myself to live in fear that he would catch up with me."

And of her mother she writes, in a passage that describes the beginning of Sabina’s escape (her mother thinks she’s going to fetch water from the springs): "Walking into the woods, I heard Mama holler, ‘Don’t fall down again. If you break a leg, I won’t be here to fix it.’

"I turned and saw her at the window. ‘I’ll be careful,’ I yelled back, then ran, with a painful lump in my throat and tears burning my eyes. Maybe I hated to cause Mama heartache by leaving, or maybe I felt sorry for myself because I didn’t believe that she loved me."

Fear of a father finding you? A belief that your own mother did not love you?

This problematic (to say the least) relationship to her parents and the drama of her struggle to transform her life — however extreme in their particulars — take on a universal quality, to which many readers will be able to relate on some levels. Sabina may represent her creator, the author of this book. But she may also represent many other Sabinas, in or out of a jungle, who are struggling through their own journeys.

So many silent stories hang on the faces of the people we meet in the street, or, perhaps, on the other side of a counter. Beyond Mud and Vines can implant one vivid story in your heart, so that you can look at your own life in a new way; and so that you can look at every other (stranger’s) face that you meet and wonder: Where has that person come from? What struggle has brought him or her to this place? Does he or she deserve to be honored simply by virtue of the silent story that beats within his or her heart?

Yet ultimately it is the particulars of this work — the extreme aspects of her journey, the singularly welcoming experience she eventually receives — that carry the most power.

You’ll rarely, if ever, meet another fictional character like Sabina.

Or hear of a story like Jorgensen’s.

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