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Virginia Hartman Books

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The Marsh Queen

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“One of the herbals I brought home from the library had a fascinating chapter on herbs and their connection to desire. For Elizabethans, a bundle of rosemary helped arrange an assignation, and an apple suggested libidinous intent. I picture Adlai's reaction to a sprig of rosemary left on his counter, or a juicy Fuji. Better yet, a "Florida butterfly" orchid from the swamp, since the same herbal had an entire page on the sensual properties of the orchid. It called the flower female----"open and inviting"----the root, male----"tuberous and reaching"----and the entire plant "hot and moist in operation.”

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“He gave me the birds, and he gave me the swamp. At some point he stopped trying to teach me the finer points of fishing. He saw what I liked about the place and supplied a way to describe it. "Pond chicken," he'd say, at the movement of something purple in the reeds, or "Kingfisher," when a small rocket flew past and ahead of us, close to the water. Once, in the same tone of voice, he said, "Swamp girl." I turned, quick, to see. "That's you, Loni Mae." He looked at me sideways and laughed. Shafts of sunlight shone through the Spanish moss above him. "Or no. I got a better name for you. The Marsh Queen.”

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“In college I had a feminist botany professor who said that the properties of herbs have been documented largely by men, but the knowledge has been passed down in an oral tradition among women, one generation to the next. Even when girls were deemed unworthy of literacy, the rhymes they heard their mothers recite, like I borage give courage, or Nettle out, dock in, dock remove the nettle sting, made them bearers of a rich knowledge. The woman in a village who knew about herbs was called the Wise Woman.”

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“Just as I'm about to step into the canoe, an egret flies low over the glassy water. The bird is white all over with delicate wisps at the head and tail. We both stop to look. The egret tucks her long neck close to her body, and her wings nearly touch the shining surface. It's a mirror---egret above, egret below. She's followed by a series of dark circles, the air from each wingbeat lifting the water. "What's that one called?" Adlai asks, though he surely must know. "Snowy," I say. "Snowy egret.”

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“Revelers in green stumbled from pub to pub as I drove away yesterday from springtime in Washington, a collage of the organic and the man-made--- redbud and sidewalk, dogwood and car. Small trees in the easement showed feathery pink blossoms. I've left the delicacy of spring for a hot, sodden green, the cruise control carrying me south through Virginia and the Carolinas, Georgia, and farther on toward the place where Florida's panhandle curves in and resort beaches fade into a coastline of dense and mangrove and fingerling waterways. Slightly inland from the Gulf sits my hometown of Tenetkee, where the water transitions slowly to land.”

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“I have dealt with killahs before." I study her face. She is not speaking figuratively. Her dark eyes hold mine. "I told you where I came from." I do some quick math. In the 90's, around the time my world was shattered by my father's death, Sierra Leone was brutalized by civil war. Mariama would have been a young adult, watching everything around her being blown to pieces. I learned it as a fact in a college classroom. Mariama lived it. How little thought I've given to the life of this woman I've come to depend on.”

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“Lady, you must be from around here, right?" I resent the Lady. "Yes I am, and you?" "I just drove here from New Jersey. Maybe you could help me with directions? I'm trying to get to Fernandina Beach, my GPS is saying 'no signal.' " I take out my Florida map from the glove compartment. The young woman laughs. "That's funny," she says. "What?" "I didn't know anyone still used those." And who's the one who's lost?”

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“I come around the curve of a hardwood hammock to witness two herons, a great white and a great blue, having what looks like a territorial dispute. I slow the canoe. Another white heron stands in the shallows a short way off, either fishing or waiting to see who'll win. The white and the blue keep flying up, each trying to warn the other off, angling their wings so the light catches them first one way and then another. I sketch them fast, trying to record the unintended grace of their motion as well as the force of their intention. While they're concerned with power and territory and fishing rights, they have no idea how stunning the exchange makes them look. The blue heron, in particular, shows me the richness of her color from every angle.”

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“The public space of the museum is not my favorite, loud and full of tourists and school groups and hungry hordes. Their curiosity is endearing---they're acolytes for the natural world. And the marble gleams with architectural detail and precious objects all around. But on these, my gray days, entering the building carries the weight of death: all the specimens, thousands of carcasses of every species, stuffed or otherwise retrieved from oblivion so we can know them, yet all dead. The birds I draw and paint, all dead. On these days, my only defense is to imagine every pinned butterfly taking wing, every stuffed marsupial waking up, every preserved plant specimen blooming and carpeting the marble floor like a time-lapse forest, and every bird coming to life, flying up to the dome and away. On the days when the fog comes and hooks into my gut like a sharp-toothed parasite, these visions can save me. The steadier, more consistent salvation, of course, is the work. I can lose myself for hours drawing, for instance, the common loon, with its inky head, white banding at the neck, and an intricacy of pin dots and fractured rectangles cascading across the wings. With the right precision, I can bring the deadness of a bird skin to a striking facsimile of life.”

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“Delores, the Wise Woman of Botany, told me while I was in Washington that every seven years, employees of my pay grade are entitled to a sabbatical, and I'm two years late in taking mine. She helped me fill out the form. I listed my purpose: "to study the birds of the southeastern United States with an emphasis on the marshlands of Florida." Hugh Adamson sputtered an objection, but he couldn't do a thing. Apparently, the sabbatical is a long-standing Smithsonian policy that would actually take an Act of Congress to reverse. I didn't write on the form of my other intention: to freelance, get my name out there, and see whether Florida is where I belong.”

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“As departments, we aren't very respectful of one another. The geologists are the Rock People and Delores and Ginger are the Plant People. Here in Ornithology, we're the Bird People, the ichthyologists are the Fish People, the entomologists are the Bug People, those in Paleo are the Bone People, and Anthro is just Antho, because otherwise we'd have to call them the People People.”

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“There was one my dad told me, setting down the book, since he knew the story by heart, about a fairy queen who lived in the center of the marsh. She was both beautiful and terrible, angry at times and kind at others, and rarely seen by mortals. Mostly she took the form of a great blue heron, surveying her kingdom and all the creatures in it. She disdained most humans, except those she helped make the passage into the next world. But if a living person had a sincere wish and she deemed it noble, she would rise up out of the swamp in her true form, with her Spanish-moss hair and her eyes like the sharpest sunbeams, and she would ask the human to perform a nearly impossible task. If they did, she would grant the wish.”

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