seeing as this blog is 3 months old already, and i’ve been in west virginia for a couple of weeks now, it’s about time to tell you about my job—which is why i’m here in the first place. after all, why else would a body move to pocahontas county, population 9,000?
my official title is “americorps VISTA volunteer,” working at the “pearl s. buck birthplace,” which is a mouthful. a fancy way of saying “i’m getting paid a little to do a lot, and all in the middle of nowhere.” hope that doesn’t sound too complain-y, but let’s just call a spade a spade, shall we?
in the same vein, the pearl s. buck birthplace doesn’t exactly have a monopoly on her legacy. the fact of the matter is, pearl buck barely lived in this house at all. her parents, as many people know, were missionaries in china for near about 40 years. after several of their children died young, they returned home on furlough--whereupon pearl s. herself was born in her mother’s childhood home in hillsboro, west virginia (which is the aforenamed “birthplace,” of course—also known as ‘the stulting house,’ after her mother’s family). they returned to chinkiang (zhenjiang if you’re, you know, actually chinese) with the infant, returning only twice in the next twenty years. as a result, pearl buck probably only spent one year total in the house—not a lot of time.
however, the pearl s. buck birthplace isn’t completely without provenance—pearl buck wrote a book entitled My Mother’s House, essentially declaring her love for the hillsboro area and the stulting home—during the course of which, she says:
I hope it will live a new life, not for myself or for my family but for people. I would like it to belong to everyone who cares to go there. From that house there has come so much life that it ought never to die or fall into ruin. For my ancestors it provided shelter and home in a new land, a house where they lived their new lives with traditional dignity and ancient faith in the fine things of life, in beauty of art and music, in the value of education, in the necessity of integrity and goodness. For my mother it provided a home, living forever in her thought and memory, though she made dwelling places in a far country. For me it was a living heart in the country I knew was my own but which was strange to me until I returned to the house where I was born. For me that house was a gateway to America. May it live again, my mother's house, and may it prove for others, too, a gateway to new thoughts and dreams and ways of life! (p. 30-31)
boom. there you have it: the good people of pocahontas county took her at her word, the women’s clubs helped raise money to buy the ol’ homestead, and it became a house museum. since then, the organization’s gone through some twists and turns, and came out a little worse for wear. which is where i (along with the other VISTA volunteers we’ve had) come in. the museum board has a (very, very long and detailed) list of goals, which i’m supposed to help them accomplish. i have my own set of goals, and hopefully between the two, some kind of magic will happen.
so there you have it! a sufficiently vague description of my job duties. it’ll get clearer in the very near future, promise.
