Blackberry Winter

“Blackberry Winter” is a 1946 short story by American author Robert Penn Warren. The story features nine-year-old Seth, an innocent and optimistic Tennessee boy whose day is narrated from the perspective of his ambivalent adult self. Often considered Warren’s magnum opus for its vivid and articulate blend of mid-century realism and existentialism, the short story illuminates the depth and breadth of rural life in the twentieth-century American South. It also explores the situational irony intrinsic to growing older, showing how new experiences continually reshape one’s memories of the past. Warren named the story “Blackberry Winter in homage to the strange cool period that takes place in June in Tennessee.

The story is set during an especially cool day in the so-called blackberry winter. Seth’s mother has told him to put shoes on if he wants to go outside; he goes outside barefoot anyway, with the intent of feeling just how cold the ground is for himself. Before he steps outside, he notices a stranger approaching the house from afar. Seth’s mother reins in the dogs, joining Seth to watch the man approach. In hindsight, Seth relates, “everything was wrong” about his appearance; his demeanor and dress both suggest danger; he carries a parcel and a knife. Seth’s innocent nine-year-old self is intrigued by the man. The man arrives at the door and asks for money. Seth’s mother agrees to employ him.

Seth observes the man get to work removing dead chicks from the family’s fowl enclosure. He recalls the jerking, machinelike way in which he tosses each bird into a bucket, and how he later washed his filthy hands before a meal. Eventually, the man’s menacing character wears Seth down, and he is unable to continue watching. He leaves to check out the creek, which has been flooded so heavily that the bridge is underwater.

Several other locals have gathered around the bridge to watch. Seth’s father is there atop his horse, “admiring the flood.” He lifts Seth aboard the saddle to see it more clearly. They attend to the steady flow of the river and the clusters of floating debris. Eventually, a dead cow floats by. Seth hears the adults gossip about whose cow it might have been. They wonder whether anyone could eat a drowned cow if they were starving.

Seth’s father takes him back to their farm. Instead of going straight inside, Seth walks to a cabin on their property rented out by a family of sharecroppers. His friend Jebb lives there with his parents, Old Jebb and Dellie. Seth expects them to warmly invite him in but finds that Dellie is sick. Old Jebb explains that the June cold portends the end of the world, and expresses his belief that the world is now full to the brim with “sinful folks.” Seemingly out of nowhere, Dellie snaps out of her fever and slaps Jebb across the face. Unsure what to make of the occurrence, Seth tells Jebb about the man who has come to work at his house. The story does not seem to register with anyone, and the family remains absorbed in the house’s dark atmosphere.

Seth returns home. Later on, the stranger gets into an argument with his father. Seth’s father fires the tramp, paying him off for his last half-day. In response, the man condemns the farm and taunts Seth’s father. Then he spits on the ground in front of his father’s right shoe. Seth’s father glares at the man until he leaves. Still intrigued by the man’s ominous presence, Seth walks with him, set back by a distance, and asks him where he is from. The stranger blows him off, but he persists, following him. At last, the tramp turns and threatens to slit his throat if he follows him farther.

The story then shifts to the present day, thirty-five years after the arrival of the stranger. Seth’s parents have both passed away. Jebb is in jail, and tragically, Dellie died early. Old Jebb, however, is going strong and is more than a century old. The narrator admits that though the stranger threatened to murder him, he continued to follow him for those three decades. The story ends with the ambiguity of this notion of “following,” suggesting that Seth might not have physically pursued the man, but was, nonetheless, unable to shake the experience of meeting him. “Blackberry Winter” demonstrates how innocence does not require a dramatic twist, or even an intelligible story, to dissolve in the mind of a child.