You cannot drive to the community of Port William, it is a fictional place that was birthed in the imagination of Wendell Berry. Port William is a tiny place, nestled on the south bank of the Kentucky River. (click here to see the map). Residents of Port William, or the membership, as Berry referred to them, are primarily farmers. But there you will also find shop-owners, a banker, a lawyer, a boarding house operator, a cafe owner, and the barber. The residents could get most of what they needed in Port William, but the membership would often have to travel to Hargrave, about ten miles down the road, for specialty items or entertainment.
All kinds of people make up The Membership. There is the town barber, Jayber Crow, a life-long bachelor who lived upstairs from his barber shop. An avid reader, he also worked as the community’s grave digger at the church cemetery. Hannah Coulter lived her entire adult life in Port William, she was married twice before she was twenty-five, her first husband having lost his life in WW2. And in my mind, the backbone of the community was Mat Feltner. Mat was a farmer, and for me is a picture of what a man should be. He was quiet, steady, kind, fair-minded, strong, forgiving, and loving. I’ve thought of getting a t-shirt made with the words “What Would Mat Feltner Do?”, but only a handful of Wendell Berry fans would understand. Mat and Bess’s son, Virgil, was Hannah’s Coulter’s first husband, the one killed in Europe. Mat understood loss, but his steadfast strength and integrity never wavered. Mat Feltner is one of my heroes. (click here and scroll down to see the membership’s “family tree”)
But in this Port William membership, all of the characters, they are flawed. All of them. For some we only get hints of their shortcomings, others have their character defects on full display in a very public way. There are individuals who drink too much. There are some who are racists. There is a man who is not faithful to his wife. There are hints at laziness, and a failure to take responsibility. These are not perfect people, and as Wendell Berry creates and develops all of these characters he is honest about who they are, warts and all.
But in telling their stories, and telling the big story of the place, each person, however flawed, is treated with great respect and dignity. They are all treated with mercy. Each character, even as they struggle and err and fail, they are all given the opportunity to “save face,” and they are given any benefit of the doubt. They are all treated with respect and dignity even in their brokenness.
Wendell Berry died a few days ago. It was a great loss. He was a farmer himself. He was a poet, an essayist, and a novelist. I never met him, or saw him in person. He and his wife were very private, living on their farm in Kentucky. But I believe that he, in his life, tried to demonstrate that same respect and dignity for those he knew. And whether it is the fictional characters of Port William, or Berry’s neighbors in his home of Port Royal, or our community of Powhatan, we all have the opportunity to treat each other with that same dignity and respect.
Amid differences and mistakes and failures, we can still choose to build up, and forgive, and love, and show mercy. We can treat our neighbors with dignity and respect, with decorum and kindness. I think this practice in the fictional place of Port William is so attractive because we see how it is desperately missed at times and places in our real community. But maybe this is a call to us to do what we can, in our real time and place, to make it a reality. May it be so.
If you are interested in entering Wendell Berry’s fictional community of Port William, here’s a list of his “Port William Novels:”
Nathan Coulter (1960)
A Place on Earth (1967)
The Memory of Old Jack (1974)
The Wild Birds (1986)
Remembering (1988)
A World Lost (1996)
Jayber Crow (2000)
That Distant Land (2002)
Hannah Coulter (2004)
Andy Catlett (2006)
A Place in Time (2012)
How It Went (2022)
Marce Catlett (2025)