For Linda's birthday, we drove to Perkasie, Pennsylvania, to visit the Pearl S. Buck House & Historic Site, a place long on my To-Visit list.
Pearl Buck was an international phenomenon—a prolific best-selling author and a pioneering activist, writing, organizing, speaking, and fundraising for many causes, including women's equality, the adoption of mixed-race children, the needs of children with disabilities, cross-cultural understanding, and civil rights. (First image: Portrait of Pearl Buck, at 72, by Freeman Elliott)
Pearl Buck's dialogue, American Argument, published in 1950, with Eslanda "Essie" Goode Robeson, a Black woman, is still relevant today. (Essie Robeson, an anthropologist, actor, and activist, was the business manager and wife of Paul Robeson, the singer, actor, professional football player, and civil rights activist.)
Pearl Buck's highly visible, outspoken activism prompted FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover to to open a file on her in 1937 that eventually amounted to close to three hundred pages.
I first encountered Pearl Buck in the late 1950s when my mother handed me a copy of a book and said, "Here, Pen, read this."
The book was Pearl Buck’s best-selling novel The Good Earth, the vivid and gripping story, set in China the 1920s, of the tumultuous family life of Wang Lung and O-Lan . (It was a best seller again in 2004 when Oprah Winfrey chose it for her Oprah Book Club.)
Published in 1931, The Good Earth won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1932,
and contributed to Pearl Buck being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in
1938 ”for her rich and truly epic description of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces.”. (She was the fourth woman and the first American woman to win.)
Born Pearl Comfort Sydenstricker, she grew up in China, the bilingual and bicultural daughter of American missionaries. She attended college in America, and then returned to China and married John Lossing Buck. In total, Pearl Buck lived half of her life—for forty years—in China, a time of upheaval and dramatic change in the country.
In 1920, Pearl Buck had a daughter, Carol, who had Phenylketonuria, a rare inherited disorder, now treatable, that causes protein to build up in the body, potentially damaging the brain. For years, Buck struggled with Carol's developmental delays and sought treatments. Finally in 1929, she returned to America to find long-term care for Carol. “I resolved that my child, whose natural gifts were obviously unusual, even though they were never to find expression, was not to be wasted,” wrote Buck. “In one way, if not the other, her life must count. To know that it was not wasted might assuage what could not be prevented or cured.”
She selected the the Vineland Training School at Vineland, in Vineland, New Jersey, a place where people with developmental disabilities could live independently in cottages. Carol lived there until her death in 1992.
In 1950, Pearl Buck published a landmark book, The Child Who Never Grew,
that gave groundbreaking public visibility to children with developmental disabilities. “So by this most sorrowful way I was compelled to tread, I learned respect and reverence for every human mind,” Buck wrote. “It was my child who taught me to understand so clearly that all people are equal in their humanity and that all have the same human rights.”
That same year, 1950, David Swindal, who was 10 years old at the time, got a copy of The Good Earth at the public library in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. His great-grandmother had taught him how to read at age 4 from the family Bible. "Much of what he read,: he recalled, "went over my head. But I could tell even then it was practically as beautiful as the King James version of the Bible. The way Miss Buck put words together. She has given me a lifetime of fabulous literature." Many years later, Swindal learned that Carol Buck's grave marker in he Vineland Training School Cemetery, a tin plate stamped with her name, had disappeared, He secured a granite marker. Put it in the back of his truck and drove from Alabama to Vineland, New Jersey. It was his way to say—'Oh, thank you Miss Buck.'"—for the "many hours, days, nights, weeks, years really the pleasure of reading Miss Buck gave me.”
The marker is etched with: CAROLINE G. "CAROL"/BUCK/1920-1992/BELOVED DAUGHTER OF/AUTHOR AND HUMANITARIAN/PEARL S. BUCK. Forty people attended the dedication ceremony on April 9, 2022.
Our tour started in the Welcome Center where our guide, Sue Ramspacher,
reviewed an illustrated timeline. On our way to Pear Buck’s house we stopped at a bronze statue created by a sculptor Selma Burke in honor of her friend Pearl Buck—Uplift.
I had once attended a tribute to Selma Burke whose bas
relief portrait of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the model for his image on the obverse of the dime. But I did not know the story that Sue told: The two women, one white, one black, met at segregated restaurant in North Carolina. They could buy food but not eat it inside the restaurant. Selma Burke and her family were seated outside when Pearl Buck arrived with her mixed-race daughter. Selma invited Pearl and her daughter to join them, the start of a devoted friendship.
Below are a few of my photographs from our visit (click to enlarge).
Pearl Buck House: In 1935, Buck and her second husband and publisher Richard Walsh bought Green Hills Farm and renovated a 1830s farmhouse where they worked and raised seven adopted children, including four mixed-race children from Asia, Europe and the United States, and foster children. Note the greenhouses attached to the house. An avid gardener, Pear Buck once wrote, “When a story halts and its people refuse to speak, an hour’s work among the plants will melt the most stubborn material into something alive and responsive.” Several specialized gardens decorate the grounds: Rain Garden, Rainbow Garden, Peony Garden, and Japanese Garden. Two flowers have been named in honor of Pearl S. Buck—a red camellia and a white peony with a few petals lined with red pigment.
Desk and typewriter: The house is filed with things that Pearl Buck brought with her from China such as the desk and typewriter she used to write The Good Earth.
Welcome House Label: On December 24, 1948, a 15-month-old mixed-race child was delivered to the house to be cared for by Pearl Buck. When she discovered that no adoption agency would place a child with brown skin, she founded Welcome House in 1949. “I was indignant so I started my own damned agency,” she explained. The child that Pearl Buck ook in the day before Christmas in 1948 was the “first Welcome House child placed in a final loving home. 63 years later, he would become the Chairman of the Pearl S. Buck International."
Apparel: Manikins throughout the house are clothed in Pearl Buck’s apparel. The label identifies this as a Maria Wohl Suit. “Maria Wohl was a high fashion designer in the 1960s. Ms. Buck preferred to wear tailored skirt suits for business affairs. . . Ms, Buck used a piece of fabric . . .to have this hat made." Note the books in the background. There were bookshelves everywhere. The label for the kimono reads: “Ms. Buck went to Japan many times . . .Several trips were for her work with Amerasian children and children with disabilities. These kimonos were given to Ms. Buck as gifts from the people she served.”
Pear S. Buck died on March 6, 1973, at her home Danby, Vermont. As she requested, she was buried at Green Hills Farm. Her grave site is just off the road leading to the Welcome Center. On our way out, we stopped to pay our respects. Her east-facing marker of Vermont granite, set before a stand of native Chinese bamboo, is etched with her Chines signature, or chop—Sai Zhenzhu (Precious Gem Silk Knitter).
Pearl Buck’s Oriental Cookbook is from my personal collection: Note Pearl Buck’s note on the back cover about preferring to “share the meals our Chinese servants prepared for themselves . . . . My mother habitually worried over my small appetite but I never enlightened her, naughty child, that I was already well fed.”
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