WHO SHALL DELIVER ME?

God strengthen me to bear myself;
That heaviest weight of all to bear,
Inalienable weight of care.

All others are outside myself;
I lock my door and bar them out
The turmoil, tedium, gad-about.

I lock my door upon myself,
And bar them out; but who shall wall
Self from myself, most loathed of all?

If I could once lay down myself,
And start self-purged upon the race
That all must run ! Death runs apace.

If I could set aside myself,
And start with lightened heart upon
The road by all men overgone!

God harden me against myself,
This coward with pathetic voice
Who craves for ease and rest and joys

Myself, arch-traitor to myself;
My hollowest friend, my deadliest foe,
My clog whatever road I go.

Yet One there is can curb myself,
Can roll the strangling load from me
Break off the yoke and set me free.

Christina Rossetti, 1876

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Dust-Jacket Blurb

People lived differently then, did things for life, they made gestures that lasted for life . . .

Whose story is I Lock My Door Upon Myself? The fiction chronicles the life of Edith Margaret Freilicht, born 1890 and called "Calla" by her mother who died birthing her. Elusive, willful, eccentric, Calla is an enigma to the town of Shaheen, Eden County, New York, to her family, her husband, her children; a flame-haired beauty who views her surroundings and circumstances as a sleepwalker moving through a dream landscape. A woman whose life comes to be defined by her association with a black itinerant water diviner, Tyrell Thompson. The fiction is told by Calla's granddaughter, in part to reach an understanding, a recognition: Because we are linked by blood, and blood is memory without language.

One of the magical things about Joyce Carol Oates's talent is her enduring ability to reinvent not only the psychological space she inhabits when writing, but herself as well, as part of her own fiction. She is one of the most talented and versatile writers of our time. This brilliant and mysterious work is the first in a series of fictions in imaginative collaboration with works of art planned by The Ecco Press.

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Excerpt

She shut her door, she locked her door upon herself early in the winter of 1913 as soon as she'd sufficiently recovered from the trauma done to her body, able to walk with difficulty yet with stubborn persistence using a cane and her thin shoulders hunched, head bowed to protect her watery squinty eyes from the sun glaring fierce as a razor on the dullest of surfaces, and ever after that as the seasons reeled past, the years, the decades, Canada geese flyng north above the highest peak of the highest roof of the house, Canada geese flying south issuing their hoarse melancholy cries, and the invisible loons on the river, and the warning calls of red-winged blackbirds in the marshes, moons too flying by, twin moons reflected calmly in her wide calm staring eyes as she thought No hunger is ever satisfied if it is a true hunger.

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