On ‘Hall of Waters’ by Camellia-Berry Grass

Book #3 in my Trans Rights Readathon week

In Hall of Waters, Camellia-Berry Grass writes linked essays about her hometown of Excelsior Springs, Missouri, where the sculptor Donald Judd was born in 1928. The Hall of Waters is the name of a building at the site of the first mineral spring the settlers discovered. Of course, “the idea that nobody used these waters from 1,000 BCE to 1880 CE, nearly 3,000 years, is audacious.” A health spa was built there. And the town was “the product of black labor and black intellect, taken by whiteness & celebrated like white achievement.” What is purity, really? Hygiene? Independence?

Quotes

In the first essay, Accountability: “The empty spaces are what writing teachers call ‘place.’ It is understood by the writing teachers that place is the bodies of water where you are from.” Water might be whiskey, hormone, while “the water levels everywhere else are rising.”

Hall of Waters: “What a place keeps underneath it is actually the thing that sustains it,” and this is the idea underlying a spa: “To pretend that the concept of natural is natural.”

Sulpho-Saline Spring: “I never felt any power in the pastel & stained glass” of church, “but here, at this abandoned well, I wanted to dance. There was just enough…