"Requa I": Intersections of the real and the fictional

Tillie Olsen has both a compelling sense of reality and stunning gifts of language and imagination. She is a writer situated at the fulcrum between reality and fiction, history and literature. My purpose here is to explore these intersections in her short story "Requa I" and in my own critical practice.1

In the center of "Requa I" sits a thirteen-year-old boy, "wrapped in the peacock quilt, rocking, scratching, snuffling"-apparently "loony."2 Recently orphaned by the death of his mother-with whom he had previously shared a life of economic hardship and small but caring pleasures-Stevie has been wrenched out of his familiar city life in San Francisco and dropped into his uncle's life as a single male in a boardinghouse in the village of Requa in northern California. Set in 1932, the peak of the Depression, the story traces the harms and griefs with which Stevie must grapple.3 It also traces the complex process through which he begins to heal, "stealthily, secretly, reclaiming" (252).

When I interviewed Olsen in 1988, she spoke of place as a crucial prompter for the story, "the immediate impulse." She spoke of camping in northern California in 1959 and of hiking up above the mouth of the river:

We went up and up, knowing nothing about the places we were passing and that this was where the old Indian village of Rekwoi (Requa) had been. When we finally reached the top with its panoramic view of the forests, the river mouth, and up and down the coast . . . we felt awe. Awe-that almost universal human response to mountain tops, to high beautiful places-which for so many ancient peoples made them sacred.4

Olsen's descriptive powers awakened in me a need to experience that same awe, to see this actual place that lay behind the story. And so, in the summer of 1996, I went in search of Requa. I was seeking the sense of awe that I'd heard in Olsen's voice as well as in her words; I was seeking a connection with the world from which Olsen had written the story, prompted in 1959 and completed in 1970; and I was seeking some sense of actuality, of historical reality that might lie behind the story.

In this quest, I was guided not only by the interview, but also by the story, which posits Requa's junkyard as a place near the highway: "Tumble of buildings and sheds, stockpiles and junk-a block from the bridge-sprawled in the crotch between 101 going north/south and the short crooked upriver road to game and Indian country" (250). The village apparently lies near the river where the salmon leap, just over a "long bridge with standing stone bears" (239), not far from the towering redwoods or the rocky shores of the north Pacific coast.

I drove north on Highway 101, crossed the bridge with standing stone bears, watching for signs directing me toward Requa. One of my maps identified Klamath as the only town in the vicinity, but another had an additional small dot labeled Requa just to the west of the highway, just north of the Klamath River, not far from that very "crotch" of intersecting roads. So I anticipated that it would be a very small, but real place. After all, it was on the map; besides, I had actually crossed the bridge with its standing bears.

Driving up and up, past a large Victorian-style building called the Requa Inn-a hopeful sign-up and up the winding road, I, too, came to an overlook. And it was a place of awe: the steep decline to the rocky shore, the deep blue water marked by foamy white; the sandbar across the mouth of the Klamath defining the place where river joined ocean. The sun shone brightly-not, of course, something one should take for granted on the northern California coast in July-and the view was breathtaking.

High noon on a day in July 1996, the ocean, the Klamath River-these were very real. But where was Requa? Where was the "tumble of buildings and sheds," the junkyard where Stevie joined Wes at work or Mrs. Ed's boardinghouse where they lived? I searched the area for such remains and found only blackberry brambles where canneries might have been; partially buried junked cars by the Salt Creek, but no junkyard; no dance hall, no boardinghouse, no Indian cemetery. The town of Klamath endured-out by the highway-but there was no Requa to be found.

Of course, this version of Requa, as historical and material reality, neither Olsen nor I had seen. The story is set in 1932; the "real" Requa of those depression years was not the "same" place that Olsen saw in 1959, nor was it the "same" place that I could ever see. The acts of historical imagination, Olsen's and mine, were multiple.

Every high school reader of literary texts knows enough not to equate a literary place with an actual place. Fictions, after all, are constructions of the imagination. And yet as readers, we do posit a kind of reality behind many of our fictional experiences; we do expect a sense of the actual when we read stories that claim us through characters whose lives we care about. And when the writer has a compelling historical imagination, as Olsen surely does, how can we not expect to find the real behind the story?