Opal Whiteley - nature writer

'I have a longing for more eyes. There is much to see in this world all about.'

“My mother and father are gone.

The man did say they went to Heaven

and do live with God,

but it is lonesome without them.”

So begins Only Opal – The Diary of a Young Girl an extraordinary children’s book set in Oregon’s timber country in the early 1900’s. It’s actually drawn from diary entries ‘of my fifth and sixth year’ written by Opal Whiteley in about 1903 - 04. This beautiful version for children is created by poet Jane Boulton and illustrator Barbara Cooney. 

I am working on a children’s book and this one I have in my collection I’ve returned to many times. Whiteley has a poetic turn of phrase that is so charming,

‘At night the wind goes walking in the field,

Talking to the earth voices there. 

I did follow her down potato rows,

And her goings made ripples on my nightgown.’

Only Opal – The Diary of Young Girl focuses on her journeys in the surrounding forests, her animal friends who she christens with grand names – the dog, Brave Horatius, her pet crow, Lars Porsena and the calf, Elizabeth Barrett Browning – and all their mishaps, along with her relationships with the people in the timber camp where she lives.  

Taken in this context I can see why it is a wonderful book for children and families. Opal’s deep fascination with the natural world resonates throughout her anecdotes.

I’ve read the picture book countless times, but when I found out that these were extracts of a much longer diary, I was curious to read more.  

There is a lot more to Opal’s story. In United States she is regarded as ‘a mystery’ with question marks around the veracity of the diary. She had already written one unpublished book, The Fairyland Around Us, and had made a bit of a name for herself in Oregon for giving lectures on nature, fairies and the environment when in 1918 she met the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Ellery Sedgewick.

The story goes that he asked her whether she had anything more and she admitted to having a childhood diary that had been torn to pieces and stored in a hat box. Sedgewick urged her to put the pieces together, a painstaking task that took two years to finish. The result though was The Story of Opal: the Journey of an Understanding Heart which was published in a serialised version in the Atlantic Monthly in 1920.  No sooner was it published than people started accusing her of being a fraud. Opal may have complicated the issue by declaring that her biological parents had been French aristocrats and that her real name was Françoise Marie de Bourbon-Orléans. Members of the Whiteley family denied this but her grandmother admitted she was definitely an adopted child. 

Author, Benjamin Hof, who wrote a biography and foreword for a reprint of her diary by E.S. Bradburne (Opal Whiteley, the Unsolved Mystery) believes the diary is genuine although remains sceptical about her claims to a French heritage. One of her teachers, Lily Black, had described her as a genius and Hof is one of many Opal supporters who are convinced she was autistic. 

I thought perhaps if I read her original diary, which is found online,

https://archive.org/details/storyofopaljourn00whit/page/8/mode/2up

I might be able to understand her a little better. As in the picture book, firstly I find many more poetic images. 

‘This woods is gray in winter when come cold days. And gray shadows walk among the trees. 

They touch one’s face with velvet fingers when one goes walking there in the woods.’

And like those authors who have worked with her material, I adore her exaltation of nature.

‘One drinks in so much inspiration when one is dabbling one’s toes in a willow creek. And one does hear the talking of plants that dwell near the water.’

All around her, from the twinkling stars above to the mouse she keeps up the sleeve of her dress, she is in constant communication with them all. 

‘I did have longings to dance. Most every day I do dance. I dance with the leaves and the grass. I feel thrills from my toes to my curls.’

If her chore for the day is to gather potatoes, she can’t help but put them in a row and make ‘a choir’ of them and then sing to them for ‘earth songs come up from the ground through the plants’. In her way of looking at the world, she can raise a humble vegetable to celestial status: 

‘And I have walked between the rows of potatoes, and I have watched the star gleams on their leaves.

The family she identifies with is not those who live with her in the cabin but is in the nature around her.

‘I have thinks I was once a tree growing in a forest. Now all trees are my brothers.’

What really disturbs me though in the storyline is the cruelty that she describes and it is primarily the numerous descriptions of corporal punishment she endures.  It’s often at the hand of “the mamma” who repeatedly whips her with a hazel switch and invariably Opal finds herself banished under the bed where she gains some comfort by writing, or ‘printing’ as she calls it, in her scraps-of-paper diary.

‘She did soon give me a whipping and put me here under the bed. Now I have wonders what that whipping was for. I did feed the chickens and carry in the wood and do the baby’s washing and empty the ashes. And more I did beside …’

She feels compelled to help the ‘folks of the fields and the woods. I have to do that no matter how many spanks I do get for it.’

When she talks of the ‘folks’, I do not know if she’s talking about the fairies she believes in or real people she meets. I have found though a photo on the Internet of one of her ‘yellow jackets are such interesting fairies’ and even though you and I might just dismiss them as mere wasps their beautiful wings could well be from an unseen realm. 

Wikimedia commons - Yellow jacket Wasp

She is beaten for coming home late, for incidents such as dressing her calf with her sun bonnet, along with countless misunderstandings in which she is just trying to help her family. 

‘When she got through patting the butter into its proper form, the mamma did throw the butter paddle on the cook table. She said she hoped and wished that she would never see that butter paddle again. She won’t. After I heard her say that, I floated it away in the creek. It made a nice boat. I took Solomon Grundy with me.’

There is cruelty in others around her too, for example, she watches the chore boy take aim at her pet crow, Lars Porsena, and shoot it dead. 

And another incident where her mamma ties her to the corner of the woodshed (to stop her exploring) until she collapses in the sun with a nose-bleed. And yet after all of these heart breaking moments, with not an ounce of grief or bitterness, she turns around and makes such a comment as ‘this is a wonderful world to live in’.

I can see how an Asperger’s child who was intensely curious about the world around her could have inflamed the simple woman who was charged with raising her. But all those beatings? If true it would make perfect sense to me that Opal would have dissociated from her ‘mamma’ and invented more loving parents in Angel Mother and Angel Father and so imagined a different heritage for herself. 

Her real guardians are the pig that follows her to school, her dog who calls her in when she is out in the dark, her favourite fir tree, Michael Raphael, who is her wise counsellor.

Yet she does have some allies in the human world too.  There is ‘the man who wears gray neckties’ who also believes in fairies and has seen her secret post box - a moss box by an old log. 

‘I thought I would have goes there to see if the fairies yet find my letter. I went. The letter – it was gone. Then I did have joy feels all over. The color pencils – they were come. 

‘No-one does have knowing of that moss box but one. He is the man that wears gray neckties and is kind to mice. He is a man with an understanding soul.’

A great observer, she notices one love struck man at the timber camp who picks bunches of flowers for his sweetheart but is too shy to personally deliver those flowers, let alone speak his mind and tell her how he really feels. Instead, he just leaves them on an old log some distance away from where she lives. Finally, it is Opal who becomes the go-between and takes one those faded bunched to the young woman – eventually leading her to the mound of flowers. They count 33 bunches of undelivered bouquets. (A trait of Opal’s, obsessively counting things, is in keeping with Asperger’s children.) 

   University of Oregon - Opal Whiteley

In today’s world her ideas are not so strange, after all there are communities like Findhorn in Scotland which are renowned for working with angels, devas and nature spirits in their gardens and no doubt, there are now many more similar places like that the world over. A recent survey in the UK revealed that more than 40% of respondents believed in fairies or little people. As for the Irish, such beliefs are embedded in their culture. W.B. Yeats communed with them regularly, Samuel Beckett admitted to meeting one once and as recently as 1999 a major road in Ireland was rerouted after claims were made by folklorist Eddie Lenihan that the original plan would take out a whitethorn bush which he said was ‘an important meeting place for supernatural forces of the region’. 

And we are increasingly recognising animals as sentient beings that not only feel but can be healers too, for example, therapists with their horses who practice equine therapy on patients. 

But Opal Whiteley lived in a different era. Not being able to make sufficient income from her lectures or writing and becoming increasingly mentally unstable, she ended up in dire poverty and was eventually admitted to psychiatric care spending her last five decades in London’s Napsbury Hospital. 

In the meantime, her writings endure whilst her fanbase continues to grow. And her wisdom is there for us all. 

‘Make Earth glad little one – that is the way to keep the fire-tongue of the glad song ever in your heart.’