United States, (1930-2020)
Sister Francetta and the Pig Baby
- Let me get right into it. When Sister Francetta was a little girl she looked into a baby carriage one day and saw a baby with a pig head. It wore dainty white clothes, had little baby hands and feet, a baby’s body. Of course the sounds it made were strange, but the main thing was the pig head. It lay there on its back, kicking its feet, waving its arms, and staring at the world through a pig head. Now Sister Francetta taught us her morality through stories. For example, little boys and girls who put their fingers in forbidden places sometimes found that their fingers rotted away. That was the moral of a story about a boy who picked his nose. However, rotting fingers were a comparatively mild consequence. Sister Francetta’s childhood world was filled with sudden and horrible attacks of blindness, deafness, and dumbness. Ugly purple growths developed overnight anywhere inside or outside of people’s bodies. Strange mutilations from strange accidents were common. It absolutely did not pay to be bad. Sinful thoughts were the hardest to protect against. Prayer and confession were the surest remedies. As I grew older, Sister Francetta’s tales gradually subsided into remote pockets of my mind, occasionally to crop up in dream or quaint reminiscence. Except for the pig baby. The pig baby is still with me. It was different from her other stories. For example, it had no moral, it was just there: there had once been a baby with a pig head. Also, whereas Sister Francetta told her other stories often, and with variations, she told the story of the pig baby only once. And she told it differently, as if she herself did not understand it but nevertheless felt a tremendous urgency to reveal it. The other stories she told because they were useful. The story of the pig baby she told because she had faith in it. It captured my imagination totally. I tried to find out more, but she usually put me off. And I thought a great deal about it. Since Sister Francetta is dead now, I suppose I am the only expert in the world on the pig baby, and what I know can be listed very quickly:
- 1. The pig baby was apparently Caucasian…
- 2. Its parents were proud of it and in public seemed totally unaware of its pig head.
- 3. I do not know how long it lived. It apparently never went to school.
- 4. It always snorted noticeably but never let out any really piglike sounds like oink.
- 5. It ate and drank everything a regular baby ate and drank.
- 6. Its parents were not Catholic.
- 7. Everyone pretended not to notice that the baby had a pig head. For some reason it was not talked about either.
- 8. At some early point the family either moved away or disappeared.
- 9. No one said anything about that either.
- Sister Francetta died a few years after I had her as a teacher. She was still young. It was whispered among us that she had horrible sores all over her body. I became an excellent student and went on to college. There I developed more sophisticated ideas about the pig baby, the two most prominent of which were, 1. that Sister Francetta herself was the pig baby, and, 2. that the pig baby was Jesus Christ. There is no logic to either conclusion. Since college I have more or less given up the pig baby. Nevertheless it is a fact that I never look into a carriage without a flush of anxiety. And I cannot get rid of the feeling that Sister Francetta is angry with me.
About the Poet:
Kenneth Otis Bernard, United States, (1930-2020), was a poet, author and playwright. He also wrote under the pseudonym, La Fanu Smerdnack. Bernard was an English professor at Long Island University (1959-1989). He was also a central figure in the experimental theater movement that began in the small performance spaces of Midtown and Downtown Manhattan in the 1960s.
Bernard was the author of eleven books, including the novel From The District File and Clown at Wall: A Kenneth Bernard Reader. His final book, The Man in the Stretcher: Previously Uncollected Short Fiction,” was published in 2005.
Bernard was involved in the Off-Off-Broadway movement throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, often working with the Playhouse of the Ridiculous at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in the East Village of Manhattan. As a playwright, Bernard rattled the expectations of audiences and critics with avant-garde works staged by the Playhouse of the Ridiculous and other theatrical groups in New York and beyond
In his lifetime, he received Guggenheim, Rockefeller, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, New York Creative Artists Public Service, and New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships and grants and an Arvon Poetry Prize. [DES-07/22]