ASSAY: A JOURNAL OF NONFICTION STUDIES
11.2

Rhonda Waterhouse

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Woven Craft: The Artistic Tools of Toni Jensen’s “Carry”
“Who benefits from having an armed presence on a place considered campus?” 
​—Toni Jensen
In Toni Jensen’s 2018 lyrical braided essay “Carry,” she forms a tapestry woven from words and ideas, weaving together campus shootings, Indigenous land theft, and violence against the less privileged. Like her Métis ancestors, Jensen combines a First Nations’ sense of rhythm and design with European yarns of language into a meaningful yet beautiful finger woven sash. This first-person tapestry weaves together the narrator’s experiences and the experiences of people she knows, with the yarns of Indigenous stolen lands. The title of the essay, “Carry,” begs readers to ask, What are we carrying? In this essay, people carry the literal: water, guns, and babies. The essay also lifts the metaphorical like snakes (one’s defenses against predators) and empty glasses (our own and others’ grief). The rest of the burdens are implied: white privilege/guilt from ancestor’s actions (stealing land from Indigenous peoples), responsibility for others, trauma, and bias/hate (both given and received). Ultimately, “Carry” compels readers to confront both the tangible and intangible weights that shape our lives revealing that what we all carry is not just physical but also historical, emotional, and deeply personal.

Jensen’s tapestry is formed by a balanced weave of four sections, with the first three about the same length and the fourth having slightly more weight. Roman numeral headings function as choke ties, knots that hold warp threads in place so they don’t shift. Each section forms a block, a larger patch of weave threaded together to make the complete design of the tapestry. In the introduction to their anthology, The Shape of Native Nonfiction, Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton write, “Just as a [tapestry’s] purpose determines its materials, weave, and shape, so too is the purpose of the essay related to its materials, weave, and shape” (6).  The structure of the composition maintains balance and harmony throughout the essay in a way that is particularly resonant for a writer of Métis identity.

The form of “Carry” matches its content, deftly twining together violence, campus life, and Indigenous land theft. Readers can see her fingers weaving the threads across and down the essay. The repetition provides the reader what feels like a vertical tapestry, much like a Métis sash. Washuta and Warburton write, “[T]he craft involved in creating such a vessel—the care and knowledge it takes to create the structure and shape necessary to convey—is inseparable from the contents that the vessel holds” (Washuta and Warburton 4). Readers can feel the weight of what is carried through the size and strength of the essay that holds them. We bear the burden a little truer after reading this essay because of the manner in which Jensen wove it.
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Section one opens and closes in the memorial garden dedicated to John Locke, a professor who was shot and killed by a student in 2000 and introduces us to one of the three main braids: campus shootings. We meet the narrator as a young professor, and we learn her dislike for the way white male professors discuss female students. Section two provides the historical context of Native lands being forcibly taken by the US government, some of which has become college campuses that sometimes perpetuate white privilege through institutionalized racism. We also meet Camptosaurus, a dinosaur discovered on the University of Wyoming campus. Part three starts with the Virginia Tech shooting and ends with the Umpqua Community College shooting, both on stolen land, and in each case, the narrator had a friend in the line of fire. Although they survived, the survivors (and by extension the narrator) were never the same. Section four recounts Jensen’s racist first college roommate and academic advisor and her narrow escape from a violent sexual predator, who is her scholarship advisor’s son. By intertwining modern privilege with historical and modern violence, the reader recognizes their own connections to these themes.


The Warp

From the beginning of the essay, Jensen weaves in colorful yarns of repetition to highlight the words’ or phrases’ significance. In her essay, “Repetition Development in the Lyric Essay,” Brinson Leigh Kresge writes, “As an employed rhetorical strategy, repetition produces emphasis, clarity, amplification, or emotional impact; this stylistic perspective implies an amalgamated result.” Jensen’s colorful yarns echo through the piece again and again, adding to the lyricality and rhythm of the essay, as Sean Prentiss and Jessica Hendry Nelson observe that “[W]hen a word, image, sound, or idea is repeated throughout a narrative…we send echoes forward and back…It’s a tactical move that creates emphasis” (Prentiss and Hendry Nelson 127). This emphasis lends rhythm to the piece, creating the Métis tapestry’s traditional warp-facing pattern, where the sash (essay) emphasizes the vertically woven threads. This vertical repetition draws the reader through the essay.

Single word and short phrase repetition is a tool Jensen deftly wields to elicit a deepening effect. The word quiet is sewn throughout the essay. The first usage, three times in the first paragraph alone, refers to the narrator’s colleague as he tends the memorial garden (Jensen “Carry,” 35). This quietness is peaceful, yet full of grief. In part three, during the Virginia Tech shooting, Mimi “instruct[s] her students not in the art of narrative forms, but in how to get down and stay down, in how to remain so very quiet” (Jensen “Carry” 38). This time being quiet could save one’s life. Quiet appears again, four times, when Amy and Chris lead students away from the Umpqua shooter (Jensen “Carry” 39). These are positive instances of the word, but in section four, the academic advisor “says in a voice not quiet—‘Get out’” (Jensen “Carry” 40). Her loudness is a sign of danger to come. Later, the attempted rapist “grows quiet, so quiet” when the narrator finds power in her position as a student journalist (Jensen “Carry” 12). His quietness shows that he knows she has the power now. Just as a weaver might choose colors that represent different histories, we experience quiet’s iridescence as its meaning and significance shift throughout the piece.

Another warp thread whose color oscillates through repetition, “bag of snakes” or a variation, appears sixteen times in this essay. In the beginning, it is an insult from a male professor about a “difficult” female student (Jensen “Carry” 35-36), but the author turns the phrase into self-defense in the fourth section when she writes, “My snakes are waiting, and I think perhaps I will, this day forward, carry them with me in that space we call always” (Jensen “Carry” 41). With this shift in usage, Jensen turns a sword into armor. The antepenultimate line of the essay answers the question posed at the beginning, weaving in the snakes one last time: “Who benefits from having an armed presence on a place considered campus? It is hard not to answer it with the negative, with the absence: not the girls who become women while they tend their snakes” (Jensen “Carry” 42).  With this shift, Jensen highlights the painful reality of self-defense as both a necessity and a weight young women must carry. Depth and power are spliced into the narrative by the echoes of bag of snakes that are woven throughout the piece (Prentiss and Hendry Nelson 127). By threading this phrase throughout the essay, readers are encouraged to confront the price of safety in spaces that should not require such vigilance, leaving us with an unsettling truth: the responsibility of protection too often falls on those most at risk. Additionally, as “Carry” is primarily about gun violence, gun- and weapon-related words are woven throughout. These words include handgun, license, bayonet, barrel, muskets, longarms, Northwest Guns, Maccakinaws, fusils, fusees, fukes, soldiers, shots, get down, stay down, shot, violence, and killed. They appear at least 35 times throughout the essay. Not only do these words lend the work rhythm when they are repeated, they emphasize the violence. This is a dark and heavy warp strand that dominates the sash called “Carry.”

Jensen’s repetition of the word campus illustrates her tension with the word. She employs Webster’s definition but appears dissatisfied with the ideas of the space being hers or belonging to anyone since many campuses are on land stolen from Native peoples. As a result, campus appears thirty-four times, territory five times, land nine times, and space nine times. Removal/remove shows up fourteen times and stolen once. Names for Native people are included many times and include Osage, Quapaw, Cherokee, Umpqua tribe, Lakota, Dakota, Nakota, Yankton Sioux, and Indian. This “carefully composed soundscape [echoes] with earlier or later material … function[ing] as signposts, alerting the reader to what matters” (Prentiss and Hendry Nelson 127). Given Jensen’s identification as a member of the Métis people, a culture that identifies with both First Nations and European heritage and has their own unique culture, readers can feel her pull between her ancestry and her current life. While she mourns for the injustice of history against Indigenous people, she also hopes for success in her chosen profession.

When Jensen first mentions Camptosaurus, it appears misaligned with the prior section of the piece, except that it is somewhat homophonic for campus. Camptosaurus is used sparingly, only twice outside of the original definition. The first time, it compares Amy, the author’s favorite student, to the dinosaur saying that she is rare because she is not entitled like many of the privileged private school students who Jensen is teaching at the time (Jensen “Carry” 39). The second time is when the narrator is being chased by the rapist and she writes, “There are no snakes present, no Camptosaurus, and my friend is asleep, is snoring from his recliner, and where have all the other people gone?” (Jensen “Carry” 41). This final use emphasizes the idea that no one, not even a dinosaur, is coming to save her. Since it is such an unusual word and because it sounds similar to campus, it gains extra emphasis for the few times we see it, weaving those instances together, in an arrowhead pattern that gives the essay momentum.
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Other groups of words repeat primarily in the longer fourth section: wait in the hall/waiting, advisor/advising, and forgiveness/apology/sorry. We’ve met the narrator’s horrible academic advisor. We’ve learned her scholarship advisor’s son is a rapist who is using step nine of a twelve-step program as an excuse to harass the narrator. Jensen draws these warp yarns together in this section with the final lines, “They are waiting in the campus halls for someone to offer advice. They are waiting still” (Jensen “Carry” 42). Since this line mentions campus and the previous line mentions snakes, she has bound together all her loose ends leaving us with the finished fringe of the essay. The tassels knot the essay together in a way that leaves the reader satisfied, but with lingering thoughts on the themes and lessons of the piece.


The Weft

Besides, rhythm and repetition, Jensen wraps many different yarns of craft into the weft of her sash: balance between prosaic and lyric language, content matching form, sentence variation, narrative control, and scene building. Although in Métis finger weaving the warp is emphasized giving a vertical feel to the sash, the weft is also important. The horizontal yarns give the sash its strength to allow it to be utilized for everything from decorative wear to claiming a buffalo after it’s killed to pulling a canoe (“Métis Culture Cards: Métis Sash”). Just as the weft threads provide the sash’s strength, Jensen’s use of these elements supports the balance and flow of the essay.

Even though it is clear that Jensen is a poet at heart, she balances her prosaic and lyrical language throughout the essay.  In the first line of the essay, she employs rhyme with “Michael Heffernan bends to tend” and she continues this sentence with imagery, “some short, once-green plants that, to my untrained eyes, remain mysterious” (Jensen “Carry” 35). Although the next image adds to the imagery, it is short and demonstrative: “He is quiet and pours the water with care.” Jensen blends poetic with ordinary language in the fifth paragraph, “when I presented to him my blank-faced silence, he waved his hands around in my doorway as if clearing a swarm of bees and took himself back down the hall. I understood him fine, of course” (Jensen “Carry” 35-36). The image of her blank face and his waving hands combine with the simile of the bee swarm and are followed by another demonstrative sentence. She understood him. We can choose almost any paragraph and find this balance repeated. In the third section, Jensen writes, “I walk circles around my dining room table because this is a thing my daughter likes. The room holds stained-glass windows—red, green, and gold-patterned—and my daughter likes to follow the patterns they make on the hardwood floor, the wall, the table” (Jensen “Carry” 38).  Readers can picture Jensen pacing as she waits for news of her friend and the imagery of the patterns made by the stained-glass window. Jensen’s mastery of poetic and commonplace language gives the essay some of its weft.

This attention follows into sentence variation. For example, in section IV, she writes, “The next week, I learn he raped one of my friends at another party. I don’t tell my newspaper advisor; she is in charge of my scholarship; she is happy her son is acquitted. Later that year when he is going through his twelve steps, Doug follows me around town, apologizing. At the bookstore: apology. At the bar: apology. At the diner: apology” (Jensen “Carry” 41). The first simple sentence is average length, followed by a compound sentence using semicolons to join three complete clauses. The next sentence uses a subordinate clause and an independent clause to form a complex sentence. The last three sentences are prepositional phrases followed by a colon and the word apology. The decreasing sentence length of this paragraph forms a funnel of tension as the narrator tries to figure out how to get away from this man.

Jensen expertly builds up her weft with narrative control. She paces the essay so that, even though it’s not chronological (beginning in 2010, moving to the 1800’s, to 2017, to 2007, to 2015, and back to when the narrator was first in college), there is always a forward momentum. The author consistently signals where we are in time and space, and we are willing to go along with her for the ride. Each story is placed in the order that gives it the most impact and the best flow. The author’s personal story of violence achieves the most power at the end because it gives the violence of campus rape equal weight to campus gun violence. If it had been discussed sooner, the impact of it would have been lost in all the death. The strength of finger weaving comes from the tight twisting and tugging of the yarns. Jensen tugs us forward leading up to her most personal narrative of violence, so that readers see not only the strength of the essay, but also the strength of the weaver.
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When Jensen brings us into a scene, the imagery and details allow the reader to feel part of the experience. Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola’s definition of scene here is useful: “Scene is based on action unreeling before us, as it would in a film, and it will draw on the same techniques as fiction—dialogue, description, point of view, specificity, concrete detail. Scene also encompasses the lyricism and imagery of great poetry” (Miller and Paola 170). In the opening scene, she shows us the memorial garden, with green-eyed, not-usually-but-currently-quiet Michael Heffernen. Another colleague is described as waving his hands around “as if clearing a swarm of bees” (Jensen “Carry” 35-36). We see elderly Michael struggling out the door with his hands full of water glasses leaving the narrator no choice but to go out with him to the garden. Jensen provides us the sensory detail of the warm concrete bench that they sit on as she learns about his dead colleague. And we know he cries when his “eyes are wet behind his glasses” (Jensen “Carry,” 36). Jensen’s skill with her craft allows her to weave this scene into her sash. Her meticulous attention to sensory details transforms her essay into living tapestry that deepens the emotional resonance of her storytelling.


The Tapestry

A speech given by Chief Seattle in 1854 and directed at President Franklin Pierce illustrated how white men were (are) ruining the land and will bring about their own demise as a result (Seattle). This speech is part of the discussion on Indigenous land being stolen that “Carry” continues. Essays like Stephen Graham Jones “Letter to a Just-Starting-Out Indian Writer—and Maybe to Myself” and Chip Livingston’s “Funny, You Don’t Look Like (My Preconceived Ideas of) an Essay” deal with similar feelings to “Carry” of being trapped between multiple identities (Washuta and Warburton). “Real Romantic” by Eden Robinson employs lyric language and twining ideas to braid together modern Indigenous culture, family dynamics, and dating. The themes are a bit different, but the tapestry feels like part of the same series, alongside Jo Ann Beard’s classic essay, “The Fourth State of Matter.” Each of these essays contributes to the ongoing conversation about history, identity, survival, and the complexities of modern life.

Interestingly enough, in a podcast interview with Blair Hodges, Jensen states that “Carry” is in conversation with Webster’s Dictionary. She is interested in how the dictionary defines words and how those definitions change over time. She cites the dictionary twice in this essay. In the interview, Jensen also mentions the Sing Our Rivers Red art exhibit and work by Amy Dalrymple and Sierra Crane Murdoch relating to missing Indigenous people around fracking sites. These sites are largely on stolen land, which builds forward from where “Carry” left off, not just looking at campus violence, but looking at sex trafficked and missing Indigenous women and children. (Jensen “Shell Play, with Toni Jensen”)
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As Jensen identifies as Métis, having a mixed heritage that is Indigenous and Euro-American, her “story will carry implications for [her] community that feels invaded by the forces of change and that is struggling to maintain traditional values on prime real estate where there’s big money to be made” (Gerard 106). She uses her words to fight the powers that are encroaching on her people and what’s left of their land. In her interview, Jensen says, “The taking by force of our land always has been twinned with the taking by force of our bodies” (Jensen, “Shell Play”). With her tapestry’s framework of well-planned sections, her warp yarns of repetition, along with weft threads of balance between prosaic and lyric language, content matching form, sentence variation, narrative control, and scene building, Toni Jensen has woven the tapestry she calls, “Carry.” Ultimately, Jensen’s work invites us to consider how we protect the lands and people that are too often forgotten or erased and to examine the violence that has gotten us here. How we decide to utilize this sash is up to us.
Click here to download a printable PDF with Works Cited. ​
Rhonda Waterhouse is originally from Pennsylvania and holds a B.S. and an M.Ed. from Penn State University. She is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Nonfiction at UNC Wilmington, where she also teaches as a graduate assistant. Her work explores themes of disability, family, gender, and nature. Her essay “Rohypnol for Dummies” appeared in Black Warrior Review (Fall/Winter 2023), and “Silent Steel Echoes: In the Footsteps of My Father on the USS Drum” was published inAmerican Submariner (Summer 2024). Her current project is a hybrid memoir about brain injury and how visiting trees helped her find a new self. While three of their five kids are in college and two are successfully adulting, Rhonda, her partner, and their dog enjoy traveling and sunrise walks on the beach near Wilmington, NC.

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