Talking Appalachian, page 23
Another thing I took notes on was how my grandmother talked. “I feel like a stewed witch,” she’d say. Or “I ain’t seed you in a month of Sundays.” I wrote down names of relatives she remembered: Honey-eating Richard, Pie-belly Miracle. I wrote down a story she told me of Old Aunt Martha Money who could cure the summer complaint. I didn’t put this into poems. I just collected it. Poems, as far as I knew, didn’t have stuff like that in them. But I valued the live language and elemental nature of her stories. Let not thy left brain know what thy right brain is doing.
After graduating from Centre College and the University of Arkansas, I studied with Samuel Yellen and Ruth Stone at Indiana University. It was exactly what I needed. Not just the workshop, but the community of writers that it fostered. Among those friends the most immediately important to me was Michael Allen, an Ohio poet who wrote about Sunday dinner at his grandmother’s, about growing corn, about everyday things that he knew as well as his face. I was astonished. Could I do that? Why not? Ruth’s class added to this realization the fact that it was not only possible but crucial to write out of my experience as a woman. Suddenly I had a wealth of material. In the twenty years since then, I’ve been trying to figure out how to be true to it.
Where you’re from is not who you are, but it’s an important ingredient. I believe you must trust your first voice—the one tuned by the people and place that made you—before you can speak your deepest truths. Irish poet Seamus Heaney, winner of the Nobel Prize, confirms this, saying in a radio interview, “I think for words to have any kind of independent energy in some way they have to be animated by the first place in ourselves. Until that happens, words don’t have that freedom and conviction that you need to write poems.” We see, then, that if a person’s experience of the written voice confirms her “first voice”—both in what she reads and in how she is taught to write—then her growing literacy will be fed by strong cultural roots.
As an Appalachian, my education to this possibility was continued by discovering Jeff Daniel Marion’s literary magazine The Small Farm in 1975 and Appalachian Journal the year after. Danny and I began corresponding, and I found out there was a whole passel of people out there writing down how their grandmother talked and why she talked like that and why her farm was taken away from her. I found out there was an entire tradition of Appalachian writing; furthermore, some of the songs my daddy had sung to me were Child ballads. In short (though it wasn’t short—it took years) I found out I had a culture. I’d been to college and graduate school, London and Paris, the Smithsonian and the New York Public Library, and now I needed to go home. For while I found all sorts of necessary and wonderful things in those places, I couldn’t find my voice.
I don’t mean I went home literally—I’d been going back for holidays and summer visits all along—I mean I went home inside; I began to pay attention to all those voices, to the language and people I grew up with. In doing so, I abandoned the larger culture’s belief that such voices had no place in art, had, in fact, nothing to say.
Kurt Vonnegut says that he finally realized he had to sound like a person from Indianapolis because that’s what he was. No construct, no posture could give him as convincing a voice. This doesn’t mean, of course, that he had to write about Indianapolis; it doesn’t even mean that someone picking up Slaughterhouse Five would know he’s from Indianapolis. It means Vonnegut did a countercultural thing: he took that voice seriously enough to believe it could speak to us all. Never mind that it’s not from a designated cultural area. It’s an ordinary voice. An ordinary voice given to visions.
I was aided in this homecoming by poet Lee Howard, whom I met early in 1980 right before her book, The Last Unmined Vein, was published. Lee didn’t just write about life in Clay County, Kentucky; she wrote in voices of people who lived there. The first section of her book, “Motherlode,” is a seam of the voices that nurtured hers. I was thrilled by the sound of these poems: “Lord gal, you have no idea / what meeting meant to me,” Aunt Neva starts out in “The Meeting”; and Uncle Orville gets our attention with “Now it’s neither here nor there / to most folks / but then I’ve never figured myself / to be like many / much less most.” Lee’s work, eloquent with everyday voices and concerns, gave me courage and a new direction. Ultimately this led me into fiction and playwriting; most immediately it gave me access to experiences, to strength and wisdom I could not claim on my own.
The first voice poem I wrote was called “Her Words.” The speaker is a combination of two women I knew growing up. Some of it is direct quotation:
You gotta strap it on
she would say to me
there comes this hardship
and you gotta get on up the creek
—there’s others besides you—
so you strap it on
Oh, you give St. ]ude what he’ll take
hand it over like persimmons
with the frost on
it ain’t nothin
there’s more stones in that river
than you’ve stepped on—or are about to
Once your hands
can get around sumac
once your feet
know the lash of a snake
you’ll strap it on
that’s what a good neck
and shoulders are for
In winter
at the settlement school
our wet hair would freeze
on the sleepin porch
and we’d wake up
vain younguns that we were
under blankets of real snow
Come Christmas
we’d walk sixteen miles
home to Red Bird mission
only once gettin
lost in the woods
snowed over
down the wrong ridge
Nobody’s askin
for what ain’t been done—
build against cold
and death scalds the dark—
you strap it on
there’s strength in the bindin’
I scrubbed on a board
I know what it’s about
As this poem illustrates, place is not just location, geography; place is history, family, the shape and context of daily life. How can I separate the mountains from my grandparents, who seemed for a long time as large and absolute as anything else against the horizon? Their importance is evident in the fact that four of my picture books are connected to them. How can I distinguish between where we stayed—my mother was the one of six surviving children who remained in Harlan alongside her parents—and the stories of those who left? Each place exists in context and in contrast with others and I grew up not only in Harlan, but in not-Lexington, not-Dayton, not-Orlando. I grew up where the Greyhound bus did not go through but turned around and went back. It was not because, as jokes would have it, we were so bad that nobody wanted to go farther; it was because the road through to Virginia was a cross between a washboard and a roller coaster.
I didn’t grow up in Harlan either, but four miles south, in a neighborhood bounded on two sides by the Cumberland River, one side by the railroad, all sides by mountains, and called Rio Vista. I’d like to know how that sudden Spanish got there. Certainly my parents got a great river view as the Cumberland rolled through the living room in 1977. This and the flood of ’63 were the source for Come a Tide.
I think being rooted nourishes a person. It limits you, too, the way all actuality limits possibility. But it gives you a context, a tapestry of conditions and stories into which your story will be woven and from which you can follow the thread of others. My metaphor for writing is listening—perhaps in part because I had visual problems as a child—but I couldn’t do it if I didn’t have a choir, a cacophony, a family reunion of voices in my head. Totally fictional voices speak out, too. Part of my work is extending the invitation.
Just as I know we are all mortal, all bound to drop out of that reunion one by one, I also know that the spirit survives. This is my experience. It came to me naturally in childhood, before I could read or write, but it’s taken me many years as a writer, as an adult, to find my way back to it. I cannot give you any doctrine, only testimony. Places have spirits; they haunt us as they are haunted by the lives that have been lived in their shelter, on their ground.
Let me give you an example by tracing the origin of Who Came Down That Road? In the fall of 1990, driving home from a day spent in two schools, I decided to treat myself to a stop at Blue Licks State Park. It’s the site of the last battle of the Revolution, fought after the war had ended. The news hadn’t made it to Kentucky yet.
It was a perfect October day, trees in full color, air so clear as to be almost clairvoyant. I stopped first at the monument and was struck to learn that the battle took place on my husband’s birthday, August 19. Then I noticed the evocative names of Kentuckians who fought there: Stern, Farrier, Jolly; Black, Green, Brown; Rose, Corn, Price, Boone; Joseph Old-field. Elemental names. Walking around the monument, I found that, except for the commander, the opponents were listed only by tribal or national name: Shawnee, Delaware, Wyandot, Mingo, Ottawa, Canadian. I took notes. Something said, “Pay attention.”
In the little museum, where I went next, I found that the battle was a relatively recent event in Blue Licks’s history. The park is situated on a buffalo trace that runs down from the Ohio River to the salt lick. White settlers had followed Indians down the trace, just as Indians had followed buffalo, buffalo had followed mastodons, and so on, back and back in the past. The museum had a few artifacts from the Fort Ancient people who settled nearby and quite a few mastodon remains, including a twenty-five-pound tooth, extracted from local ground.
When I came out I saw a historical marker pointing to a part of the buffalo trace you can still walk on, so I set off into the woods. No one was around but me, and soon I was far enough away from the museum at one end and the highway at the other to really enter the place. The dry grass and crimson leaves were shining. It was hard to tell wind from light. And I had the strangest sense that someone else was there. I kept turning to look behind me or stopping to listen. Nothing. Finally I realized it wasn’t anything visible I was sensing, but a spirit-trace the travelers had left, like the path they’d worn into the ground. And I began to imagine, almost to hear, a child asking, “Who came down that road?”
I’ve learned about the hazards of writing while driving, so I just let the possibility cook till I got home, then made a few notes (before I got out of the car, lest the tide of family doings sweep it out to sea), and started work later that night. It’s my habit to get a first draft, so that I don’t lose the feeling, before I get into the research. Otherwise what I don’t know overwhelms me. I spent the next few days obsessed with finding the voice and the turnaround for the book. Form was never a problem, because the line I was given brought its own structure (question led to question—“Who came before that?”) and a certain playful exasperation at being hounded off the edge of the globe by a small child’s questions.
Once I had a draft, I set to work in libraries and on the telephone, documenting and double-checking what I had written. One thing that nagged me was the reference to goldenrod at the end. I hadn’t seen any goldenrod at Blue Licks since it’s gone by late October, but it just sounded right to me. Besides, I told myself; the plant grows all over Kentucky—everywhere but your basement—and it’s the state flower; it’s got to grow at Blue Licks, too. So I let it stand. Then one day I was talking to someone at the park, and he wanted to know if I had put in anything about the goldenrod.
“What about it?” I asked.
“Well, this is a pretty famous place among botanists,” he told me. “There’s a kind of goldenrod found in a three-mile radius of Blue Licks that grows nowhere else in the world.”
“Yes,” I said, feeling again the shiver I’d felt on the trace, “I put that in.”
Something put it in, made it feel right in relation to the whole. Seamus Heaney sheds light on this, too, when he says in the interview quoted earlier, “A poet has to find the language that makes the common, almost unconscious life vocal; he must be voice box for something that is in the land, the people.”
You can’t be a voice box for your own feelings and experiences, much less for those of your place, if you’ve accepted the teaching that your first speech was wrong. For if you abandon or ridicule your voiceplace, you forfeit a deep spiritual connection. As Bobbie Ann Mason said in a Kentucky Educational Television profile, “I was not able to write stories until I got over being ashamed of how my people talked.”
“How [our] people talked” is the embrace of language that welcomed us into the world. It is nurture, humor, memory vision. It is what we must get back to in order to know ourselves, the “first voice” that teaches us to speak.
In My Own Country
Silas House
The First Time
I am twelve. The teacher’s pet. I often get to lead the class in the Pledge of Allegiance, I am the first called on when I put up my hand, I have been personally selected by Mrs. Black to write the class play about FDR.
But today Mrs. Black is absent, and we have a substitute. Sour, sullen, angry for no good reason, although in retrospect I think it may have been because of her green, all-polyester dress suit that looked like the fabric of my granny’s couch. Mrs. Black is always happy and excited about learning. This substitute teacher does not want to be here. Plus, she is from Off. Off is anywhere but here, and we hear people talk about it all the time (“Oh, that preacher don’t know what he’s talking about . . . he’s from Off.” “She moved Off and completely changed; thinks she’s better than us now.”)
The substitute stands at the blackboard and slaps a ruler against her hand. Her cat’s-eye glasses look like something a teacher would wear on The Andy Griffith Show. “Well, does anyone know the answer?”
We are studying caves. The question she has asked is why people shouldn’t touch cave walls when they are spelunking. We all know the answer because Mrs. Black gave a good presentation on it yesterday—making spelunking my new favorite word, which I have been trying to work into a sentence naturally ever since—but this woman is too hateful and no one wants to cooperate with her. Darrell Karr does a bird call—Hooty-Who!—and everybody laughs.
The miserable woman’s brows arch in together. “Have you kids not learned anything about caves?”
I raise my hand, as I can’t stand the silence stretching out across our classroom, and because I don’t want her to think we’re stupid.
“Yes?” she nods to me, more exasperated than glad that I’m willing to answer.
“You shouldn’t touch cave walls because the oil from your finger could stop a stalactite from growing.”
The substitute looks like she might laugh, then she looks mad again. “Your answer is correct. But if you want people to take you seriously, you must stop talking like a hillbilly.”
I have been taught that this word is acceptable only when another hillbilly is using it. This woman is not my people.
“It’s oy-el,” she enunciates. “Not ull. And it’s feeng-er, not fanger.”
“That’s the way I talk,” I counter, sitting up straighter in my desk, defiant.
“You tawlk wrawng,” she mimics, and laughs to herself. The whole class is silent. No one is laughing with her, and the shame rushing over me isn’t because she’s embarrassed me in front of my classmates—to them she’s only embarrassed herself—but because I know that really, she’s making fun of my people.
Why They Didn’t Stay
My parents left the mountains briefly in the late 1960s to find work. “There was nothing for us back home except for me to work in the mines or at some gas station and for your mother to be a waitress,” my father explains.
So they went North. Two of my paternal uncles had already settled in Hamilton, Ohio, another one to Michigan, and one of my mother’s sisters had recently moved to Dayton. They sent back news of good-paying jobs. On their visits home my aunts chattered about the big department stores and how the schools were so much better and how they had washer-dryer sets Up North, while my uncles bragged about bars being on every corner and their newfound ability to own Corvettes. To hear them tell it, it was the Promised Land.
My parents ventured to Flint, Michigan, where they rented a trailer in a Little Appalachia trailer park and immediately found jobs with good wages. My father poured concrete on the Flint River Flood Control Project while my mother built refrigerators at the Gibson plant.
My father didn’t have trouble Up North. He’d had his fair share of discrimination in the army, where boys who talked like him were singled out as hillbillies. Once, at Fort Hood, Texas, during an alert in the middle of the night, my father had struggled to get his shoes on due to being half-drunk and sleepy-eyed. A fellow soldier laughed at him. “What’s wrong, Hillbilly? Not used to putting on shoes?” My father—remembering how hard his mother had worked to raise him and his eight siblings alone after my grandfather died—rose up with arms flying. He and the man had fought all over the barracks. Perhaps once he got North he didn’t even hear the put-downs anymore, or maybe the “country come to town” gleam was not as bright on him as on my mother.
That rural glimmer was only one of the things that shone out from her. She had a natural ability to make friends: she impressed them with her wild tales of having been a driver in the Manchester Drag Races and with her singing prowess. Before long, everyone was gathered around her during lunch, demanding Loretta Lynn and Brenda Lee songs.
“I couldn’t eat my lunch for them wanting me to sing,” she says, now. She was surprised that northerners loved country music so much, but eventually she realized that they were making fun of her, too.
