Gaining the Higher Ground: An Appreciation

FEATURED AUTHOR—MEREDITH SUE WILLIS Gaining the Higher Ground: An Appreciation Keith Maillard On my personal list of favorite West Virginia novels, Meredith Sue Willis' Higher Ground is either at the top of the list or very close to it. I've read the book several times now, with increasing pleasure, and each time I've always found a greater depth and resonance. Critical studies have been written about Higher Ground—Tal Stanley's in The Iron Mountain Review (Vol. XII, Spring 1996) is a good one—and I don't intend to write another; I simply want to talk about why I like it as much as I do. A good starting point is the pang of the familiar. Willis and I are close in age, and our West Virginia home towns are quite different in some respects, but there is also much that is similar. I know the people she is writing about, and I also know what it takes to write about them, having done so myself, so I'm in a good position to judge how well she's done, and she's done superbly well. I love the way the story of Blair Ellen Morgan opens so directly and forcefully with "one little girl at dead center of the universe" where the voices of the grown-ups "passed over and ruffled me gently like summer wind in hay, bending me a little for my own good." Accounts of childhood and adolescence will always fascinate us when they're vivid and particular—this is what it was like, to be here, in this place, at this time—and Willis glories in the particular. I love her details—like the ice water and flour and CriscoAunt Pearl uses to make her pie crust. I love the precision of her language and the way it becomes, in crucial passages, as highly charged as poetry. And I love her use of symbols. I hesitate to use that word, and I'm not doing so with any pretension to literary precision, but it's a ready-to-hand term for images in fiction that evoke or stand for or point the way toward something else, a larger meaning. Symbols are dangerous. When they're used badly, they can be like anvils dropped onto a table top, but Willis never uses them like that. She folds them into her realistic details like Crisco into the pie crust; we scarcely notice them, but we can feel something at work deep in the story. For instance, look at how she uses red. Driving with her parents "into the squat hills, into the country," the 38 child, Blair Ellen, knows that she is "not where I belonged." She sees "anold red plowhorse standingby the creek," and itmakes her sick. She hates the "crowd of tow-headed children on a porch," one of them "a big fat red-headed girl stretched out on a glider, sucking a Dreamsicle." This is Carmell Odell who will introduce Blair Ellen to the disturbing world of the hillbilly Odells. Just before Blair Ellen meets Carmell, she falls and cuts herself. "Out of the dust on my forearm welled a line of rich blood." She touches the blood with her tongue and feels a rush of energy and a loss of fear. In the next paragraph, she encounters the red-headed Carmell with her scriptural name that echoes "carmine" and means "red" in Hebrew. As they are getting acquainted, Carmell tells Blair Ellen about killing a chicken with a hatchet. "Was it bloody?" Blair Ellen asks, fascinated in spite of herself. Red is blood is life. The magical, evocative scene in which Blair Ellen meets Carmell's cousins, India and Garland Odell, presents the central conflict—and the central mystery—of the novel. Blair Ellen walks through Carmell's house, out onto the back porch, and comes upon a ritual in progress. This will be her first full, and fully dangerous, encounter with the Other in all of its eerie, incomprehensible seductiveness. The best way to write such a scene is exactly the way Willis has written it—to begin by placing it firmly in the real world: "It was...