Stones in My Passway: Ellen Chesser's Country Blues and the Stone Imagery in The Time of Man

SCHOLARSHIP Stones in My Passway: Ellen Chesser's Country Blues and the Stone Imagery in The Time ofMan Dennis C. Winter Stones in my passway and my road seems dark at night, pains in my heart have taken my appetite. — Robert Johnson, blues singer. One of the most striking and persistent images in Elizabeth Madox Roberts' novel, The Time of Man, is that of stones. Ellen Chesser is constantly in touch with the stony and rocky earth of the Kentucky hill country in which she lives and travels. Furthermore, there is an attached sense of ritual invoked in many of the passages that mention these stones and rocks, whether it be in the touching of, the walking barefoot upon, or the hand-placing of stones. The path of Ellen's young life is a stony way—a path of simple hardship imbued with an overall sense of pity. Her pity and compassion for the elements and events of her life might be likened to a blues song or a personal gospel song that treats the moments of the heart from within the young girl's "poor white" perspective. Ellen's blues plaint begins with her simple skyward declaration: "Here I am! I'm Ellen Chesser! I'm here!" (89). This brief but poignant chorus is colored with a universalizing brush stroke that takes its core sense of pathos from the "faint dying phrase, 'in the time of man'." Aware that she is living her time within this overarching time of man, Ellen evinces many moments of such blues-tinged emotions that center on pity. She has pity for the corn, pity for her father, renewed pity for the farm, pity for her mother and father's futile attempts at bedroom secrecy, and finally, "she pitied them with a great pity, the pity of a child for adults" (40). We are also told by the narrator at about this time that "the perpetual sadness ofyouth had flowed upward to engulfher" (96). Ellen, at this point, is unable to gather her sense of this sadness into any concrete form of thought, and she cries out in a universally adolescent fashion: "Oh, why am I here and what is it all for anyway? I'm a-fallen through the world and there's no end to the top and no end 41 to the bottom ... there's no end to anything" (96). This is not a blues song of hopelessness, though, for ringing repeatedly within Ellen is a paradoxical, inner, salvific and comforting phrase: "It's no knowen how lovely I am. I'm a-liven. My heart beats on and on and my skin laps around me and my blood runs up and it runs down, shut in me. It's unknowen how lovely" (97). What is sad about this phrase is that it rings true for her first love. Jonas never realizes how truly lovely she is, and he squanders his chance at having a true love relationship. It might also be said that much later, Jasper, Ellen's husband, settles into a compromised role of domesticity and really may also have missed out on knowing the true depth of his wife's loveliness. But this is later in life, when the potency and heart rending impact of "first love" has passed and healed to time. At Hep Bodine's farm, the first of many tenant farm homes in which Ellen lives during the course of the novel, we see her following a creek, "jumping from white stone to white stone, feeling safe in the narrow ravine hidden among the willow bushes" (24). She is ever the country child, at home on the earth and with the earth, and often she is most at ease by herself injust such idyllic settings. Later that day she "lay on a large rocky shelf, tired from wandering. Her thin flanks sank against the white stone and her stringy legs quivered with their exhaustion" (24). Beside the cabin she "stood about the stone step, without a care," and later she returns to the cabin, walking, "moving slowly to feel the security of the path, touching a tree with her fingers, trailing her hand along the...