Small Caucasian Woman (review)

lacks the fervent urgency of the other chapters, because here Awiakta speaks in the circle of friends. It is an intimate glimpse of the pattern of her own life and work. Here aesthetics and activism unite, a generous model for any who would follow Awiakta's lead. Section five returns to the central message of the book. Here key words in chapter headings are "survival," "memory and wisdom," "balance and healing," "cooperation and harmony." This is Awiakta's pattern for the future, summed up in the concluding story of Nobel laureate Barbara McClintock, whose study of corn genetics resulted in the discovery of how genes "jump." lust when we think we have everything under control, Nature surprises us. Similarly, "all the boxes and labels society forces people into explode in a vision of a great, shining web of peace and creativity," Awiakta says. "The CornMother engenders dreams." And no one is excluded from the dreaming. Men and women, youth and elders—all are included in and empowered by this book. That is its greatest virtue. The very forces which have called this book into being, which make it necessary, are themselves Selu's gift. Ironically, the corn, like the civilization it symbolizes, contains within itself complex forces of destruction and survival. Marilou Awiakta the poet delights in this interplay of paradox and ambiguity. She knows the same basket can both give and receive, must both give and receive if it is to fulfill its purpose. So it is with this basket her book. "I offer you a gift," Awiakta says in one of her poems. What now shall her basket receive in its turn from us? —Parks Lanier, Jr. Elaine Fowler Palencia. Small Caucasian Woman. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993. 158 pages. $19.95. Elaine Fowler Palencia is a Morehead native, a romance author (as Laurel Blake), and a frequent participant in Appalachian writing programs, and she now has given us Small Caucasian Woman, short fiction set in "Blue Valley," Kentucky. These low-key efforts are deceptively strong, laced with insight and humor, a feminine vision of my own home region which had me recognizing pieces of the culture I'd long overlooked. Though most of the stories have been previously published (including "What Lee Anne Hawkins Did with Her Life" in Appalachian Heritage, Summer 1992), my favorite was one which may be too strong for most journals : "Stealing Sugar" is a powerful and pathetic story of fathers, daughters, dogs, and granddaughters, filled with twists and a nightmarish quality, told 62 through the eyes of a little girl and her new friend from a different level of society. Small Caucasian Woman is filled with real women, some trying to leave and some trying to get back home, plus a delightful tongue-in-cheek look at the current primitive art craze in "The Art Business." The title story begins with a personal ad in the Blue Valley News, a paper which "had never printed a personal ad before, there being no need to advertise one's private affairs in a town small enough for everyone to already know them. Moreover, to ask publicly for help in satisfying any need more intimate than selling a used backhoe or giving away free kittens went against the gnarled independence of our hill ways. We suspected a city type ..." Palencia's awareness of the culture is often buried within a paragraph, as in this excerpt from "The Best-Dressed Man in Dayton": "Nobody had ever said they loved me. Forresters is the type to wait until after you're dead to say it." Or this description of the organist who played roadhouse rowdy music for a funeral: "Directly she came out smiling to herself, a skinny litde old thing about seventeen, with limp red hair down to her shoulders and crooked-cut bangs. Her polyester suit was too short, and her spindly legs made her shoes look as big as Daisy Duck's. Somebody needed to do her over." Palencia doesn't "do over" Blue Valley: she captures the reality from the inside. This is the second 1993 book of short fiction drawn from the Morehead- /Northeast Kentucky area—the other being Chris Offutt...