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  • Everyone’s Invited to the Next Huddle Family Reunion
  • Amy Wright (bio)

The year I turned eleven, I sat with my family and many others in the sanctuary of the Wytheville Baptist church to hear local Ivanhoe boy, David Huddle, now grown and living in Vermont but back in town for the Chautauqua Festival to read from his newly published collection of prose.

Huddle read “Poison Oak,” a story whose narrator could have been one of my teenage boy cousins, except he saw and said things they never would have:

My grandmother was very small and had a sharp face that seemed angry whenever she looked at anyone except my brother and me. She wore white dresses, white stockings, and black, lace-up shoes. She wore no underclothes, so that if she stood in front of a window you could see right through her dress. If she had a bruise on her leg or hip she would hitch up her skirt and show it to you. Sometimes in the morning she stood at an upstairs window in a gauzy nightgown so worn that it didn’t hide her breasts at all and shouted angry instructions to my grandfather or one of his men. For a while I was embarrassed, but then I got used to her ways, as almost everyone who knew her did.

The casual brazenness of this woman and the influence she exerted over the men around her informed my budding concept of femininity and the captivating power of literature, but what retains my interest years later is how her immodesty exudes a certain uproarious innocence, even suggests that desire might be innocent were it freely expressed, which it almost never is. But if it were—it might resemble this woman wearing only a papery nightgown and fearless defiance of being anyone other than herself. There may be no greater freedom than that, or so this passage planted such a seed in my young mind. It bears a distinctly Appalachian fruit, the [End Page 56] way a mulberry, a pawpaw, or a blackheart cherry characterize the region, although they will grow, like questions of how to live, almost anywhere.

As it turns out Huddle himself could have been one of my cousins, by marriage, considering he dated and later dedicated a number of lyric images to my cousin Melva Stephens, whose memory he recalls in “Kindness” and “No End,” and “Boy Story.” She is the pretty majorette who makes his speaker “feel ashamed / I’m no longer a boy a girl would want” (Glory River 49). She is the innocent his teen speaker corrupts with cigarettes at band camp and whose desire he tries to negotiate in the back seat of a Dodge Coronet, being the kind of boy who plays his “sax so gorgeously the whole world / would bat its eyes at [him]” (Black Snake 16). This is the same Melva Stephens who stayed unlike Huddle in southwest Virginia, married, had a daughter, divorced, taught me poetry in the sixth grade, and died of lung cancer in 1996, which is to say, I read David Huddle with one ear cocked—as with music—for what he leaves out as much as what he includes.

The parts that are left out of nonfiction are what make the story, the Georgia-based writer Harrison Scott Key says, and it may make poetry an appealing genre for crafting memory. The lyric blind can offer a sharp slant for privacy—perhaps necessary for a writer who includes specific real world examples not only of his unblushing grandma and since-passed pubescent love, but also his surgeon, the poet Dorianne Laux, Wythe county citizens T. W. Alley, Mary Sawyers and Bobby Walter’s mother, and his daughters Molly and Bess, whose photograph appears in the front matter of Black Snake at the Family Reunion. The form allows one to dash and shimmer over parts of each story while bringing others into carefully tended relief.

Narratology has undergone an exciting upheaval since the advent of digital media, and scholars have filled journals and texts with examinations of its parameters, the potential it offers for meta-cognition, and the possible obsolescence of the narrator...

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