Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers

Voiceplace

z o ~ !:' z z -< GEORGE ELLA LYON Born in 1949 and raised in Harlan, Kentucky, George Ella Lyon was educated at Centre College, the University ofArkansas, and Indiana University, where she studied with poet Ruth Stone. She began submitting book manuscripts in 1972; her first book, Mountain, was published in 1983. Since then Lyon has published a second collection of poetry (Catalpa, 1993), thirteen picture books (including Come a Tide [1990], featured on Reading Rainbow; Who Came Down That Road? [1992], aPublisher's Weekly Best Book of the Year; and Basket [1990], winner of the Kentucky Bluegrass Award), three novels for young readers (including Borrowed Children [1988], winner of the Golden Kite Award), an autobiography (A Wordfol Child, 1996), and Choices (1989), a book of stories for adult new readers. Her most recent books are Ada's Pal (1996) and With a Hammerfor My Heart (1997). Lyon recently collaborated with Jim Wayne Miller and Gurney Norman in the editing ofA Gathering at the Forks (1993), an anthology that celebrates fifteen years of the Hindman Settlement School Appalachian Writers' Workshop. She was also the execurive director of the Appalachian Poetry Project, a 1980 pilot project designed to support poets and poetry in the Central Appalachian region. Lyon lives in Lexington with her husband, musician Steve Lyon, and her two sons, Benn and Joey. She makes her living as a freelance writer and teacher. * * * Voiceplace Early in "Song ofMyself," Walt Whitman declares that he is "one ofthe Nation of many nations, the smallest the same and the largest the same" and then gives us fourteen long lines ofplaces and ways of life, from the "Kentuckian walking the vale ofthe Elkhorn" to the fishermen "offNewfoundland, / at home in the fleet of iceboats." He concludes the catalogue by saying: "I resist any thing better than my own diversity, / Breathe the air but leave plenty after me, / And am not stuck up, and am in my place." Whitman knew that democracy did not require and should not produce sameness-even within the individual ("Do I contradict myself?" he asks. "Very well then I contradict myself."), that in fact our strength and vitality spring from our variety. No melting pot for Whitman, no stew even, but many pots aromatically bubbling with everything from grits to borscht to fricasseed buffalo. What has happened to our taste for differences? "I hungered for the burr ofAppalachian r's," writes West Virginia poet Mary Joan Coleman in "D.C. Working Girl Lonesome." Living in the city, she longed not only for the place but for the voice ofhome. She grew up where the ruggedness of landscape and life shaped the language, where metaphors outnumbered even kinfolks . Having moved to a place where her accent was ridiculed, she realized her loss. For the history and spirit ofa place are in its voices; to accept the denigration ofthe speech you were born into is to sever one ofthe threads ofongoing life. It is also to foster the false impression that culture happens somewhere else, New York or Los Angeles, Chicago or Boston, and has to trickle down to the rest of us, that culture is a commodity that we buy or travel far to see rather than something that comes.from us and speaks to us. It implies that stories-and therefore the people who tell and hear them-are more important in the metropolis than in the mountains or the Midwest. It took me a long time to recognize the vital connection between voice and place in my own life and work. I grew up in Harlan County, Kentucky, in the coalfields, and was in high school during the War on Poverty. I remember the TV stereotypes-not just on The Beverly Hillbillies but on the news-of mountain people both materially and culturally deprived. So I thought, if I am going to write, the first thing I have to do is go somewhere and acquire a culture. During that process I would learn to sound like I was from somewhere else. I didn't know that was like cutting your throat to remedy hunger. Voiceplace 169 In college I wrote poetry primarily, and my subjects were medieval music, Dutch painters, and love. The language was that of a person born in a book and majoring in men's studies. We called it English. But I kept a journal, too, where I set down things that interested me. One was a sentence I'd seen printed in crayon on a young child's paper at Pine Mountain Settlement School: "I hope how soon Spring comes." I loved the way the rising sap of spring, hope itself, lifted the words into a new order. Not standard but rare, expressive. "How I hope Spring comes soon" is tired by comparison. 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 ofrelatives she remembered: Honey-eating Richard, Pie-belly Miracle. I wrote down a story she told me ofOld 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 ofher stories. Let not thy left brain know what thy right brain is doing. After graduating from Centre College and the University ofArkansas, 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 ofmy experience as a woman. Suddenly I had a wealth ofmaterial. 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, recent winner of the Nobel Prize, confirms this, saying in a radio interview , "I think for words to have any kind ofindependent 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 ifa person's experience ofthe 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 ofpeople out there writing down how their grandmother 170 GEORGE ELLA LYON talked and why she talked like that and why her farm was taken away from her. I found out there was an entire tradition ofAppalachian 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 schoo!, London and Paris, the Smithsonian and the New York Public Library, and now I needed to go home. For while I found all sorts ofnecessary 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 UnminedVein, was published. Lee didn't just write about life in Clay County, Kentucky, she wrote in voices ofpeople who lived there. The first section of her book, "Mother/ode," 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- Voiceplace so you strap it on Oh, you give St. Jude 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 donebuild against cold and death scalds the darkyou strap it on there's strength in the bindin' I scrubbed on a board I know what it's about 171 k this poem illustrates, place is not just location, geography; place is history, family, the shape and context ofdaily life. How can I separate the mountains from 172 GEORGE ELLA LYON 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 ofsix 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 notLexington , 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 ofconditions 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 ofvoices 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 ou.t ofthat 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 myselfto a stop at Blue Licks State Park. It's the site ofthe last battle ofthe Revolution, fought after the war had ended.The news hadn't made it to Kentuckyyet. 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 Oldfield. 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." Voiceplace 173 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 offinto 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 ofwriting while driving, so I just let the possibility cook till I got home, then made a few notes (before I got out ofthe car, lest the tide offamily 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 soundedright 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 ofgoldenrod 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 174 GEORGE ELLA LYON 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 ifyou 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 1 got over being ashamed ofhow my people talked." "How [our] people talked" is the embrace oflanguage 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. ...