Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers

Appalachian Loaves and Fishes

~ ...l Z o o BENNIE LEE SINCLAIR Resident of Cleveland, South Carolina, and poet laureate of the state, Bennie Lee Sinclair (b. 1939) is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Furman University and the ninthgeneration descendant ofsettlers of the state's mountainous "Dark Corner." Her first volume, Little Chicago Suite (1971), was introduced by Mark Strand and very quickly became known in poetry circles. Her second volume ofpoetry, The ArrowheadScholar (1978), received the Winthrop College Excellence in Writing Award. Lord ofSprings appeared in 1990 and won a Pulitzer Prize nomination. And in 1992 she published The Endangered:New andSelected Poems. Sinclair is the author ofa mystery called The Lynching (1992) that relies heavily on her memory ofthe last lynching in South Carolina -a lynching that occurred in her hometown when she was nine years old. Poems, stories, and essays by Sinclair have appeared in journals including North American Review, Foxfire, San Jose Studies, Poet Lore, and South Carolina Review. She has also written a short story chapbook and two regional histories and received the Appalachian Writers' Association Book oftheYear Award. Sinclair lives on a 135-acre wildlife and wild plant sanctuary in the mountains above Cleveland with her husband, Don Lewis. * * * Appalachian Loaves and Fishes I came into life part of a mountain family whose landscape, culture, and people were my own. But before I W:IS five, my parents' separation closed this world to me. At nineteen I reentered it when I married Don Lewis and we began our pilgrimage ofthe hills. Now I am fifty-seven and have come to know this world with special intimacy. Its influences on my life and work I consider to be gifts ofbiblical proportions, my Appalachian loaves and fishes. Why? My father was born on a mountaintop berween Fruitland and Bearwallow, North Carolina, in 1912. My great-uncle John told that, as a boy, he watched the Cherokee doctor ride up to the house with a large satchel thrown over the saddle. "There's a baby in that satchel," my great-grandmother Lizzie Sinclair told him. "The doctor has come to deliver it." My father, Waldo Graham-"Graham"-Sinclair was born later that March morning, safely delivered. My mother, Bennie Lee Ward, entered life a seeming great distance away, though it was only sixty miles, in a modern hospital in the South Carolina foothills town ofGreenville. Her mother, Pernecy-"Necy" -a grieving young widow, named the baby "Bennie," after its father, Ben Ward, who had died six weeks earlier ofswine flu, aged rwenty-six. A half-century later Necy recalled that birth of her only child when spring peepers chanted forlornly, "Ben! Ben! Ben!" It was the first day ofspring, 1917. My father, Graham, grew up at the top of the Blue Ridge escarpment, in a remote region ofhigh mountains, deep forests, and small farms. Mother was raised at the bottom of the escarpment, in a growing metropolis. Necy drove her own car. The first time my father visited Greenville, in 1921, he and his parents, brothers and sisters, rode down from the hills in a "bow frame" covered wagon. His mother, Effie, had hitched up the horses. The family moved to Greenville in the first years of the Great Depression, when farming failed. An unlikely match, my parents met in early 1933, when Daddy went to work in a small grocery. Perhaps the only thing they had in common was striking good looks, but that was enough. When Mother came to the store to buy meat, she was charmed by the newcomer's tightly curled, widow's-peaked, blue-black hair and Appalachian Loaves and Fishes 263 pale blue eyes. He was in awe ofthis ninety-pound, petulant s9cialite with wrenbrown curls and tiny waist. When she got home, she found he had written her a love note on the butcher paper. She was fifteen, he twenty-two. Against both families' objections, they soon married. My brother, Waldo Graham Jr., "Buster," was born that December. When I came along six years later, my parents and brother had been living for some time with Necy and her second husband, Ocron Jones. Necy and Ocron had married in June 1929, when he was a very wealthy man. Mother was given finery, the run ofa palatial house, and even a chauffeur. By the end ofthat historically dreadful year, Ocron was bankrupt, but not before Mother had developed a taste for riches and...