Listen Here: Women Writing in Appalachia

All On A Summer's Afternoon

532 LISTEN HERE I will not write their names. Deeper than books, than church, I have caught some ancient pain, accepting it to cup, as in a chalice, between my trembling hands. ALLONA SUMMER'S AFTERNOON from The Morning of the Red-Tailed Hawk (1981) When my mother had turned her sad slow heel back into childhood, she ran away, for most of a summer's afternoon. Neighbors with pitying faces came to help my father search the Flint River bottoms where she had scratched up arrowheads for us and told such tales that Creeks were lurking behind every pine and oak for all our summers. They combed high grasses skirting the beaver ponds where she once sat, shushing our very breath to quietness even the shyest beaver could trust. They found her in the farthest pasture. Tugging feebly at her print dress caught in a tangle of barbed wire, she stood with wide eyes, watching the Indians come from behind the trees. ...