Jesse Stuart: A Reminiscence

Jesse Stuart: A Reminiscence by Stephen M. Holt Hold April when there's music in the air, When life is resurrected like a dream, When wild birds sing up flights of windy stair And bees love alder blossoms by the stream. —Jesse Stuart "Hold April" Growing up in the Ohio River foothills near Greenup, Kentucky, I early became aware of Jesse Stuart's reputation as a significant American author. Of course as a child I read several of his books, such as Red Mule and Penny's Worth of Character, and I also caught an occasional glimpse of the man himself strolling down Main Street in Greenup, shaking hands and always talking. An imposing, square-shouldered man with a firm jaw and warm, alert eyes, his presence seemed to envelop the entire town. As my interest in literature increased, 39 my interest in Jesse Stuart increased until I became acquainted with him in the mid-1960s. I cannot say that Jesse supplied the sole impetus I needed to attempt a college education. But I can say he was an important influence and role model, and his inspirational example during the days of my young adulthood gave me much confidence in the years just ahead. In fact, I have come to realize how very fortunate I am to have been in the presence of such a remarkable artist and educator as Mr. Stuart, a man who always proudly sang his tales in a lyrical, affirmative, refreshing voice. My fondest memories of Jesse are those from springtime, the season he loved and praised so much. To him, the rebirth phase of the seasonal cycle is most precious. Aware, no doubt, of T. S. Eliot's famous paradoxical assertion in The Waste Land that "April is the cruellest month," Jesse writes in the ninth of his sonnet series Man With a Bull-Tongue Plow, Oh, April is the fairest month, to us— White flowers in the silver blowing wind— And their leaves in the wind hang tremulous And wind and leaves play a sweet violin. Indeed, it is the spring, particularly in April, that I am most often reminded of this proud Scots-Irish son of the Appalachian soil. In the spring of my senior year at the old Wurtland High School, "Miss Lutie" Nickell, a remarkable septuagenarian English teacher, struck upon the idea of presenting the dramatic version of Jesse's autobiographical novel The Thread That Runs So True as our school play. The night of the performance, there we were—an elderly lady and a handful of unskilled but willing teenagers on the stage of our cavernous high school gymnasium, presenting a play inspired by the work of a renowned author, with that very author seated in the audience, watching intently from his metal folding chair near the free throw line of the gym floor. I had taken the minor role of a student of Jesse's 1925 Lonesome Valley School, and I recall having a mere seventeen lines to deliver. But I delivered each line with a full heart; indeed, our entire cast responded with real effort, and after the curtain call Mr. Stuart lavished praise upon the production. He seemed just as excited about this local, amateur tribute as if he were being honored from a national platform. He noted enthusiastically, "You young people have marvelous speaking voices—very well-modulated, and they carry so well." I considered this comment high praise because Jesse's own voice had the same qualities he had attributed to ours. In fact, with each reading of Jesse's works, I unfailingly hear his powerful voice echoing like a fox hunter's horn across a cold Kentucky ridge in December . I hear it clearly when I read in The Thread That Runs So True: I thought if every teacher in every school in America—rural, village, city, township, church, public or private—could inspire in his pupils with all the power he had, if he could teach them as they had never been taught before to live, to work, to play, to share, if he could put ambition into their brains and hearts, that would be a great way to make a generation of...