Honor for Glory

FICTION Honor for Glory Barbara Smith YOU KNOW THAT SAYING ABOUT PROPHETS not being without honor except in their own hometowns? Well, I, Glory Felicity Slone, ain't no prophet, but I sure have been without honor. Folks within fifty miles of War, West Virginia, would laugh their square heads off should I so much as whisper the word "artist." But by God, that's what I am beginning to believe I am about becoming. See, in recent years now I have been spending unemployed moments sitting here on the blocks in front of my doublewide— doublewide on account of because I used to have a husband and two little kids to shelter. But that's another whole story. Maybe not. Maybe that's the gist of it, what forced me into artisting. See, all the time growing up, wishing my ma and pa was some other kid's ma and pa or I was somebody else's kid or, best yet, Ma and Pa had brung me up in some other not-so-god-forsaken location, I would sit up in the apple tree or crawl into Pa's abandoned backyard coal mine, and I would dream ofbeing someplace else, someplace over the mountain, someplace like Charleston staring at that golden dome or Cincinnati with them Reds and all, or maybe even Akron where I could make tires for cars or little kids' bikes. And what I would do while I was dreaming was take a piece of coal and draw pictures on Mama's old grocery bags, them brown kind what was wore out and had holes in them. I would draw kids on their bikes and Abraham Lincoln sitting down in a rocking chair instead of having to stand up worried-like for years and years like my history books showed him in front of the West Virginia capítol. I'd draw Ma and Pa laying on a beach in North Carolina though that never turned out right on account of it was too hard to imagine, so I'd draw them sitting under the apple tree out back. I could almost imagine that. That's what I'd do, hide in my secret places and think up stories and draw pictures and sometimes just play with a kitten, whichever one was not yet a big nasty cat. That went on for years and years until Ma and Pa decided I was big enough to work and put me out as a hired girl after school and on week ends and in the summer until I didn't have no more private time 53 nor the interest nor energy to do nothing but sleep and help can the tomatoes. Then Kenny and me, we got married, me already, like they say, with child and him going to work cat-eye shift in the mine and me taking in laundry which was mighty hard work what with having to take it to the laundromat and making next to nothing for what was still mighty hard work. Then the first kid and the second one, and then Kenny laid off and us not able to sell the trailer and still paying on the mortgage, so he tells me he's heading for Ohio where his two cousins are working, Cincinnati, he says, and he's taking the girls with him so's they can see the big city, and he will be bringing them back before school starts, like two weeks maybe. And I am stupid enough to believe him, to think he is more worldly wise than me, which he is, laid off or not, but that sure don't make him honest. He is not, I am coming to believe, any more smart than his stupid little wife, I now must suspect, but he is, I must admit, more worldly wise and therefore has led me to believe him many times when I should not of. So anyhow, I don't hear from him or them, any of them, and I am worrying some about my girls, but in spite of his habits of running around some and spending money on foolishness like, you know, that...