Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers

KATHRYN STRIPLING BYER: Deep Water

z ~ ~ z z :r: Q, KATHRYN STRIPLING BYER Kathryn Stripling Byer (b. 1944) is currently poet-in-residence at Western Carolina University, in Cullowhee, North Carolina. She was born in southwest Georgia and raised on a farm surrounded by cornfields and numerous cousins. Byer was fascinated by the mountains from an early age, always deeply influenced by her paternal grandmother's unrealized desire to one day return to the Blue Ridge Mountains, the place ofher birth. She graduated from Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, and took an M.F.A. from UNC-Greensboro, where she studied with AllenTate, Fred Chappell, and Robert Watson. While there she won the Academy of American Poets Student Prize for the UNC system. Her first volume of poetry, The GirL in the Midst ofthe Harvest (1986), was published in the Associated Writing Programs Award Series, and her second, Wildwood FLower (1992), received the Lamont Prize for the best second book by an American poet from the Academy of American Poets. Her most recent collection, forthcoming in 1998, is BLack ShawL. Her poems have also appeared in Georgia Review, Hudson Review, Southern Review, and Nimrod, among others, as well as in numerous anthologies. * * * Deep Witer TUCKASEGEE Wherever I walk in this house I hear water. Or time, which is water, the same Tuckasegee that runs past my window. What matter that some days I weary of it like the songs I sing over and over again in the kitchen, pretending I cannot hear water departing though I so plainly hear it, ifonly from habit? A sequence of bones rots beneath where I walk on the trail that unwinds down the hill to our yard where the leaves also rot. Every morning I braid what is left of my hair so that I may unbraid it to braid it again. So we harvest our gardens that winter will lay waste. We mend seams that pull apart slowly and scrub sweat from what we have sewn. With the same hands we knead bread and gather the crumbs as they fall, put away what we take out and take stock ofwhat we have left. It is all the same work. It has always been done, this undoing, ongoing, no matter who paces the rooms of the houses Deep ~ter alongside the banks, whether praising or cursing whatever is living or dying within them. Until it runs out like the river, our time is the music the water makes, leaving who's left of us listening. 63 "Solitude," said Emma Bell Miles in The Spirit ofthe Mountains, "is deep water, and small boats do not ride well in it." No one who has lived for long in these mountains can doubt the power of that solitude. It can cause a woman to sink into its depths and never rise again. It can drive her crazy trying to break its hold on her, all the while drawing her closer and closer to the edge of some jump-off, the distance rising up before her like a vision of freedom. The worst thing that icy blue water can do to a woman is to render her silent. Resigned to its hold, she becomes mute when she ought to be singing. A singer knows how to navigate deep water, setting the ripples spreading, sailing the song on its way. A singing woman knows how to travel, how to hang on for dear life and ride on the wave ofher own voice. To the women living in these mountains years ago, singing must have seemed the only way they could travel. Though their men might hightail it to Texas or spend weeks away on hunting forays, though the circuit rider might come and go, waving his Bible and shouting his message, they remained.They knew their place. They knew its jump-offs, its laurel hells, its little graves grown over with honeysuckle and blackberry briars. They knew the lay ofcloud shadows rolling down one ridge and up another. And their place knew them. Out ofthat reciprocal knowing, they were able to sing their way through their solitude and into a larger web ofvoices, voices that I have come to see as connective tissue stretching across these hills. Or, to draw on an image that has haunted me for a long time, like a black shawl that gathers up all of these voices into its complicated, endlessly evolving pattern. When I came to...