Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers

No Scapin the Booger Man

DENISE GIARDINA Denise Giardina was born in 1951 in Bluefield, West Virginia, and grew up in a coal camp. She is a graduate of West Virginia Wesleyan College and Virginia Theological Seminary. Her first novel, Good King Harry (I 984), was compared to Dickens by the New York Times. Author of Storming Heaven (I987) and The Unquiet Earth (I 992), two novels that cover sixty years of coalfield history in fictional Blackberry Creek, West Virginia, Giardina tells the unwritten story of a time now vanished, a story that American history has long neglected. Both novels have been highly praised by the national media, as well as by writers such as George Garrett, Annie Dillard, Carolyn Chute, Barbara Kingsolver, and Clyde Edgerton. Giardina is currently living in Charleston , West Virginia, and is writer-in-residence at West Virginia State College. * * * No Scapin the Booger Man 1learned to read and write in standard English atThorpe Elementary School, but before the teachers enticed me with the clean preciseness ofspelling and grammar, mine was a different language. 1was no prodigy who reads at age two or three and goes bored and superior to first grade. 1 stared with some curiosity at the tiny black squiggles that were supposed to be words, but 1 did not read until 1 was urged to it. 1saw no need to hurry. 1had the stories. 1 heard the stories first while perched upon the bony knees of old men. My papaw sang the violent, pure tales of the mountains. Back and forth his knee would sway, and me upon it, back and forth. Froggy wint a courtin and he did ride, mm hmm. Papaw's voice ud leap up at the end of a line like hes surprised at somethin. Uncle Brigham talked out his stories. He wudnt really my uncle, jus lived nex door, a good hearted coal miner who drank too much likker an hit his wife. He allays told his stories in the summer dusk with the frogs a peepin an the litnin bugs hoverin like the Lords gardan angels. Uncle Brigham ud sit in the front porch swing an tell bout the strange feller buried in the tater patch an the poor fool who dug up his big toe an took it home an wouldnt you know he et it an here come the booger man to git it back. Don't tell me no more Uncle Brigham cause I dont want to know. 1m on the firs step. 1m on the second step. 1WANT MY BIG TOE. They never was no scapin the booger man. Mter while 1 was makin my own stories an lettin urn run round inside my head. One a my favorites was bout the people at lived in a ole partment buildin in Welch. Welch was the county seat an it was jus glamrus as any city with its neon Falls City beer sign an so many buildins you couldnt never go in em all. Strange thangs must go on in such buildins, an stranges of all in at partment buildin, cause it had balconies. People at lived in partment buildins with balconies, ey wouldnt be like the rest of us. Eyd be from forrin countries whur theyd been princesses and dukes, only now they was in exile. Eyd have their jewls in the closet an therd be little statues an vases that was made a red an green glass an theyd be lots of flairs, specially roses. Them princesses ud be lookin to go back to their homes some day. Like lots of my stories, this un didnt have no end. 130 DENISE GIARDINA I learned about endings later, when I was taught quotation marks and spelling . Learning to spell ended any illusions I may have had that we are totally free and independent creatures. No, there was a higher authority that molded us all to its will and ordered our lives for us, an authority as inexorable in its own way as the booger man. Spelling and grammar are benevolent dictators perhaps, subjugating one raw culture that a broader one may be experienced. Coal companies are not so benevolent, and even as I lost my own Appalachian innocence, I lived through the destruction of my community. Home then was Black Wolf, West Virginia. Ten houses, little boxes once painted white but now grey with coal dust. A hulk of a company store (with a poor creature...