Bloodroot: Reflections on Place by Appalachian Women Writers

Counting the Sums

RITA SIMS QUILLEN Born in 1954 in Hiltons, Virginia, the fifth generation to be born in that place, Rita Sims Quillen is the oldest of four children. When she was thirteen, she almost got the part ofMick in the film version of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. She married her high school sweetheart at nineteen, graduated from a local community college at the age of twenty-three, and then transferred to East Tennessee State University, where she majored in English/education and minored in business. While an undergraduate, Quillen won first place in the Virginia Highlands Writing Contest (essay division) and published two stories in small magazines. She received the Outstanding English Student Award from ETSU in 1980. Her M.A. thesis, Lookingfor Native Ground: Contemporary Appalachian Poetry, was published in 1989. Quillen, also author of an elaborate bibliography of modern and contemporary mountain poetry that was published in AppalachianJournal in 1985, is fast being viewed as an aurhority on mountain literature . A chapbook of her poetry, October Dusk, was published in 1987. A new fulllength book, Counting the Sums (1995), contains a collection of her most recent poetry . Since 1987, Rita has taught in the English Department at Northeast State Technical Community College. She is an associate professor and received the Outstanding Faculty Award in 1992. Quillen currently lives in Weber City, Virginia, a small town about five miles from Hiltons, with her husband, Gary Mac Quillen, and two children. * * * Counting the Sums I must tell them someday when they are old enough for memory about the family of twelve huddled in a creaking cabin cracked feet oozing on splintered floors, show them the photo album my father by a '52 Ford his foot propped on the bumper with the confidence only the baby boy in a clan of doting sisters could ever know, my mother in a red coat the hat with fur trim beaming at the camera with the smile of a survivor the strong one in a house ofweakness. A counting ofall their sums requires the telling of day after day in two rooms with four kids and an ironing board $20 in a drawer two weeks to payday the mouth-drying grief ofa busted radiator, a day ofstinging sweat in a heat-dancing field coal grit in the back of the throat. -Counting the Sums "We are all the sums we have not counted," Thomas Wolfe wrote, "and every moment is a window on all time." In my writing, I attempt to count my life's 220 RITA SIMS QUILLEN sums, revisiting the mystery of particular moments. I am positive that I would have become a writer regardless ofmy life's circumstances, but I am also sure that had I lived somewhere else, had I been grown in other soil, I would have been a different writer. The time and place of my birth is crucial to understanding some things about my material and my viewpoint. Like many of the writers in this volume, I am part of the reaction to what I call the "cultural pressure cooker" ofAppalachia. As I discussed in my book Lookingfor Native Ground, the Deep South earlier in this century and the Southern Appalachian region today represent rural communities with distinct cultural traditions and values that are being challenged and shaped by rapid industrialization , commercialization, and mass media. Allen Tate, one ofthe Southern Agrarians , or Vanderbilt "Fugitives" as they were called, pointed out what happens when there is such a "crossing ofthe ways." He notes in his essay "The Profession ofLetters in the South" that there has always been an intense literary reaction, no matter what culture or what era. "It [the cultural clash] has made possible the curious burst ofintelligence, ... not unlike, on an infinitesimal scale, the outburst of poetic genius at the end of the sixteenth century when commercial England had already begun to crush feudal England" (p. 768). As part of a place and culture under the intense pressure of change, I felt the strong urge to record, to capture, to preserve every word, every experience, every image I could before it was too late. I live by my senses and my instincts, and this time and place called Appalachia is fertile ground for someone like me. There are so many powerful images, from my childhood in particular, in a world so different. I remember cakewalks with fiddle music, revival meetings, and molasses stir...