Black Shawl by Kathryn Stripling Byer (review)

our increasing engagement in the act of reading, the point of view apparently ceases to quaver after the first hour or two of reading. As Aristotle has stated, "Ourjudgments when we are pleased and friendly are not the same as when we are pained and hostile." And to be sure, after fifty pages with Icy, we are friendly with her and pleased with Rubio for creating her. Ultimately, the portrait is a compelling one. We are given, in ley's own words, the story of a girl who grew "to see the world through hope-filled eyes. Though hope did not come easy." And so ley's rite of passage is, at last, the story of a girl who earns the right to hope, earns it through her own determination, through her love for her friends and family, and through her faith in a universe that is itself, in some troubled way, impure but good. -William Jolliff Kathryn Stripling Byer. Black Shawl. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998. $11.95. Haunted by the voices of mountain women, Kathryn Stripling Byer's Black Shawl is a three-part collection of poems based on ballads women sang through their hardships. The first, "The Ballad Singers," tells about the daily lives of women wanting to escape the mountains to find love. The second section, "Blood Mountain," tells about hardships, abuse, and blood. The final part is the voice of Delphia, a teacher who taught the mountain children to read. Byer was inspired to name her book after a shawl she ordered from Sears and Roebuck when she noticed how the fringes folded in her arms. The title, Black Shawl, is also a metaphor for so much of the tragedy mountain women experienced as the black fabric seems to gather their voices. Byer, who is the writer in residence at Western Carolina University, moved to Western North Carolina in 1968 from southwest Georgia. She formed kinship with the mountain women as the voices of mountain women reminded her of her own grandmother, born in North Georgia. Byer felt obliged to move to the mountains because of her grandmother's love for this region. Byer thinks the mountain women sang ballads to help them make it through the dark nights, through the solitude, and also keep them in touch with the history of the Old World. Most of the singers Byer knew were women who were keepers of the ballads from a Scots Irish heritage: 63 "What else could they do?/ But when they sang/ their solitude into/ those old songs of love/ and betrayal, each verse/ must have called like a path/ to them, braving the laurel/ hills, rockslides/ / and bottomless chasms... One by/ one, I see them open their mouths.// Here I am,/ they sing,/ having become their own voices." And according to Byer, the voices of mountain women are still very much alive in these Appalachian Mountains. -Brenda Kay Ledford Sharyn McCrumb. The Ballad of Frankie Silver. New York: Putnam, 1998. 386 pages. Annabel Thomas. Blood Feud. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998. 208 pages. $24.95. She has done it again. Sharyn McCrumb's newest "ballad" novel, The Ballad of Frankie Silver, combines detailed historical research with masterful storytelling to produce yet another book that is both a joy to read and an education on Appalachia, this time on the British legal system in use in this country during the 1880s. Frankie Silver is the stuff oflegends, a beautifulblonde teenager who was the first woman ever hanged in the state of North Carolina, in 1883, a feisty mountain girl who supposedly took her secrets to the grave. The Frankie legend says she took an axe and whacked her husband, nineteen-year-old Charlie Silver, into bits and pieces, burned some and buried others, then stood trial in a courtroom where the law prevented her from testifying on her own behalf. No, this is not the "Frankie and Johnny" ballad we have always known, the song where "he was her man, and he was doing her wrong." "It's like confusing Barbara Bush with Barbara Mandrell," explains one of the characters. "A mere coincidence of names." That minor issue is resolved...