by Lee Smith
THE PASSAGE OF TIME ADDED a special poignancy to Lou’s work. In her poem “Smith Creek No. 1,” for instance, she told how she “loathed the likes of Smith Creek where I followed my husband to . . . those years of borning five young ones by myself with no doctor and washing for five on a board until four o’clock, until the sun dropped behind Gumm’s Hill.” Hard times. Yet after the passage of many years, this period took on a beautiful elegaic glow. In “ ‘Smith Creek No. 2 (feeling bad about writing Smith Creek No. 1),’ ” she is “calling back those years of planting harvesting / Breathing touching among our meanderings / In and out of lives where we pursued / All strange and wonderful things / Down deep into the mysterious dark / Where the roots wind about the heart” as “The seasons change and go. The fire eyes of an opossum glow.” The final image was one of peaceful beauty, life come gloriously full circle at last: “In Smith Creek, a scarlet leaf floats round and round.”
“You know how the mist comes up and covers the land, lots of times?” Lou asked me. “Some of these people that I write about are from a long time ago, they’re not anymore, they’re just kind of like the mist that covers my mountains. Sometimes I think they may still be there in those mountains. My people may still be right there.”
Lou was born on the North Fork of the Holston River, one of ten children in the Price family. “We ran all over the hills and watched from behind trees and played Indians, and I knew more flowers and animals than I did people.” She went to the Radford Normal School at sixteen, graduating cum laude in three years, then returned home to teach. Lou married Homer Crabtree in 1942 and moved to the Smith Creek area, near where she was born. She had five children in seven years, taking a ten-year leave from teaching to “raise cattle, tobacco, and young’uns. Oh, money is scarce on a mountain.” Lou characterized her husband as a “very soft-spoken man . . . a very calm and kind man . . . a man that people would come and sit down and talk to.” Later she returned to the classroom, teaching just about every subject at every level, from a one-room school to elementary and high schools.
After Homer’s death, Lou bought her home at 313 Valley Street for $4,000, money she’d “saved up” from teaching, and moved into town in 1960 as a widow with five teenagers. In reminiscing about the “early widow phase,” Lou winks at me: “Oh, you’ll have lots of opportunities as a young widow. They say, ‘When you’re old, I’ll take care of you’ . . . like hell they will! I was through and done with all that.” Her son George “who raises those old Charolais cattle” shared her Valley Street home for a long time. Even after her official retirement, Lou continued to teach all manner of classes, especially enjoying the GED and English as a Second Language groups, “getting to know some gorgeous people, from Viet Nam, and Japan, and Venezuela . . . well, everyplace!”
She was also the leader of the Rock of Ages Band of senior citizens, which performed all over the area. “We have three pianists in case one gets sick, we can fall back on another one. We have a mandolin player and a guitar player and an autoharp. Mr. Harold Clark on the mandolin, he is eighty-some years old, and he can play that ‘Somewhere My Love.’ His wife is one of our chaperones. You wouldn’t think we need chaperones, but we do! We have got the best banjo player in town, her name is Love Craig, and she is eighty-five years old. Oh, can she play that banjo! Now that is really something, to hear Love Craig play the banjo.”
I agree, having served as “roadie” on several tours with the Rock of Ages Band.
But always, Lou was writing, her life a testament to the sustaining and revitalizing power of language. She often stuck her brother into a story. “He died at the age of thirty, after coming back from the war one year, and he was an alcoholic, so that was a great grief to me. Oh yes, we were close. Now once in a while when I put in this character Bud, that’s my brother. It makes me feel good, you know, that though he died, I can keep him going.” Her writing was widely published; Louisiana State University Press brought out her collection of stories, Sweet Hollow, in 1984. (The publisher was startled when he first called her house and George answered, as he invariably did, “Hello! Poorhouse!”—“Hoping they’d think it was something else, and sometimes they did!” Lou laughed.) Her book of poems, The River Hills and Beyond, came out from Sow’s Ear Press in 1998. Lou won the Virginia Cultural Laureate in Literature Award, the Governor’s Award for Arts in Virginia, as well as a special award from the Virginia Highlands Festival. Calling on Lou, a one-woman stage play celebrating her life and work, premiered at the Barter Theater in Abingdon and then toured Virginia; she even appeared on the Today Show.
But none of this meant much to Lou. She called the later phase of her life “the porch years” and what she liked to do most was sit out on that porch where I visited her so many times amid the jumble of old furniture and plants and knickknacks, just talking and reading and watching the traffic pass by. Sometimes we sang a little. “Oh darling, you can’t love but one. Oh darling, you can’t love but one. You can’t love but one and have any fun . . . You can’t love ten and love me again—Oh boy, I’m leaving on that midnight train!” or “Cindy got religion, she danced around and ’round, she got so full of glory, she knocked the preacher down!” We laughed a lot.
In winter, we’d sit inside by the heater near her sturdy bed layered with quilts, books, and manuscripts piled everyplace. Everything in that room was precious to her. “Now, take these cabinets. My husband’s people were cabinetmakers. Fine old cabinetmakers. They could join up two pieces of wood so it looked like it growed together. That’s my mother’s blue vase up there. It is a cobalt blue and they don’t make that cobalt anymore. They use all that cobalt in cancer treatment.” Lou herself never took so much as an aspirin. She lived entirely in the front room by then, with kitchen and bathroom at hand and a good view of Valley Street out the bay window. She had a steady stream of visitors, pilgrims like myself.
“Why, there’ve been people here from the Arctic regions, just dying to talk. A man was in here the other day that had climbed Mt. Everest, and a woman came who was going on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. I’ve always wanted to go on that myself,” Lou told me.
“Why not?” I asked. “A lot of people take up traveling when they retire.”
“Why, I don’t have to!” she laughed. “I have traveled all over the world right here on this porch. People talk to me, they take me to all these places that they’ve been to. We are in a changing time, but people do like to talk. They will come and sit down here and talk—especially if they can laugh!”
“These porch years are very creative for me,” Lou said. She also called them her “spiritual years.” She became interested in space, even taking a course from the University of Virginia. She wrote more than fifty “space poems.”
When I asked why she had gotten so fascinated with space, Lou answered, “Because it’s out there! Our universe is like a great big clock, run by God’s laws of chemistry, math, biology, and science . . . Now you know He doesn’t do things mish-mash! And there’ll come a day when the spirit will take leave of this old body. It’s going to rise up to Paradise, and I wanted to know where Paradise was! So I’ve found out by science how it’s going to happen. When you go faster than the speed of light, then you get younger and younger. Science and scripture agree! You’re going to live forever in paradise, and you’ll be young. I can’t wait!”
Lou’s new interest seemed to be an expansion—not a contradiction—of traditional religion. “I went to churches all my life,” she told me, mentioning the old Centenary Methodist Church in particular. “I never went to a church in my life that I wasn’t helped. And now,” she said, “I’m open! I’m open to everything!”
I told Lou that I believed I finally understand something she told me so long ago: “ ‘You have to travel a lonely road. It is you yourself traveling along, and if you are able along the road to meet a friend, to meet a love . . . you’re very, very lucky. But it is a lonely road even though you have sons and daughters that you love better than yo
ur own life—that you’d give your own life for. One day you have to let them go, you let them all go. Oh, all right, it’s a lonely road.’ ”
Now I know what she meant.
“Do you ever have times you can’t sleep?” she asked me. “You probably don’t, but you will, honey, you will. Well, things will rise out of the night, some way or other. All our people back of us can rise and come out in the night time awful good, and talk to us, and comfort us. Why I saw your mother one time, Lee, sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of the Martha Washington Inn! I saw your pa driving that fancy car right up to heaven.
“Death should be thought of as a beautiful part of life,” Lou said. “I’m not a bit afraid of dying. I want to die right here in this old bed with a pencil in my hand.” But not anytime soon—“I want to make it to 2000. I’d like to see what they do and say about it!”
Actually she made it to April 10, 2006, dying in her sleep at ninety-three. I had promised Lou I would “preach at her funeral” and I did—one of several speakers at the same Abingdon United Methodist Church where we had first met in the creative writing class, all those years ago. I read her poem “Salvation” aloud at the service. Afterward I walked over to Valley Street and stood for a long time looking at Lou’s house, which had been sold and spruced up. The porch looked like anybody’s porch now. I remembered her words, “We are all going in a circle, and death is not the end of our circle. It is just a word that some people have.” I fingered the buckeye in my pocket.
LOU’S POEM “SALVATION” WAS PRINTED in the program for her funeral on April 14, 2006.
SALVATION
jesus jesus jesus i got something
this old body aint so important
in this old body i feel holiness i got holiness
i got jesus flirtin with death
ever day in the coal mines flirtin with death
my daddy flirted and my brothers flirted
and my uncles and cousins
and my daddy got his back broken
flirtin with death
brother flirtin with death motorcycles, race cars
not my way flirtin with death
sister flirted i danced around her coffin
high in my hand same snake caused her death
laid her three weeks baby in her dead arms
sister got holiness flirtin with death
i feel holiness jesus i got something
washing the feet laying on hands dancing the fire dance
glory glory glory
praying for the sign the wounded blood of jesus
on the feet on the hands on the head
praying three years for the jesus sign
glory hallelujah
in the church house old snake washed clean
i put him to my shoulder flirtin with death
i touch him to my lips flirtin with death
flirtin with death i raise him to my breast
old velvet lips with his singing tail and lightning breath
i offer old velvet lips my snowy white breast
jesus jesus this old body aint so important
i got holiness flirtin with death
—Lou V. Price Crabtree
(March 13, 1913 – April 10, 2006)
Lightning Storm
WHEN I WAS A CHILD, books brought my deepest pleasure, my greatest excitement. Reading, I often felt exactly the way I felt during summer thunderstorms: I just had to run out of the house and up the mountain into the very storm to whirl in the thunder and rain on the rocky top while lightning cracked all around me.
Since the next best thing to reading books was writing them and talking about them, I ended up becoming a writer and a professor. But then there came a time when I realized that I was hearing entirely too much about agents and advances, about “revising the canon” and “privileging the text” and “writing across the curriculum.” I became depressed about writing, which no longer seemed relevant to anything real. I had lost the lightning.
So when a Lila Wallace – Readers’ Digest Writers’ Award in 1992 offered me the chance to get out of my college classroom and affiliate with a nonprofit group of my choice for some community involvement, I jumped at the chance to get back to the coal fields.
I chose to work with the Hindman Settlement School in Hindman, Kentucky. I had often been a visiting writer for their summer creative writing workshop. The school’s adult learning center, a no-nonsense brick building overhanging a muddy creek, offered a year-round literacy program, adult education classes, and tutoring services for the high school equivalency exam. The need for these programs is great. Half the county’s population hasn’t made it through high school; most dropouts leave before the ninth grade. Unemployment is high, and incomes are low.
I had the privilege of visiting this ongoing program each fall and spring for three years. At the Settlement School, I lived in a log house, gave readings and talks at area schools and community colleges, and conducted several daily workshops with students in the programs at the Adult Learning Center. We usually had ten to eighteen people per group; I also worked one-on-one with several people who really had a lot to say—some began writing their own life stories.
Since I can’t actually remember the time when I couldn’t read and write, I didn’t understand the enormous sense of empowerment that comes with mastering written language. It was a revelation for me to meet red-headed, good-looking Connel Polly of Vicco, Kentucky, a successful grading contractor who had kept his illiteracy secret from everybody but his wife for fifty years. In It’s Like Coming Out of a Deep Hole, his booklet of memories printed by the Hindman School, he recounts this incident:
One time, the mining company sent me to Canton, Ohio, going after mine parts in a pickup truck. They had told me which roads to take and what the exit was, and I was supposed to find this company that was on Fifth Street. So I drove all around looking for a five, and I couldn’t find it. That’s when I realized “Fifth” was a word, and I couldn’t read it. I couldn’t find it. That’s the only time I ever cried in my life. I just pulled off the road and sat there and cried. I was eight hours away from home and it was getting dark. That was pitiful. Finally I had to ask somebody, and it turned out I was sitting right at it. I could see it. I felt so bad I didn’t even stay the night. After I did my business I drove on back, and I was down all the way home. I was so blue. I felt the worst I’ve ever felt. There I was—a grown man—trying to make a living in that shape!
Now, he writes:
I didn’t know learning to read would change my life so much. It has made me have more confidence in myself. Before, I even had a fear of going into a public restroom. I had fear of being embarrassed by someone handing me something to read. I stayed away from places such as banks, post offices, and doctors’ offices. The first visit to a new doctor was hardest because you had to fill out forms. I always had my wife with me. Now, I’ll go anywhere. Also, me and my wife leave notes for each other. Now that’s something!
Lively Florida Slone, a well-known local ballad singer, did not enroll until the death of her husband. She writes:
I always thought of myself as a bean planted in a garden, and then someone put a big rock on top of me so that I could not get out of the ground. Now . . . I have gotten my driver’s license, and I can write my own checks. I can read my Bible and my songbooks. I have always liked to make up songs and stories, but I never could write them down before. Now I can. I am beginning to grow. Maybe one of these days I’ll be like Jack’s beanstalk!
Mrs. Slone became a participant in many activities at the Adult Learning Center, where her outgoing personality brought her many friends.
The school put together a collection of Mrs. Slone’s writing entitled A Garden of Songs, which range from love songs to hymns (“Voice of Angels”); to funny party tunes like “Chew Tobacco” and “Big Fat Dog.” There are also story songs such as “Red Hot Election” and “School Bus Wreck in Floyd County” that chronicle local events.
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She tells the circumstances that occasioned the writing of each song. “One time I was asked to leave a church because my husband had been married before—they called him ‘a old double-married thing.’ I went home and wrote this song. I wrote it to give me comfort. I wanted the world to know that Jesus was the pastor in my church, not somebody else.” That song is entitled “To All the People Looking Down Their Nose at Me.”
Some of Mrs. Slone’s songs are pure poetry. About the composition of “Last Night,” she tells us, “It was rainy one night, and the clouds were passing by, and I could hear the whippoorwills calling—it’s been years ago.”
Last night I sat and watched the clouds go by
I heard whippoorwills call from the mountains so high
I heard the water as it dropped soft and low
Seems like death is a secret nobody knows.
Other writers also took the opportunity to express deep feelings. Pretty young Promise Sandling wrote about her childhood:
I used to feel like no one loved me cause
My family was always falling apart
All my dads always left
But now I feel wonderful-N-I am happy
Because guess what?
I think I am smart!
Most of my writing students were women. Some had been unable go to school when they were girls because of early pregnancies; local churches and general opinion were against abortion, so this had not been an option. Married or not, these women had raised their children, often in difficult circumstances. Other girls had needed to stay home from school to help out with younger children or sick family members. Many enrolled upon discovering, after divorce or widowhood, what they could do for themselves.
Glenda Johnson, who eventually had to drop out of the program to tend ailing relatives, first found the time to write about her son:
This is a poem about Roy Glen Johnson.
He lives in a wooden house
At Mallie, KY 41836
He has blue eyes