Oral History (9781101565612)

by Lee Smith

  RICHARD BURLAGE DISCOURSES UPON THE CIRCUMSTANCES CONCERNING HIS COLLECTION OF APPALACHIAN PHOTOGRAPHS, C. 1934.

  I parked my automobile carefully in front of the bank, wrapped my new English scarf about my neck and put on my hat, adjusting it in the mirror. The scarf and the hat were important to me, affording—or so I thought—a kind of disguise. The mustache helped, too. And the mirror pleased me because of its frame, the way it entrapped my image and framed it so nicely, reassuring me again that here was a new man, a confident man, so different from the boy who had left here ten years back. Even my eyes were different: no longer startled and wild, but melancholy and wise in the mirror’s frame, betraying a knowledge beyond my years. And why not? I mused upon the singular pain to which I had been privy in these hills. Now I returned as a mature man, an artist, having in that interim deserted literature for the relatively new field of photography—this vocation, in fact, having occasioned my present visit. For I wished—foolish notion—to capture a bit of the past. I checked my film, my lenses. I stepped out into the cold clear light of early mountain spring, and turned to lock the door.

  A crowd of little boys had gathered around my automobile, giggling and poking at each other, yet retaining still that judgmental solemnity I always found so unsettling among the mountain youngsters.

  “Hey, mister,” one of them said. “Hey, mister, how much you pay for that car?”

  Glancing up and down the narrow, rutted street, I noted then that mine was the only new automobile among all those parked cars and battered muddy trucks which lined it. The pale sunlight glinted somehow obscenely off the outstretched wings of the silver eagle on the hood.

  “Hey, mister, you gotta nickel?” The boys kicked at my tires. I considered asking them not to, yet refrained from so doing when they were joined by several older friends, lean and hardfaced, who hung back against the bank’s streaked marble façade and gathered beneath the green-striped flapping awning of Stinson’s Pharmacy next door. The possibility of an unpleasant incident dawned on me. I smiled uncertainly, I hoped disarmingly, in the general direction of them all, checking my camera again, for these fellows were nothing if not picturesque.

  “Hey, mister, take my picture! Hey, mister, looky here!” The little boys went into a frenzy.

  “You’ll have to stand very still then,” I told them, focusing, relieved to have diverted their attention away from the automobile. “Stand still,” I repeated.

  “Like this?” one said, pushing another, so that three of them fell in a struggling heap until one sat up bawling, with a bloody nose.

  I snapped the shutter.

  This photograph caught the boy sitting flat in the muddy street, legs stretched out straight before him so that one can plainly see the hole in the sole of his shoe and how it has been patched with cardboard—“Hoover leather,” they call it—the boy digging one fist into his face crying, his expression one of anger and loss so extreme as to be obviously inappropriate to the momentary injustice which occasioned it, blood running down from his torn nose into his mouth and dribbling back out the corner of his mouth, his other hand with its pudgy fingers splayed childishly in the dirt. I captured this boy in the foreground, sharp relief: even the patches on his overalls stand out. Behind him, blurred and grinning, stand the other boys and the shiny new automobile, an incongruous, ironic juxtaposition!

  The other photographs I made that day captured beautifully, I feel, the essence of that mountain town in those depressing times, including, as they did, the following:

  —The older boys, bashful and hateful, in a sullen row before the bank with its boarded-up windows and doors. A skinny rat-faced dog walks out the side of this photograph, one of the boys kicking at it but kicking with his foot only, body stiff and unmoving, no expression on his face except for that ominous squint they all have, squinting straight into the sun.

  —An old man, stooped and worn, leaning on his cane in front of the new monument to the WWI dead which the V.F.W. had put up in front of the courthouse. The monument, white and shining, the old man gray, shades of gray deepening to the final dark blur of his face beneath the lowered black brim of his hat.

  —A store window empty except for a glassy-eyed naked doll, rampantly blond, with one eye wildly open and one eye flatly closed with its uniform black-brush lashes lying flat against its dimpled cheek, several pieces of chipped, flowered china, a messy pile of clothes in the corner, and a sign that says “Out of Buisness” (sic!).

  —A young mother sitting patiently on the curb waiting for somebody as if she has all day or perhaps all month to wait, which perhaps she has, a filthy squirming barefoot baby on her lap, her plaid dress torn at the armpit, her eyes huge and dark and tubercular and staring straight into the camera, her lips parted slightly as if to utter something she cannot articulate, something which I feel I captured, nonetheless, in this photograph.

  After I had knocked for at least five minutes—the place still looked open, at any rate, if run-down—Justine Poole herself unlocked the door. Justine had grown hugely, grossly fat in these lean years, shrewd eyes nearly hidden within their bulging pouches of fat, a series of chins cascading down into some kind of billowing Chinese robe. The lobby behind her lay furred in shadow, drapery drawn, the desk empty.

  I stood stunned, blinking in the light on the threshold.

  “Richard,” Justine said promptly. “You haven’t changed a bit.” I confess I was taken aback!

  I professed gallantly, “Nor have you,” as it seemed the thing to say, but she threw back her head at this and laughed uproariously, the old Justine, and flung open the door.

  I seated myself on a maroon velvet wing chair I remembered, terrible tufted imitation velvet, and took the liquor she brought me in a glass which looked none too clean although it was difficult to tell, the lobby being so full of shadow, and the room itself seemed larger than it had been. Emptier. Yet I felt we were not alone; indistinct murmurings reached my ears from time to time, muffled footsteps above. The light was of course insufficient for me to make photographs and I felt suddenly disoriented, or perhaps it was the effect of the liquor after the long hard drive. Justine spoke at length of what had happened since I left.

  “You’ll hear folks say hell, it don’t make hardly no difference”—she referred to the Depression which she had already characterized as “old Hoover’s fault”—“and for them in the hollers it’s true, I reckon, you know how things was up there all along”—I nodded in agreement—“but down here in town it’s a different story. You see them banks closed? and such as that? I could tell you stories after stories, like old Ludie Davenport whose husband, God rest his soul, finally died after lingering all those years, and so she sold the farm hit’ll be two year ago come April, and got a pretty penny for it, all that bottom land, and then she come into town and put every cent of that sixteen-hundred dollars into the Miners and Merchants Bank, and two days later it closed down flat, there’s lots of stories I could tell you, Richard. . . .”

  In the gloom, Justine’s rustling form billowed and spread on the chaise longue, growing larger and larger, it seemed to me, while her voice grew more and more indistinct and seemed to be floating away. I wondered if she was drunk.

  “Ah,” she said finally, after telling me that the best she could do these days was to give hobos a room in exchange for chopping wood, and telling me how she had to cook rabbits and how she had to make coffee out of roasted sweet potatoes, information so first-hand as to make me—I admit it—distinctly uneasy, as, indeed, this whole conversation made me uneasy what with the occasional murmuring sounds and a girl’s high sudden giggle coming from nowhere out of the stories above us and then nothing, a hush, except for Justine’s whispery recital of hard times.

  “Ah,” she said, pouring more whiskey into my glass then leaning forward, a monstrous effort, “you want to know whatever happened to Dory Cantrell.”

  I felt the liquor flaming up inside me, burning out my whole stomach suddenly so that I w
as unable to speak. I felt again exactly as I had felt then, caught fast in the grip of something I had thought (hoped) was dead. It seemed that the years burned away to reduce me to what I was then, red-hot flame and ash, awful and elemental: I fought to maintain my carefully wrought control.

  “Oh, not necessarily,” I said.

  Justine Poole laughed her huge and genuine laugh. “Not necessarily!” she mimicked me, and for an instant I hated her, and became unreasonably frightened of her, and offended. I stood to take my leave.

  I had opened my mouth to say something appropriately chilling, something to the effect that I am happily married thank you to the daughter of an Episcopal bishop, a woman wise and warm and intelligent beyond my wildest dreams, that I am the father of two handsome children etc., when I heard loud deliberate steps descending and I turned, hat in hand, to see who it might be. A coarse-looking man of about fifty, wearing overalls and a thick dark suit coat, walked heavily through the dim lobby and out the front door. He did not speak or nod to Justine or myself.

  Disconcerted, I sat back down abruptly.

  “She married Luther Wade, Richard.” Justine’s voice came to me through the wake which I imagined the man had made through the lobby’s still, dusty air. “She’s a wife now, with a husband better than most, and children, and you are not to go up there and bother her any more. They live in the Blackey coal camp up in the holler that used to be Granny Younger’s, if you want to know that. Now you can go on back to Richmond and stay there.” Justine’s words hung in the air like the dust. Of course she was right. Still, I had thought I might give Dory some money perhaps, and I had hoped—oh God, what had I hoped? I felt as much of a fool as ever. I had been inspired to make this trip by a passage from Ecclesiastes. Oh God!

  Justine struggled to heave herself up from the chaise longue. Her ankles, I saw, remained as white and tiny as ever, and I wondered how they could possibly support her.

  “Take care of yourself,” she enjoined, enveloping me in a hug from which I feared I might never recover. She was so huge and soft it was like embracing a cloud and sinking down and down into it; she smelt of liquor, nicotine, and cheap perfume and powder—loose powder, the kind one finds for sale in dime stores. I broke free at last and gave her soft fat hands a final squeeze, wondering, queasily, if I would bruise them. She sank back onto the chaise.

  “Oh yes,” I said, turning back at the door. “Aldous. Do you think I could find him at home right now?”

  Justine laughed low in her throat; I fancied she had misunderstood the question.

  “Aldous,” I said, louder, and Justine said, “Dead.”

  “He’s been dead for seven years now,” she said in her whispery voice, “and if you go out the way he went, you’ll be a lucky man, Richard—a lucky man.”

  Thus I departed, shaken, buoyed out the door on the wave of her ghostly laughter. Dead! I shook my head to clear it and gulped cold air, astounded at the brightness of the day and at the very fact that it was still day, still February, after all. Dead. Full of fiery unmanageable energy then, I adjusted my camera and clicked away rapidly, framing everything:

  —The peeling door as Justine closed it, her puffy fingers visible around its edge, the rest of her a great unseen burgeoning presence within the dark slit which is all that is left now of the interior of the Smith Hotel, façade merely, in this photograph of the door.

  —A blank bottom-story window with its shade drawn tightly down, white woodwork and white shade in the pale flat glare of the sun.

  —The corner porch viewed from an odd angle so that the hanging swing appears to be in motion, although empty. An overturned flowerpot spilling earth in the foreground on the corner of the porch. And Justine’s foolish forsythia, wildly ahead of its time, blooming enthusiastically in the muddy dirt by the front steps, the only intricate thing and in fact the only living thing in this photograph of flat surfaces, square angles, diminishing planes.

  —And finally, the long view, which I gained from a vantage point in the middle of the busy street where I was almost (twice) run down while I made this picture: the whole of the Smith Hotel, the Gothic lettering on the small sign in its window still an anomaly, promising something quaint or charming, something clearly not present here, the whole hotel rising flat and white up from its tiny wrecked yard, porch on the side like an afterthought, a joke perpetrated by somebody who had once been somewhere else, the illogical forsythia down in the corner of the photograph, Black Rock Mountain behind, no sky—and then, on the second story, the surprise: that far left window with the shade momentarily raised and the two girls in their white slips pressed giggling against the glass, their breasts flattened against it, their bare white shoulders indistinct in the gloom behind them.

  I confess I leaped for my magnifying glass when, upon development, these girls emerged! They were quite a shock to me, validating somehow my theory of photography if not life itself: the way a frame, a photograph, can illumine and enlarge one’s vision rather than limit it. Frankly, I find in this theory an apologia for the settled life, for the lovely woman I have married who manages things so well yet understands the worth of my artistic pursuits.

  This photograph, one of the best, I entitled “Whorehouse, c. Hard Times.”

  Although it was three o’clock already and I knew all too well how soon the sun set there, I found myself unable to leave without photographing, at least, Hoot Owl Mountain, and the schoolhouse at Tug, and the store (although I had no desire to encounter Wall!), Grassy Creek perhaps: I was obsessed by capturing these scenes. It proved slow going, however, the road treacherous, wide enough for only one vehicle at a time, but, thank God, there was truly a road, at least! Everything that had happened to me seemed to have happened a million years ago, or seemed to be, in some inexplicable way, still happening, over and over again as it has, I suppose, been happening on some level ever since these events took place, as all events that ever happened always do, are never ever over, I realized, surprised, jerking the wheel so the automobile veered suddenly off onto the shoulder of the road in the dark patch through the pines. Shuddering, I gripped the wheel again with sweaty palms and steered the car back onto the unpaved road, still ascending. I saw the sycamore tree.

  —The sycamore stands hugely white and stark against the dark mountain beyond it, the lowering sky. The Cantrell homestead, nestled high among the three mountains, has a snug dreamy other-worldliness; a ribbon of mist clings to the peak of Snowman Mountain.

  —The store at Tug, added onto now in several different directions, squats on its patch of litter-covered bare clay like something built by ignorant children out of whatever came to hand, the people around it stopped dead in their tracks to stare at the camera and beyond it with their habitual resigned distrust, their old wariness.

  I found myself astounded by the changes along the road. Tiny ugly frame houses and makeshift shacks had mostly replaced the log cabins I remembered; or those cabins had been fronted and boarded out of all resemblance to the kind of homemade simplicity I used to love. Nothing had been done with thought or care of consequence, I noted—lumber stripped and the land left, machine parts everywhere rusting, trash and refuse out in the yards in front of the homes, if you could call them that, and children—children everywhere, ragged and dirty, in the road and in the filthy bare yards along it. Even the creek itself looked different, brown and swollen, trash along its banks where evidently it had flooded, and not so long ago. I drove slowly and deliberately up the hazardous hairpin turns of Hurricane Mountain; rounding a final curve, I found myself on a kind of overlook from which I could make wide-angle shots of the Blackey Coal Camp which occupied now the entire holler where the old woman named Granny Younger used to live.

  I had never seen anything like it. The lumber companies had stripped the timber out all the way up the mountain, on both sides of the holler. They were doing it, I recalled, logging this holler, even while I was here, the logs on the narrow-gauge line going down to the Levisa River, fil
ling it bank to bank, the loggers waiting for high water to raft them down to Catlettsburg, Ky. Somehow I had thought nothing of it at the time, which caused me to wonder what else I might have missed! what else might have made no impression. I did not enjoy the uneasiness which this idea produced, nor the way this holler made me feel, this coal camp.

  One mountainside was layered with small identical company houses, rickety coal-blackened flimsy squares each with its door in the middle, its two windows giving out onto the porch, the porch itself on stilts as the houses were set back against the steep mountain. Dogs and chickens, sometimes children, could be glimpsed beneath the houses. The houses appeared to be in imminent danger of falling off the mountain. The unpaved roads leading up to them were muddy, full of potholes. Trash, rusting machine parts, and bodies of cars lay everywhere, along that road, in all the yards (where no grass grew!). At the bottom of the holler stood a structure of yellow bricks—the company store—surrounded by other cement-block and frame buildings which appeared to be offices. Behind these, the jumble of trucks and equipment, the railroad, the coal cars, and the giant black hulk of the tipple hanging over it all. The air was acrid, sulfurous. Looking up beyond the tipple to the top of the mountain, I saw the hulking slag heap, black and vast and smooth and slightly smoking, always on fire. The sulfur came from there.

  My vantage point on the hairpin turn of Hurricane Mountain, facing this coal camp, made me feel omniscient: I could view it all and view it whole, the people tiny, not real people, not at all, the cars and trucks nothing but toys. I was taking wide-angle shots when the man approached me silently, the way they always come, and hunkered down to watch me for a while before he spoke.