Listen Here
Page 9
Womanspirit is coming back!
A corn seed for remembrance.
OUT OF ASHES PEACE WILL RISE
from Selu: Seeking the Corn-Mother's Wisdom (1993)
Our courage
is our memory.
Out of ashes
peace will rise,
if the people
are resolute.
If we are not
resolute,
we will vanish.
And out of ashes
peace will rise.
In the Four Directions…
Out of ashes peace will rise.
Out of ashes peace will rise.
Out of ashes peace will rise.
Out of ashes peace will rise.
Our courage
is our memory.
ARTIE ANN BATES
(July 20, 1953–)
Eastern Kentuckian Artie Ann Bates was born in Blackey, where she now lives with her husband and son in one of the Letcher County homes where she grew up. The daughter of Eunice Cornett Bates, an elementary school teacher, and Bill Bates, a coal miner, she was the fifth of six children in her family.
During her childhood, she explains, she rarely saw anyone she didn't know. “My first experience living among strangers occurred when I began college at the University of Kentucky in the summer of 1971. These strangers thought I was the stranger.” Homesickness drove her home for a term at Hazard Community College, but then she returned to Lexington, where she earned her undergraduate degree in nursing in 1976 and took some influential courses in Appalachian history (with Harry Caudill) and in writing (with Gurney Norman). She is now a medical doctor who completed her training at the University of Louisville in 1986. She has also completed a residency in child psychiatry at the University of Louisville, where she has been working with sexually and physically abused children.
While a medical student, she wrote in personal journals, began a novel about a young woman in medical school, and had a son before moving back home in 1987 to practice medicine in eastern Kentucky.
On being a wife and mother, she writes, “raising kids is the most important work we ever do.” Being a parent, she continues, “causes me to reach to depths of my selfish self and come out with forgiveness. The romance with my husband is a life-sustaining energy source.” A community activist who opposes dams on Linefork Creek and who participated in the local PTA, she often contributed letters to the editor and essays on local politics and the environment to newspapers. She explains that “Appalachia has taught me to survive wherever I land, especially on a little piece of rocky land. It has given me a conscience to write some of its history, one of making do.”
OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE
PRIMARY
Books for children: Ragsale (1995). Autobiographical essay: “Root Hog, or Die,” Bloodroot (1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 55–60. Essays: “I'd Sharpen Your Ax,” Appalachian Heritage 21:2 (spring 1993), 26–30. “Belinda, Our Tremendous Gift,” Appalachian Heritage 19:2 (spring 1991), 3–6. “Heirlooms” Appalachian Heritage 18:2 (spring 1990), 26–31.
SECONDARY
William T. Cornett, review of Ragsale, Appalachian Heritage 23:4 (fall 1995), 70–71. Joyce Dyer, “Artie Ann Bates,” in Bloodroot, 54.
BELINDA, OUR TREMENDOUS GIFT
from Appalachian Heritage (1991)
When Belinda Ann Mason is introduced as a member of the prestigious National Commission on AIDS it goes something like this: “Mother of two children who contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion during childbirth.” Belinda thinks that is not very telling and would prefer to rewrite it, since there seems to be a subliminal message that anyone who contracted AIDS by other means did so by choice. Her rewriting would say that she is from a rural area and that she loves Conway Twitty. Also it would say that more than anything she loves sitting at her Granny's house watching All My Children with her.
Being fellow Letcher Countians and college buddies at the University of Kentucky ten years ago, I have rediscovered my old friend through her writings. Because we live six hours apart and because we are both extremely swamped with work and family, we have had to visit by telephone. Yet I now know her better than when we were in college because her work is so expressive and clear.
After reviewing a large amount of Belinda's creative writing and work with AIDS, my conclusion is that she is a genius, and strikingly similar to Harriette Arnow. She is a master storyteller and playwright, an eloquent speech writer and orator. She is a thinker who takes command of an audience and holds them in the strong web of her words.
A large part of Belinda's writing is present in her hometown of Whitesburg, Kentucky. At Appalshop, the well-known media center, her plays are under contract with Roadside Theater. A video tape in progress consisting of a speech to Southern Baptist Ministers, an informal interview at her home, and a speech to a group of doctors and medical students at the University of Kentucky was recorded by Herb E. Smith and Anne Johnson. This will be shown as part of the Headwaters series on Kentucky Educational Television (KET).
Another large segment of Belinda's work is being archived in the Special Collections of the M.I. King Library at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. This includes numerous short stories and poems as well as a novel in progress about a young boy, Merle, who contracts AIDS through a blood transfusion.
As I plug in the VCR tape entitled “Belinda Excerpts” I feel a quiet excitement as if my friend will jump out of the television. How I wish it were possible. Though we have talked by phone, I have not seen Belinda since early 1987, three months after she was infected with HIV.
Belinda comes onto the screen penetrating my eyes, ears, and chest with her presence and her words. She has changed a bit, I think, as she talks with her same mountain drawl. She is more beautiful than I remembered, perhaps because she is dressed for a crowd. Her heart-shaped face and soft lisp deliver words of great weight.
Belinda is speaking to a group of Southern Baptist Ministers in the first part of this tape. Her message is clear and precise, her mission as a spokesperson for AIDS is unmistakable. “AIDS is a test, not for the people who are infected but for the rest of society. Will we extend the hand of compassion and touch of Christ to others?…We must put away the label of victim of AIDS, there are no innocent or guilty victims, nobody planned to get it…. AIDS can be less about dying than about choosing how to live…. Nothing can ever separate us from the love of God. Nourish and cherish the people in your life, they are lessons for you.”
Her voice in this speech is unrelenting. Because she is a person with AIDS quite different from the norm, she is easier to accept. Because of her race, financial status, private pay insurance, family and church support, she is one of the privileged.
Belinda delivers the serious message that we have lost more people to AIDS than to the Vietnam War. Blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals, and drug users suffer a social prejudice that numbs us from the seriousness of AIDS. Yet “we are all Gods children. We must not be judgmental, we must not blame or shame, we must practice what we say.”
Belinda became infected with HIV during an obstetrical emergency in the birth of her second child, Clayton. She recalls driving to the hospital with her husband Steve, feeling “poised on the edge of something.” She thought that “something” was another wonderful chapter in the family life they shared with their daughter Polly. She thought the recovery from the obstetrical emergency would be the worst she would have to suffer, only to find later that a unit of blood was contaminated with HIV.
Belinda's words in speaking for people with AIDS reminds one of her character Enoch's words in her play Gifts of the Spirit. Enoch says that “Working on a building is what living is. And just like wood working, you got to have things to believe in before you can build something that'll stand. A house that'll keep the wind off of you. A life where doors is hung right and the roof won't bow. The Lord's give us plenty to delight in and a whole lot to believe. If they is a day of judgement coming as some says, I don't
think we'll be faulted much for drinking or gambling nor none of the other things you've heard is a one-way ticket to hell. If He's got a quarrel with us, it'll be for us not laying ahold of our tools. Not trusting our materials.”
Among Belinda's best tools are her oratory skills, social conscience, will to help others, and her creative writing ability. In taking up her tools Belinda Mason is a prolific writer of Appalachian literature. Her ear for the music of language immortalizes Appalachian speech and culture. She says she “gave back what I heard,” the “poetry that other people speak in restaurants.”
Of Belinda's short stories appearing in print, one of them was taken as fact. “A Christmas Lesson” was in Appalachian Heritage, Vol. 15, No. 4, 1987. Country music singer Naomi Judd, who had recently subscribed, read the story and thought the two women were real. She said the characters “feel like my family.” Naomi felt compassion for the women in the story trying to find Conway Twitty and wanted to personally introduce them. After talking with the Hazard, Kentucky, telephone operator and finding that they were not real people, Naomi called the editor and got Belinda's address and telephone number. Later she wrote to Belinda. She arranged a private meeting, praised her for the excellent writing, and has kept in touch with Belinda ever since.
In addition to Gifts of the Spirit, Belinda has another play produced by Roadside Theater called War on Poverty. Centered around the local shooting of a Canadian filmmaker in the late 1960s, the play encompasses Appalachia's image of itself from within and from the eye of the outside cameras.
To outsiders the shooting incident reiterated stereotypes of Appalachians as impulsive gun wielders. It also lifted the valve of pent up resentment from the influx of those who came to help us poor mountaineers. Belinda's play shows “the other side of the coin besides the crazy hillbilly.” It uses slides and “family pictures” to show how we see ourselves and explores significant events that led up to the shooting and beyond. The play is a composite of every Appalachian's frustration in loving the homeland only to discover pity and shame by the outside world.
Belinda Mason's interest in the common person captures us as we feel at home with her characters. She has always been fascinated with the women who follow country music stars like Conway Twitty. Her characters speak our language, struggle our hardships, share our passions. Gid, at his friend Hargis’ funeral in Gifts of the Spirit, says of having to live in the city, “All that traffic, sirens a blowing, lay down at night with nary a thing between you and a total stranger but a wall. Step outside and cars and people darting ever which way. Like a gang of diddle chicks.”
Belinda's zest for life, like her writing, is that of seizing the moment. She resents editors’ suggesting that she rewrite things since, “I never do anything that I can do better.” She often answers people who ask how she feels about having AIDS with, “I'd rather have a broken leg.” She noticed one of her medical records narratives described her as a “32 year old black woman…” and said “Well, well, I've been black all these years and didn't even know it.” She says the great division in humankind is “not race or religion but those who are able and those who are not.”
Belinda Mason is quietly determined. From the days [as] Miss Whitesburg High School, or running track and jumping hurdles, she is writing as a journalist. From newspaper work and freelance creative writing she is being featured in the American Medical Association's newspaper The AMNews, publishing articles on AIDS in the Boston Globe, medical journals such as Primary Care and various AIDS journals. Her travels take her from coffee with President Bush and, at his request, accepting a coveted seat on the National Commission on AIDS, speaking to ministers’ groups, Congress, AIDS activists and to medical grand rounds at the University of Kentucky.
It is to a group of doctors and medical students at the University of Kentucky that Belinda is speaking in the second speech of this video tape from Appalshop. Her message to doctors about AIDS is a serious charge since “doctors, like journalists and media people, have the most to learn and are in the best position to institute real attitude changes, to lead people to water if not to knock them over the head and make them drink.”
She serves up to them a “scrubbed clean Southern style AIDS which allows listeners to avoid examining their own feelings about otherness.” In discussing the method by which she became infected with HIV, people are “spared confrontation with the messy realities of sex and drugs.” She drives home the message that “puritanical squeamishness” and “racism and homophobia” prevent this society, both professionals and the lay public, from effectively facing AIDS.
The demands for Belinda to speak became so numerous that she dreaded getting on an airplane because it meant separation from her family. Belinda's daughter, Polly, tiring of her mother's absences asked her how one gets to be “unfamous.” Then, when her mother was asked to speak at one more meeting, said, “I thought you weren't going to be famous anymore.”
Belinda's family is very dear to her. She has Polly who is 8 and Clayton who is 4. Her husband Steve, a musician, teaches at a local community college. He speaks of her in a soft voice as “articulate, a very unusual person.” She comes from an east Kentucky mountain family, the oldest of Barbara and Paul Mason's three children, having two younger brothers.
In the time before AIDS the Rainbow Room, her son's green and yellow painted nursery, was a place where any dreams could come true. Now that is a “distant and receding memory,” as she is “one of the people whose life I used to write about as a small town journalist.” Belinda carefully describes to these medical students that having AIDS gives one both “devastation and exhilaration in equal measure.” Devastation at the “wreckage of a simple and satisfying life with my family, exhilaration at finding myself alive at all.” With springtime coming, her children healthy and playing, the family safe, she says, “The grace of it all sustains me.”
As I remove the tape I think of Belinda's words during a recent telephone conversation. She talked about the irony of “the terrible beauty of AIDS. I have new eyes. I can see things different. Life is precious and rich. It's a tremendous gift.”
Then I think of this powerful little woman, her green eyes and childlike hands, and of her contribution to people with AIDS and especially to people without AIDS. Her plays and short stories have opened Appalachia to us, to the charm of our culture and a deeper way of viewing life. Her writing shows us who we are and from whom we came, and that as common people we are okay. She encourages us to live a passionate, caring life, to make the most of every moment, and to nurture a healthy sense of humor.
Belinda, a flower of life, is our tremendous gift. She lives one of her favorite Native American sayings, “The quality of life is not measured by length but by the fullness with which we enter into each present moment.”
Note: For more on Belinda Ann Mason, see the biographical note and sample of her work on pp. 386–90.
FRANCES COURTENAY BAYLOR
(January 20, 1848–October 19, 1920)
Frances Courtenay Baylor was born in Fort Smith, Arkansas, the daughter of Sophie Baylor Dawson, from Winchester, Virginia, and army officer James Dawson.
Educated by her mother, Baylor spent most of her childhood on army posts. She lived in San Antonio and New Orleans. Around 1865, when her father died (or left), her mother resumed using her maiden name and returned with Frances to live with family in Virginia. At the end of the Civil War, they traveled to England with Frances's sister, who had married Confederate general J.G. Walker, and lived there for several years before returning to Winchester, Virginia.
Baylor drew on her travel experiences for a number of newspaper sketches that appeared in papers from London to New Orleans under the name of a male relative. Her first success was a novel, On Both Sides, in which she combined two popular sketches she had written for Lippincott's Magazine—the first focused on the social life and adventures of an American family in England and provided the counterpoint for a corresponding tale of an English fami
ly in America. “Miss Baylor” (as she signed her work) also became well known for her patriotic poetry. Though her poetry has not been collected, her collected stories were published in A Shocking Example, and Other Sketches.
Of her many novels written for children, Juan and Juanita, focusing on the capture and escape of two Mexican children, received widest acclaim. At the heart of many of her books are characters who struggle with clashing cultures.
Baylor's second novel, Behind the Blue Ridge: A Homely Narrative, focuses on mountain people of Virginia and follows in the local color tradition of Mary Noailles Murfree, recording the dialect and regional customs of people Baylor observed.
In 1896, she married George Sherman Barnum. She was widowed by 1900 and returned to her mother's home in Winchester, where she spent the remainder of her life.
In this excerpt from Behind the Blue Ridge, John Shore, who has never been a devout churchgoer, “married the prettiest girl on the mountain” and briefly becomes a church member.
OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE
PRIMARY
Novels: A Georgian Bungalow (1900), The Ladder of Fortune (1899), Miss Nina Barrow (1897), Claudia Hyde (1894), Juan and Juanita (1888), Behind the Blue Ridge: A Homely Narrative (1887), On Both Sides (1885). Short stories: A Shocking Example and Other Sketches (1889).
SECONDARY
Dictionary of American Biography, Vol. 1 (1964), 76. C. Carroll Hollis, “Frances Courtenay Baylor,” Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary (1979), 20–21. The National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1898), 366.
BEHIND THE BLUE RIDGE (1887)
from Chapter 1
Unfortunately, John Shore's connection with the church was of the briefest. There are Pharisees in every fold, and that ancient element of all the churches was represented in this one by certain well-to-do farmers’ wives who generally sat together, and somewhat apart from all the others, in the chief seats. In the course of the next “protracted meeting” a very poor, and particularly frowsy, unkempt, but reputable young girl imprudently took a seat on the end of one of these benches, tacitly reserved for the elect ladies; and that from sheer embarrassment and not from any desire to intrude upon her neighbors. Up rose the leading lady of the party, and, seizing a blue parasol, and a magenta fan, and a gilt-edged hymn-book, she swept ostentatiously across the aisle and took up a fresh position where paupers could not come between the wind and her nobility, bridling haughtily as she did so, and saying, “I can't get religion with no such people.” John Shore heard her, and felt as if he had received a blow in the face; but the forlorn girl accepted the insult meekly, and when “the mourners” were invited to go up she rushed forward and fell weeping on her knees beside her fellow-sinners in a tumult of feeling that made her oblivious of the fact that religion was intended exclusively for the rich and respectable. To John Shore's amazement she was not allowed to stay there. Her tattered robe was not the robe of pharisaic righteousness at all, and, unobserved by the preacher, certain of the elders went up to her, said something to her, and then half led, half hustled her to the back of the church, where she was allowed to drop into a seat near the door. On seeing this, John Shore, who was singing a hymn, suddenly closed first his lips and then his book, and, turning, marched fiercely down the main aisle and out of the church, followed by his wife's startled gaze and the eyes of the whole congregation. “Ef that's religion, I've got no use for it!” he said, hotly, when explaining his defection to his wife afterwards. “She had as good a right to be there as anybody. I'll not set foot in meetin agin, and it's no use askin’ me.”