Listen Here

by Sandra L. Ballard

  And so snapped one of the cables that might have held this soul in the storm that was to beat upon his house and make his heart desolate; nor is it only simple and ignorant folk who make the mistake of confounding Christianity with Christians—so-called.…

  SUE ELLEN BRIDGERS

  (September 20, 1942–)

  Fiction writer Sue Ellen Bridgers grew up in Pitt County, North Carolina, and moved to Jackson County, North Carolina, in 1971. She was the middle child of the three children of Elizabeth Abbott Hunsucker and Wayland Hunsucker. While her father struggled periodically with depression, her mother encouraged her ambitions to be a writer. “She knew instinctively the value of story. She knew how it brought light into the shadows, meaning to the ambiguous, shape to the fears and delights in daily life. Her encouragement strengthened my resolve to find meaning in the world through language.”

  Bridgers earned her B.A. from Western Carolina University in 1976, the same year her first novel, Home Before Dark, was published. It was named New York Times Outstanding Book of the Year. She is best known for her novels for young people and adults, including All Together Now—which was named Library of Congress Book of the Year, recipient of the Boston Globe–Horn Book Honor Book Award, and the Christopher Award. Her earliest novels, as well as Notes for Another Life, Sara Will, and Permanent Connections, all won the American Library Association's Best Books for Young Adults award.

  She and her husband, Ben Oshel Bridgers, live in Sylva, North Carolina, and have three children and six grandchildren.

  Her writing process “usually begins with a visual impression of a person,” she says. Her central character's identity takes shape as she goes through “a time of questioning, of being receptive to everything I see, hear, read,”—a period of “creative awareness” that can last for months, during which time she takes notes and writes the opening scene.

  All of her books are set in North Carolina, though not all are set in the mountains, as are Sara Will, Permanent Connections, and a series of short stories about the same characters.

  In this excerpt from Sara Will, the title character is experiencing an upset in the quiet, routine life she's had with her sister, Swanee. Sara has never married and has never lived anywhere except in the ancestral home she shares with her sister. They have recently taken in several relatives, including a young woman with an infant, who arrived on their doorstep with no place else to go. Sara has been reluctant to open her life to the visitors, and she balks at the idea of babysitting while the rest of the family goes to church.

  OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE

  PRIMARY

  Novels: All We Know of Heaven (1996), Keeping Christina (1993), Permanent Connections (1987), Sara Will (1985), Notes for Another Life (1981), All Together Now (1979), Home Before Dark (1976). Autobiographical essays: “Notes from a Guerrilla,” English Journal 88:6 (July 1999), 41–47. “Writing for My Life,” ALAN Review (fall 1995), 1–6.

  SECONDARY

  Pamela S. Carroll, “Southern Literature for Young Adults: The Novels of Sue Ellen Bridgers,” ALAN Review (fall 1990), 10–13. Contemporary Authors (1977), Vols. 65–68, 79. Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series (1992), Vol. 36, 49–52. Ted Hippie, Presenting Sue Ellen Bridgers (1990). Something About the Author (1981), Vol. 22, 56.

  SARA WILL (1985)

  from Chapter 11

  So they went, leaving her on the porch with Rachel cradled to her chest. She pulled the blanket snugly around the small body everywhere cold could seep in and walked out into the yard. The baby was quiet, fed, groggy, content. She didn't seem to know or care in whose arms she nestled. Held out at arms’ length she would have screamed, panicked by instinctive fear of falling, but secure within a boundary, any boundary, she was at peace.

  It's the same with me, Sara thought. Here in her front yard staring at the receding bubble of dust behind the truck, she felt herself standing on the edge of her life looking out into what she had always imagined was a rocky place, treacherous with slippery boulders and rising water.

  She had seen the valley flooded, had stood alone on the ridge every evening for a month and watched the rising water enveloping familiar places. The water had been alive and powerful. She had been careful not to slip. It was the same with her life; she had thought she would drown out there among people, pushed under by obligations, held fast by concerns she would collect like stones. She had hung back, clinging to the old and familiar which, although chipped, faded, practically useless, offered no resistance. She had fashioned the shape of things, her life here, Swanee's there, the two connecting only at mealtimes or when some minor dilemma faced them simultaneously. She had controlled all the possibilities except natural disasters, illness, and death and had not wanted to look beyond the solitary confinement she faced each morning.

  Now, expecting the worst, she was forced to see in place of her dark vision, her own landscape painfully ragged and in need of repair. She saw dilapidated gates, the dry pond bed grown up, the scraggly garden. She saw things Fate Jessop and Michael could do. These intruders might have brought the world with them to ravel her seams, but their damage seemed slight, almost imperceptible, amid the oversights she'd made herself.

  Still, she didn't regret her old life. What had been wrong with it? She couldn't think what. She had earned a living, had salvaged her family heritage in ledger books, photographs, household goods, cemetery markers. She had kept the land safe, drawing from it only those resources essential to its maintenance. She had repaired and refurbished when nothing else would do. She had had good friends once, before family took precedence. She had had her share of dates, all local boys she'd been in school with who remembered the awkward girl she'd been and didn't expect any handholding or obligatory smooching, just a screaming ride on the county fair bullet or a willingness to sit through a double feature of gangster movies. She had liked to dance and to play bridge. She had liked Frank Settlemyer but not enough to marry him. Was that true? Had it really been a lack of affection that made her hesitate until it was too late? Surely she had once dreamed of a life different from the one she now led, but she couldn't remember the particulars of it. It had been, after all, a dream, a fantasy saved for sleep. She hadn't let foolishness interfere with the day-to-day practicalities of her life, and she'd managed to accomplish all she'd intended, except for a road cut through the woods and the bridge.

  But now the boundaries weren't so clear. Lately, she'd awakened shuddering on the edge of fragile dreams, and the days were dense with emotion. She couldn't quite identify the dread that followed her about, pushing against her, prodding until she felt as though she were again leaning from the ridge toward the dark water. She recognized the panic, though. Its dark familiarity clung to her like a cloak knotted at her throat. Resignation spread across her shoulders.

  What was even more strange was the tenderness she had begun to feel. Seeing her life becoming different—every day of this week had presented itself embroidered with a new quirky stitch in someone's personality, some unforeseen glimpse into past lives that astonished her with their richness—she felt only slightly unhinged. She had expected peculiarities. That had been her most persuasive mental argument against letting them stay. What she didn't understand, what truly baffled her, was the feeling of tenderness, of melting inside, that came when she was least prepared for it and which released her briefly and without warning from the tightly held terror she'd felt when she first saw the truck bouncing up the lane.

  This morning she'd felt that tenderness while Swanee Hope stood in the hall before the speckled mirror and nervously tucked gray wisps under the edges of her ancient hat. She was wearing her finest, but even that seemed tattered and shabby, out of fashion. Swanee was pretty—why had she always tried to deny that?—but the drab fading blue of her coat and hat defeated her gentle baby features. Swanee is a person meant for pastels, Sara had thought, watching her sister lift on her toes in excitement, poised like a dancer anticipating the sound of music.

  At
that moment, Sara Will had felt something. Love, perhaps? Surely she had always loved her sister, yet she couldn't bring herself to speak of it. How could she? How did you say I love you to someone you'd known all your life? It would seem so sudden, so impulsive, wouldn't it? Such an embarrassing oversight of feeling all these years. Besides, she couldn't undo, could she, make amends for neglect, for all the years of belittling sarcasm Swanee had seemed to ignore? Swanee had probably deserved every derogatory remark Sara Will ever sent in her direction. Still, Sara regretted cattiness and jokes made at Swanee's expense. With all that, perhaps even because of her sister's endurance, she knew she loved her. Surely she always had.

  The baby stirred under the blanket, stretching into sleep. I need to finish dinner, Sara Will thought, moving toward the house. The roast was in the oven but there was corn to put on, fruit to chop for the salad, the table to set. She had plenty to keep herself busy while the house was empty. If nothing else, she could work one of the crossword puzzles she'd been saving from the paper.

  But instead of doing any of those things, she sat down in the parlor with the baby in her arms and pushed back the blanket from Rachel's head so the soft fuzz was under her hand. The baby's cheek was against her breast as soft as cotton. Her mouth bubbled a film of moist milky breath onto Sara Will's dress. The warmth seeped in. Sara sat there in the silence, not thinking about anything, not moving.

  She'd never felt this calm before, although she'd always considered herself a staid person, reserved, even locked inside herself. This was a new kind of quiet. It seemed to flow between herself and the sleeping baby. After a while she stood up as if startled by her own heartbeat and, cradling Rachel's head against her shoulder to keep the child steady, went up the stairs to put her in the crib. I have to finish dinner, she thought, folding the blanket over the sleeping infant. I can't just sit about all day.

  Rachel, startled by the cool flat bed after Sara Will's warm closeness, tensed in a shiver, and Sara touched her back to comfort her. What brought you here to change me? she wondered. The baby relaxed, fingers unclenched, lips parted, eyelids still. I don't want this to happen, Sara Will said silently, but then she could hear the words in the room. They seemed to echo around her, bouncing off the papery walls, resounding as they struck the pine floor, dull from so many years without wax. She had neglected so many things. She had never even listened to her own voice until now.

  “I don't want to care about you, Rachel,” she said, this time aloud, as if the spoken words could free her. She knew they could not. There was no way to be free again. She turned away from the sleeping baby, went softly to the door, left it partly open so that from the kitchen she could detect the slightest sound. Going down, her arms felt empty.

  FLORENCE COPE BUSH

  (March 29, 1933–)

  Florence Cope Bush is the daughter of Dora (“Dorie”) Woodruff Cope and Fred Cope. Born in Tremont, Tennessee, a small community between Townsend and Cades Cove, she lived there only three years before her parents’ land was claimed by eminent domain to create the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. “I have no memory of ever having lived in the misty, blue mountains,” she writes. “But everything about the Smokies fascinates me, and I'm ever drawn back to the place of my birth.”

  She spent many summers on her grandparents’ farm in Sevier County, Tennessee, and to preserve something of their way of life, which she saw disappearing, she wrote the story of her mother's life, Dorie: Woman of the Mountains. Bush spent nine years collecting information from her mother and from libraries. She wrote the manuscript “as a gift” to her daughter and her mother. When a friend convinced her to publish two thousand copies, it sold well because “Dorie came to represent a female relative in almost everyone's life.” She often hears, “You wrote about my mother, my grandmother, my aunt.”

  A former newspaper reporter and freelance writer in Knoxville, Tennessee, Bush has written an appealing account of her family's transitions in southern Appalachia in the early twentieth century. The book's six chapters cover the years from 1898 to 1942. In 1993, Bush won the Tennessee History Award, jointly sponsored by the Tennessee Library Association and the Tennessee Historical Association.

  In this excerpt from chapter 1, the writer records her mother's memories of the family's Cherokee neighbors.

  OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE

  PRIMARY

  Nonfiction: Dorie: Woman of the Mountains (1992), If Life Gives You Scraps, Make a Quilt (1992), Ocona Lufta Baptist: Pioneer Church of the Smokies, 1836–1939 (1990).

  SECONDARY

  George Brosi, “Booklist and Notes,” Appalachian Heritage 20:3 (summer 1992), 73. Jane R. Wilson, review of Dorie: Woman of the Mountains, Appalachian Heritage 21:3 (summer 1993), 68–69.

  FROM DORIE: WOMAN OF THE MOUNTAINS (1992)

  In the early spring of 1899, Pa decided to move closer to his job. He rented a small farm near the Cherokee reservation. They loaded their few pieces of furniture on a wagon and moved in time for spring planting. Ma worked along beside him until her time to give birth. I was born May 8, 1899, almost an anniversary gift to them.

  The Cherokee women were very curious about Pa and Ma. Many times Ma would look up and see a silent, unsmiling Indian looking in the window or open door. Sometimes, when working outside, she'd catch a fleeting glimpse of them behind the trees. They watched while she boiled and washed the clothing in a big, black wash kettle. The kettle sat on three rocks, over a fire. Ma would bring water from the river to fill the kettle and then build a fire under it.

  Pa had driven two posts into the ground and stretched rope between them to hang the clothing out to dry. Some of the articles of clothing fascinated the Indians. They'd touch the white bran-sack sheets and wonder about the use for such a big piece of cloth. Indian women washed their clothes in the river and dried them by draping them over rocks and bushes. It wasn't long before Ma could see clotheslines beside the Indians’ cabins. They learned fast.

  Ma made friends with some of the women. They taught her how to make Indian bean bread and chestnut dumplings. The bread was made of cornmeal, like cornbread, with cooked dried beans mixed into the dough. Chestnut dumplings were chestnuts covered with cornmeal dough, shaped into a ball, rolled in corn shucks, tied on each end with a strip of shuck, and dropped into boiling water.

  The Cherokees had many ways to eat corn. It was roasted, boiled, stewed, ground up, parched, popped, mixed with other vegetables and meat, and baked in many kinds of bread. Over half of the Indians’ food was plant food. They favored deer meat and bear meat and caught fish with their bare hands.

  They tapped maple sugar trees for sweetening. This, along with wild honey was used for trade. Scuppernong grapes, strawberries, huckleberries, gooseberries, crab apples, and persimmons were staples of their diet in the summer months. Persimmons were used with the corn to make a slightly sweet, cakelike bread.

  There was one Cherokee delicacy Ma never tasted—they had a fond-ness for roasted wasp larvae. Finding a new wasp nest just before the young were hatched, they'd take a small stick and remove the white larvae and roast them over an open fire. It was considered an act of bravery to steal a nest from an angry swarm of wasps.

  In the early 1900s it was still common for an Indian man to have more than one wife. Ma knew several families where there were three wives for one husband. The census taker said he had found one man with six wives. Two seemed enough for most men.

  After Ma had won the friendship and respect of the Cherokee women, they began to share their legends with her. One woman told her:

  At one time all living things were in the sky, on the sky rock, and this was before the world was made. All the animals could understand man; and man could understand them. Then man dishonored the privilege and was striken deaf to the talk of animals and birds. The Great One who was over the sky rock punished man so that he could only understand the talk of his own kind.