Listen Here
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Ma loved to hear these stories. She had great admiration for the Indians and said you could learn patience from them. They never hurried with anything. They knew it took time for the giant white oak to grow from a tiny acorn. There was nothing man could do to rush the growth of the seed planted in the ground. Time meant nothing to them. Man must wait for some things to happen. Worry and work could only accomplish so much; the rest was left to the Great One in the sky.
KATHRYN STRIPLING BYER
(November 25, 1944–)
The daughter of a homemaker and a farmer, Kathryn Stripling Byer grew up in southwest Georgia. She graduated from Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, in 1966 with a B.A., and earned her M.F.A. in 1968 at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, where she studied with Allen Tate, Fred Chappell, and Robert Watson. While there, she won the Academy of American Poets Student Prize for the University of North Carolina system.
“Most of my poetry is rooted in the earth of two poetic landscapes,” Byer explains, “each with its own particular voice and rhythm. One is the flatlands of Georgia, where I was born and grew up [in Camilla]. The other is the mountains of western North Carolina and Tennessee…. If the Deep South is a dusty plain haunted by childhood, these mountains are a crazy quilt of trails haunted by women's voices.” Byer describes the particular influence of her paternal grandmother, born in the Blue Ridge, who told her stories of belonging there and wanting to be there when she died. A persona named Alma speaks to Byer as a poet and “seems, in some ancestral way, to be speaking as a kinswoman, harking me back to those grandmothers and great-grandmothers whose stories I grew up hearing.” Her 1983 chapbook, Alma, reveals the importance of women's voices, as does much of her other work.
For The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest, Byer received a 1986 citation from the Associated Writing Programs Award Series. Wildwood Flower received the 1992 Lamont Award from the Academy of American Poets. Byer has also received the Anne Sexton Poetry Prize (1982) and the Thomas Wolfe Award (1992). She has received writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. Her collection Black Shawl is dedicated to novelist Lee Smith and the late photographer Sharon Anglin Kuhne, a native of Kentucky. It was selected for the Roanoke-Chowan Award and the Brockman-Campbell Award. Catching Light won the 2003 Southeast Booksellers Award in Poetry. Composer Harold Schiffman has set Wildwood Flower to music in a cantata titled Alma, commissioned by the Hungarian National Symphony.
She served on the faculty of the M.F.A. Writing Program at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro in 1995 and as Poet-in-Residence at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina, from 1990 to 1999. In 2001, she received the North Carolina Award in Literature.
OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE
PRIMARY
Poetry: Catching Light (2002), Evelyn (1999), Black Shawl (1998), Wildwood Flower (1992), The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest (1986), Alma (1983), Search Party (1979). Selected essays: “Deep Water,” in Bloodroot (1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 62–70. “Turning the Windlass at the Well: Fred Chappell's Early Poetry,” in Dream Garden: The Poetic Vision of Fred Chappell (1997), ed. Patrick Bizzaro, 88–96. “The Wind Passing Through,” in Writing Fiction and Poetry [Boson Books online, an e-book], ed. Sally Sullivan (1995).
SECONDARY
Contemporary Authors (1994), Vol. 142, 56–57. Joyce Dyer, “Kathryn Stripling Byer,” in Bloodroot, 61. Robert E. Hosmer Jr. “Poetry Roundup” [review of WildwoodFlower America (13 November 1993), 17–18. “Kathryn Stripling Byer Issue,” Iron Mountain Review Vol. 18 (spring 2002). Ann F. Richman, “Singing Our Hearts Away: The Poetry of Kathryn Stripling Byer,” in Her Words (2002), ed. Felicia Mitchell, 38–48.
WILDWOOD FLOWER
from Wildwood Flower (1992)
I hoe thawed ground
with a vengeance. Winter has left
my house empty of dried beans
and meat. I am hungry
and now that a few buds appear
on the sycamore, I watch the road
winding down this dark mountain
not even the mule can climb
without a struggle. Long daylight
and nobody comes while my husband
traps rabbits, chops firewood, or
walks away into the thicket. Abandoned
to hoot owls and copperheads,
I begin to fear sickness. I wait
for pneumonia and lockjaw. Each month
I brew squaw tea for pain.
In the stream where I scrub my own blood
from rags, I see all things flow
down from me into the valley.
Once I climbed the ridge
to the place where the sky
comes. Beyond me the mountains continued
like God. Is there no place to hide
from His silence? A woman must work
else she thinks too much. I hoe
this earth until I think of nothing
but the beans I will string,
the sweet corn I will grind into meal.
We must eat. I will learn
to be grateful for whatever comes to me.
BITTERSWEET
from Wildwood Flower (1992)
Under the thin flannel nightgown,
my daughter's ribs: frail
harp I stroke
as if I might make some lovely sound
of those bones. At my breast
she would cling to the nipple,
my milk like a sudden thaw straining
the downspout let down, oh
the stony earth blossomed, I saw
my pots brimming, my skirts full
of apples. I rocked her to sleep
singing, “Little bird,
little bird under my wing.” Hear
my voice crack! I cough
and keep silent. Now she is the one
in this house who sings, crooning
like wind in the chimney. My sweet songs
have all blown away,
one by one, down the mountain.
LINEAGE
from Wildwood Flower
This red hair
I braid while she
sits by the cookstove
amazes her. Where
did she get hair the color
of wildfire, she wants to know,
pulling at strands of it
tangled in boar-bristles.
I say from Sister, God knows
where she is, and before
her my grandmother you
can't remember because
she was dead by the time
you were born, though you hear
her whenever I sing,
every song handed down
from those sleepless nights
she liked to sing through
till she had no time
left for lying awake
in the darkness and talking
to none save herself.
And yet, that night
I sat at her deathbed
expecting pure silence,
she talked until dawn
when at last her voice
failed her. She thumbed out
the candle between us
and lifted her hand
to her hair as if what
blazed a lifetime might still
burn her fingers. Yes,
I keep a cinder of it
in my locket I'll show you
as soon as I'm done telling
how she brought up from
the deep of her bedclothes
that hairbrush you're holding
and whispered, “You
might as well take it.”
EASTER
from Wildwood Flower (1992)
Where my father's house stood
at the edge of the cove is a brown church
the faithful call Bosom of God.
I have come back to sit at the window
where I can see appl
e trees bud
while the preacher shouts death has no victory.
Everywhere dogwoods are blooming
like white flesh this man claims
is devil's work: woman who tasted
the apple and disobeyed God. But for Christ
we are doomed to the worms waking under
these hills I would rather be climbing
again with my father's goats bleating
so loud I can't hear this man say
I must ask the Lord pardon for what
I've come back to remember—the sun
on my neck as I shook loose my braids
and bent over the washpot. My bare feet
were frisky. If wind made the overalls
dance on the clothesline, then why
shouldn't I? Who's to tell
me I should not have shouted for joy
on this hill? It's the wind I praise God for
today, how it lifted my hair like a veil.
MOUNTAIN TIME
from Black Shawl (1998)
News travels slowly up here
in the mountains, our narrow
roads twisting for days, maybe years,
till we get where we're going,
if we ever do. Even if some lonesome message
should make it through Deep Gap
or the fastness of Thunderhead, we're not obliged
to believe it's true, are we? Consider
the famous poet, minding her post
at the Library of Congress, who
shrugged off the question of what we'd be
reading at century's end: “By the year 2000
nobody will be reading poems.” Thus she
prophesied. End of that
interview! End of the world
as we know it. Yet, how can I fault
her despair, doing time as she was
in a crumbling Capitol, sirens
and gunfire the nights long, the Pentagon's
stockpile of weapons stacked higher
and higher? No wonder the books
stacked around her began to seem relics.
No wonder she dreamed her own bones
dug up years later, tagged in a museum somewhere
in the Midwest: American Poet—Extinct Species.
Up here in the mountains
we know what extinct means. We've seen
how our breath on a bitter night
fades like a ghost from the window glass.
We know the wolf's gone.
The panther. We've heard the old stories
run down, stutter out
into silence. Who knows where we're heading?
All roads seem to lead
to Millennium, dark roads with drop-offs
we can't plumb. It's time to be brought up short
now with the tale-teller's Listen: There once lived
a woman named Delphia
who walked through these hills teaching children
to read. She was known as a quilter
whose hand never wearied, a mother
who raised up two daughters to pass on
her words like a strong chain of stitches.
Imagine her sitting among us,
her quick thimble moving along these lines
as if to hear every word striking true
as the stab of her needle through calico.
While prophets discourse about endings,
don't you think she'd tell us the world as we know it
keeps calling us back to beginnings?
This labor to make our words matter
is what any good quilter teaches.
A stitch in time, let's say.
A blind stitch
that clings to the edges
of what's left, the ripped
scraps and remnants, whatever
won't stop taking shape even though the whole
crazy quilts falling to pieces.
CANDIE CARAWAN
(December 27, 1939–)
Cultural educator Candie Anderson Carawan has been at the forefront of social change in Appalachia since the 1960s. A native Californian, Carawan first came to the South as a college art major on an exchange program from Pomona College in Claremont, California, to Fisk University in Nashville.
Shortly after her arrival in Tennessee, she was caught up in the fledgling civil rights movement, becoming one of the first whites arrested in the lunch counter sit-ins to protest segregation. She met her husband, musician and folklorist Guy Carawan, at a civil-rights workshop; together, they have devoted their lives to preserving grass roots culture and furthering causes of social justice.
In 1963, the Carawans went to Birmingham, Alabama, to record the songs of the civil rights movement, and they were arrested by the infamous police chief Bull Connor for attempting to enter a black church. Carawan recalls, “We could see the demonstrators as they came from one of the mass meetings…fire hoses were turned on them. We could see this from the jail cell.”
Over the years, Carawan has used the Highlander Research Center in New Market, Tennessee, as her home base. Dedicated to empowering the disenfranchised, Highlander offers leadership training and community building workshops. Through books and recordings, Carawan and her husband have documented the songs and stories of a number of America's major social movements. “We've worked not only in the civil rights movement,” says Carawan, “but with coal miners, migrant workers, and on women's issues.”
Now retired, the Carawans live in East Tennessee in a cabin adjacent to the Highlander Center. Candie Carawan is a potter who continues to write, make music, and remain active in issues of social justice.
Carawan was an exchange student at Fisk University in the spring of 1960. In the following excerpts from Sing for Freedom, she recalls her experiences.
OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE
PRIMARY
Nonfiction: Sing for Freedom: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement Through Its Songs (1990), Voices from the Mountains: Life & Struggle in the Appalachian South (1982), Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Songs of the Freedom Movement (1968), Ain't You Got a Right to The Tree of Life?: The People of John's Island, South Carolina, Their Faces, Their Words, and Their Songs (1966). Folksong recordings: Sparkles and Shines (1999), Tree Of Life=Arbol de la vida (1990), High on a Mountain (1984), Birmingham, Alabama 1963 (1979), Green Rocky Road: Songs & Hammer Dulcimer Tunes From Appalachia & the British Isles (1976), Music from the People's Republic of China Sung and Played on Traditional Instruments (1976), Been in the Storm So Long: Spirituals, Folk Tales and Children's Games from John's Island, South Carolina (I960).
SECONDARY
Fred Brown, “Eyes on the Prize,” Knoxville News-Sentinel (2 May 1999), E1–E2. Contemporary Authors, First Revision (1976), Vols. 17–20, 125.
FROM SING FOR FREEDOM: THE STORY OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT THROUGH ITS SONGS (1990)
INTRODUCTION
In the spring of 1989, Appalachian miners striking the Pittston Coal Company were singing “We Shall Overcome.” In China, where a massive campaign for democracy by students and workers has just been put down, students were photographed with “We Shall Overcome” on their headbands and T-shirts. Bishop Desmond Tutu has used the song as he tries to help people in the United States envision what his country is going through in its painful struggle toward equality and justice. This powerful song, which came originally out of the black church in the southern United States, was adapted and used in the labor movement, and rose to international prominence as the theme song of the civil rights movement. It lives today. It is but the best known of more than eighty songs which were developed and spread in the South and around this country between 1960 and 1965.
The civil rights movement has been described by some as the greatest singing movement this country has experienced. The freedom songs came out of the historical experience and the creativity of southern black communities. There are many kinds and ranges of moods. Two especially important
ones are the old, slow-paced spirituals and hymns that sing of hope and determination, and rhythmic jubilee spirituals and bright gospel songs that protest boldly and celebrate victory. Many of these songs have new or revised words to old tunes.
Having witnessed the civil rights era, most of us take for granted the notion of adapting well-known songs to situations of the present. It wasn't always so.
…
So how did this begin to happen? One place it happened was at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee. Highlander was one of the gathering places during the early days of the movement. Weekend after weekend in the early 1960s, community leaders and activists from across the South came to share information, to strategize and to plan, to bolster each others’ spirits as they returned home to confront segregation.
We were based at Highlander for those years and could build on what had been learned there during the Labor Movement—that singing could be a strong unifying force in struggle, and that commonly known songs, particularly southern gospel and religious songs with repetitive stanzas adapted to the situation, were most effective. For many years Zilphia Horton had worked with grassroots community people coming to Highlander. She drew from them their favorite songs and helped them change a word or two or shape them slightly differently to fit the situation in their home community (often a union campaign). She also taught songs that she knew from different parts of the South, from around the country and from abroad. In the 1940s and ’50s she carried songs from Highlander out to picket lines across the South and brought songs back from various union struggles.
…
Pete Seeger had been in contact with Zilphia and with Highlander. His repertoire, as he sang with progressive movements in the North, included many songs from the South. He came to Highlander to share his music, and in 1945 carried away from the school a labor version of “We Shall Overcome” which had been used by striking Food and Tobacco Union workers in Charleston, S.C.