FROM SIGHT TO THE BLIND (1914)
One morning in early September, Miss Shippen, the trained nurse at the Settlement School on Perilous, set off for a day of district-visiting over on Clinch, accompanied by Miss Loring, another of the workers. After riding up Perilous Creek a short distance, they crossed Tudor Mountain, and then followed the headwaters of Clinch down to Skain's Fork, where in a forlorn little district-school-house the trained nurse gave a talk on the causes and prevention of tuberculosis, the spitting of tobacco-juice over the floor by teacher and pupils abating somewhat as she proceeded. Two miles farther on she stopped at the Chilton home for a talk to half a dozen assembled mothers on the nursing and prevention of typhoid, of which there had been a severe epidemic along Clinch during the summer.
Afterward the school-women were invited to dinner by one of the visiting mothers. Mrs. Chilton at first objected to their going, but finally said:
“That's right; take ‘em along with you, Marthy. I allow it'll pyeerten Aunt Dalmanuthy up to hear some new thing. She were powerful’ low in her sperrits the last I seed.”
“Pore maw!” sighed Marthy, her soft voice vibrant with sympathy. “It looks like things is harder for her all the time. Something new to ruminate on seems to lift her up a spell and make her forgit her blindness. She has heared tell of you school-women and your quare doings, and is sort of curious.”
“She is blind?” inquired the nurse.
“Blind as a bat these twelve year',” replied Mrs. Chilton; “it fell on her as a judgment for rebelling when Evy, her onliest little gal, was took. She died of the breast-complaint; some calls it the galloping consumpt'.”
“I allus allowed if Uncle Joshuay and them other preachers had a-helt off and let maw alone a while in her grief,” broke in Marthy's gentle voice, “she never would have gone so far. But Uncle Joshuay in especial were possessed to pester her, and inquire were she yet riconciled to the will of God, and warn her of judgment if she refused.”
“Doubtless Uncle Joshuay's high talk did agg her on,” said Mrs. Chilton, impartially, “but she need n't to have blasphemed like she done at Evy's funeral occasion.”
Marthy covered her face with her hands.
“Oh, that day!” she exclaimed, shuddering. “Will I ever forgit it? John and me had got married just a month before Evy died in October, and gone to live up the hollow a small piece from maw, and even then she were complaining of a leetle scum over her eyes. Losing Evy, and rebelling like she done atterward, and Uncle Joshuay's talk, holp it along fast, and it were plain to all before winter were over that he had prophesied right, and her sight were a-going. I would come down the branch of a morning and beg her to let me milk the cow and feed the property and red up the house and the like, but she would refuse in anger, and stumble round over chairs and table and bean-pot and wash-kittle, and maintain all spring and summer her sight were as good as ever. Never till that day of the funeral occasion, one year atter Evy died, did she ever give in.”
Here Marthy again covered her face with her hands, and Mrs. Chilton took up the tale:
“I can see her now, up thar on the hill-shoulder, betwixt you and John on the front log, by Evy's grave-house, and Uncle Joshuay a-hollering and weeping and denouncing like he does, and her setting through it like a rock. Then finally Uncle Joshuay he thundered at her the third time, ‘Hain't it the truth, Sister Dalmanuthy, that the judgment and the curse of God has fell on you for your rebelliousness, like I prophesied, and that you hain't able to see John thar or Marthy thar or the hand thar before your face thar?’ when Aunt Dalmanuthy riz up sudden, and clinched her hands, and says slow and fierce: ‘Man it is the truth you speak. The curse has fell; and I hain't able to see John here or Marthy here or the hand here before my face here. But listen what I got to say about it. I'm able to hate and to curse as good as God. And I do! I hate and curse the Hand that, after taking all else I loved, snatched from my bosom the one little yoe lamb I treasured thar; I hate and curse Him that expected me to set down tame and quiet under such cruelty and onjestice; I hate and curse and defy the Power that hated and spited me enough, atter darkening the light of my life, to put out the sight of my eyes! Now,’ she says, ‘you lay claim to being mighty familiar with the Lord; take that message to Him!’ she says.
“Women, that whole funeral meeting kotch its breath at them awful words, and sot there rooted and grounded; and she turnt and looked around defiant-like with them sightless eyes, and strode off down the hill, John and Marthy follering.”
After a somewhat protracted silence, Marthy's gentle voice resumed:
“And from that day to this John and me hain't left her sence. We shet up our house and moved down to hern; and she tuck to setting by the fire or out on the porch, allus a-knitting, and seldom speaking a word in all them years about Evy or her sorrow or her curse. When my first little gal come along, I named it Evy, thinking to give her some easement or pleasure; but small notice has she ever showed. ‘Pears like my young uns don't do much but bother her, her hearing and scent being so powerful’ keen. I have allus allowed if she could get her feelings turnt loose one time, and bile over good and strong, it might benefit her; but thar she sets, day in, day out, proud and resdess, a-bottling it all up inside.”
DENISE GIARDINA
(October 25, 1951–)
Born in Bluefield, West Virginia, Denise Giardina (pronounced jar-DEE-na) is the daughter of Leona Whitt Giardina, a nurse who grew up in eastern Kentucky, and Dennis Giardina, an accountant whose family came from Sicily to work in the mines. She grew up in the coal mining camp of Black Wolfe in McDowell County, West Virginia, where most of the men in her family worked for the mining companies. Her grandfather and uncles were miners; her father was a bookkeeper for Page Coal and Coke Company. When she was thirteen, the mine that employed her father closed, and she witnessed the dissolution of the community. Her family moved to Charleston, West Virginia.
She earned her B.A. from West Virginia Wesleyan College in 1973 and spent several years in Washington, D.C., as part of the ecumenical Christian activist community known as the Sojourners Fellowship. In 1979, she completed a Master of Divinity from Virginia Theological Seminary and was ordained by the Episcopal Church as a deacon. During her ministry in McDowell County, West Virginia, a bishop tried to discourage her from becoming involved in political issues like speaking out about absentee landowners not paying property taxes, and such censure helped her decide to channel her creative energy into becoming a writer and activist.
She describes herself as “an Appalachian writer, interested in the affinities between Appalachia and other exploited places like Poland and Central America,” and she adds, “I am also interested in writing that includes the political and spiritual dimensions in life and am not much interested in fiction that pretends these areas do not exist.”
Her first book, Good King Harry, is an antiwar novel set in fifteenth-century England, exploring crises of conscience faced by young Henry V and introducing moral dilemmas that are a hallmark of Giardina's fiction.
Storming Heaven focuses on West Virginia and Kentucky mining communities and the conflicts between coal companies and miners that led to the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, when coal barons convinced President Harding to send U.S. troops to put down the union. This novel was a Discovery Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and received the 1987 W.D. Weatherford Award for best book published about the Appalachian South.
She uses multiple narrators in Storming Heaven and in its sequel, The Unquiet Earth, to span the years from the 1890s to 1990 and explore the public and private crises of the generations of characters in World Wars, mining strikes and layoffs, and the War on Poverty in her fictional Justice County, West Virginia. For The Unquiet Earth, Giardina received an American Book Award and the Lillian Smith Award for fiction.
Saints and Villains takes readers from West Virginia mountains to European ones, examining the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and its moral complexities. For it she won
the 1999 Fisk Fiction Prize awarded by the Boston Book Review.
Giardina is the only writer in this book to have been a candidate for governor. In 2000, her gubernatorial campaign as a candidate for the Mountain Party in West Virginia succeeded in establishing a third party based on environmental and community-based issues.
OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE
PRIMARY
Novels: Fallam's Secret (2003), Saints and Villains (1998), The Unquiet Earth (1992), Storming Heaven (1987), Good King Harry (1984). Selected essays: “No Scapin the Booger Man,” in Bloodroot (1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 129–31. “Appalachian Mirror,” New York Times (31 October 1992), L21. “Solidarity in Appalachia,” The Nation (3 July 1989), 12–14. Interviews: W. Dale Brown, “True Stories: A Conversation with Denise Giardina,” Carolina Quarterly 47:1 (fall 1994), 40–51. Thomas E. Douglass, “Interview: Denise Giardina,” Appalachian Journal 20:4 (summer 1993), 384–93. Susan Koppelman and Janet Mullaney, “Belles Lettres Interview: Denise Giardina,” Belles Lettres (spring 1989), 11, 21.
SECONDARY
Tim Boudreau, “Fighting Back: Denise Giardina talks about Storming Heaven,” Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine 5:1 (spring 1988), 9–10. Aviva L. Brandt, “Region's Untold Tales Bring Writer Home,” Charleston [WV] Gazette (16 May 1993), E9. Contemporary Authors (1987), Vol. 119, 118–19. Joyce Dyer, “Denise Giardina,” Bloodroot, 128. “Denise Giardina Issue,” Iron Mountain Review Vol. 15 (spring 1999). Laurie K. Lindberg, “An Ethical Inquiry into the Works of Denise Gardina,” Appalachia Inside Out, Vol. 2, 664–72. Lillian S. Robinson, Coal Miner's Daughter [review of The Unquiet Earth], The Nation (28 December 1992), 816–18. Teresa K. Weaver, “Moving Mountains: West Virginia Novelist Runs for Governor…,”Atlanta Journal-Constitution (24 October 1999), Ml, M3. Meredith Sue Willis, review of The Unquiet Earth, Appalachian Journal 20:2 (winter 1993), 204–6.
STORMING HEAVEN (1987)
from Chapter 3
CARRIE BISHOP
You have seen old photographs, brown and sweet-looking, as though dipped in light molasses. My memories of the Homeplace in Kentucky are like that. Sweet, bitter-sweet.
When I was ten years old, Ben Honaker lent me his copy of Wuthering Heights. I loved it, just for the name of it, even before I read it. It has the sound of a lost and precious place, Wuthering Heights. I learned from that book that love and hate are not puny things. Nor are they opposed. Everything in this world that is calculating and bloodless wars against them both, wars against all flesh and blood, earth and water.
Even now, when I whisper that name, Wuthering Heights, it is the Homeplace I see. My people crowd around me, Ben and Flora, Miles, Daddy, Aunt Jane and Aunt Becka. And I see myself, waiting for Heathcliff, waiting for someone to come from outside, bearing with him both passion and menace.
I knew he would come from the outside, because Daddy and Aunt Becka said I would never find a man on Scary Creek or Grapevine. I was too forward, they said, too stubborn. I was not pretty like Flora. Flora looked like the princess in children's stories old folks tell—white skin, rosy cheeks, and black hair. She took after Daddy and Aunt Becka's side of the family, which was part Cherokee. I took after my dead mother's side. Freckles splashed my face, my shoulders, my arms. My nose was a trifle large, my hair drab brown.
“Carrie takes after the Mays,” Aunt Becka said to Daddy one night when we were in bed before the hearth and supposedly asleep. She was Daddy's oldest sister. “She's even got her Papaw Alec's nose, poor child. Hit wouldnt look so bad on Miles.”
I couldn't sleep for worrying and went straightway up the river the next morning to the Aunt Jane Place. Aunt Jane May lived at the mouth of Scary Creek where it flowed into Grapevine. Aunt Jane was both my grandmother and my great-aunt. She was Daddy's aunt who had married Alec May, and their daughter Tildy was my mother.
I cried out my hurt feelings to her. She sat composed, her hands laid flat on her lap so the blue veins stood up in ridges.
“Dont you pay no mind to your Aunt Becka,” she said. “That woman will wrap her tongue around any kind of silliness. You're the picture of your mother, and I love to gaze on you for it.”
“Am I ugly?”
“Course you aint ugly. You favor your Papaw Alec a heap, too. His face had character. They wasnt no forgitting what he looked like, no more than you could forgit the mountains. When I stand on my porch and look at those mountains, I still yet see him everywhere.”
Uncle Alec had been dead for a long time, killed in the War Between the States.
“You think he's a ghost?” I asked. “You think he still yet comes around here, and that's why you cant forgit him?”
Aunt Jane smiled. “Maybe. Sometimes I feel him close. But ifn he's a ghost, he's a contented one. He walks for joy, not for disquiet.”
I began to watch for him then. I thought he walked abroad in the fog. The mists rose from the river each morning to cling to the mountaintops, and in the evenings, after a rain shower, patches of fog ran like a herd of sheep up the hillsides. I would go out then, breathe the air and feel it clean the bottom of my lungs. A path wandered behind the cabin down the riverbank. Grapevine was broad and green, slow running, never more than waist deep on a grown man save during the spring thaw. I waded into the water, my skirt hiked to my thighs. Silver explosions of trout churned the water and minners darted fearlessly about my legs. I came abreast a stand of cattails and halted. The sweep of Grapevine curved away north, its path to Shelby and the Levisa hidden by the far mountains layered one after another, the mist dancing up their flanks. Every way I turned the lush green peaks towered over me. Had it been winter or spring, they would have been iron gray, or dappled with pink and white dogwood, sarvis, and redbud, but always they would be there, the mountains, their heights rounded by the elements like relics worn smooth by the hands of reverent pilgrims.
I swept my arm up and flung water like beads of glass.
“Hey, Uncle Alec,” I whispered.
THE UNQUIET EARTH (1992)
from The Ice Breaks, 1930s
DILLON FREEMAN
When my daddy died I was an infant, lying on his chest with his thumb caught tight in my fist. I try to remember properly. I try to remember to hold on tighter to that thumb, to keep the warmth from seeping out. If I squeeze hard enough I'll recreate him, thumb first, then the rough hand, the forearm with its thick brown hair, the soft fold of skin over his throat, the chin stubbled coarse with beard. But I stop there because it is all I can bring to life. I don't know his face. And the quickening wanes again until only the thumb is warm, and then not even the thumb.
Me and Mom still live in the cabin where he died. She dragged the deathbed outside and burned it like a funeral pyre. He was already buried in the Homeplace cemetery with the rest of her people. But it was like she had to see something go up in flames. She wouldn't have dreamed to throw herself on the fire, though, like Teacher says those women do over there in India. My mother, Carrie Freeman, wouldn't turn her back on life for nobody, not even a man she loved so desperate she slept with him and them not married and traipsed over mountains to be with him.
I am the child of that love. A woods colt, as we say in these Kentucky mountains. Nobody troubles me over it. Nobody dares because I am a steady fighter. People here don't get het up over such things anyway, except a few of the meanest church women. Besides, my mother was married to a preacher before she and Daddy made me, and I ended up with the preacher's last name, so that as good as sanctified the whole proceedings.
My daddy was a union organizer over in the West Virginia coalfields, and he was in a battle with the state police and company thugs and took a bullet that snapped his spine clean in two. That's how he came to die slow and in bed with me sprawled atop him. Rachel, who is my cousin, says she recalls him. I don't believe she could recall much, she was barely two. But she says she remembers being scared of the Aunt Jane Place because a mean man lived there. Mom says Daddy was bad-tempered for being paralyzed and Rachel was skitti
sh of him. It does put me in awe of Rachel a little, it makes me jealous because I should be the one to remember him. I should remember grabbing onto that thumb. But I don't hold Rachel's memory against her. I just stay as close to her as I can.
Rachel gets uncomfortable when I talk about Mom and Daddy making me. She was raised more proper. Rachel is a Honaker, and she lives on the Homeplace just down Grapevine nigh to the shoals. We are first cousins—our mothers are sisters, Carrie and Flora. Me and Mom live at the Aunt Jane Place. It is all the same land, just two different houses, theirs the white wood farmhouse, ours the cabin that creaks in the wind and smells of woodsmoke. Uncle Ben says move down to the Homeplace, he'll build on an extra room and the older younguns will be moving out soon, but Mom won't hear of it. I think she wants to stay in the house of Daddy's last breathing.
Uncle Ben is worried about whether we can live on our land at all. He says the taxes have gone up because the coal companies are buying land, and he has taken out a mortgage to pay them. Then he opened a general store at the mouth of Scary to help pay the mortgage but the store is not doing any good. Mom says Ben would pick the depths of the Depression to open up a store. Uncle Ben is a smart man but him and Aunt Flora have got no business sense, Mom says, and they give too much credit. In these times we are living in, lots of folks need credit. So the sacks of flour disappear from the dusty shelves as soon as they are set out, and Ben cannot keep the pokes of already baked-and-sliced lightbread that caused such a stir when they first arrived. A poke of sliced lightbread is prized, for it means you can afford to spend money to replace the biscuits and cornbread people bake themselves, but Ben even gives credit for lightbread, so everyone is the same.
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