Listen Here

by Sandra L. Ballard

  At school Rachel has fried egg sandwiches on lightbread with store-bought mayonnaise or sometimes mayonnaise by itself which nobody else has. She doesn't take on about it. Mom will not have lightbread in the house, she says even if we had the money it's just as tasty as a handkerchief and she sends me to school with yellow cornbread. Some younguns who bring cornbread hide what they have because they are embarrassed to be poor but I won't do that because it would shame my Mom.

  Mom says she gives the store less than a year, then she smiles and says, “That Ben, he'll feed the hollow while it lasts.” There's things we don't get from the store. We grow our corn and vegetables and raise our own pigs and chickens and milk cows. We put up preserves in mason jars for the winter, or I should say the women do. They stand over the cast-iron stoves in the heat of summer and stir the great boiling pots of tomatoes and beans, dip their ladles into the roiling red and green liquid, and wipe the sweat from their faces with one corner of their aprons. They slice the apples and sun-dry them into leather-sweet strips. They take a needle and thread to the beans and hang them in rows to dry from the porch rafters. Me and Uncle Ben and his big boys plow and hoe and plant and haul. Rachel tends the chickens and cows.

  But we get lard and salt from the store, and baking soda and flour, and nails and needles for piercing. And Goody's Headache Powder that Aunt Flora eats like it is candy.

  Sometimes when the hens are laying good, Rachel has two eggs to trade at the store. Aunt Flora makes her trade even though the store is theirs, because she says it is proper. Rachel trades for a Three Musketeers. Each of us pops one chocolate Musketeer in our mouths and we break the third exact down the middle. I like to see the nougat heart. Or Rachel trades for a CoCola in a little green bottle, what some call a dope and others call a sodypop but Rachel always calls by its right name. Ben's store has a big metal sign nailed to the front wall with a raised red oval that reads Coca-Cola in curlicued white letters. The red paint has faded in the sun and there are dents where younguns throw pebbles to hear the clang. The best sodypops come from Ben's ice chest and you sit on the front stoop where the bottle catches glints of sunlight and you look at the green mountain that hovers over the store. It is best when your feet are dusty from the road. Rachel and I share sodypops and the neck of the bottle is warm and tastes the way I guess her mouth would taste.

  A long time ago Uncle Ben was the teacher at the Scary Creek School. I am glad he doesn't teach anymore because I despise school and if he was the teacher I'd have to despise him. I am not a bad student, I learn what I am supposed to, but still I don't care for it. You have to hold your pencil a certain way even though it's cramped as hell and if you don't do it right, Teacher wraps your fingers around the pencil hard and like to breaks every bone in your hand. You learn spelling rules and grammar rules and that the way you talked all your life is ignorant even though it seems to suit most people fine, and when Teacher goes on and says we live in a free country it's just a little hard to believe. Nobody admits it but school is to teach you how to get bossed. I reckon I could read some books on my own and learn what I want, but my mom sets a store by school.

  Rachel is the best student. She is sixteen and I am only fourteen-and-three-quarters. But I am right behind her at school. Rachel is very thin and has wavy light-brown hair that come to her shoulders. She wears very nice clothes because Aunt Flora cuts pictures from the mail-order catalog and makes dresses to look like them. My mom says it's a good thing I'm a boy because she can't sew and she would send me to school in potato sacks. Most of what I wear is hand-me-downs from Uncle Ben's boys.

  Once Aunt Flora got hold of some old window drapes and clothes from a missionary box. Missionaries from up North are always sending us boxes of old things like we aren't even Christian. I wouldn't touch a thing in those boxes nor my Mom neither, but Aunt Flora says why waste, she can make the things nicer than when they were sent. She took some drapes of slick red material and made Rachel a coat that looked like the Chinese wear. Then she cut down a big white wool skirt and jacket into a dress with a high collar and red buttons down the front. Rachel wore the red coat and white dress to school on Class Day when we all had to recite poems. Rachel's dress had long narrow sleeves and a long skirt down to her boot tops. When she stood up to recite, she looked like a queen.

  JANICE HOLT GILES

  (March 28, 1909–June 1, 1979)

  A native of Arkansas, Janice Holt Giles attended the University of Arkansas, as well as Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. Her first marriage ended in divorce in 1939, and in 1945 she married Henry Giles, a Kentuckian whose family had settled in the state during the eighteenth century. The couple made their home on the Giles family farm near Knifely, Kentucky.

  A prolific writer, Giles contributed short stories to McCall's, Good Housekeeping, and Woman's Day. Her first book, The Enduring Hills, was published in 1950. For the next decade and a half, Giles produced nearly a book a year, both fiction and nonfiction.

  Her most popular works were a series of extensively researched novels about the American frontier. The first in the series, The Kentuckians, depicts the struggles of the earliest settlers who pushed westward into the Kentucky wilderness through the Cumberland Gap. It was followed by Hannah Fowler, which examined the harsh reality of frontier women's lives. The Believers depicted the communal life of Kentucky's Shakers.

  Giles wrote, “If I only enjoyed writing these books as much as I do the research all would be well, but alas, the writing is a heavy piece of work.”

  Two autobiographical works, A Little Better Than Plumb and Forty Acres and No Mule, detail life on the Giles's remote ridge farm. One reviewer declared that Forty Acres and No Mule did more “to bring alive the section of country now known as Appalachia than a half a dozen surveys.”

  In 1996, the Giles Foundation was established to preserve Giles's literary legacy and to restore her log home. The Foundation plans to preserve the home as a museum and a writer's retreat.

  In the following scene from Hannah Fowler, Hannah and her injured father, Samuel, have been befriended in the Kentucky wilderness by a woodsman named Tice who happened upon them. Because of the threat of Indian attack, Hannah and Tice take turns standing guard through the night.

  OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE

  PRIMARY

  Novels: Act of Contrition (2001), Shady Grove (1978), The Believers (1976), Wellspring (1975), The Kinta Years (1973), Miss Willie (1971), Six-Horse Hitch (1971), The Great Adventure: A Novel (1966), Run Me a River (1964), Voyage to Santa Fe (1962), Savannah (1961), Johnny Osage (1960), The Land Beyond the Mountains (1958), Hannah Fowler (1956), Hill Man (1954), The Plum Thicket (1954), The Kentuckians (1953), Tara's Healing (1951), The Enduring Hills (1950). Nonfiction: The G.I. Journal of Sgt. Giles (1965). Autobiography: A Little Better Than Plumb (1962), Forty Acres and No Mule (1952).

  SECONDARY

  Contemporary Authors (1967), Vols. 1–4, 368. Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, Vol. 3, 228. Bonnie Cox, “Kentucky Women Writers: Lost, Forgotten, Overlooked, and Acclaimed,” Belles Lettres (spring 1991), 12–14. Dianne Watkins Stuart, Janice Holt Giles: A Writer's Life (1998). Dianne Watkins, “Foreword,” Hannah Fowler (1992). Dianne Watkins, Hello, Janice (1992).

  HANNAH FOWLER (1956)

  from Chapter 3

  It was black dark when she awakened. She rolled over and edged to the front of the lean-to, looked at the sky. She judged it was near midnight. Certainly the dawn was several hours off yet. She shivered as she crawled out of the warm bed and reached back for the blanket to wrap about her shoulders, yawning. Tice heard her and called out softly in the darkness, “You needn't to git up.”

  She found her gun and made her way over to him. “I'd ruther to,” she said. “If you're aimin’ to hunt in the mornin', you'll need a mite of rest yerself.”

  He grunted and she could see a blur of movement by the trees. He was standing. “If they's e'er trouble,” he told her, “hit'll come from acrost the river. I d
on't look fer it, understand. Hit's jist best to take keer. You got yer gun?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, then…. Yer pa ain't stirred. Reckon that rum purely knocked him out.”

  “Hit must of. The sleep'll do him good.”

  “Yes…well, come daylight, if I don't stir, call me. If he c'n stand bein’ moved, we'd best make camp further away from the river.

  “Ain't you aimin’ on takin’ the raft on up the river?”

  “No, ma'am. That would be the last thing I'd aim on doin'. We'll move an’ camp an’ wait till yer pa c'n travel. Then we'll strike out through the woods. Well, I'll lay awhile now.”

  Hannah settled herself by the tree. She was fully awake now, felt fresh and rested. There was an open spot in the trees just over the camp and by leaning her head back and resting it against the trunk of the tree she could see the stars, and a little, pale disk of moon off in the west. You could tell, she thought, the time of night by the stars and moon, when the night was clear. And you could tell, too, that the winter was over and summer coming on. They moved, the stars did, changing places in the sky with the hours, and changing places as the seasons passed them by. She thought about it, wondered about the stars and moon, wondered why they'd been put there to shine in the night…why they moved. It wasn't a thing she could study out, though. It was past e'er human body's knowing, she guessed. There were some things that couldn't be studied out.

  She felt a breath of wind on her cheek. There, now…wind was one of them. What was it? Where did it come from? What moved it unseen around the world and across the land? It would stir through the night, ruffle the leaves and shake them, bend the limbs—but when the dawn was near, when the dark was just beginning to lift, not light yet but just ready to be, it would quieten as if it listened for the sun. As still as death it would be then, at that time just before the light streaked into the sky, so still that, if you were stirring then, you could hear your own breath coming and going in your throat, and hear your own heart beat. The way of wind…it went queer and odd to a human body.

  And the way of rain, blowing up in the clouds, the clouds splitting and pouring it down. She named over to herself the things she could in no way study out…wind, the moon and stars, rain, sunlight, clouds, storm, the fall of rivers down the land, the rise and flow of water. There was a power of things, she told herself, no human body could ever know the straight of. You could, in time and with study, know the ways of birds and animals, and even folks. They had life inside them, they all bled and their hearts beat and they breathed in the air. One way or another they all moved, flew or walked, swam or ran. They all died, too. The sun, now, and the stars, the wind and the rain, the water in the rivers, those things went on forever. How could it be, she wondered, that a thing that lived should come to the end of its living, and those things that had no life in them should go on forever? “Hit ort,” she told herself, “to be the other way round, looks like.” Then she laughed, to think of the sun and stars and moon dying. “The folks would die fer sart'n, then,” she said.

  She never talked about such thoughts as these. Once when she was a child she had tried to tell Samuel about the sound the branch back of the house made, running over the rocks. It went, she had told him, like singing, real soft. “You c'n hear the words, I reckon,” Samuel had said, grinning at her.

  “I kin,” she had told him stoutly. “Hit's a singin’ ‘Go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep.’”

  Sam had not laughed then. Sternly he had bade her to keep such foolish talk to herself. “Hit ain't nothin’ but water runnin’ over the rocks,” he'd said. “Don't go gittin’ foolish fancies in yer mind, Hannah. They'll make you go quare in the head…folks'll think you're tetched, an’ they'll mistrust you.”

  So she had never again named the things she thought to Samuel, or to anyone else. But she was always thinking them, just the same. It did no harm to think, as far as she could see.

  Samuel moved in his sleep, stirred and muttered, threw one hand from under the blanket. She watched until he had settled, her thinking distracted, and when he was quiet again she thought about moving camp tomorrow…today, now. Wondered where Tice would pick. Wondered if Samuel could be moved. Thought of the problems and shook her head. Below, she could hear the liquid sound of the river, running shallow around the tongue of the beach. She smiled in the dark. In spite of Samuel, running water did make a singing sound.

  NIKKI GIOVANNI

  (June 7, 1943–)

  Nikki Giovanni was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, into a close-knit African American family. Although her parents moved the family to Cincinnati when Giovanni was an infant, she returned frequently to Tennessee to be with her grandparents, and she attended Austin High School in Knoxville.

  Giovanni entered Fisk University in Nashville at the age of seventeen but was expelled after her first semester for leaving campus without permission. She returned to Fisk in 1964 and became an activist, leading two hundred students in a demonstration that forced the reinstatement of a campus chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In 1967, she graduated, magna cum laude, with a B.A. in history.

  After attending the University of Pennsylvania's School of Social Work, Giovanni enrolled in Columbia University's M.F.A. program for creative writing but left without completing her degree after publishing her first book of poetry in 1968 entitled Black Feeling, Black Talk. Hailed as a unique voice, Giovanni's revolutionary rhetoric won her many fans.

  Over the years, Giovanni's poetic vision has grown to include themes of love and creativity alongside those of anger and revolution. Her son, Thomas, was born in 1969; since then, many of her works, beginning with Spin a Soft Black Song, have been for young readers. Once, when questioned about this transformation, Giovanni replied, “Only a fool doesn't change.”

  She is the author of numerous books of poetry and essays, holds honorary doctorates from more than a dozen institutions (including Smith College and Indiana University), and has been given the keys to more than three dozen cities, including New York City. Giovanni is the first African American University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, an honor bestowed upon only one-half of one percent of the faculty. She is “Hokie proud.”

  In her essay “Griots” from the collection Racism 101, Giovanni examines the interplay of family and memory. The term “griot” refers to an African elder who preserves a community's oral history.

  OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE

  PRIMARY

  Poetry: Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (2002), The Love Poems of Nikki Giovanni (1997), The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni (1996), Those Who Ride the Night Winds (1983), Vacation Time: Poems for Children (1980), Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day (1978), The Women and the Men (1975), Ego-tripping and Other Poems for Young People (1973), My House: Poems (1972), Spin a Soft Black Song: Poems for Children (1971), Re:Creation (1970), Black Feeling, Black Talk (1968). Essays: Racism 101 (1994), Sacred Cows—and Other Edibles (1988), Gemini [autobiography] (1971). Autobiographical essay: “400 Mulvaney Street,” in Bloodroot (1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 133–39. Nonfiction: A Poetic Equation: Conversations Between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker (1974), A Dialogue: James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni (1973). Editor of anthologies: Grand Fathers: Reminiscences, Poems, Recipes and Photos of the Keepers of Our Traditions (1999), Shimmy Shimmy Shimmy Like My Sister Kate: Looking at the Harlem Renaissance Through Poems (1996), Grandmothers: Poems, Reminiscences, and Short Stories About the Keepers of Our Traditions (1994), Appalachian Elders: A Warm Hearth Sampler (1991), Night Comes Softly (1970). Illustrated poems for children: The Genie in the Jar (1996), The Sun is So Quiet (1996), Knoxville, Tennessee (1994).

  SECONDARY

  Alex Batman, “Nikki Giovanni,” Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Poets Since World War II (1980), Vol. 5, 286–89. Contemporary Authors (1978), Vols. 29–32, 237–38. Joyce Dyer, “Nikki Giovanni,” in Bloodroot, 132. Virginia C. Fowler, “And This Poem Recognizes That: Embracing Co
ntrarieties in the Poetry of Nikki Giovanni,” in Her Words (2002), ed. Felicia Mitchell, 112–35. Joanne V. Gabbin, “Giovanni, Nikki,” The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (1995), 349–50. Great Women Writers (1994), Vol. 2, 135–37. Lillie P. Howard, “Nikki Giovanni,” American Women Writers (1980), Vol. 2, 135–37. Something About the Author (1981), Vol. 24, 120–21.

  GRIOTS

  from Racism 101 (1994)

  I must have heard my first stories in my mother's womb.

  Mother loved a good story and my father told good jokes, but it was her father, Grandpapa, who told the heroic tales of long ago. Grandpapa was a Fisk University graduate (1905) who had majored in Latin. As he sometimes told the story, he had intended to be a diplomat until he met Grandmother, but that is probably another story altogether, he being Black and all in 1905 or thereabouts.

  Grandpapa loved the stars. He knew the constellations and the gods who formed them, for whom they were named.

  Grandpapa was twenty years the senior of Grandmother, so he was an old man when we were born. Grandmother's passion was flowers; his, constellations. One needn't have a great imagination to envision this courtship: the one with her feet firmly planted on earth, the other with his heart in the sky. It is only natural that I would love history and the gossip of which it is composed.

  Fiction cannot take the place of stories. Aha, you caught me! Fiction is stories, you say. But no. Stories, at their best, pass along a history. It may be that there was no Ulysses with a faithful Penelope knitting and unraveling, but something representative of the people is conveyed. Something about courage, fortitude, loss, and recovery.