Listen Here

by Sandra L. Ballard

  But Virgil wasn't paying any attention to her. He hunched low in the car seat as the armed guard walked toward them. With World War II raging across the oceans, the guards checked everyone who came in or out of the newly built city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Mattie didn't understand what was so important about the city, but she had learned to live with the fences surrounding it and with the guards at all the exits. Now she couldn't help grinning as she thought how wonderful it would be if Virgil had to have a pass and couldn't get one.

  But, of course, that wouldn't happen. Kids came into Oak Ridge with adults and left with them anytime. It was only grown-ups who had to wear the numbered plastic cards with their pictures in order to get in or out of the city.

  The man in the crisp khaki-colored shirt and pants, pistol buckled at his waist, flicked his eyes from the badge Daddy held up back to Daddy's face. Then he bent over and stared into the car. He looked at twelve-year-old Virgil in the front seat, at thirteen-year-old Mattie as she tried to appear nonchalant in the corner of the backseat, and at the empty seat beside her.

  Mattie thought of how scared she'd been last summer when the family had entered Oak Ridge for the first time. The guard had told Daddy to open the trunk of the car. Then Daddy had taken out their suitcases and opened them, one by one. The guard had looked casually at the piles of neatly folded clothes. Then he let them go.

  But even though he hadn't messed with their clothes, Mother still didn't like the search.

  “Nosey, isn't he,” she said, as they drove away.

  “Now, Lucy, he's just doing his job.”

  “I guess his job is to insult innocent people.”

  “Most of the time they just look at your badge and wave you on. But they have to check about every ninth or tenth car just to keep everybody honest.” Daddy reached over and patted Mother on the knee. “It wasn't anything personal.”

  “Personal or not, I don't like the idea of somebody checking us.”

  Mattie had leaned forward, eager to hear how Daddy would reassure Mother. Months had passed from the time he had applied for the job until he had been hired. And the neighbors had all told them they'd been questioned about Daddy by FBI agents. She hadn't given much thought to the questioning; however, the sight of Oak Ridge and its tight security made her wonder.

  But Daddy was not very comforting. “All I know,” he said, “is that whatever is going on has something to do with the war effort. None of us know what we're working on, and we're warned not to say a word about our jobs.”

  “What was the guard looking for in our suitcases?” Mattie had asked.

  Daddy had only shrugged. Ever since, Mattie had wondered what sort of thing she might have innocently brought along that would have caused the guard, to keep them from entering Oak Ridge.

  Now, as Daddy drove the car away from the gates, Virgil resumed his talking.

  Mattie sighed loudly. Her cousin had talked nonstop during the six-hour drive from the mountains of eastern Kentucky to east Tennessee. The crooked roads were enough to make her feel half sick, and keeping all the windows closed against the damp March air hadn't helped. The sound of Virgil's voice had almost finished the job. After the first hour she'd grown tired of turning her head from Daddy to Virgil and back again in order to follow their conversation. She had tucked her feet up on the seat, leaned her back into the corner, and pretended she was on a bus going to a place she'd never seen. Might as well actually be going, she thought. Daddy and Virgil wouldn't have noticed anyway if she'd vanished into thin air.

  And here they were taking up where they'd left off a few minutes earlier. As they drove along the Turnpike, the main street in Oak Ridge, toward the west end of town, Virgil wanted to know what each building was, why the people were standing in line, and why the buses and buildings were all the same drab green.

  And, of course, Daddy answered the questions in his usual cheerful voice. To listen to him, you'd think Daddy was glad Virgil was coming to live with them for a while.

  Well, Mattie hoped someone was glad. When she was younger, she had liked having Virgil as a playmate. But he had changed during the last year or two. Now he drove her crazy with his talk about how much better boys were at everything than girls. And whenever Daddy was around, Virgil monopolized him.

  When Mattie could stand the front-seat conversation no longer, she interrupted.

  “I hope Mother has supper ready. I'm starving to death.”

  Daddy nodded to her. “I don't doubt she'll have fried chicken and mashed potatoes ready for a celebration.”

  “What celebration?”

  “Why, us bringing Virgil down to Tennessee.”

  Virgil twisted in his seat and grinned at her. Mattie wanted to cross her eyes and stick her tongue out, but she saw Daddy watching her through the rearview mirror. So she turned her face to the window and concentrated on the colorless scene sliding by.

  Finally they left the Turnpike, followed Illinois Avenue up a hill, and turned left onto West Outer Drive. Mattie could see the Cumberland Mountains rising to the west. They were gentle mountains, etched in purple against the setting sun or tipped with white against a bright winter sky. They were not like the mountains she'd lived among in Kentucky. There, the valley between the ridges was so narrow there was room only for the dirt road bordering the creek and for the houses with their tiny lawns. Eastern Kentucky mountains were so crowded together that the valleys received direct sunlight only during the midpart of the day.

  “Here we are,” Daddy said, as he pulled the gray Ford off the gravel road onto the edge of their lawn.

  Mattie looked at her home. The land surrounding the house required a great deal of imagination to be considered a lawn. The yard was rocky red clay with oaks stretching overhead thirty feet before they branched out into limbs and leaves. Like the rest of the recently built city, the yard was muddy in the March rains.

  “Gol-ol-lee,” Virgil said, as the three of them stepped from the car. “What a long house you've got, Uncle Omer.”

  Daddy laughed. “We'd be in fine shape if we could just live in all of it. Nope, Virgil, this is what the government calls a T.D.U., a Twin Dwelling Unit. Only, everybody who lives in one hopes it's a Temporary Dwelling Unit.”

  “Yeah, real temporary,” Mattie muttered. At least for you, Virgil, she wanted to add.

  VIRGINIA HAMILTON

  (March 12, 1936–February 19, 2002)

  Virginia Hamilton was the first African American writer to win the Newbery Medal, one of the most prestigious awards in children's literature. A native of Yellow Springs, Ohio, Hamilton's lifelong interest in African American history grew from the tales told by her maternal grandfather, who was born a slave and managed to escape. “In the background of much of my writing is the dream of freedom tantalizingly out of reach,” Hamilton said.

  She attended Antioch College and Ohio State University, but left school and moved to New York to pursue a writing career. In 1960, she married Arnold Adoff, a well-known white anthologist of African American poetry. The couple, who had a son and a daughter, lived in Hamilton's Ohio hometown until her death.

  Critics credit Hamilton with having raised the standards of American literature for younger readers; her books are often challenging both in style and theme. “What is transformed from myth, history, and family narrative in my own fictions is not a play-pretty to be held in the hands of children,” says Hamilton. “My fictions for young people derive from the progress of Black adults and their children across the American hopescape. Occasionally, they are light-hearted; often they are speculative, symbolic and dark.”

  During the course of her career, Hamilton's work garnered not only critical acclaim but also a long string of awards.

  Her best-known novel, M. C. Higgins the Great, won the Newbery Medal, the National Book Award, and the Boston Globe–Horn Book Award. In 1992, she was awarded the Hans Christian Andersen Medal for her contributions to children's literature.

  Set in the Appalachian foothi
lls, M. C. Higgins the Great depicts the life of an African American teenager (M.C.) who loves his home on Sarah's Mountain, yet lives in fear of the seemingly inevitable day when the strip-mining “spoil” from the mountain above them slides down and buries the family home. M.C.'s place of refuge is a forty-foot-tall steel pole that towers above his house. From the top, M.C. surveys the valley below, a world beyond his own troubles.

  In the scene below, M.C. tries to make his father, Jones, realize the danger the family faces from their beloved mountain.

  OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE

  PRIMARY

  Books for children: Time Pieces: The Book of Times (2002), Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush (2001), Wee Winnie Witch's Skinny: An Original Scare Tale For Halloween (2001), The Girl Who Spun Gold (2000), Bluish: A Novel (1999), Plain City (1998), Second Cousins (1998), The Magical Adventures of Pretty Pearl (1997), Many Thousand Gone: African Americans From Slavery to Freedom (1997), Primos (1997), The House of Dies Drear (1996), When Birds Could Talk & Bats Could Sing: The Adventures of Bruh Sparrow, Sis Wren, and Their Friends (1996), Her Stories: African American Folktales, Fairy Tales, and True Tales (1995), Drylongso (1992), Cousins (1990), Anthony Burns: The Defeat and Triumph of a Fugitive Slave (1988), A White Romance (1987), On Being a Black Writer in America (1986), The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales (1985), A Little Love (1984), Willie Bea and The Time The Martians Landed (1983), The Gathering (1981), Dustland (1980), Justice and Her Brothers (1978), M.C. Higgins the Great (1974), The Planet of Junior Brown (1971).

  SECONDARY

  Contemporary Authors (1977), Vols. 25–28, 299. Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series (1999), Vol. 73, 217–21. Martha E. Cook, “Virginia Hamilton,” American Women Writers (1980), Vol. 2, ed. Lina Mainiero, 232–34. Something About the Author (1989), Vol. 56, 60–70.

  M.C. HIGGINS THE GREAT (1974)

  Chapter 4

  It wasn't often that he and Jones could sit down together without Jones having to test him or think up a game to see if he could win it. He knew Jones only wanted to have him strong and to have him win. But he wished his father wouldn't always have to teach him.

  Just have him listen to me, M.C. thought. Have him hear.

  Maybe now he and Jones were sitting without a war between them. Maybe he could speak about what was on his mind.

  “Daddy?” he said, “you taken a look up there, at the spoil heap behind us?”

  “Way behind us,” Jones said, easily and without a pause. He was looking off at the hills he loved and at the river holding light at the end of the day. He was thinking about his wife, his Banina, who would not have had time yet to concern herself with coming home. But in another hour or so, she would think about it. She would say to herself, It's time! No clock was needed to show her. From where she was across-river, she could look away to these hills. She might even be able to see M.C.'s needle of a pole. No, not likely. But maybe a sparkle, maybe a piercing flash in the corner of her eye. She would have to smile and come on home.

  Jones sighed contentedly.

  “Daddy,” M.C. said, “it can cause a landslide. It can just cover this house and ground.”

  “That's what's bothering you?” Jones asked. “That's why you were standing tranced in the cave. You thought I didn't know but I did. You worry about everything you don't need to worry from.”

  A shudder passed over M.C. like a heavy chill. Jones studied M.C.'s face. M.C. was so skilled at living free in the woods, at reading animal signs, at knowing when the weather would change even slightly. Jones could convince himself at odd moments that the boy had second sight. And now, half afraid to ask but worried for his children on their way to Harenton, his Banina, he said, “What is it you see?”

  M.C.'s eyes reflected light bouncing green and brown from one hill to another. Deep within the light was something as thick as forest shadow.

  “Just some rain coming from behind us,” M.C. said. “You listen and you can maybe hear it come up Sarah's other side.” There was more. It was a feeling M.C. hadn't known before. He kept it to himself.

  Jones stepped off the porch and turned around in order to see behind him. Beyond the rim of the outcropping, he saw Sarah's final slope with shade slanting halfway across it, and trees, made more dense with late-day shadow. As the trees appeared heavier this time of day, Sarah's seemed to pierce the sky.

  Jones gazed at the spoil and beyond it to the bare summit where he had spent so much time with M.C. when the boy was small. Looking, he remembered how he had taught M.C. all he knew about hunting bare-handed. He recalled Sarah's cut, trees falling.

  Now he listened. He saw the sky grow heavy with mist as he watched. It turned gray and, finally, dark. He heard sound coming. Rain, like hundreds of mice running through corn. He watched it come over the mountain and down the slope in a straight line.

  M.C. hadn't bothered to move from the step. He had already felt the rain, seen it without seeing.

  Wind hit Jones first. It ran before the rain. Jones didn't want his clothes soaked, so he stepped onto the porch while rain came full of mist, but hard all the same.

  They watched it. The rain marched down Sarah's and on across, turning hill after hill the same shade of silver mist clear to the river. Then it was gone from the mountain. As it had come, clawing through cornstalk, it vanished with the same familiar sound.

  “Huh,” Jones grunted. “That will cool it off maybe a minute. Wish it would rain hard enough to fill up that gully. Then I could take me a swim without sweating a mile to do it.”

  M.C. had his mind on the spoil heap. He couldn't see it but he could feel it, the way he felt Sarah's above him pressing in on him when he lay in his cave room.

  “It holds the water,” he told his daddy, “just hanging on up there. It'll rain again and it'll grow just like it's alive.”

  “Now why did you have to catch hold of that all of a sudden?” Jones asked him. “You get something in your head, I swear, you don't let it go. Glad when school gets going. Catch hold of your math work like that one time. Don't talk to me no more,” he added and sat down again on the step.

  The step was wet. So was M.C., who seemed not to notice. The rain was just dripping now. The mist had grown intense with light.

  “It already cover all the trees they root up,” M.C. forced himself on. “It'll tear loose, maybe just a piece. But without a warning. Maybe a roar, and sliding into the yard and trying to climb my pole.”

  “Quit it,” Jones said. “Just…don't talk to me.”

  M.C. couldn't tell if there was any worry in his father's face. He could see only an intensity of anger at being bothered.

  Suddenly the sun came out. M.C. bowed his head until the light leveled off, softened and shaped by the green of hills.

  Doesn't even hear me, M.C. thought. Fool, Daddy. All at once, he wanted to be back up on his pole.

  Dude'll have to tell him. He'll have to listen.

  Bright sunlight began to dry up the truth seen so easily in the rain.

  “These old mountains,” Jones said. He looked out over the side of Sarah's and beyond. “They are really something.”

  M.C. stayed quiet. Sullen.

  “It's a feeling,” Jones said. “Like, to think a solid piece of something big belongs to you. To your father, and his, too.” Jones rubbed and twisted his hands, as if they ached him. “And you to it, for a long kind of time.” He laughed softly. To M.C., it sounded full of sadness.

  PAULETTA HANSEL

  (August 29, 1959–)

  Poet Pauletta Hansel is one of three children of Lamie Lewis Hansel and Charles Hansel of Somerset, Kentucky. Born and raised in eastern Kentucky, she began writing when she was a child and became a published poet (in Mountain Review) when she was a teenager. At age sixteen, while still in high school, she was recruited to enroll at Antioch College. She attended Antioch's Appalachian campus in Beckley, West Virginia, and graduated in 1978 with a B.A. in human services. Her master's degree, with a concentration in Montessori
education, is from Xavier University (1980).

  In 1976, Hansel's work was featured in Ms. magazine in an article on Appalachian women poets. At age fifteen, she told the Ms. reporter that both her grandfathers were miners, but “home” for her “meant one mountain community college town after the other, wherever her father happened to be teaching philosophy. ‘The outside,’ she says, ‘never did seep in all that much.’”

  She was instrumental in organizing early networks of Appalachian writers, including the Soupbean Poets, a politically active writers group she co-founded at Antioch; Street Talk, a theater collective that wrote, produced, and performed plays locally and nationally from 1980 to 1984; and the Southern Appalachian Writers Cooperative (SAWC), which is still active today.

  Since 1980, Hansel has worked in Cincinnati, first as a teacher at a Montessori school, then as a paralegal for the Legal Aid Society of Cincinnati, then as an administrator for the Urban Appalachian Council, where her main responsibilities focused on community arts programs and community development. She is currently a teacher and administrator at Women Writing for (a) Change, a feminist creative writing center.

  She gave up writing from 1984 to 1994, in part, she says, because “in my early years I tried too hard to be an ‘Appalachian writer,’ and lost the sound of my own voice in trying to blend with others. My work now is definitely influenced by my Appalachian roots…but the stories and language reflect not just my past but my present as an urban dweller for more than half my life.” Her poetry has appeared in Appalachian Journal, Adena, Twigs, Wind, Pine Mountain Sand and Gravel, and in anthologies including New Ground, A Gathering at the Forks, and Old Wounds, New Words.

  OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE

  PRIMARY

  Poetry: Divining (2001). We're Alright but We Ain't Special (1976), with Gail V. Amburgey, Mary Joan Coleman. What's a Nice Hillbilly Like You…? (1976). Some Poems by Some Women (1975).