Listen Here
Page 28
SECONDARY
Jacqueline Bernard, “Mountain Voices: Appalachian Poets,” Ms. 5:2 (August 1976), 34–38. Jackie Demaline, “The Arts Life: Desk doesn't bind this poet,” Cincinnati Enquirer, 30 July 2000.
WRITING LESSONS (I.)
from Divining (2001)
I look for the way
things will turn
out
—Poetics, A.R. Ammons
I am trying to find the shape of things,
to find where words might go
without the prodding of my pen,
left to their own devices:
startled sliding up
as if unnoticed,
nestling in the curve
of century's end;
places I have never seen—
Niagara Falls, Lookout Mountain—
sliding down
between the floorboards
of my mother's kitchen, 1962.
I am trying to find the shape of things,
to let them unfold
without my restless hands forever
moving, pressing up or down
into the patterns
so familiar they are all I ever
dare to sew;
to let this life unfold:
a bolt of cloth spilling
from a tall shelf,
haphazard by its own design;
a liar's yarn spinning out
incredulously true.
SHE
from Divining (2001)
That spring
she let herself go,
uncoiled the cord
and slipped out through
the crack in the window.
She was unleashed.
Even her hair sprung
free of curl.
Her clothes
would not stay put.
She spoke too loudly.
Sentences ran on
ahead of her.
She followed
when she chose.
When people said
they didn't know her
anymore,
she did not
hear them.
WRITING LESSONS (II.)
from Divining (2001)
You really only need to breathe,
as long as you breathe
with everything,
the way your hand breathes in
the shape of a baby's head
as you cradle the soft
green scent of his neck,
and your ears breathe in the teeming
silence of the forest's edge,
and how your eyes breathe in the day
as it cracks wider open
all the way until you see
its fiery center
pushing out the night,
and how your very heart
breathes all you
cannot bear to know
with eyes or ears or skin alone.
Breathe in and hold until your
center burns and swells
but does not crack.
Breathe out.
TO HER MOTHER, LYING IN STATE
from Appalachian Journal (1982)
At least that's what they say,
in state.
I say he's the one who's in a state, daddy
now can't use you like a cane.
He lies without you for a pillow,
eyes open and not able to believe
that you aren't standing in the door.
Lying in state.
What do they know
about the states you've lain in?
One had the mountain you were born on,
where you lay screaming in a midwife's arms,
on your mother's breast,
by the willow, up creek
and in his arms,
or the state you were in
when you left, screaming inside,
to come up north
to this state without mountains.
You lied then
that first night when he asked
if things would be all right there.
He lied too
when he believed you.
Lying in state.
What a state you both were in
when I lay inside you,
him without a job,
you without him, half the time,
or anything you knew back home.
Then I was there,
screaming in a doctor's arms,
who got paid by the state.
You worried then
the state would take me.
You would've hid, you said,
or run back home,
but stayed thinking times get better soon.
You told me this,
me with my daughter in me,
and so scared.
Times changed,
but not enough to keep me here.
Just like you,
I left,
like my girl will leave me,
coming back
only now to see you
lying in state.
You would be in a state
to see me here, too late
and with this girl, eyes black like coal,
like dirt,
like yours.
But they don't know that.
CORRA HARRIS
(May 17, 1869–February 7, 1935)
Corra Mae (or Mary) White Harris was born in Elbert County, Georgia. She married Lundy Howard Harris, a Methodist clergyman, in 1887 and began writing in an effort to eke out a living after her husband suffered a nervous breakdown and was forced to resign his professorship at Emory College. She became a regular contributor to a New York journal, the Independent, tackling everything from book reviews to editorials.
Her novels Were extremely popular during the first half of the twentieth century. Her first novel, The Jessica Letters, was followed by her best-known work, A Circuit Rider's Wife, a novel set in rural Georgia which was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post. The book, based on her husband's experiences in the ministry, was a witty critique of the Methodist Church and its underpaid emissaries in rural mountain communities. A film version of the novel was released in 1951 under the title I'd Climb the Highest Mountain.
Harris published a total of fourteen novels and spent the final years of her life writing a column for the Atlanta Journal. Her papers are at the University of Georgia.
In this scene from A Circuit Rider's Wife, a novel based on Harris's own experiences as a minister's wife, the female narrator ponders the fate of a “fallen” woman in a turn-of-the-century mountain community.
OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE
PRIMARY
Novels: The Happy Pilgrimage (1927), Flapper Anne (1926), As a Woman Thinks (1925), My Book and Heart (1924), A Daughter of Adam (1923), The House of Helen (1923), The Eyes of love (1922), My Son (1921), Happily Married (1920), From Sunup to Sundown (1919), Making Her His Wife (1918), A Circuit Rider's Widow (1916), The Co-Citizens (1915), Justice (1915), In Search of a Husband (1913), The Recording Angel (1912), Eve's Second Husband (1911), A Circuit Rider's Wife (1910), The Jessica Letters (1904).
SECONDARY
Grace Toney Edwards, “Foreword,” A Circuit Rider's Wife (1998). National Cyclopedia of American Biography (1937), Vol. 26, 380–81. L. Moody Simms Jr., “Corra Harris,” Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary (1979), 205–6. John E. Talmadge, “Harris, Corra May White,” Notable American Women 1607–1950: A Biographical Dictionary (1971), Vol. 2, 142–43.
A CIRCUIT RIDER'S WIFE (1910)
from Chapter 5
I have often wondered what would have happened if the prodigal son had been a daughter. Would the father have hurried out to meet her, put a ring on her finger and killed the fatted calf? I doubt it. I doubt if she would ever have come home at all, and if she had come the best he could have done would have been to say: “Go, and sin no more.”
But “go,” you understand. And all over the world you ca
n see them, these frailer prodigals, hurrying away to the lost places.
In a rotting cabin, in an old field five miles from Redwine, lived one of them. Once a week she walked fourteen miles to the nearest large town to get plain sewing, and with this she supported herself and child. The field was her desert. For eight years no respectable woman had crossed it or spoken to her till the day William and I and the redheaded horse arrived at her door. She stood framed in it, a gaunt figure hardened and browned and roughened out of all resemblance to the softness of her sex; her clothes were rags, and her eyes like hot, dammed fires in her withered face. William sprang out of the buggy, raised his hat and extended his hand.
“My wife and I have come to take dinner with you,” he said.
“Not with me! Oh, not with sech as me!” she murmured vaguely. Then, seeing me descend also, she ran forward to meet me, softly crying.
We stayed to dinner, a poor meal of corn hoecake, fried bacon and sorghum, spread upon a pine table without a cloth. But of all the food I ever tasted that seemed to me the most nearly sanctified. It was with difficulty that we persuaded the lost Mary to sit down and partake of it with us. She was for standing behind our chairs and serving us. After that she sat, a tragic figure, through every service at Redwine, even creeping forward humbly to the communion. She was not received, however, in any of the homes of the people. She might “go in peace”—whatever peace her loneliness afforded—that the Scriptures might be fulfilled, and that was all. They would have none of her. This was not so bad as it seemed. She was free, indeed. Having no reputation to win or lose she could set herself to the simple business of being good, and she did. The time came when the field changed into a garden and the cabin whitened and reddened beneath a mass of blooms.
MILDRED HAUN
(January 6, 1911–December 20, 1966)
East Tennessean Mildred Eunice Haun was one of three children of Margaret Ellen Haun and James Enzor Haun. As the writer explained, “My mother was a Cocke County Haun and married a Hamblen County Haun.” Mildred grew up in the Hoot Owl District of Cocke County, Tennessee, and attended public schools there.
Deciding that her community needed a doctor, Haun went to live with an aunt and uncle to further her education. After graduating from Franklin High School in 1931, she was admitted to Vanderbilt University. She gradually abandoned her dream of medical school and took an advanced composition course with poet John Crowe Ransom, who encouraged her to write. After she graduated, she continued to write stories about her native Cocke County while she taught high school in Franklin and began graduate school. Donald Davidson directed her 440-page M.A. thesis “Cocke County Ballads and Songs,” a valuable collection of East Tennessee folklore. She also studied writing, supported by a fellowship, at the University of Iowa. When she completed her collection of stories, The Hawk's Done Gone, it was accepted for publication by Bobbs-Merrill in 1940.
Throughout her life, she supported her mother and herself with work as a writer and an editor. She was book review editor for the Nashville Tennessean (1942–1943), an editorial assistant to Allen Tate on the Sewanee Review (1944–1946), and an information specialist who lived in Memphis and then Washington D.C., and wrote and edited press releases, speeches, and technical information for military personnel and the Department of Agriculture.
Haun's stories show her keen ear for dialect and the oral tradition that surrounded her at home, as well as her willingness to explore the dark side of human nature. Regarding the subjects of her stories, critic Hershel Gower asks, “How does one account for the intense absorption in somber, discomfiting themes—witchcraft, incest, miscegenation, infanticide…?”
In her story “The Hawk's Done Gone,” the family matriarch, Mary Dorthula White, is counting her losses, because her husband Ad and stepson Linus have been selling her valuables to antique dealers.
OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE
PRIMARY
Short stories: The Hawk's Done Gone (1940), The Hawk's Done Gone and Other Stories (1968).
SECONDARY
Hershel Gower, “Introduction,” The Hawk's Done Gone and Other Stories (1968), ix–xxv. Stephen Glenn McLeod, “Bottom of the Night: A Study of Mildred Haun,” M.A. Thesis, Vanderbilt University, 1973. Mossy Creek Reader [Carson-Newman College, Jefferson City, TN] 3 (spring 1993) [entire issue devoted to Mildred Haun includes previously unpublished stories, photographs, and essays: Fred Chappell, “New Stories by Mildred Haun,” 35–37. Amy Tipton Gray, “The Perfect Hell of ‘The Hawk's Done Gone,'” 40–47. Robert Morgan, “This Page of Names: The Narrative Art of Mildred Haun,” 38–39. Karen Travis, “Adventure Begins at Home,” 49–56],
THE HAWK'S DONE GONE (1940)
from The Hawk's Done Gone
MARY DORTHULA WHITE (BORN JANUARY 6, 1847)
I wonder why Ad and Linus never tried to sell me off to them hunters for old things. I would be a sight for somebody to look at. Big and motley and rough-looking. Old and still strong for my age. I miss the things they have sold. These new-fangled things are weak. They make me feel weak too. But I ought not to be setting here nursing this old Bible. I ought to get out and pick some sallet for supper.
The Bible is about the only old thing I have left, though. I thought I couldn't thole it when Ad and Linus first started selling off my stuff. I hate them folks that come around hunting for things to put in the Smoky Mountain museum. And I nigh hate Linus for letting them have my things. Linus is Ad's youngest boy by his first old woman and he has been spoiled rotten. Ad is the one that spoiled him too. Ad has turned everything over to him and let him run it to suit hisself—my own stuff too.
William Wayne was the only one of them antique hunters that was decent. Him and that painted-up woman he called Miss Robinson come together. I recollect that first day when they come. I was bent over the tub washing. Miss Robinson, she strutted up like she thought she was something on a stick, all dyked out in a purple silk dress and spike-heeled shoes. The first thing she did was to commence complaining about having to walk through the mud.
Miss Robinson's old hawk eyes seed everything I had. She got around Linus and got nigh everything I wanted to keep. She picked out the things she wanted. Looked at both of my corded bedsteads. One of them wasn't in very good shape, she said, and she didn't know whether she would take it or not. I felt like giving her a piece of my mind. And I did flare up a little. I looked at her straight and I said, “Who said anything about you taking either one of them? Them is the first bedsteads my pa ever made—made them for him and Ma to start housekeeping on. I was born in this one hyear and all my youngons were born in it.”
I recollect the way I said it to her. I recollect the way William Wayne looked—almost like the soldier boy looked at me that day—that first day. William Wayne had brown eyes—big brown eyes that smiled as much as his mouth did. He put me in mind of the soldier, smiling all the time and talking so gentle. But Charles would be old by now. Old enough to be dead. He was older than me back then. I was just fifteen year old and he was a full-grown man. At least he was old enough to be out fighting the Yankees. At first I thought William Wayne might be Charles's boy maybe. But then I knowed Charles wouldn't ever have any other boy. William Wayne had pity for me and he hated to take my bedsteads away.
It didn't matter who had pity, though, for Linus and Miss Robinson made the bargain. The very next day Miss Robinson would send a wagon up here with two brought-on bedsteads, pretty ones, she said, to swop for my two wild-cherry ones.
And nigh all my quilts too. That huzzy said she would take all the pretty ones. Said some of them were mighty dirty but she could have them cleaned. My “Harp of Columbia.” Of course, Miss Robinson's hawk eyes got set on it the very first thing. The one I was piecing on when Charles come.
I was setting in here in the big house piecing on it when I heard the soldiers walk up into the yard—setting here in the old hickory rocking chair with Ma's red-and-tan checked homespun shawl around my shoulders. I kept it in my hand when I st
arted to get the water for them. I held it all the time while Charles went to the spring. He looked at the quilt when he come back.
“What's that you are making there?” he asked. He took hold of it and fingered it like it was a piece of gold. “I never could handle them little squares and three-cornered pieces with my big fingers,” he said. And his hands were big. But I knowed right then I wasn't afeared of Charles.
I could tell from the way he kept looking at me he thought I was pretty too. He didn't tell me till all the other soldiers went over in the horse lot to catch up Old Kate. He didn't come right out plain and tell me then. “I'll bet your name is Edith—or Mary one.”
“Huh uh—Mary's just part of it.”
“Mine is Charles—Charles Williams. What is the rest of yours?”
“Hit's Dorthula—Mary Dorthula White.”
“It's pretty too.” In that deep voice. He kept feeling of the quilt. And looking at me. “Does that little red blanket on your shoulders keep you warm?”
That “Harp of Columbia” quilt was the one I always held in my lap and worked on when anybody come to see me during the while Joe was growing inside me. I told Joe about using it to hide him. Joe thought a heap of that quilt. I think it was the prettiest one I ever made. With Joe's stitches on it. My stitches—short and straight. And Joe's over there in the corner—long and crooked. Miss Robinson didn't take notice of them, I reckon. But somebody took Joe's stitches out, I know, before they hung it up for folks to look at. Nobody else would care. But I would rather had the hair pulled out of my head than had Joe's stitches pulled out of that quilt. The way he looked up at me with them eyes he had—Charles's eyes—and begged me to let him quilt. I couldn't help but let him do it. “And you won't pull mine out, will you, Ma?” I promised him his stitches never would be pulled out.