SECONDARY
Pam Kingsbury, “A sweet and sassy slice of life,” http://www.bookpage.com/0205bp/fiction/some_days_there's_pie.html. Library Journal (15 March 2002), 105.
SOME DAYS THERE'S PIE (2002)
Chapter 1,
ON MY WAY TO THE REST OF MY LIFE
Rose is dead. I am sorry for it but not surprised; she's been dying for years now. I found her lying on the roll-away in Room 12 of the Little Swiss Inn in Mount Claire, North Carolina. It's just like Rose to have left me the double bed. I don't want to be any trouble, was what she said all the time, but there's a lot of people who say that kind of thing who are loads of trouble. Rose never was.
We had been driving since that morning, starting in Lawsonville, where it was hot. It was not hot in Mount Claire. It was chilly, and I had already started worrying that this damp air was not going to do a thing for her but make her sicker. We were on our way to Texas because Rose was born in Texas, in a little town on the Gulf of Mexico, to a mother who claimed to have a little Cajun in her and a daddy who ran a printing press, which was why Rose swore she had ink in her blood. Cajun or ink, either one could account for a lot. When I met her, she was seventy-nine years old but looked older, bent over like the letter C, which made it so she peered up at you when she talked, like a turtle out of its shell, craning its neck to see the sky. Her skin was wrinkled and pale, and her voice had gone rusty from too many cigarettes. Rose claimed she had aged early, but her hair was still the color of mountain clay; she was named for it, red on the day she was born, the only one in the family, Red Rose.
The Little Swiss Inn had no restaurant, and I had gone looking for supper. “You want to come?” I had asked Rose.
“No, Ruthie,” she said. “I think I'll just lie down for a minute.”
“I'll bring you back something.”
“I'm not all that hungry right now, thank you.”
“What do you want?”
“Whatever you get, hon. You decide.”
I let it go at that, because I knew she was telling the truth. Rose did not care about food. She said she never did, and I believed her, because food and clothes and houses and all those things that keep a body together were things Rose never thought about, which can be an admirable quality in a person, but sometimes I wondered if it didn't make her do dotty things, like when she left half-eaten sandwiches on other people's desks, or buttoned her shirts up crooked. Her house reminded me of Durwood's, the hardware store next door to where I grew up, which was a mess, partly because that's what happens when something gets old, when it moves through time holding on to things, not because some things are worth holding on to, but because it takes too long to sort through them. Durwood had boxes of Christmas ornaments older than me on the shelves, but he saw no reason to buy more until those were gone. Year by year they had dwindled until there came a time when nobody wanted to hang anything that old on their Christmas tree. So there they sat, next to the hammers, which were mixed in with screwdrivers, which were mixed in with drill bits, which were mixed in with extension cords. If you were wanting nails, you had to scoop them out of a wooden keg and weigh them on a rusting scale, and there were cats everywhere. I worked over there at Durwood's, selling his wife's homemade fried pies, something you might not expect to find in a hardware store. People would come in wanting plumbing fixtures and a pie; I never got over that.
What you expected to find in a place like Durwood's was a potbellied stove in the middle of the floor, where men and near-men gathered to commiserate over the state of the world or the state of their lives, sometimes without words, just a look between fellows who know you and know what you mean. I used to imagine my daddy in a place like that. I used to imagine he would wink at me from across the store as if right there in Durwood's was where we belonged. I had no way of knowing if he was that kind of man, but that's how I pictured him.
Now, I never saw evidence of any such a stove in Durwood's, which tells you to look out; I'm likely to blow things up bigger than they are; but this much is true: Durwood's was a place where people went for more than what they could buy. You can go down to Kmart for a box of nails if that's all you want.
As for Rose's house, if I had suggested we straighten it up, she would have looked at me as if I'd gone crazy. Most everything she owned was given to her anyway, which was one thing about Rose; if somebody gave her something, she did not throw it away, so there were odd things, like dead house plants, and seashells sitting in little piles of sand, and the two Chinese dolls on top of the refrigerator, one jade green, the other robin's-egg blue, whose heads bobbed up and down when you opened the door. Sometimes I wanted to shake her. I did not care what she wore or how she kept her house, but I hated that other people did. They had made her into a town character, the eccentric old lady, “old” being the key word, as if there is a point you can cross and lose your place in the world. Everybody loved Rose, but no one paid any attention to her anymore. People talked to her the way you talk to a child. They acted as if she were already dead.
The Little Swiss Inn was surrounded by woods with no sign of a restaurant anywhere. The office was in a trailer next to the highway, the front stoop covered with bright green indoor/outdoor carpet. I had to pry open the metal screen door and, instead of a bell, a tinny music box played the first two lines of “On Top of Old Smoky.” I found the manager in the office flipping through a model-rocket catalogue. He was a large man who wore glasses too tiny for his head, and he did not look up when I walked in.
“So,” I said. “Where in the world is Big Swiss?”
He frowned, stuck a finger in the page to save his place, then looked up. He did not laugh.
“Any chance of getting something to eat around here?” I asked.
“Sam's Deli. About a quarter mile down the road. They got pizza, too.” He said I could walk. “No problem.”
A sidewalk followed the road through the woods, crossed a large creek, then led to the town of Mount Claire. I passed a couple of gas stations, a 7-Eleven, a bank, and a post office before reaching the main part of town, where crowds of people were dressed in shorts and golf shirts, their children wearing T-shirts that said Hilton Head and Grand Caymen Island and Ski Aspen. They were buying corncob pipes and bird feeders and wooden bear statuettes with Mount Claire burned into their sides. I passed by stores that sold shuck dolls made by mountain people, which was probably true, if you were talking about the mountains of China. There was a snack shop making out like there's something so special about ice cream you had to pay three dollars a scoop to find out what it was. I didn't linger. I found Sam's Deli and bought two turkey subs and chips then stopped by the 7-Eleven. I got us some Cokes and a couple of candy bars: Butterfinger for Rose, a Bit-O-Honey for myself.
I had not wanted to stop in Mount Claire. My idea was to keep going, drive on past sundown into the night, eating up the miles in darkness. I liked that vision of myself, tough night driver, cigarettes and coffee keeping me awake, a sad song on the radio. My car did not have a radio, but that's beside the point. What I wanted was to feel like an outlaw, which was not so farfetched since me and Rose had snuck away from Lawsonville without telling anybody. I wanted it to be me and Rose and the truck drivers and their headlights and the night sky and the sound of my wheels going faster than the speed limit, but Rose insisted she had to rest, so we stopped. If we hadn't, Mount Claire, North Carolina, would have stayed forever a tourist town I passed through once, a dot on a map that meant nothing to me.
When I got back to the room, Rose was lying on her back as if she were sleeping, but dead people don't really look like they are sleeping. There's something wrong.
“Rose?”
The only light in the room came from what spilled through the blinds, throwing stripes across the floor. They fell across the roll-away and Rose. I sat down next to her and held her hand. It was still warm, enough to make you think for a minute anyway, that what was happening wasn't really happening.
“Oh, Ros
e.”
I sat there for a long time.
I don't know how long, but the first thing I remember noticing was the sack from Sam's Deli. I was holding it without knowing I was holding it, when all of a sudden I looked and remembered it was there. Then I understood; Rose was dead. More than the way her arm was stiff when I shook it, more than the pulse I could not find; this simple fact: Rose was never going to eat that sandwich.
I did not know a lot of dead people, unless you want to count my daddy, but I did not remember him. I knew Marianne Johnson, a girl from school who was killed in a head-on collision with a lumber truck when she was sixteen. She had a locker near mine and once had asked to borrow my hairbrush, and I had said no. Marianne had hair that fell down her back like black satin ribbons. The strange thing was, after she died I found myself thinking about her all the time. It came to me at odd moments, like a dream that lingers in the back of your mind long past the time it should have faded away. I see the man who drove the truck. He is standing at his kitchen counter, eating a honey bun. He burns his mouth on coffee, which he drinks from a plastic travel cup as he walks out the door. It is dark still. When he pulls onto the highway I see a single stream of light, heading east. Then I see Marianne. She gets out of bed, drops her nightgown on the floor, gets dressed, and combs her satin hair. She eats nothing before getting into her small, white car, the envy of those of us who did not get cars for our sixteenth birthday. I see a single stream of light heading west, and I wonder. Was there a line between them, drawn before they were born, a line they raced along until that morning, or was it, simply, that one of them looked down to change the radio?
The part that gets to me is the nightgown. Because there is something about dropping your nightgown on the floor that says, I'm coming back.
I'm coming back.
But she didn't. Marianne Johnson was never going to pick up her nightgown, and Rose. She was never going to eat that sandwich.
It was not fair that Rose had died, and not just to her but to me, too. I am not going to pretend otherwise, because it is the truth. No matter what happens to somebody else, you are still thinking about what's happening to you, and what had happened to me was that the first purely noble thing I had ever done in my life had just come to an end.
LILY MAY LEDFORD
(March 17, 1917–July 14, 1985)
Lily May Ledford, author, musician, and storyteller, was a founding member of the Coon Creek Girls, the country's first all-woman string band. The seventh of fourteen children born to an eastern Kentucky farm family, Ledford's childhood was filled with traditional mountain activities—ginseng digging, berry picking, fodder pulling, and making music.
Ledford learned to play a groundhog hide banjo when she was seven. A couple of years later, she traded everything she owned (an old flashlight, a sweater, a sling-shot, and a box of crayons) for a broken fiddle. She whittled new parts for it, then fashioned a bow out of a willow stick and hair from the tail of the family's plow horse.
In 1935, Ledford auditioned for and won a regular job with a Chicago radio show, the WLS National Barn Dance, where she played fiddle, banjo, and guitar. In 1937, the Coon Creek Girls, composed of Lily May, her sister Rosie, and two other female musicians, was formed. Eleanor Roosevelt invited the group to the White House in 1939 to play for the King and Queen of England. The group performed together until 1957.
In 1968, Lily May was “rediscovered” at the Newport National Folk Festival, and from then on was in demand as a solo performer at folk festivals throughout the United States and Canada. Shortly before her death, she was awarded a National Heritage Fellowship, the nation's highest honor for traditional artists.
Ledford's brief autobiography, Coon Creek Girl, describes her childhood in Kentucky's Red River Gorge as well as her life as a musician during the early days of radio.
OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE
PRIMARY
Autobiography: Coon Creek Girl ( 1980).
SECONDARY
Ellesa Clay High, Past Titan Rock: Journeys into an Appalachian Valley (1984), 67–106, 169–83. Ellesa Clay High, “A Tribute to Lily May Ledford,” Appalachian Heritage 14:2 (spring 1986), 5–6.
COON CREEK GIRL (1980)
from Chapter II
Off on my first train trip to my first job in radio at nineteen, I had with me my home-made fiddle case, shaped like a coffin, and my pasteboard suitcase packed with odds and ends of home-made clothing, hand-me-downs and borrowed clothes (everybody had tried to help me out). I had about $9 in my pocket.
Mr. Lair [talent manager at WLS] greeted me warmly, and as we started on our drive straight to WLS, he began to tell me of his plans for a barn dance of his own, to originate in Cincinnati, Ohio, and about his plans for an all-girl band of which I could be the leader. He told me of a couple of girls he had auditioned and was saving till the right time came to bring together this act. He thought it would all happen within a year and again warned me against signing any kind of contract with WLS. We reached the station on Washington Boulevard about a mile or two from the Loop and its rattle and clatter of elevated trains, buses, street cars and thousands of people of every race, creed and color, all talking and gesturing in all kinds of languages.
Oh how frightening, yet how exciting it all was. “Lord have Mercy,” I said, “Mr. Lair, I'll never learn how to get to and from work.” He then told me that he and Mrs. Lair had already planned to keep me in their home for a while. How grateful I was when I heard this. I felt among friends. Mr. Lair had briefed most everybody about me, and as we walked into the station a tall gentleman was introduced to me, a Kentuckian, Red Foley! I grew to depend upon this gentle-natured person, as a defender against the teasing I later was to receive from the others. I finally got to know the others and liked them very much too, for if they hadn't liked me they wouldn't have bothered to tease me about the way I talked and my old-fashioned music.
Most everyone was at the station each day and all day when not on the road with a show. The heads of WLS, said to be the greatest hillbilly station on the map, encouraged this. Many rehearsal rooms were provided, along with a billiard room, and a rec room for off-hours. All this resulted in a family atmosphere all over the 4 or 5 floors. The station was owned and sponsored by Prairie Farmer, a weekly magazine that was published on one of the lower stories.
After I had met everybody on our floor, including the many office workers with their smiling welcome, I was led on a tour of all the other floors, and oh Lord! so much of everything and so many nice people to take in, in an hour's time. Gradually my fears and apprehensions melted away and I began to feel proud and sure of myself. More than once Mr. Lair remarked that I had shown poise that no one would have thought a mountain girl could have possessed.
…
One night on the barn dance, a little boy was brought out on stage with an old fiddle. He was wearing shabby clothes and I watched, almost in tears (he looked so much like my brother Coyen) to see what they would do with him. They interviewed him briefly and put him on to play, calling for backup guitars. That little boy rared back and just made that fiddle talk with a couple of fast breakdowns. By then I was crying a little. The MC called me up, introduced me to the boy, and asked me what did I think of this little fiddler, hitch-hiking from way down in Southern Indiana. I was putting my arm around the boy's shoulder and starting to tell him how proud I was of him when I burst into uncontrollable crying, tears streaming and splashing on the stage. I had to turn and hurry off stage, embarrassed to death, and get to the dressing room and cry it out. When I went back on stage, now composed, Red, Lulu Belle and a few others were crying. I was neither scolded nor teased about this. Everyone at home who had been listening in wrote letters to cheer me up, realizing that I was homesick. Poor old Mama dressed a chicken and sent it, thinking that it being winter it would reach me without spoiling (it did spoil). She also sent a few jars of blackberry jam, molasses and pickles. Bless her heart. She had been touched deeply by my crying spell on t
he air and I'll never forget her for it, for she was a person that believed in no pampering. All my life she had scolded and lectured me saying, “Toughen up! If the rest can make it you can! You let people lead you around by the nose too much!”
By Christmas of 1936, I had gained a good solid popularity with my listeners, and also the friendship of my co-workers. Patsy Montana was one of my best friends, always wearing her leather western costume and big white hat, taking me home with her. Dolly and Millie did the same, and Lulu Belle to her nice apartment, for a good home cooked meal. I also remember the hospitality of Red and Eva.
I shopped and shopped for Christmas, for the family and for the “Skiddies,” as I loved them and owed them so much for their great help in the past. I ran my legs off riding street cars and “L's” to the post office, mailing huge packages. Then the fans started mailing stuff, home made cookies, candies, roses, clothes, cosmetics, and finally one that tore the mail room all to pieces. A live crated possum had arrived for me, a baby one. Rev. Sharpe was greatly alarmed but consented to let me keep it. It wouldn't allow itself to be petted, nor would it eat anything I brought to it. It just huddled up and grinned. How I longed for persimmons, favorite food of possums. He finally got out of the crate and crawled into the coal bin and got all black and filthy. Mr. Lair appeared, to take it and donate it to the zoo, so his whole family and I went to the zoo, enjoyed it and donated the possum. I was given a check for $5 for the “donation of one o'possum.” I kept this check for a long time before cashing it. I wish I'd kept it. To this day I believe that the sender of the possum was only trying to relieve my homesickness.
GRACE LUMPKIN
(March 3, 1891–March 23, 1980)
Grace Lumpkin usually gave 1900 or 1901 as the year of her birth, though her younger sister, born in 1897, says that Lumpkin was 88 when she died in 1980. Born in Milledgeville, Georgia, to Annette Caroline Morris Lumpkin and William Wallace Lumpkin, a Civil War veteran, she was the ninth of eleven children. Around the turn of the century, the family lived in Columbia, South Carolina. Moving to a farm in Richland County, South Carolina, around 1910, gave Lumpkin firsthand experiences with sharecroppers.
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