The first meeting for volunteers was held in one of the main buildings at Eastern State Hospital in Knoxville, now called Lakeshore Mental Health Institute. The men and women who showed up that day practiced role playing (I'm still not sure why) and discussed problems the exiles might face outside the environment they were so accustomed to. But nothing prepared us for the tour through the upper floors of the state mental hospital. In that brief walk-through, I experienced an immediate realization of the pain and frustration that mental illness can create not only for patients, but for their families as well. We walked through areas where glassy-eyed men and women constantly shuffled up and down the halls, mumbling to themselves; we entered huge wards where elderly or unmanageable patients were tied to chairs with sheets, and we passed dismal rooms with gray, padded walls and floors, rooms of the last resort. Then, suddenly, I was jolted by a male patient who leaned into my back and pushed his face into my hair. “Don't be afraid,” said one of the psychologists leading the tour, “he loves the smell of shampoo.” No wonder. The building was permeated by the odors of urine, disinfectants, cooking grease, and—you somehow realize this instinctively—the unmistakable odor of fear. Part of that fear was my own. It was impossible to walk into such a place and not be afraid, not be sickened, not be traumatized by a strange man pushing his face into your hair.
I had a lot to learn.
When we left the building, the psychologists warned us about patients walking in the streets of the hospital complex. “Don't worry,” said these jaded caregivers, “they'll move when they see you coming. They're crazy, but they're not stupid.” I gradually came to learn that this seemingly careless attitude was a protective shield the doctors used to keep themselves from becoming overcome with despair at the emotional magnitude of their jobs.
My initial meeting with Mildred and three other women who were to begin their outside lives together was more frustrating than traumatizing. It took place in one of the bungalows on the hospital grounds. Those who lived in the bungalows were the luckier patients. To a certain extent, they had learned to take care of themselves—bodily, anyway, although their medication was overseen by an orderly. They had a certain amount of freedom; some of them could even ride the bus in to town. All had some sort of job in the hospital—waiting tables, cooking, cleaning, or washing dishes. They could watch television and smoke—a precious privilege and vice that Mildred had picked up in the hospital. She continued to chain smoke up until the very day of her death, and I was convinced that she would die by setting herself or her rooms on fire. Partly because of her poor vision and partly because of her preoccupation with something I could never see, Mildred always forgot the ash at the end of the cigarette, which grew longer and longer, until finally it surrendered to gravitational pull, dropped and burned yet another hole in her skirt, her sofa, her bed, or the battered secondhand coffee table in her living room. Once, she saw a television program about lung cancer, and at eighty-one or eighty-two, she asked me did I reckon she would die from smoking. I told her no, that if she was going to get lung cancer, she'd surely have contracted it by now, and though I feared her death by fire, I figured that she had had few enough pleasures in this world anyway without taking away her cigarettes. Let her keep smoking.
The meeting with the four women that day was tense, because as they say in the movies, what we had there was a failure to communicate. All of them were frightened about being displaced from the safe and familiar surroundings of the hospital and their now accustomed routines. The women were mostly quiet, and, as was her custom, Mildred exhibited her paranoia by sitting off by herself in a corner of the room, with her back to the wall. She never made eye contact with anyone, not for years, and the first time she looked me directly in the face, I went home rejoicing.
KAREN SALYER MCElmurray
(September 12, 1956–)
Karen Salyer McElmurray was born in eastern Kentucky, “where my writing began,” she says. “When I was nine years old, I'd visit my grandmother in Johnson County during the summers and I became friends with Vicky Cantrell [now Hayes], the girl across the road. She played twelve-string guitar and wrote songs and poems. I wanted to do these things too, so I began to write poetry. Later, after I grew up in Frankfort, Kentucky, in the central part of the state, Johnson County remained my spiritual and emotional homeplace…. When I close my eyes and think of ‘home,’ I think of my grandmother's house…. When I dream of houses and home, that's the place my subconscious takes me, the place for which I long.”
After earning her B.A. in philosophy and literature at Berea College in 1980, McElmurray earned an M.F.A. in fiction at the University of Virginia in 1986, an M.A. in contemporary fiction writing at Hollins University in 1989, and a Ph.D. in American literature at the University of Georgia in 1997. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the North Carolina Arts Council. She is currently a writing professor at Berry College in Georgia. “I have also worked as a cook, a landscaper, and a waitress,” she said. “All my lives have made my writing life.”
Her first novel, Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven, is set largely in Inez, a real eastern Kentucky mining town, fictionalized as the home of Ruth Blue Wallen, her husband Earl, and their son Andrew, characters who are searching for God, love, and redemption.
She describes her forthcoming memoir, Mother of the Disappeared: An Appalachian Birth Mother's Journey, as “my own story as a mother who relinquished her child to adoption” and as “also my own mother's story.” In 2002, McElmurray was reunited with her son, who was born in 1973; she discovered that his name is Andrew. The excerpt is the opening scenes from her memoir.
OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE
PRIMARY
Novel: Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven (1999). Memoir: Mother of the Disappeared: An Appalachian Birth Mother's Journey (2003). Essay: “Minimalism and Maximalism in the Creative Writing Classroom,” Creating Fiction: Instruction and Insights from the Teachers of Associated Writing Programs, ed. Julie Checkoway (March 1999). In Leaving the Nest: Mothers and Daughters on the Art of Saying Goodbye (2003), ed. Marilyn Kallet.
SECONDARY
Reviews of Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven: Atlanta Journal-Constitution (14 Nov. 1999). Chicago Tribune (30 Jan. 2000), sect. 14: 5. Lambda Book Report (Feb. 2000), 18. Women's Review of Books (July 2000).
MOTHER OF THE DISAPPEARED: AN APPALACHIAN BIRTH MOTHER'S JOURNEY (2003)
from June 21, 1973
I'm sixteen and I'm on my way to the maternity ward of King's Daughter's Hospital in Frankfort, Kentucky, with a boy I'll call Joe. He's my husband, and we're riding the elevator, which we once skipped school to do all afternoon, for that rush of up and back down and up. Now a nurse with crimson nails is guiding my wheelchair and some woman is holding the hand of a little girl with lace-edged socks and a deep cut on her forehead, stitched at a slant.
Nothing but a baby, says the woman, and she means me. She has cat-eye glasses, and her voice is slurred as whiskey.
Or that's me. I'm buoyant already, with contractions and momentum. The labor isn't much, yet. Physically, there's a pushing down between my legs, a shove at my lower back, an ache, none of it worse than menstrual cramps. It's my image I want to keep intact. I'm with it. I'm moving forward, steady as we go. I'm tough, ready to give birth as if it were an everyday affair, casual as buttered toast or sex.
Nothing but a baby her own self, the woman says, looking at me with a rat-toothed smile.
And she's right. I'm a teenaged girl and I'm married to a teenaged boy and we've decided to give our son away at birth. I'm sixteen and I'm waiting for the future to happen, but it already has, in ways I'll discover for the rest of my life.
These are the facts. My son, relinquished to adoption on the day he was born, was named Brian Keith McElmurray by the Kentucky Department of Social Services in June of1973. Other than his name, which they later sent to me in a form letter, I know very little a
bout this boy who long ago became a man. I know that he was born very early in the morning, after a hard two days of labor. I know he weighed six pounds and something when he slid from my womb, the only time I ever heard him cry. I know that I was allowed, by law, to refuse to relinquish my son to my father who, two days after the birth, told me how he'd stood looking through the hospital nursery window and wondered that such a new being could so resemble his own father, a Standard Oil service station man who died when I was nine. I know that this is the only second-hand glimpse I have ever had of my son's face.
I know, or I have been told according to what is admissible by Kentucky Adoption Law, that my son was adopted one year after I relinquished him. Twenty-five years after his birth I will finally receive a letter from the Kentucky Department of Social Services, my first irrefutable proof that my son has a life beyond my own imperfect memory. The letter, dated January 15, 1998, states:
Dear Ms. McElmurray:
In response to your request to place information in the adoption/case record of Brian Keith, this is to let you know that your letter/request has been placed in his adoption record. To date, our agency has had no contact with him or the adoptive family since he was adopted by a Kentucky family in 1974. If he should ever contact our agency in the future seeking information about his birth family, we will advise him of your letter/request.
Under Kentucky's current adoption law, KRS 199.570, we can share the following non-identifying information about the adoptive parents.
The adoptive father was born in 1936 and had his Ph.D. in math. He was a professor at a large university. The adoptive mother was born in 1938 and also had advanced degrees in math. She taught part-time at the college level. Both enjoyed good health and had more than adequate resources to provide for a child or children. Brian Keith had adjusted quite well to the adoptive parents and they to him. The adoptive mother enjoyed being a mother and housewife. Our agency has no current information on the adoptive family.
I hope this information is helpful to you. For your information, Brian's birth date as given in our record is June 21, 1973.
Sincerely,
Virginia Nester
Program Specialist
These are the facts I currently possess, accrued like stray traces of dust. A paper trail that might lead, if I knew how to follow it, to irrefutable truths about what it meant to bear a son and give him away on that long-ago day, June 21st, 1973.
On this day of the birth, I woke in a room shadowed by floodlights Joes father kept on in the dog lot, for his coon hounds. Damian, the Siamese cat, slipped out from the bend of my knees. We both often got out of bed at that time, the cat for a midnight kitchen raid and myself to stand at the window. White and liver-spotted dog coats, night moisture on glass, all of it gleaming and cool. Pain in my lower back woke me this night, a tightness starting in my back and moving down, pulling between my legs. Not for sure yet this was labor, I raised my hand to the window. A thin hand, and in the flood light I saw blue. Pale blue skin, blue bones, right down to the blue, chilled insides of me.
Joe, I said. Wake up. I think it might be time.
Time, he said.
His chubby cheeks were bluish, a two day beard, and his boy eyes were pale blue with bits of sleep in the corners. He rubbed his fists against them hard, and I thought of the times I'd seen those eyes, wide and black, the pupils expanded and electric with acid or speed or whatever else we could drum up from the streets and medicine cabinets of our town. I wished both of us could fall into those pupils, some bottomless and safe place, and never come back again. Instead, I saw blue sparks ignite in the close bedroom air. We were both so small in that light. Blue sparks of fear, his and mine, ignited the scents of socks and sleep. What I didn't imagine yet was the stretching, the slow opening of me.
Oh my god, Joe said.
He was sitting on the edge of the bed, full lips beneath his mustache twitching. He had a habit of drawing his long mustache hairs into his mouth, sucking, especially when he was frightened or angry. I went to him, tucked his head next to my stomach, where he could hear movement. If this child could talk, I wondered, what would be the words? I'm late, I'm late, like the rabbit in Alice and Wonderland. I want to stay here, the baby might say, in this soft place of blood.
Joe and I had a plan of sorts down pat. We'd prearranged with his parents, Rose and Joseph, with whom we lived, to use their station wagon for the hospital run—no fooling around in the middle of the night with hot wiring the Duster, which was now our car. We envisioned a back road shortcut to the hospital, a screeching halt at the emergency room, a wheelchair or two and then, in the most undefined part of our plan, a fast-forward version of that thing called labor, a painless, tidy version that involved no excretions or wounds, nothing so flesh-like as afterbirth. The real exodus was chaos.
My water had not yet broken, but the pain was shifting lower, and had developed an urgent, burning edge. Joe threw on cutoffs and a rose-colored polyester shirt and, still barefoot, opened the door, flipped on the hall switch and flooded the room with light. Somewhere, in the piles of blue jeans, Marvel Comics and the circuit breakers and boards that were his hobby, lay a spare set of keys to the station wagon, ready for an emergency. I stood in the middle of this emergency, cradling my belly, which was lower than it had been and needed hands to hold it up….
LLEWELLYN MCKERNAN
(July 12, 1941–)
Poet and children's author Llewellyn McKernan is a native of Arkansas who has set down roots in West Virginia. She is married to poet John McKernan, and the couple has one daughter. McKernan earned her B.A. in English from Hendrix College in Conway, Arkansas, in 1963, followed by an M.A. in English from the University of Arkansas in 1966. In 1976 she completed an M.A. in creative writing from Brown University. Her thesis was a collection of poetry, The Blue Ball, and Other Poems.
Says McKernan, “I have lived longer in Appalachia than anywhere else on earth. It is home to me. Its hills and valleys map my mind. Its creeks and rivers flow through my lines.”
She is the author of four books for children and three volumes of poetry, including Short and Simple Annals: Poems about Appalachia, and Many Waters: Poems from West Virginia. McKernan is currently an adjunct professor of English at Marshall University.
OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE
PRIMARY
Poetry: Many Waters: Poems from West Virginia (1994), Short and Simple Annals: Poems about Appalachia (1983), The Blue Ball, and Other Poems (1976). Books for Children: This is the Day (1994), This is the Night (1994), Bird Alphabet (1988), More Songs of Gladness (1987). Autobiographical essay: “Letter from a Poet in West Virginia,” in Bloodroot (1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 188–91.
SECONDARY
James Byer, “The Woman's Place Is in the House,” The Poetics of Appalachian Space (1991), ed. Parks Lanier Jr., 178–82. Joyce Dyer, “Llewellyn McKernan,” in Bloodroot (1998), 187. Marianne Worthington, “Nothing Must Be Lost: Regional Identity and Dialogue in the Works of Edwina Pendarvis and Llewellyn McKernan,” Appalachian Heritage 30:2 (spring 2002), 7–19.
MANY WATERS
from Many Waters: Poems from West Virginia (1994)
Nothing in my house
but pale blue foliage
furniture dry as chalk and
dusty, and
tiny paths that lead
to bathroom, bedroom, kitchen,
jammed on both sides
with books opened
by the wind
and mulched by good intentions.
I do not trust
the light that comes through the windows
nor the pantry
where canned goods
are stacked from floor to ceiling nor the one
recipe with “darling
darling” written all over it. I only trust the rain,
how it vanishes
then reappears
the same yet different. Once this spring
after a storm
the basement flooded,
a natural disaster that left in its wake
strange plants
hooded like cobras
and during a cloudburst this summer hail
big as jawbreakers
tumbled down
the chimney (inside them were seeds:
sunflower, alfalfa,
mung bean).
And now that it's fall and I'm a Jill-in-the-Box
whizzing from love letter
to laundry, ironing board
to ironing out the flaws in a real estate contract,
scattering here a toe
there a nipple—
O! Out of a ragtag bobtail sky a hissing and
a murmuring
builds
in the long yellow funnel of a cloud that
swells, pregnant
with strife, and a dark streamlined cry
spreads its wings,
getting louder and louder,
wheeling like a plot,
chockful of the quotidien, getting wild-eyed
and in heat
when it reaches
my level: thundering through trees, crashing
into windows,
spinning rooms
around on their stone foundation. The roof
pops like corks
out of champagne bottles as the rain shouts
down the house with its jiggers
and I rise, drenched to the bone,
luminous, whole,
bringing out from under the lumber
all the family silver.
FOR MY GRANDMOTHER WHO KNOWS HOW
from Many Waters: Poems from West Virginia (1994)
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