I have brought you at last what you sternly required that I
bring you,
And have brought it alone.
I, who from the womb must be drawn, though the first born,
a daughter,
And could never stand straight with the rifle, nor lean with
the plow;
Here is ease for the curse, here is cause for the breaking of
silence.
You can answer me now.
It has taken me long to return, and you died without
knowing,
But down where the veins of the rock and the aspen tree
run—
Land of my fathers and blood, oh my fathers, whatever
Is left of your hearts in the dust,
I have brought you a son.
ARROW GRASSES BY GREENBRIER RIVER
from Paradox Hill (1972)
Arrow grasses by the river,
Phalanx, spear by spear arrayed,
Teach us that we may remember
Others here have walked afraid.
Teach us—all our generation—
We are not the first to know
Death and war and red transgression
Where these quiet waters flow.
Long ago our father's father
Here in springtime dropped his corn,
Died and fell, an arrow winging
In his heart that April morn—
Dead as you and I will ever
Lie beneath the atom's burst—
Arrow grasses by the river,
Teach us we are not the first,
Nor the last to live in danger,
Live in wonder and in woe,
Here on earth beside the river,
Where the quiet waters flow.
THE MILKWEED LADIES (1988)
from A Patch Of Earth
Until I was sixteen years old, until the roads came, the farm was about all I knew: our green meadows and hilly pastures, our storied old men, the great rolling seasons of moon and sunlight, our limestone cliffs and trickling springs. It was about all I knew, and, except for my father and before him, the old Rebel Captain, all that any of us had even known: just the farm and our little village down at the crossroads, and the worn cowpaths winding the slopes; or we kids driving the cows home in the summer evenings; or the winter whiteness and stillness, Aunt Malindy's “old woman in the sky” picking her geese, the “old blue misties” sweeping out of the north.
Some of our tales were old and old, going back into time itself, American time. Living so long there in the same field under the same gap in the mountain, we had seen, from our own ragged little edge of history, the tall shadows passing by. “Old Hickory” in his coach passed along our dug road one morning; General Lee one evening on his way to the Gauley rebel camps. Then, in 1863, as we watched from our cliff walls and scrub oak bushes, the great Yankee army passed on its way to the Battle of Droop: all day long the clank and spur and roll of their passage, 2,000, 3,000, 4,000, hard, blue Yankees, their bayonet tips made bloody in the sunset.
Grandpa Tom, our “old one,” had gone with George Rogers Clark to Kaskaskia and had run the Falls of the Ohio under an eclipse of the sun. Uncle Bill went to Point Pleasant against old Cornstalk and his Ohio Shawnee; then Little Uncle John to the War of 1812; Captain Jim to the Virginia Rebels, his brother Al to the Yankees. My father, in 1906, sailed with Teddy Roosevelt's Great White Fleet; then Cousin Paul and Cousin Coe “to make the world safe for Democracy.”
But before I grew up and went out into the world—and a bloody thing I found it—we were all at home there in our faded cottage in the meadow, all of us safe and warm. Sometimes now, a quiet sense comes to me, the cool mist blowing in my face as though I am walking through islands of fog and drifting downhill slowly southward until I feel the mountains behind my shoulder. Walking on, I can see the light in the “big room” window as I come to our cottage standing in the meadow under “Bridger's” Mountain, as it always stands on the fore-edges of my memory, and the old farm where I ran the April fields and pastures to my great rock up in the woodland where the lavender hepaticas grew. Then I knew just the earth itself: the quiet measure of the seasons; the stars in the sky; the wheat field in August, golden: darkness and day; rain and sunlight; the primal certainty of spring. Then we were all there together, the years not yet come on us, these seventy-five years of war and money and roaring turnpikes and torrents of blood.
I know, deep down, that our one old farm is only a ragged symbol, a signet mark for all the others, the old and far older hard scrabble mountain farms of Kentucky, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia, all the briery fields scattered across the mountains south. And how the earth holds us is still a dark question. It is not the sucking deepness that draws us, for the earth is mother, protector, the home; but the oppressor too. It requires, sometimes, the very lifeblood of its own, and imprisons the flyaway dreams and bends the backs of men and women. Yet to love a familiar patch of earth is to know something beyond death, “westward from death,” as my father used to speak it.
We could sense, just beyond our broken-down line fences, the great reach of the American continent flowing outward. Because we stood so long in one place, our rocky old farm and the abundant earth of the continent were linked together in the long tides of the past. Because the land kept us, never budging from its rock-hold, we held to our pioneer ways the longest, the strongest; and we saw the passing of time from a place called solid, from our own slow, archean, and peculiar stance.
JANE MERCHANT
(November 1, 1919–January 2, 1972)
Jane Hess Merchant, one of four children of Donia Swann Merchant and Clarence Leroy Merchant, was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, where she lived all her life. Debilitated by a bone disease, Merchant spent her adult life in bed, writing poetry that ranged from humorous reflections to religious meditations. When she became deaf in the final years of her life, she relied on the written word as her primary means of communication.
More than fifteen hundred of her poems have been published in newspapers and magazines in the United States, Canada, and England.
Her talent has been acknowledged by awards from the National League of American Pen Women for The Greatest of These and Blessed Are You. She received the 1961 Lyric Foundation Citation and Award for Outstanding Achievements in Poetry, and the 1965 Beaudoin Gemstone Award for Poetry.
OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE
PRIMARY
Poetry: Because It's Here (1970), Every Good Gift (1968), All Daffodils Are Daffy (1967), Petals of Light (1965), The Mercies of God (1963), Blessed Are You (1961), In Green Pastures (1959), Halfway up the Sky (1957), Think about These Things (1956), The Greatest of These (1954).
SECONDARY
Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, Vol. 4, 416. Lillian Keller, “Through a Poets Window,” Progressive Farmer (April 1952). Publishers Weekly (January 24, 1972). Grace Watkins, “The Poetry Merchant,” Christian Herald (November 1954).
LANTERNS AND LAMPS
from The Greatest of These (1954)
My parents carried light with them, for they
Lived in the days when people made their own
Or did without. The lantern's frosty ray,
When Dad came late from milking, always shone
As if a star were coming home to us,
And if I called at midnight, goblin-harried,
The shadows fled and night grew luminous
Before the little lamp that Mother carried.
Folk have small need of lamps and lanterns now;
Even on farms the darkness will withdraw
By swift electric magic, but somehow
I always shall be grateful that I saw
My parents’ coming make the darkness bright
And knew them as the carriers of light.
FIRST PLOWING IN THE HILLS
from The Greatest of These (1954)
When it's too soon for spring, and even too soo
n
To think of it, you'd think—some afternoon
You're sure to raise your eyes and see them there
Cresting the topmost ridge that tries to pare
Whole sections from the sky; a man and team
Of horses plowing. Cloud and clod would seem
To feel the plowshare equally. You wonder
If the sun itself isn't apt to be plowed under
In that steep enterprise. It makes you proud
Of men who'll start out halfway up a cloud
To sketch designs for summer on a land
That isn't sure of spring. You understand,
Of course, it's hard work plowing on a hill,
And bottom lands grow better crops, but still
There's something useful to the heart and eye
In men who plow the earth, against the sky.
EMMA BELL MIES
(October 19, 1879–March 19, 1919)
Writer and painter Emma Bell Miles was born to Martha Ann Mirick Bell and Benjamin Franklin Bell. Her mother was visiting relatives in Evanston, Illinois, away from their home along the Ohio River in Rabbit Hash, Kentucky, when she gave birth to twins. Miles's brother lived only one day. Both parents were teachers and strict Presbyterians. Because of her frail health, Miles was educated mostly at home, where she learned at a young age to read and enjoy nature studies with her mother.
In hopes that a climate change would improve her health, the family moved south in 1891 to Walden's Ridge, Tennessee, near Chattanooga. By 1899, Miles was strong enough to begin attending the St. Louis School of Art, and her father planned to send her to New York to study art. But Miles had plans of her own, and she married mountaineer Frank Miles in 1901. Their twin daughters were born in 1902, and three other children followed by 1909.
Her marriage to Frank was a rocky one with frequent moves and a pattern of separations and reunions. They lived in a tent when they could not afford better housing, and she sold sketches to the summer people to support the family. With her husband often out of work, Miles frequently was responsible for keeping the struggling family finances afloat.
By 1903, Miles had met writers Alice MacGowan and Grace MacGowan Cooke, successful collaborators and sisters who were published authors of novels, stories, and poems. They helped Miles to get her first publications, two poems and a nonfiction article, in Harper's Monthly in 1904. The article became a chapter of her first book, The Spirit of the Mountains, a landmark study that inspired Horace Kephart's Our Southern Highlanders and others with her keen observations and frank admiration of mountain people.
OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE
PRIMARY
Nonfiction: Our Southern Birds (1919), The Spirit of the Mountains (1905). Poetry: Strains from a Dulcimore (1930).
SECONDARY
Kay Baker Gaston, Emma Bell Miles (1985).
THE SPIRIT OF THE MOUNTAINS (1905)
Cabin Homes
“Poor people has a poor way.”
Solitude is deep water, and small boats do not ride well in it. Only a superficial observer could fail to understand that the mountain people really love their wilderness—love it for its beauty, for its freedom. Their intimacy with it dates from a babyhood when the thrill of clean wet sand was good to little feet; when “frog-houses” were built, and little tracks were printed in rows all over the shore of the creek; when the beginnings of aesthetic feeling found expression in necklaces of scarlet haws and headresses pinned and braided together of oak leaves, cardinal flowers and fern; when beargrass in spring, “sarvices” and berries in summer and muscadines in autumn were first sought after and prized most for the “wild flavor,” the peculiar tang of the woods which they contain.
I once rode up the Side with a grandmother from Sawyers’ Springs, who cried out, as the overhanging curve of the bluff, crowned with pines, came into view: “Now, ain't that finer than any picter you ever seed in your life?—and they call us pore mountaineers! We git more out o’ life than anybody.”
Grandmothers and Sons
“There's more marries than keeps cold meat.”
The best society in the mountains—that is to say, the most interesting—is that of the young married men and that of the older women. The young people are so shy that they can hardly be said to form a part of society at all. They are hedged with conventions and meet almost as formally as young Japanese. For example, on entering church the men are expected to turn to the left and seat themselves, and the women to the right. It is permitted a young fellow who is avowedly out courting to sit beside his “gal,” but I cannot imagine what would happen if a young woman were to place herself on the men's side of the house.
After marriage something of the young man's shyness wears off; he gradually loses his awe of the opposite sex, and even within the conventions he finds room for intelligent conversation. Then he begins to be interesting, for his twenty-odd years of outdoor experience have really taught him much. As for the woman, it is not until she has seen her own boys grown to be men that she loses entirely the bashfulness of her girlhood, and the innate beauty and dignity of her nature shines forth in helpfulness and counsel.
I have learned to enjoy the company of these old prophetesses almost more than any other. The range of their experience is wonderful; they are, moreover, repositories of tribal lore—tradition and song, medical and religious learning. They are the nurses, the teachers of practical arts, the priestesses, and their wisdom commands the respect of all. An old woman has usually more authority over the bad boys of a household than all the strength of man. A similar reverence may have been accorded to the mothers of ancient Israel, as it is given by all peoples to those of superior holiness—to priests, teachers, nuns; it is not the result of affection, still less of fear.
HEATHER ROSS MILLER
(September 15, 1939–)
Poet and novelist Heather Ross Miller was born in Albemarle, North Carolina. Both her father, Fred Ross, and her uncle, James Ross, were novelists, and Miller's aunt Eleanor, herself a poet, married acclaimed fiction writer Peter Taylor. “I took it as natural,” says Miller, “this business of finding stories and poems in everyday affairs.”
Miller earned her B.A. in English in 1961 and her M.F.A. in 1969, both from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She also did postgraduate work in modern drama and cinema at the University of London, and taught at several North Carolina colleges, as well as at the University of Arkansas. In 1984, she was awarded an honorary Ph.D. from Methodist College in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
Her first novel, The Edge of the Woods, published in 1964, won the National Association of Independent Schools Best Book Award for that year. Critics lauded the novel for its lyrical style. One reviewer wrote, “Hers is a truly individual style which, though drawing in a rather original manner on Biblical imagery, in no way suggests any recognizable imitation of her literary elders.”
Miller has gone on to publish more than a dozen books and has contributed to periodicals ranging from the New York Times to Vogue. Miller says, “I want the stories, the poems, to be natural. I am a Southern woman, and I write about the places that flavor me.” Since 1992, she has been the Thomas Broadus Professor of English at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia.
In the following scene from The Edge of the Woods, Miller's first novel, we meet Anna Marie Wade, an observant child being raised by her grandparents.
OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE
PRIMARY
Novels: Champeen (1999), Gone a Hundred Miles (1968), Tenants of the House (1966), The Edge of the Woods (1964). Stories: In the Funny Papers: Stories (1995), A Spiritual Divorce and Other Stories (1974), Delphi: A Collection of Stories (1969). Poetry: Days of Love and Murder: Poems (1999), Friends and Assassins (1993), Hard Evidence: Poems (1990), Adam's First Wife (1983), Therapia (1982), Horse Horse, Tyger Tyger (1973), The Wind Southerly (1967). Memoir: Crusoe's Island: The Story of a Writer and A Place (2000). Autobiographical essay: “A Natural History,”
in Bloodroot (1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 193–99.
SECONDARY
Contemporary Authors, New Revision Series, Vol. 5, 372–73. Joyce Dyer, “Heather Ross Miller,” in Bloodroot, 192. Lottie H. Swink, “Heather Ross Miller,” Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary (1979), 307–8.
THE EDGE OF THE WOODS (1964)
from Chapter 1
Here is my name across the top line of my copy book: Anna Marie Wade, born September twenty-third, in the time of the autumnal equinox, when day and night are everywhere on earth of equal length. And winter approaches. In the night, the wind changes and brings frost with morning, turning the songbirds southward. The blood-red bead in the thermometer slowly descends. And Paw Paw will have to poke up the fire, showering the hearth with crimson sparkles.
“Listen! It's a snow fire,” he says, holding the poker stiffly upright, like a toy soldier at attention.
My brother and I look up from our lessons and strain our ears to hear the soft crunch, crunch, shoo-ish of the flame that Paw Paw says sounds like a man walking on a crust of snow.
Grandmother is brushing out her hair for bed. Long pearl-grey strands rippling down her shimmy like a dim waterfall, a mist, her brush racing through it, making little electric crackles in the soft, drowsy room.
“Whoo-ee,” she says, stopping a moment, the hair floating over her face like a dingy cloud. “I'm all give out in my back. One of you younguns come over here and finish my hair for me. Anna'Ree?”
I close my copy book and put my yellow pencil in the washed-out iodine bottle which holds all our pencils and pieces of pencil, pins, rubber bands, and such. Grandmother's hair feels dry and soft in my hand, strangely impersonal and unalive, like the thick hair of our shaggy shepherd, a cloak that could be thrown off at any moment and reveal the naked flesh beneath. I let it slide through my fingers, grey, white, a few rivulets of dull gold, a mantle of salt-and-pepper, Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your golden hair, Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your golden stair.
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