As I stood there, squinting my eyes trying to figure out what was in the bundles each spirit woman carried in her arms, and muster up enough courage to stay and see what would happen next, Addy May turned and looked directly at me. I swear she looked directly at me and smiled right into my eyes, never missing a beat to her swaying or a word to her song. When she did that, I ran back home as fast as I could and didn't tell a soul what I had seen than night. Not even my mama. As a matter of fact, I kind of forgot about the incident for a while because my thoughts were on other things. Mostly my new boyfriend, Roger. That is until I heard from Lydia Rattler that Addy May had been arrested for stealing a baby boy.
She had gone into John and Amanda Wolfe's house late one night and taken their baby right from his crib. The baby hadn't cried or made any noise or anything, so the parents didn't know he was missing until his mama woke up the next morning and went to check on him. He was only six months old but he was big for his age. I had seen him in front of the Spirits on the River with his mama the week before Addy May stole him. Amanda had gone in there to apply for a job and asked me and my cousin Lenny, who happened to be walking by at the time, to hold him for her while she went in the restaurant to get an application. It was really curious to me that I had actually held that same baby in my arms just a week before Addy May stole him.
She hadn't tried to hide him or anything, and that's why they found out so quick that she had him. She had just taken him home with her, and when Mavis Rose had passed by Addy May's house on her way to the Tribal Offices as she did every weekday morning, she had seen Addy May sitting there on her front porch in an old rocking chair, holding him. Mavis said later that she thought it was kind of odd, Addy May sitting there on her front porch with a baby and all, but didn't know how odd until she arrived at work and was told that the Wolfe baby was missing. Of course she told all of them at the Tribal Offices what she had seen and they called the Wolfes who had Addy May arrested. The baby wasn't hurt or anything, so the Wolfes didn't press it. The authorities let Addy May go after a good talking to because they didn't know what else to do with her, I guess.
Mama said she probably needed some kind of professional help ’cause she had never got over the death of her two babies who had burned to death that past winter. One was a girl, about a year-and-a-half old, and the other a boy, six-months old. Her old mobile home had caught fire because of bad wiring or something, and she hadn't been able to save them.
I cried after my mama told me that story. I cried like I had never cried for anybody before because I felt close to Addy May somehow. So I went to visit her about a week after that. I just stopped by her house on my way home from school one day to tell her I was her cousin and just to see how she was doing. She didn't talk much, just nodded her head a little, and gave me some water from her well to drink. I can still taste that water now, all fresh and cool and sweet from that dipper gourd she used. I stayed for about an hour I guess, just sitting there on her front porch with her, not talking. And that was OK with me ’cause I felt like I just needed to be there for her. She never mentioned that night I had seen her in the road, swaying and singing, but I knew she knew. And I knew she knew that I cared about her.
I didn't go back to visit her again, but I did see her at different times, walking around, mumbling to herself. She got real crazy after the Wolfe baby incident and people just kind of left her alone and made up more rumors about her to entertain themselves. She wasn't a real threat to anybody, and the Crowe Sisters who lived down the road from her always made sure she had something to eat.
I guess I just grew up and forgot about her for several years. There were my two kids and a husband to worry over, and I hadn't thought about her for a while until Mama told me that Addy May had died. She had gotten the flu or pneumonia or something, and passed to spirit in her sleep one night.
“She's probably better off,” Mama had said. I quietly agreed ’cause deep inside I knew that Addy May was with those two spirits who understood the song she was singing that night there in the middle of the road. The night she was swaying and singing in the moonlight, and I stood in the darkness of the brush, quietly watching and listening.
MARY NOAILLES MURFREE
(January 24, 1850–July 31, 1922)
The daughter of Fanny Priscilla Dickinson Murfree, who inherited plantations in Tennessee and Mississippi, and William Law Murfree, a successful attorney and published writer, Mary Noailles Murfree was born in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, a town named for her great-grandfather.
Although a childhood illness had left her lame from the age of four, she enjoyed spending summers in the Cumberland Mountains, at her family's cottage in Beersheba Springs. There, she and her elder sister, Fanny, observed the place and met the mountain people who became the subjects of her local color fiction.
After the family moved to Nashville in 1857, Murfree attended the Nashville Female Academy. She completed her education in a Philadelphia boarding school.
Murfree began to write in the 1870s, with encouragement from her father. Using the pseudonym Charles Egbert Craddock, she published her first important story, “The Dancin’ Party at Harrison's Cove” in the Atlantic Monthly (May 1878). After her initial success, she signed a number of stories and novels with her male pseudonym. Her first novel, Where the Battle was Fought, focuses on the Civil War, an event that drastically affected her family, as their home was destroyed.
Murfree is best known for her contributions to local color fiction about Tennessee mountaineers. After publishing her first collection of short stories, In the Tennessee Mountains, she received widespread, favorable reviews and soon thereafter achieved national attention when she revealed her identity. Her literary reputation rests on her work from the 1880s. Her later fiction followed popular trends toward historical romances.
Popular as a lecturer, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of the South during the last year of her life.
The following scenes, excerpted from In the Tennessee Mountains, offer examples of some typical features of local color fiction: dense dialect, humor, and descriptions of natural landscapes that use flowery diction and allusions to classical literature.
OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE
PRIMARY
Novels: The Erskine Honeymoon (published posthumously in the Nashville Banner, December 29, 1930–March 3, 1931), The Story of Duciehurst; A Tale of the Mississippi (1914), The Ordeal; A Mountain Romance of Tennessee (1912), The Fair Mississippian (1908), The Windfall (1907), The Amulet (1906), The Storm Centre (1905), The Frontiersmen (1904), The Spectre of Power (1903), The Story of Old Fort Loudon (1899), The Juggler (1897), The “Stranger People's” Country (1891), His Vanished Star (1894), The Despot of Broomsedge Cove (1888), In the Clouds (1886), The Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains (1885), Where the Battle Was Fought (1884). Short stories: The Raid of the Guerilla and Other Stories (1912), The Bushwhackers and Other Stories (1897), The Phantoms of the Foot-Bridge and Other Stories (1895), The Mystery of Witch-Face Mountain and Other Stories (1895), In the Tennessee Mountains (1884). Books for children: The Champion (1902), The Young Mountaineers (1897), The Story of Keedon Bluffs (1887), Down the Ravine (1885).
SECONDARY
Richard Cary, Mary N. Murfree (1967). Allison R. Ensor, “What is the Place of Mary Noailles Murfree Today?” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 47:4 (winter 1988), 198–205. Edd Winfield Parks, Charles Egbert Craddock (1941). Nathalia Wright, “Introduction,” In the Tennessee Mountains (1970), 5–33.
IN THE TENNESSEE MOUNTAINS (1884)
from Drifting Down Lost Creek
“Laws-a-me!” she cried, in shrill, toothless glee; “ef hyar ain't ’Vander Price! What brung ye down hyar along o’ we-uns, ’Vander?” she continued, with simulated anxiety. “Hev that thar red heifer o’ our'n lept over the fence agin, an’ got inter Pete's corn? Waal, sir, ef she ain't the headin'est heifer!”
“I hain't seen none o’ yer heifer, ez I knows on,” replied the young black
smith, with gruff, drawling deprecation. Then he tried to regain his natural manner. “I kem down hyar,” he remarked in an off-hand way, “ter git a drink o’ water.” He glanced furtively at the girl; then looked quickly away at the gallant redbird, still gayly parading among the leaves.
The old woman grinned with delight. “Now, ef that ain't s'prisin',” she declared. “Ef we hed knowed ez Lost Creek war a-goin’ dry over yander a-nigh the shop, so ye an’ Pete would hev ter kem hyar thirstin’ fur water, we-uns would hev brung su'thin’ down hyar ter drink out'n. We-uns hain't got no gourd hyar, hev we, Cynthy?”
“’Thout it air the little gourd with the saft soap in it,” said Cynthia, confused and blushing.
Her mother broke into a high, loud laugh. “Ye ain't wantin’ ter gin ’Vander the soapgourd ter drink out'n Cynthy! Leastwise, I ain't goin’ ter gin it ter Pete. Fur I s'pose ef ye hev ter kem a haffen mile ter git a drink, ’Vander, ez surely Pete'll hev ter kem, too. Waal, waal, who would hev b'lieved ez Lost Creek would go dry nigh the shop, an’ yit be a-scuttlin’ along like that, hyar-abouts!” and she pointed with her bony finger at the swift flow of the water.
He was forced to abandon his clumsy pretense of thirst. “Lost Creek ain't gone dry nowhar, ez I knows on,” he admitted, mechanically rolling the sleeve of his hammer-arm up and down as he talked. “It air toler'ble high,—, higher'n I ever see it afore….
…
It was a great opportunity for old Dr. Patton, who lived six miles down the valley, and zealously he improved it. He often felt that in this healthful country, where he has born, and where bucolic taste and local attachment still kept him, he was rather a medical theorist than a medical practitioner, so few and slight were the demands upon the resources of his science. He was as one who has long pondered the unsuggestive details of the map of a region, and who suddenly sees before him its glowing, vivid landscape.
“A beautiful fracture!” he protested with rapture,—“a beautiful fracture!”
Through all the countryside were circulated his cheerful accounts of patients who had survived fracture of the skull. Among the simple mountaineers his learned talk of the trephine gave rise to the startling report that he intended to put a linchpin into Jubal Tyne's head. It was rumored, too, that the unfortunate man's brains had “in an’ about leaked haffen out;” and many freely prompted Providence by the suggestion that “ef Jube war ready ter die it war high time he war taken,” as, having been known as a hasty and choleric man, it was predicted that he would “make a most survigrus idjit.”
“Cur'ous enough ter me ter find out ez Jube ever hed brains,” commented Mrs. Ware. “’T war well enough ter let some of ’em leak out ter prove it. He hev never showed he hed brains no other way, ez I knows on. Now,” she added, “somebody oughter tap ’Vander's head, an’ mebbe they'll find him pervided, too. Wonders will never cease! Nobody would hev accused Jube o’ sech. Folks'll hev ter respec’ them brains. ’Vander done him that favior in splitting his head open.”
…
…A vague prescience of dawn was on the landscape; dim and spectral, it stood but half revealed in the doubtful light. The stars were gone; ever the sidereal outline of the great Scorpio had crept away. But the gibbous moon still swung above the dark and melancholy forests of Pine Mountain, and its golden chalice spilled a dreamy glamour all adown the lustrous mists in Lost Creek Valley. Ever and anon the crags reverberated with the shrill clamor of a watch-dog at a cabin in the Cove; for there was an unwonted stir upon the mountain's brink.
ELAINE FOWLER PALENCIA
(March 19, 1946–)
Having grown up in Morehead, Kentucky, in the 1950s, where her mother taught at the county high school and her father taught at Morehead State College (now a university), Elaine Fowler Palencia recalls receiving very little emphasis on Appalachia in her formal education. When she was sixteen, her family moved to Cookeville, Tennessee. She graduated from Vanderbilt University, magna cum laude, with a B.A. in 1968, where she studied English literature with Allen Tate.
She lives in Champaign, Illinois, with her husband, a professor of comparative literature at the University of Illinois, and her son, who attends special education classes. Their daughter is a doctoral candidate at the University of Missouri. Palencia has taught creative writing at Illinois Wesleyan University and lectured at a number of universities and writers’ conferences. She currently works as a freelance writer and editor and as a YMCA aerobics instructor.
She wrote her first story in Spanish, while spending a summer in Colombia with her husband, whose home is in the Andes. But since she became serious about writing fiction, she has written in English spoken by Appalachian characters. Her father's stories of his childhood on farms in West Virginia, on Spurlock Creek and Nine Mile Hollow, provide important background for her fiction.
Equally important, she says, are her Aunt Glenith's stories of leaving the hills (and Brierhoppers) for Ohio cities. She explains, “The main theme of my writing is exile and return: the search for home. It arises from my journey away from eastern Kentucky—first to central Tennessee, then Germany, Boston, Detroit, Colombia, and to end up in the flat Midwest. My sense of story comes from the narrative, anecdotal speech of my Appalachian friends and relatives. I owe my entire writing career to having grown up in the region. Every story I write is a letter to the place I came from.”
Palencia has received awards for her fiction and poetry from the Appalachian Writers Association, the Illinois Arts Council, Iowa Woman, Willow Review, Appalachian Heritage, the Kentucky State Poetry Society, and the American Association of University Women. Her poem “Emily Dickinson's Bodyguard Speaks,” published in River King Poetry Supplement, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has written two poetry chapbooks about her son, Taking the Train and The Dailiness of It. Under the pseudonym of Laurel Blake, she is also the author of several mass-market romance novels, earning recognition as a finalist for the Golden Medallion Award of the Romance Writers of America.
The author's Aunt Glenith and Uncle Carl inspired the characters of Dreama and Floyd McDonald in Small Caucasian Woman, a critically acclaimed collection of interrelated short stories set in an eastern Kentucky town (based on Morehead) and tracing the lives of Appalachian people who migrate to northern industrial cities. They reappear, along with other characters and places in Brier Country, her second collection of Appalachian short fiction.
OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE
PRIMARY
Short stories: Brier Country: Stories from Blue Valley (2000), Small Caucasian Woman (1993), Heart on Holiday (1980). Poetry: The Dailiness of It (2002), Taking the Train (1997). Autobiographical essay: “Leaving Pre–Appalachia,” in Bloodroot (1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 201–8.
SECONDARY
Pat Arnow, review of Small Caucasian Woman, Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine 10:3 (fall 1993). Joyce Dyer, “Elaine Fowler Palencia,” in Bloodroot, 200. Art Jester, “Morehead Native Writes and Dreams About Kentucky,” Lexington Herald-Leader (15 August 1993), E4. Marianne Worthington, review of Brier Country, Appalachian Heritage 28:2 (spring 2000), 66–70.
BRIERS
from Brier Country: Stories from Blue Valley (2000)
They came in a shiny new car. Don Fields was waiting for them under the maples, sitting on one of Mr. Forrester's old yard chairs. We supposed they had called Don from the town. We had seen the man before but not the woman, when the man decided to buy the old Forrester place. From the edges of the yard, we watched and waited.
We like Don. Don and his family live by the bridge. Don's granddaddy helped build the bridge. Don's daddy was killed in the Big War.
The new people were wrong for us. We could tell by their smell, a smell of flowers killed in moonshine. We could tell by their soft hands. They were tall and ruddy, matched like a pair of Irish setters.
The man had lightning with him. We could feel it.
Don knew it, too.
“What's that ye got there, a Geiger counter?” he asked.
>
“It's a laptop computer,” said the man.
“Oh, right. My daughter has one of them. She works for the state,” said Don.
“Really,” said the man, and smiled at the woman.
We do not like lightning.
Don showed them around. He showed them where Mr. Forrester fell in the garden. That was why the Forresters had to go live with their daughter far away. After they left, Charley Carruthers was looking after their farm, but he is not able anymore. He could not keep the renters from throwing their garbage off the back porch and using the henhouse for firewood.
We do not like fire.
Mr. Forrester came back to visit once. He died on Charley Carruthers's porch. Then the Forresters’ daughter, Dreama, decided to sell the farm. Long years ago, Dreama liked to come with two buckets and a jug of water and pick all morning. She did not stamp the bushes down but slipped in between the vines. She sang to herself and ate berries until the juice ran down her chin. We miss Dreama still.
We like Charley and his wife. They live above the road. Charley is part Old People. When Charley digs up a ginseng plant to sell, he puts a seed down in the hole to grow a new plant. He shows respect.
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