Listen Here

by Sandra L. Ballard

…

  When Henry had burned his plant bed he plowed and hoed the ashes into the soil and made a frame of logs about the whole, a light frame to hold the canvas that would be stretched over the bed when the seeds were sown. There were more stones to gather after the plowing and these Ellen piled outside the bed. The rocks were dark with mould and moss, for this was a virgin hill. It was a mild March day, cool and clear, with winds worrying the hillside brush and leaping off across the farms in a great rush or beating gently now and then at Ellen's garments. Henry nailed at the frame while she worked with the stones.

  “No plow iron ever cut this-here hill afore, not in the whole time of man,” Henry said.

  “The time of man,” as a saying, fell over and over in Ellen's mind. The strange men that lived here before our men, a strange race doing things in strange ways, and other men before them, and before again. Strange feet walking on a hillside for some purpose she could never think. Wondering and wondering she laid stones on her altar.

  “Pappy, where do rocks come from?”

  “Why, don't you know? Rocks grow.”

  “I never see any grow. I never see one a-growen.”

  “I never see one a-growen neither, but they grow all the same. You pick up all the rocks offen this-here hill and in a year there's as many out again. I lay there'll be a stack to pick up right here again next year.”

  “I can't seem to think it! Rocks a-growen now! They don't seem alive. They seem dead-like. Maybe they've got another kind of way to be alive.”

  “Maybe they have. All I know is they grow.”

  “Rocks have got shells printed on the sides and some have little snails worked on their edges and some have got little worms-like worked on. But once I found a spider with a dragon beast in a picture on its back. Some rocks, now, are shaped like little silos and some are all marked with little snails and waterbugs and some are open fans and some have little scallops on the edges. Rocks grow in ways that are right pretty now. It's a wonder, really.”

  “I wish I could see a rock grow,” she said again. “I can't think how it is. You could watch a rock for a whole year and you'd never see any sign of it growen. The rock doorstep over at Bodine's didn't grow e'er bit all the time we lived there.”

  …

  She was working alone on the hillside. Henry had gone for the seeds and was long in returning. She gathered stones from the plowed soil and piled them in her neat mound, and the wind continued to blow off the hilltop. She found spotted ladybugs hidden under the leaves and the twigs; they shone out like jewels in the brown and black of the earth. Far away toward MacMurtrie's cedar trees doves were crying, and over the plowed field plovers went circling, singing on the wing. To the northeast the hills rolled away so far that sight gave out, and still they went, fading into blue hazes and myths of faint trees; delicate trees stood finer than hair lines on a far mythical hill. She piled stone after stone on the mound, carrying each across crumbled earth that the plow and the hoe had harried. The rocks fell where she laid them with a faint flat sound, and the afternoon seemed very still back of the dove calls and the cries of the plovers, back of a faint dying phrase, “in the time of man.” The wind lapped through the sky, swirling lightly now, and again dashing straight down from the sun. She was leaning over the clods to gather a stone, her shadow making an arched shape on the ground. All at once she lifted her body and flung up her head to the great sky that reached over the hills and shouted:

  “Here I am!”

  She waited listening.

  “I'm Ellen Chesser! I'm here!”

  ANNE NEWPORT ROYALL

  (June 11, 1769–October 1, 1854)

  Some sources identify Anne Newport Royall as the first female American newspaper journalist. A dubious legend has it that she once caught President John Quincy Adams skinny dipping in the Potomac and sat on his clothes until he agreed to an exclusive interview. Though their mutual friendship makes the story's credibility questionable, she had a reputation for being a strong-willed woman.

  The daughter of loyalist William Newport, she was born near Baltimore, Maryland, before the American Revolution, and grew up on the western Pennsylvania frontier, in Westmoreland County. When her father died, her mother Mary, a Virginia native about whom little is known, remarried, had a son, and lost her second husband. The family then relocated to Monroe County, Virginia, now West Virginia, where her mother found work as a servant in the household of the wealthy Captain William Royall, reputed to be a friend of George Washington.

  The teenaged Anne won Royall's attention, though he was at least twenty years her senior. He shared with her his extensive library, his deist ideas, his antislavery sentiments, and in 1797, when she was twenty-eight, they married. When he died in 1813, she decided to move south to the warmer climate of Alabama, where she lived for a decade before Royall's children succeeded in their quest to break his will and left her, at the age of fifty-four, without financial resources.

  Had she not been faced with this hardship, she may never have become a writer. Motivated to support herself, Anne Royall began her career as a journalist. She traveled by foot, by stagecoach, and by steamboat in the 1820s, when travel was neither entirely safe nor very comfortable, and took copious notes on nearly every important American city and settlement, producing ten volumes, which sold fairly well. Her travel narratives combined documentary social history with her lively personal opinions and wry observations, spiced heavily by her rather bitter worldview.

  Around 1830, Royall settled in Washington, D.C., where she began petitioning the United States Government for her widow's pension from her husband's Revolutionary War service (which she did not obtain until 1848). In the meantime, she acquired a printing press and took in printing jobs before beginning her own weekly newspaper, for which she served as investigative reporter, writer, editor, printer, and subscription manager. It featured political gossip and uncovered graft in public offices, in addition to editorializing for religious tolerance and the separation of church and state, as well as a number of other causes.

  In one infamous incident she attacked a local group of Presbyterians, or “Holy Willies” as she called them, and a little-known law was evoked to convict her of being a “common scold.” She was fined ten dollars—in lieu of a dunking—and according to at least one source, President Jackson's secretary of war, John Eaton, paid her fine.

  Earning both fear and begrudged respect, she boldly lobbied for her causes in her enterprising newspaper, first named Paul Pry, and then The Huntress, until she was eighty-five.

  The first of her travel books continues to be her best known.

  OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE

  PRIMARY

  Mrs. Royall's Southern Tour (3 vols., 1830–1831), Letters from Alabama (1830), Mrs. Royall's Pennsylvania (2 vols., 1829), The Black Book: A Continuation of Travels in the United States (3 vols., 1828–1829), The Tennessean: A Novel Founded on Facts (1827), Sketches of History, Life and Manners in the United States by a Traveller (1826).

  SECONDARY

  Sarah Harvey Porter, The Life and Times of Anne Royall (1909). George S. Jackson, Uncommon Scold: The Story of Anne Royall (1937). Russel B. Nye, “Royall, Anne Newport” in Notable American Women 1607–1950, Vol. 3, 204–5. Don Dodd and Ben Williams, “‘A Common Scold’: Anne Royall,” American History Illustrated, 10:9 (January 1976), 32–38. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 43, 402–8.

  SKETCHES OF HISTORY, LIFE, AND MANNERS, IN THE UNITED STATES (1826)

  from Kenhawa County

  As this famous county is to be a link in the chain which is to connect that part of Virginia east of the mountains with the whole of the western country, I have been at some pains to pick up every thing respecting it. As curiosity leads one to trace things to their origin, such as the history of countries, and remarkable events, I have traced this part of Virginia as far back as the year seventeen hundred and seventy-four, to the memorable battle of the Point [Battle of Point Pleasant, in 1774, a pivotal Revolutiona
ry War battle], fought between the whites and the Indians, at the mouth of this river [the confluence of the Ohio and Kanawha Rivers]. I have seen several men who were in that bloody and hard fought battle, and have just returned from viewing the ground on which it was fought. I have seen that part occupied by the “Augusta militia,” commanded by Gen. Lewis, and that by the Indians. I have seen the bones of the latter sticking in the bank of the Ohio river; part of the bank having fallen in where the battle was fought discloses their bones sticking out in a horizontal position: the engagement lasted from sunrise till dark; the victory was claimed by the whites. From this bank, which is a hundred feet, or thereabouts, in height, I had a view of the beautiful river Ohio: at this place it is said to be five hundred yards wide.

  This river, which is justly celebrated for its beauty and utility, flows in a smooth current as silent as night; not the least noise can be heard from it; not the smallest ripple is seen. This, and its limpid appearance, the rich foliage which decorates its banks and looks as though it were growing in the water, by reason of its luxuriance, completely conceals the earth, and constitutes its beauty. If the reader can imagine a vast mirror of endless dimension, he will have an idea of this beautiful river. It is so transparent that you may see pebbles at the bottom; not a rock or stone of any size, has a place in the Ohio. Kenhawa is a very handsome river, being generally as smooth as the Ohio, but by no means so limpid; it has a greenish appearance; you cannot see the bottom, except at the shoals. And more than all this. I have seen the celebrated heroine, Ann Bailey, who richly deserves more of her country, than a name in its history.

  This female is a Welch woman, and is now very old. At the time Gen. Lewis's army lay at the Point, a station on Kenhawa river, Ann would shoulder her rifle, hang her shot-pouch over her shoulder, and lead a horse laden with ammunition to the army, two hundred miles distant, when not a man could be found to undertake the perilous task—the way thither being a perfect wilderness, and infested with Indians. I asked her if she was not afraid—she replied, “No, she was not; she trusted in the Almighty—she knew she could only be killed, and she had to die some time.” I asked her if she never met with the Indians in her various journies. (for she went several times.) “Yes, she once met with two, and one of them said to the other let us kill her, (as she supposed, from the answer of the other). No, said his companion, God dam, too good a soger, and let her pass:” but how said I, did you find the way,—“Steered by the trace of Lewis's army, and I had a pocket compass too.” “Well, but how did you get over the water courses?”—Some she forded, and some she swam, on others she made a raft: she “halways carried a hax and a hauger, and she could chop as well has hany man;” such was her dialect. This is a fact that hundreds can attest. A gentleman informed, that while the army was stationed near the mouth of Elk, he walked down that river to where it intersects with Kenhawa, for the purpose of fishing; he had not remained long there before he heard a plunge in the water, and upon looking up, he discovered Ann on horseback swimming toward him; when the horse gained the landing, she observed, “cod, I'd like to a swum.” She was quite a low woman in height, but very strongly made, and had the most pleasing countenance I ever saw, and for her, very affable. “And what would the General say to you, when you used to get safe to camp with your ammunition.” “Why he'd say, you're a brave soldier, Ann, and tell some of the men to give me a dram.” She was fond of a dram. When I saw the poor creature, she was almost naked; she begged a dram, which I gave to her, and also some other trifle. I never shall forget Ann Bailey. The people here repeat many sayings of hers, such as “the howl upon the helm on the bank of the helk”—that is, an owl on an elm upon the bank of Elk river.

  CYNTHIA RYLANT

  (June 6, 1954–)

  Cynthia Rylant was born in Hopewell, Virginia, and grew up in the mountains of Raleigh County, West Virginia, surrounded by the warmth of a family who lived on the edge of poverty. She is the daughter of a nurse, Leatrel Rylant, and an army sergeant, John Tune. Her parents divorced when she was young, and she spent some of her childhood with her grandparents while her mother was in nursing school. “I grew up reading comic books because there was no library in my town or in my school, and I did not enter a public library until I was in my twenties,” says Rylant.

  Rylant graduated from Morris Harvey College (now University of Charleston) in 1975 with a B.A. in English, then earned an M.A. in English at Marshall University in 1976. After completing a Master's in Library Science at Kent State University in 1982, she worked as a children's librarian in Akron, Ohio, before becoming a full-time writer.

  Rylant has won numerous awards, including a Newbery Award in 1993 for her young adult novel, Missing May. Her first book, When I Was Young in the Mountains was a Caldecott Honor Book, as was The Relatives Came. She received the 1991 Boston Globe–Horn Book Award for nonfiction for Appalachia: The Voices of Sleeping Birds.

  Her childhood experiences left her with a special affinity for the underdog. “I get a lot of personal gratification thinking of those people who don't get any attention in the world and making them really valuable in my fiction—making them absolutely shine with their beauty.”

  Rylant currently lives in Oregon with her son, Nate. Her selected papers, including multiple drafts of many of her works, are held by the Special Collections Department in the university library at Kent State.

  The following excerpt is the opening chapter of Missing May, in which Summer faces the death of her foster mother, May, and the grief of May's husband, Ob.

  OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE

  PRIMARY

  Selected picture books: Poppleton Everyday (1998), Tulip Sees America (1998), Bear Day (1998), Scarecrow (1997), Silver Packages: An Appalachian Christmas Story (1997), Cat Heaven (1997), An Angel for Solomon Singer (1992), Mr. Grigg's Work (1989), All I See (1988), Birthday Presents (1987), Night in the Country (1986), The Relatives Came (1985), This Year's Garden (1984), Miss Maggie (1983), When I Was Young In the Mountains (1982), and more than a dozen books in the Henry and Mudge series. Fiction for children: Missing May (1992), Appalachia: The Voices of Sleeping Birds (1991), A Couple of Kooks: And Other Stories about Love (1990), A Kindness (1989), A Fine White Dust( 1986), Every Living Thing (1985), Blue-Eyed Daisy (1985). Poetry for children: Good Morning Sweetie Pie and Other Poems for Little Children (2002), Soda Jerk (1990), Waiting to Waltz (1984). Autobiography: “Newbery Medal Acceptance,” The Horn Book Magazine 69:4 (July/August 1993), 416–19. But I'll Be Back Again (1989). Anita Silvey, “An Interview with Cynthia Rylant,” The Horn Book Magazine 63:6 (November/December 1987), 695–702.

  SECONDARY

  George Brosi, “New Books,” Appalachian Heritage 20:3 (summer 1992), 79. Contemporary Authors, Vol. 136, 357–58. Something about the Author (1991), Vol. 13, 155–63. Something About the Author (1992), Vol. 13, 155–63; Vol. 50, 182–88; Vol. 76, 193–99. Diane Ward, “Cynthia Rylant,” The Horn Book Magazine 69:4 (July/August 1993), 420–23.

  MISSING MAY (1992)

  Chapter One

  When May died, Ob came back to the trailer, got out of his good suit and into his regular clothes, then went and sat in the Chevy for the rest of the night. That old car had been parked out by the doghouse for as long as I could remember, and the weeds had grown up all around it so you didn't even notice it unless you looked, and for years I couldn't understand why Ob didn't just get rid of the awful thing. Until I saw him sitting in it after the funeral. Then I knew that even though nobody in the world figured that old car had any good purpose, Ob knew there was some real reason to let it sit. And when May died, he figured out what it was.

  I never saw two people love each other so much. Sometimes the tears would just come over me, looking at the two of them, even six years back when I first got here and was too young to be thinking about love. But I guess I must have had a deep part of me thinking about it, hoping to see it all along, because the first time I saw Ob help May braid her long yellow hair, sitting in the kitchen o
ne night, it was all I could do not to go to the woods and cry forever from happiness.

  I know I must have been loved like that, even if I can't remember it. I must have; otherwise, how could I even recognize love when I saw it that night between Ob and May? Before she died, I know my mother must have loved to comb my shiny hair and rub that Johnson's baby lotion up and down my arms and wrap me up and hold and hold me all night long. She must have known she wasn't going to live and she must have held me longer than any other mother might, so I'd have enough love in me to know what love was when I saw it or felt it again.

  When she died and all her brothers and sisters passed me from house to house, nobody ever wanting to take care of me for long, I still had that lesson in love deep inside me and I didn't grow mean or hateful when nobody cared enough to make me their own little girl. My poor mother had left me enough love to go on until somebody did come along who'd want me.

  Then Uncle Ob and Aunt May from West Virginia visited, and they knew an angel when they saw her and they took me on home.

  Home was, still is, a rusty old trailer stuck on the face of a mountain in Deep Water, in the heart of Fayette County. It looked to me, the first time, like a toy that God had been playing with and accidentally dropped out of heaven. Down and down and down it came and landed, thunk, on this mountain, sort of cockeyed and shaky and grateful to be all in one piece. Well, sort of one piece. Not counting that part in the back where the aluminum's peeling off, or the one missing window, or the front steps that are sinking.

  That first night in it with Ob and May was as close to paradise as I may ever come in my life. Paradise because these two old people—who never dreamed they'd be bringing a little girl back from their visit with the relatives in Ohio—started, from the minute we pulled up in Ob's old Valiant, to turn their rusty, falling-down place into a house just meant for a child. May started talking about where they'd hang the swing as soon as she hoisted herself out of the front seat (May was a big woman), and Ob was designing a tree house in his head before he even got the car shut off. I was still so sick to my stomach from traveling all those curvy West Virginia roads that all I could do was swallow and nod, swallow and nod. Try to smile without puking.