Dimestore (9 page)

Now I know what she meant.

“Do you ever have times you can't sleep?” she asked me. “You probably don't, but you will, honey, you will. Well, things will rise out of the night, some way or other. All our people back of us can rise and come out in the night time awful good, and talk to us, and comfort us. Why I saw your mother one time, Lee, sitting in a rocking chair on the porch of the Martha Washington Inn! I saw your pa driving that fancy car right up to heaven.

“Death should be thought of as a beautiful part of life,” Lou said. “I'm not a bit afraid of dying. I want to die right here in this old bed with a pencil in my hand.” But not anytime soon—“I want to make it to 2000. I'd like to see what they do and say about it!”

Actually she made it to April 10, 2006, dying in her sleep at ninety-three. I had promised Lou I would “preach at her funeral” and I did—one of several speakers at the same Abingdon United Methodist Church where we had first met in the creative writing class, all those years ago. I read her poem “Salvation” aloud at the service. Afterward I walked over to Valley Street and stood for a long time looking at Lou's house, which had been sold and spruced up. The porch looked like anybody's porch now. I remembered her words, “We are all going in a circle, and death is not the end of our circle. It is just a word that some people have.” I fingered the buckeye in my pocket.

LOU'S POEM “SALVATION” WAS
PRINTED
in the program for her funeral on April 14, 2006.

SALVATION

jesus jesus jesus i got something

this old body aint so important

in this old body i feel holiness i got holiness

i got jesus flirtin with death

ever day in the coal mines flirtin with death

my daddy flirted and my brothers flirted

and my uncles and cousins

and my daddy got his back broken

flirtin with death

brother flirtin with death motorcycles, race cars

not my way flirtin with death

sister flirted i danced around her coffin

high in my hand same snake caused her death

laid her three weeks baby in her dead arms

sister got holiness flirtin with death

i feel holiness jesus i got something

washing the feet laying on hands dancing the fire dance

glory glory glory

praying for the sign the wounded blood of jesus

on the feet on the hands on the head

praying three years for the jesus sign

glory hallelujah

in the church house old snake washed clean

i put him to my shoulder flirtin with death

i touch him to my lips flirtin with death

flirtin with death i raise him to my breast

old velvet lips with his singing tail and lightning breath

i offer old velvet lips my snowy white breast

jesus jesus this old body aint so important

i got holiness flirtin with death

—Lou V. Price Crabtree

(March 13, 1913 – April 10, 2006)

Lightning Storm

WHEN I WAS A CHILD,
books brought my deepest pleasure, my greatest excitement. Reading, I often felt exactly the way I felt during summer thunderstorms: I just had to run out of the house and up the mountain into the very storm to whirl in the thunder and rain on the rocky top while lightning cracked all around me.

Since the next best thing to reading books was writing them and talking about them, I ended up becoming a writer and a professor. But then there came a time when I realized that I was hearing entirely too much about agents and advances, about “revising the canon” and “privileging the text” and “writing across the curriculum.” I became depressed about writing, which no longer seemed relevant to anything real. I had lost the lightning.

So when a Lila Wallace – Readers' Digest Writers' Award in 1992 offered me the chance to get out of my college classroom and affiliate with a nonprofit group of my choice for some community involvement, I jumped at the chance to get back to the coal fields.

I chose to work with the Hindman Settlement School in Hindman, Kentucky. I had often been a visiting writer for their summer creative writing workshop. The school's adult learning center, a no-nonsense brick building overhanging a muddy creek, offered a year-round literacy program, adult education classes, and tutoring services for the high school equivalency exam. The need for these programs is great. Half the county's population hasn't made it through high school; most dropouts leave before the ninth grade. Unemployment is high, and incomes are low.

I had the privilege of visiting this ongoing program each fall and spring for three years. At the Settlement School, I lived in a log house, gave readings and talks at area schools and community colleges, and conducted several daily workshops with students in the programs at the Adult Learning Center. We usually had ten to eighteen people per group; I also worked one-on-one with several people who really had a lot to say—some began writing their own life stories.

Since I can't actually remember the time when I couldn't read and write, I didn't understand the enormous sense of empowerment that comes with mastering written language. It was a revelation for me to meet red-headed, good-looking Connel Polly of Vicco, Kentucky, a successful grading contractor who had kept his illiteracy secret from everybody but his wife for fifty years. In
It's Like Coming Out of a Deep Hole
, his booklet of memories printed by the Hindman School, he recounts this incident:

One time, the mining company sent me to Canton, Ohio, going after mine parts in a pickup truck. They had told me which roads to take and what the exit was, and I was supposed to find this company that was on Fifth Street. So I drove all around looking for a five, and I couldn't find it. That's when I realized “Fifth” was a word, and I couldn't read it. I couldn't find it. That's the only time I ever cried in my life. I just pulled off the road and sat there and cried. I was eight hours away from home and it was getting dark. That was pitiful. Finally I had to ask somebody, and it turned out I was sitting right at it. I could see it. I felt so bad I didn't even stay the night. After I did my business I drove on back, and I was down all the way home. I was so blue. I felt the worst I've ever felt. There I was—a grown man—trying to make a living in that shape!

Now, he writes:

I didn't know learning to read would change my life so much. It has made me have more confidence in myself. Before, I even had a fear of going into a public restroom. I had fear of being embarrassed by someone handing me something to read. I stayed away from places such as banks, post offices, and doctors' offices. The first visit to a new doctor was hardest because you had to fill out forms. I always had my wife with me. Now, I'll go anywhere. Also, me and my wife leave notes for each other. Now that's something!

Lively Florida Slone, a well-known local ballad singer, did not enroll until the death of her husband. She writes:

I always thought of myself as a bean planted in a garden, and then someone put a big rock on top of me so that I could not get out of the ground. Now . . . I have gotten my driver's license, and I can write my own checks. I can read my Bible and my songbooks. I have always liked to make up songs and stories, but I never could write them down before. Now I can. I am beginning to grow. Maybe one of these days I'll be like Jack's beanstalk!

Mrs. Slone became a participant in many activities at the Adult Learning Center, where her outgoing personality brought her many friends.

The school put together a collection of Mrs. Slone's writing entitled
A Garden of Songs
, which range from love songs to hymns (“Voice of Angels”); to funny party tunes like “Chew Tobacco” and “Big Fat Dog.” There are also story songs such as “Red Hot Election” and “School Bus Wreck in Floyd County” that chronicle local events.

She tells the circumstances that occasioned the writing of each song. “One time I was asked to leave a church because my husband had been married before—they called him ‘a old double-married thing.' I went home and wrote this song. I wrote it to give me comfort. I wanted the world to know that Jesus was the pastor in my church, not somebody else.” That song is entitled “To All the People Looking Down Their Nose at Me.”

Some of Mrs. Slone's songs are pure poetry. About the composition of “Last Night,” she tells us, “It was rainy one night, and the clouds were passing by, and I could hear the whippoorwills calling—it's been years ago.”

Last night I sat and watched the clouds go by

I heard whippoorwills call from the mountains so high

I heard the water as it dropped soft and low

Seems like death is a secret nobody knows.

Other writers also took the opportunity to express deep feelings. Pretty young Promise Sandling wrote about her childhood:

I used to feel like no one loved me cause

My family was always falling apart

All my dads always left

But now I feel wonderful-N-I am happy

Because guess what?

I think I am smart!

Most of my writing students were women. Some had been unable go to school when they were girls because of early pregnancies; local churches and general opinion were against abortion, so this had not been an option. Married or not, these women had raised their children, often in difficult circumstances. Other girls had needed to stay home from school to help out with younger children or sick family members. Many enrolled upon discovering, after divorce or widowhood, what they could do for themselves.

Glenda Johnson, who eventually had to drop out of the program to tend ailing relatives, first found the time to write about her son:

This is a poem about Roy Glen Johnson.

He lives in a wooden house

At Mallie, KY 41836

He has blue eyes

and blond looking hair and

he likes to ride his bike.

He likes to play outside all the time.

He is afraid of my father.

He would like to have

His family whole again.

When I first visited the high school equivalency program, black-haired, statuesque Ollie Wallen had just enrolled. She looked down all the time, and didn't say much. Two years later, Ollie was wearing nail polish and joining vigorously in every discussion. She wrote to her congressman with a complaint and was pleased when he called her at home to advise her how to take action on getting benefits she was due. Here is a poem by Ollie:

I used to be married

But now I am divorced.

I used to do things for my husband

But now I do things for myself.

I used to feel bad about myself,

But now I feel great about myself,

Like a rope was wrapped around me

But now it is loose.

It's a long, winding road from where I am living now to the mountains of eastern Kentucky. But it brought me home. My involvement with this program made me remember what reading and writing were all about in the first place, before book tours and disputes about deconstructionism. Helping people express themselves in writing for the first time is like watching them fall in love. For me, it brought back the old thrill, the lightning storm.

Driving Miss Daisy Crazy; or, Losing the Mind of the South

CARRBORO, N.C.—APRIL 12, 2000.

I want to start by introducing you to Miss Daisy. Chances are, you already know her. She may be your mother. She may be your aunt. Or you may have your own private Miss Daisy, as I do: a prim, well-educated maiden lady of a certain age who has taken up permanent residence in a neat little room in the frontal lobe of my brain. I wish she'd move, but as she points out to me constantly, she's just no trouble at all. She lives on angel food cake and she-crab soup, which she heats up on a little ring right there in her room.

Miss Daisy was an English teacher at a private girls' school for forty-three years, back in the days when English was English — before it became Language Arts. She was famous for her ability to diagram sentences, any sentence at all, even sentences so complex that their diagrams on the board looked like blueprints for a cathedral. Her favorite poet is Sidney Lanier. She likes to be elevated. She is still in a book club, but it is not Oprah's book club. In fact, Miss Daisy is not quite sure who Oprah is, believing that her name is Okra Winfrey, and asking me repeatedly what all the fuss is about. Miss Daisy's book club can find scarcely a thing to elevate them these days, so they have taken to reading
Gone With the Wind
over and over again.

Miss Daisy's favorite word is
ought
, as in “You ought to go to church this morning.” She often punctuates her sentences with “you know,” as in, “Lee Marshall, you know you don't believe that!” or, “Lee Marshall, you know you don't mean it!” She believes it is true about the two ladies who got kicked out of the Nashville Junior League: one for having an orgasm, and the other for having a job.

In fact, Miss Daisy reminds me of another lady I encountered many years ago, when I moved down to Alabama to become a reporter for
The Tuscaloosa News
. The former editor of the ladies page of the paper had just retired. “Thank God!” everybody said, since for many years she had ceased to write up events in the paper the way they actually happened, preferring instead to write them up the way she thought they should have happened.

The South runs on denial. We learn denial in the cradle and carry it to the grave. It is absolutely essential to being a lady, for instance. My Aunt Gay-Gay's two specialties were Rising to the Occasion and Rising Above It All, whatever “it” happened to be. Aunt Gay-Gay believed that if you can't say something nice, say nothing at all. If you don't discuss something, it doesn't exist. She drank a lot of gin and tonics and sometimes she'd start in on them early, winking at my Uncle Bob and saying, “Pour me one, honey, it's already dark underneath the house.” Until she died, I never knew that another of my aunts had had a previous marriage. It had been edited right out of the family, in the same way all pictures of that husband had been removed from the family albums.

Denial affects not only our personal lives, but also our political lives, our culture, and our literature. In her book
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
, Toni Morrison talks about a kind of denial she sees operating in American literature and criticism; she chides liberal critics for what she calls their “neglect of darkness.” She says that “the habit of ignoring race is understood to be a graceful, even generous, liberal gesture . . . but excising the political from the life of the mind is a sacrifice that has proven costly. . . . A criticism that needs to insist that literature is not only ‘universal' but also ‘race-free' risks lobotomizing that literature, and diminishes both the art and the artist.” Morrison suggests that black characters in classic American novels have been as marginalized as their real-life counterparts.

But back to Miss Daisy. I'm taking her out to lunch today. Miss Daisy claims she “just eats like a bird,” not deigning to confess to anything as base as hunger or even appetite, but she does like to go out to lunch. And while she's making her final preparations—that is, clean underwear in case we are in a wreck, gloves, money safely tucked in her bra in case her purse is stolen—let me tell you about this restaurant we're going to.

You may be surprised to learn that I actually own this restaurant, and that it is actually a sushi bar. But, hey! It's the New South, remember? And actually, our sushi bar (named Akai Hana and located in Carrboro, North Carolina) presents a little case study in the New South.

The land Akai Hana stands on today, at 206 W. Main St, was farmland not so very long ago, when Carrboro was a dusty, sleepy little farm village on the old road from Chapel Hill to Greensboro. This was an open field, with a tenant house at the end of it. Then Carr Mill came in, and mill houses sprouted up in neat little rows, like beans, to house the families that worked at Carr Mill. As the university grew, Chapel Hill grew, too, spreading outward toward Carrboro, which gradually became a service adjunct of Chapel Hill. This was the place you came to buy your grass seed or to get your tires fixed at the Chapel Hill Tire Company, right across the street from us. Carrboro was mostly black then, and all poor. Miss Daisy never came here except to pick up her cook. Every business in Carrboro closed at noon on Wednesday, because everybody went to church on Wednesday night. And nothing was open on Sunday.

Our brick building, constructed in the early fifties, was first occupied by a popular, locally owned café named the Elite Lunch, which featured Southern cooking and lots of it. It had two dining rooms, one for white and one for colored. In the early sixties it was superseded by Pizza Villa, whose name alone testifies to Chapel Hill's—and Carrboro's—increasing sophistication. By now, plenty of graduate students and even some professors lived in Carrboro. The mill had closed, and those mill houses were affordable.

By the mid-seventies, when an outrageously colorful chef took over and turned it into Avanti, Carrboro was coming of age. The mill became Carr Mill Mall, filled with trendy boutiques. In the eighties, a cooperative health-food grocery named Weaver Street Market opened up. Artists moved in. Carrboro started calling itself the Paris of the Piedmont.

Avanti's chef hung paintings by his artist friends. He stuck candles in wine bottles on each of his artfully mismatched tables. He opened the patio for outdoor dining. He made soup with forty cloves of garlic. Then, even Avanti was superseded by the truly gourmet Martini's. The owner's wife's mother came from Italy to run the kitchen, while her homemade pasta dried on broomsticks upstairs. My first husband and I had some memorable meals there, and my present husband remembers that he was eating polenta in this very gazebo when a former girlfriend gave him the gate. Ah, what sweet revenge it is now to own that gazebo, which we have (of course) transformed into a pagoda.

But back to our narrative. The owner died in a wreck, Martini's closed, and the restaurant underwent a total transformation before opening again, for breakfast and lunch only, as a bakery and café, very French, with a marble floor and lace curtains at the windows. Pre-Starbucks, the two ladies who now owned it served muffins accompanied by the first good coffee in Carrboro.

We bought the place from the muffin ladies. Why? You might well ask. Have I always had a burning desire to go into the sushi business? No, actually, my own attitude toward raw fish is closer to Roy Blount's poem about oysters:

I prefer my oyster fried.

Then I'm sure my oyster's died.

IT WAS MY HUSBAND'S IDEA.
He always called my son Josh the “samurai stepson,” and their favorite thing to do together was to go out for sushi. The closing of the only sushi bar in town coincided with Josh's improvement from schizophrenia. New medications made it possible for him to have a more regular life, and what better job could a samurai stepson get than in a sushi bar? (I can hear Miss Daisy saying in my ear, “Now Lee Marshall, you know you shouldn't have told that!” But I am telling it anyway.) We held long conferences with Bob, the sushi chef. We met with the muffin ladies and the bank. We hired a designer and a construction firm. We were under way, even though nobody except us thought this was a good idea. Our accountant was horrified. The guys from the tire shop across the street kept coming over to ask, “How's the bait shop coming along?”

We opened in 1997. Let me introduce you around.

Bob, manager and head chef, hails from the coastal North Carolina town of Swansboro. At college in Chapel Hill, he wrote poetry and played guitar until his wanderlust led him to California, where he eventually became an ardent convert of the Reverend Moon and joined the Unification Church. He married his Japanese wife, Ryoko, in a ceremony of twenty-five thousand couples in Madison Square Garden. They are still happily married, with six beautiful children.

Under Bob's direction, Akai Hana employs people from diverse backgrounds, including Hispanic, Burmese, Thai, Japanese, Filipino, Chinese, Korean, African-American, and African. Meet Rick, for instance, who heads the kitchen in back (yes, we do have cooked food, for people like Miss Daisy, who is enjoying some grilled teriyaki chicken right now). Anyway, both Rick and his wife, a beautician, are Chinese Filipinos who have been in this country for eighteen years, sending for their siblings one by one. Their son, a physician, is now completing his residency in Seattle. Their daughter, who recently earned her doctorate in public health, works for a world health organization in L.A. Rick's nephew Brian, one of the wait staff, plays saxophone in the UNC jazz band.

Ye-tun, a cook and a former Burmese freedom fighter whose nickname is “Yel,” proudly showed me a picture of himself coming through the jungle dressed in camo, carrying an AK-47. Now my husband calls him the “Rebel Yell,” but nobody gets it.

Okay: Bob, Ryoko, Brian, Helen Choi, Ye-tun, Miguel, Jose, Genita, Mister Chiba, and Mister Choi—these people are Southerners. We are all Southerners. Akai Hana is a Southern restaurant, just like Pittypat's Porch or Hardee's.

Judging merely from our lunch at Akai Hana, we are going to have to seriously overhaul our image of the South, and of Southerners, for this millennium.

My little piece of land in Carrboro is typical. The South was two-thirds rural in the 1930s. Now it is over two-thirds urban. One half of all Southerners were farmworkers in the thirties; now that statistic is at 2 percent. And out of those farmworkers in the thirties, one half were tenant farmers. Now we have no tenant farmers, but migrant workers instead.

Our Southern birthrate, which used to be famously above the national average, is now below it. This means that immigration—and in-migration—are defining the South's population. Soon Texas and Florida will both have nonwhite majorities.

Well, this very idea has given Miss Daisy a headache. She just doesn't have a head for figures, anyway. She'd like some dessert, but Akai Hana serves only green tea ice cream, which is too weird to even think about, in Miss Daisy's opinion. So we pay up and drive a few blocks down to Mama Dip's Country Kitchen, where Mildred “Dip” Council, Miss Daisy's former cook, has opened her big, fancy new restaurant. She's published a cookbook, too. She's been written up by Calvin Trillin and Craig Claiborne; she's been on TV. She's an entrepreneur now. Miss Daisy orders the lemon chess pie. I go for the peach cobbler myself.

Some things never change. Some Southern food will never go out of style, no matter how much it may get nouveau'ed. And large parts of the South still look a lot like they used to—the Appalachian coal country where I'm from, for instance, and the old Cotton Belt. A layer of cultural conservatism still covers Dixie like the dew. As a whole, we Southerners are still religious, and we are still violent. We'll bring you a casserole, but we'll kill you, too. Southern women, both black and white, have always been more likely than Northern women to work outside the home, despite the image projected by such country lyrics as “Get your biscuits in the oven and your buns in the bed, this women's liberation is a-going to your head.” It was not because we were so liberated; it's because we were so poor. This, too, is changing: now our per capita income is at 92 percent of the national average.

With all these changes, what should I tell my student, one of my very favorite students, who burst into tears after we attended a reading together at which Elizabeth Spencer read her fine short story “The Cousins.” “I'll never be a Southern writer!” my student wailed. “I don't even know my cousins!” Raised in a military household, relocated many times, she had absolutely no sense of place, no sense of the past, no sense of family. How did she spend her childhood? I asked. In the mall in Fayetteville, North Carolina, she tearfully confessed, sneaking cigarettes and drinking Cokes.

I told her she was lucky.

But she was also right. For a writer cannot pick her material any more than she can pick her parents; her material is given to her by circumstances of her birth, by how she first hears language. And if she happens to be Southern, these factors may already be trite, even before she sits down at her computer to begin. Her neurasthenic, fragile Aunt Lena is already trite, her mean, scary cousin Bobby Lee is already trite, her columned, shuttered house in Natchez is already trite. Far better to start out from the mall in Fayetteville, illicit cigarette in hand, with no cousins to hold her back, and venture forth fearlessly into the New South.

I once heard the novelist George Garrett say that the House of Fiction has many rooms. Well, the House of Southern Fiction is in the process of remodeling. It needs so many more rooms that we've got brand-new wings shooting out from the main house in every direction. It looks like one of those pictures of the sun as drawn by a second-grader. In fact, that's the name of it—the House of the Rising Sun—which is right over here by the interstate. I'll run you by it as we drive Miss Daisy home.

Look—there's my student right now, knocking on the door, suitcase in hand. She doesn't know yet that once she takes a room in there, she can never come out again. She doesn't understand that she's giving up her family and her home forever, that as soon as she writes about those things she will lose them, in a way, though she will mythologize them in her work, the way we all do, with all our little hometowns of the heart.