Listen Here (10 page)

A Time to Study Law*

As women work for the good of our people and move into positions where we help make governing policies, it is useful and strengthening to study the Creator's laws and precedents for their application. Most people now call these laws “natural.” Native people have traditionally called them “sacred.” In either case, the laws are immutable and inexorable. And they are good guides for keeping focused and centered in our efforts.

My parents used a real spider's web, one that I could see and touch, to teach me the laws. Two that are especially appropriate for women to study are these:

The Creator made the Web of Life and into each strand put the law to govern it. Everything in the universe is part of the web. Stars, trees, oceans, creatures, humans, stones: we are all related. One family. What happens to one will happen to all, for the Creator's laws function this way. They teach us to cooperate and live in harmony, in balance. Ignorance of the laws is no excuse, because through Mother Earth the Creator reveals them continually. If we are reverent toward her and take only what we need, she will sustain us. If we are irreverent and take too much, we separate ourselves from her power and we will die.

A similar law governs all warm-blooded species, including the human. The gender that bears life must not be separated from the power to sustain it. From the eagle to the mouse, from the bear to the whale, the female has the power to nurture and protect her young. A complementary law governs the siring gender, who ranges farther and is more changeable and transitory. Together, the laws make a balance, which provides for continuance in the midst of change—and for the survival of the species.

For centuries American Indians studied the Creator's web and wove the sacred laws into their own cultures, each tribe according to its customs. The welfare of children was paramount.

Imagine that the Grandmothers of these cultures—the female ancestors—have returned to sit in council and consider the dilemmas of American society. Undoubtedly, they would put these questions first on their agenda:

“Who will take care of the children? Who will feed, clothe, shelter, educate, protect—nurture them to maturity?” They would insist that the issue of children's care be resolved before the issue of birth is even considered. To do otherwise is unconscionable. “Children are the seeds of the people. Seed corn must not be ground,” is the ancient tribal wisdom for survival.

Suppose we then take the Grandmothers to our cities and show them microcosms of the “grinding of children” that is a national disgrace: physical and sexual abuse, economic exploitation through drugs and the sex industry, the steady descent of women and children into poverty, the violence toward women of all ages. “Although we've had the vote for sixty-five years,” we explain, “until recently women have been barred from policy-making bodies that govern life in America. Even now, on a national level, our power is weak: one in nine on the Supreme Court, 4 percent in the Congress and about the same in the state legislatures. We do not have equal representation in making any laws, not even those that affect our children and our own bodies. We are being undermined, disenfranchised, disempowered.…”

Calm and steady, the Grandmothers have listened intently. “We've heard this story before. Remember what happened then to the people….”

Native women, especially, do remember.

I'd thought it would never come to this—again. Seemingly, the women's movement was mending the Creators law that was broken in the Grandmothers' time. I'd thought my daughters—and surely my granddaughters—would serve with men on the councils of the land, resuming their ancestors' place as “Mothers of the Nation.” I'd thought they and my son and their children would live in a society restored to the balance that ensures survival….

“Seed corn must not be ground.”

What can women do to prevent our disempowerment and the “grinding” of our children?

For myself, I am a poet, a writer. I have no political clout, no big money to roll. But I do have faith in the Creator. And I do remember the Grandmothers' stories, especially the Cherokee one. I must
tell
it to my children, for it has been erased from most books. Hearing it, they will better understand the Web of Life and their places in it. Science teaches them the web's pattern, but not that the laws holding it in place are sacred. The story will also help my children realize how crucial it is to keep any issue within its context when making a decision. An issue, too, is part of a web. And many of our society's negative attitudes toward women and children have deep roots in the past.

The story of the Cherokee Grandmothers shows how the people interpreted the Creator's law for the female—making the welfare of children central—and of what happened when that law was broken. This story was repeated in many Indian nations.

As I have described previously, when the European men first arrived, Cherokee women had been the center of the family and the center of the Nation for about two thousand years. When the Cherokee men asked, “Where are your women?” the Europeans said, “What are your women doing here?” To their minds, it was “pagan” and “uncivilized” to have women in places of power. Besides, the Europeans followed the laws of property, and the property they wanted was the land. To get it, it was evident they would have to upset the tribal balance. A primary way to do that was to undermine the power of women. No rocks at first. Just steady pressure for decades. They refused to deal with women in treaty negotiations. They called the Cherokee system a “petticoat government” and insisted on their own way. They introduced alcohol to the people. And within the wholesome teachings of Christianity, which the Cherokee found familiar and sound—God is Creator of all, love God and your neighbor as yourself—many missionaries also brought the concept that woman is unclean (because of menses) and the cause of the fall of man. This teaching alarmed the people, for it was well known that “a people cannot be conquered until the hearts of its women are on the ground.” Meanwhile, on diplomatic and military levels, the men fought losing battles. Word came back along the great trade routes that the process was everywhere the same in Indian country.

But there was hopeful news from the Iroquois in the North. As a primary model for their constitution, Benjamin Franklin and his colleagues were studying the League of the Iroquois and its Great Law of Peace, which by the late 1700s had united five, then six nations for centuries. Based on equal representation and balance of power, the Great Law had been codified long before European contact by Hiawatha and the Peacemaker, with the support of Jikonsaseh, the most powerful of the clan matrons. The Iroquois system was (and is) spirit-based. The Council of Matrons was the ceremonial center of the system as well as the prime policy maker. Only sons of eligible clans could serve on the councils at the behest of the matrons of their clans, at the executive, legislative and judicial levels. Public and private life were inseparable and the matrons had the power to impeach any elected official who was not working for the good of the people.

But when Franklin and others incorporated the Iroquois model into the U.S. Constitution, they omitted women
as a gender
, as well as men of color and men without property. Within fifty years, indigenous people were forced onto reservations, declared “alien and dependent” by the U.S. Supreme Court, decimated.

In the time of crisis, bereft of political power and disenfranchised in their own land, the Grandmothers felt their hearts sink low. But they did not allow them to be “on the ground.” Instead, they took them
underground
, where they joined with wise men, Grandfathers, who accepted women's power as a complement to their own. By restoring the balance of the Creator's law for survival as well as by keeping faith with other sacred laws, American Indians have slowly and patiently rewoven their lives and are emerging with renewed strength.

In most other surviving cultures, deep below the turmoil of historical events, there have been counterparts of the Indian Grandmothers and Grandfathers who, according to their customs, have found ways to ensure that the gender that bears life is not separated from the power to sustain it.

Many institutions in America are trying to bring gender balance into their structures—churches, synagogues, universities, corporations. The U.S. Congress is not among them. Two hundred years have passed since the U.S. Constitution was adopted, fifty-one years since the Equal Rights Amendment was first introduced for debate. Congress remains adamant in refusing to mend the Creator's law, as well as reluctant to make complementary,
enforceable
laws for the siring gender's responsibilities for children.

In some other sectors of society, also, the attitude toward women coming into the public sphere is, “What are you doing here?”

We know why we're here. We're doing our part to get the job done. Keeping our government and our society in balance requires the minds and energies of two genders. The more America is in harmony with the Creator's laws, the better off our people will be.

You and I are sisters but different. Yet we have common ground in an old saying, “There are many paths up the mountain.” If we take the mountain to be Womanspirit rooted in the sacred, there is honor to your path and honor to mine. We are one in our calling to bring Womanspirit into balance with Manspirit in our world. We must continue in our paths and resume our rightful places on the councils that govern our land and its people. Otherwise, our Mother Earth will die. And all that lives will die with her. Peace to your path and peace to mine. On our way up the mountain, we'll call to each other: “Keep going. We'll make it. We'll make it. Sure we will.…”

Womanspirit is coming back!

A corn seed for remembrance.

from
Selu: Seeking the Corn-Mother's Wisdom
(1993)

Our courage
is our memory.

Out of ashes
peace will rise,
if the people
are resolute.
If we are not
resolute,
we will vanish.
And out of ashes
peace will rise.

In the Four Directions…
Out of ashes peace will rise.
Out of ashes peace will rise.
Out of ashes peace will rise.
Out of ashes peace will rise.

Our courage
is our memory.

(July 20, 1953–)

Eastern Kentuckian Artie Ann Bates was born in Blackey, where she now lives with her husband and son in one of the Letcher County homes where she grew up. The daughter of Eunice Cornett Bates, an elementary school teacher, and Bill Bates, a coal miner, she was the fifth of six children in her family.

During her childhood, she explains, she rarely saw anyone she didn't know. “My first experience living among strangers occurred when I began college at the University of Kentucky in the summer of 1971. These strangers thought
I
was the stranger.” Homesickness drove her home for a term at Hazard Community College, but then she returned to Lexington, where she earned her undergraduate degree in nursing in 1976 and took some influential courses in Appalachian history (with Harry Caudill) and in writing (with Gurney Norman). She is now a medical doctor who completed her training at the University of Louisville in 1986. She has also completed a residency in child psychiatry at the University of Louisville, where she has been working with sexually and physically abused children.

While a medical student, she wrote in personal journals, began a novel about a young woman in medical school, and had a son before moving back home in 1987 to practice medicine in eastern Kentucky.

On being a wife and mother, she writes, “raising kids is the most important work we ever do.” Being a parent, she continues, “causes me to reach to depths of my selfish self and come out with forgiveness. The romance with my husband is a life-sustaining energy source.” A community activist who opposes dams on Linefork Creek and who participated in the local PTA, she often contributed letters to the editor and essays on local politics and the environment to newspapers. She explains that “Appalachia has taught me to survive wherever I land, especially on a little piece of rocky land. It has given me a conscience to write some of its history, one of making do.”

Books for children:
Ragsale
(1995).
Autobiographical essay:
“Root Hog, or Die,”
Bloodroot
(1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 55–60.
Essays:
“I'd Sharpen Your Ax,”
Appalachian Heritage
21:2 (spring 1993), 26–30. “Belinda, Our Tremendous Gift,”
Appalachian Heritage
19:2 (spring 1991), 3–6. “Heirlooms”
Appalachian Heritage
18:2 (spring 1990), 26–31.

William T. Cornett, review of
Ragsale, Appalachian Heritage
23:4 (fall 1995), 70–71. Joyce Dyer, “Artie Ann Bates,” in
Bloodroot
, 54.

from
Appalachian Heritage
(1991)

When Belinda Ann Mason is introduced as a member of the prestigious National Commission on AIDS it goes something like this: “Mother of two children who contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion during childbirth.” Belinda thinks that is not very telling and would prefer to rewrite it, since there seems to be a subliminal message that anyone who contracted AIDS by other means did so by choice. Her rewriting would say that she is from a rural area and that she loves Conway Twitty. Also it would say that more than anything she loves sitting at her Granny's house watching
All My Children
with her.

Being fellow Letcher Countians and college buddies at the University of Kentucky ten years ago, I have rediscovered my old friend through her writings. Because we live six hours apart and because we are both extremely swamped with work and family, we have had to visit by telephone. Yet I now know her better than when we were in college because her work is so expressive and clear.

After reviewing a large amount of Belinda's creative writing and work with AIDS, my conclusion is that she is a genius, and strikingly similar to Harriette Arnow. She is a master storyteller and playwright, an eloquent speech writer and orator. She is a thinker who takes command of an audience and holds them in the strong web of her words.

A large part of Belinda's writing is present in her hometown of Whitesburg, Kentucky. At Appalshop, the well-known media center, her plays are under contract with Roadside Theater. A video tape in progress consisting of a speech to Southern Baptist Ministers, an informal interview at her home, and a speech to a group of doctors and medical students at the University of Kentucky was recorded by Herb E. Smith and Anne Johnson. This will be shown as part of the Headwaters series on Kentucky Educational Television (KET).

Another large segment of Belinda's work is being archived in the Special Collections of the M.I. King Library at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. This includes numerous short stories and poems as well as a novel in progress about a young boy, Merle, who contracts AIDS through a blood transfusion.

As I plug in the VCR tape entitled “Belinda Excerpts” I feel a quiet excitement as if my friend will jump out of the television. How I wish it were possible. Though we have talked by phone, I have not seen Belinda since early 1987, three months after she was infected with HIV.

Belinda comes onto the screen penetrating my eyes, ears, and chest with her presence and her words. She has changed a bit, I think, as she talks with her same mountain drawl. She is more beautiful than I remembered, perhaps because she is dressed for a crowd. Her heart-shaped face and soft lisp deliver words of great weight.

Belinda is speaking to a group of Southern Baptist Ministers in the first part of this tape. Her message is clear and precise, her mission as a spokesperson for AIDS is unmistakable. “AIDS is a test, not for the people who are infected but for the rest of society. Will we extend the hand of compassion and touch of Christ to others?…We must put away the label of victim of AIDS, there are no innocent or guilty victims, nobody planned to get it…. AIDS can be less about dying than about choosing how to live…. Nothing can ever separate us from the love of God. Nourish and cherish the people in your life, they are lessons for you.”

Her voice in this speech is unrelenting. Because she is a person with AIDS quite different from the norm, she is easier to accept. Because of her race, financial status, private pay insurance, family and church support, she is one of the privileged.

Belinda delivers the serious message that we have lost more people to AIDS than to the Vietnam War. Blacks, Hispanics, homosexuals, and drug users suffer a social prejudice that numbs us from the seriousness of AIDS. Yet “we are all Gods children. We must not be judgmental, we must not blame or shame, we must practice what we say.”

Belinda became infected with HIV during an obstetrical emergency in the birth of her second child, Clayton. She recalls driving to the hospital with her husband Steve, feeling “poised on the edge of something.” She thought that “something” was another wonderful chapter in the family life they shared with their daughter Polly. She thought the recovery from the obstetrical emergency would be the worst she would have to suffer, only to find later that a unit of blood was contaminated with HIV.

Belinda's words in speaking for people with AIDS reminds one of her character Enoch's words in her play
Gifts of the Spirit.
Enoch says that “Working on a building is what living is. And just like wood working, you got to have things to believe in before you can build something that'll stand. A house that'll keep the wind off of you. A life where doors is hung right and the roof won't bow. The Lord's give us plenty to delight in and a whole lot to believe. If they is a day of judgement coming as some says, I don't think we'll be faulted much for drinking or gambling nor none of the other things you've heard is a one-way ticket to hell. If He's got a quarrel with us, it'll be for us not laying ahold of our tools. Not trusting our materials.”

Among Belinda's best tools are her oratory skills, social conscience, will to help others, and her creative writing ability. In taking up her tools Belinda Mason is a prolific writer of Appalachian literature. Her ear for the music of language immortalizes Appalachian speech and culture. She says she “gave back what I heard,” the “poetry that other people speak in restaurants.”

Of Belinda's short stories appearing in print, one of them was taken as fact. “A Christmas Lesson” was in
Appalachian Heritage
, Vol. 15, No. 4, 1987. Country music singer Naomi Judd, who had recently subscribed, read the story and thought the two women
were real.
She said the characters “feel like my family.” Naomi felt compassion for the women in the story trying to find Conway Twitty and wanted to personally introduce them. After talking with the Hazard, Kentucky, telephone operator and finding that they were not real people, Naomi called the editor and got Belinda's address and telephone number. Later she wrote to Belinda. She arranged a private meeting, praised her for the excellent writing, and has kept in touch with Belinda ever since.

In addition to
Gifts of the Spirit
, Belinda has another play produced by Roadside Theater called
War on Poverty.
Centered around the local shooting of a Canadian filmmaker in the late 1960s, the play encompasses Appalachia's image of itself from within and from the eye of the outside cameras.

To outsiders the shooting incident reiterated stereotypes of Appalachians as impulsive gun wielders. It also lifted the valve of pent up resentment from the influx of those who came to help us poor mountaineers. Belinda's play shows “the other side of the coin besides the crazy hillbilly.” It uses slides and “family pictures” to show how we see ourselves and explores significant events that led up to the shooting and beyond. The play is a composite of every Appalachian's frustration in loving the homeland only to discover pity and shame by the outside world.

Belinda Mason's interest in the common person captures us as we feel at home with her characters. She has always been fascinated with the women who follow country music stars like Conway Twitty. Her characters speak our language, struggle our hardships, share our passions. Gid, at his friend Hargis' funeral in
Gifts of the Spirit
, says of having to live in the city, “All that traffic, sirens a blowing, lay down at night with nary a thing between you and a total stranger but a wall. Step outside and cars and people darting ever which way. Like a gang of diddle chicks.”

Belinda's zest for life, like her writing, is that of seizing the moment. She resents editors' suggesting that she rewrite things since, “I never do anything that I can do better.” She often answers people who ask how she feels about having AIDS with, “I'd rather have a broken leg.” She noticed one of her medical records narratives described her as a “32 year old black woman…” and said “Well, well, I've been black all these years and didn't even know it.” She says the great division in humankind is “not race or religion but those who are able and those who are not.”

Belinda Mason is quietly determined. From the days [as] Miss Whitesburg High School, or running track and jumping hurdles, she is writing as a journalist. From newspaper work and freelance creative writing she is being featured in the American Medical Association's newspaper
The AMNews
, publishing articles on AIDS in the
Boston Globe
, medical journals such as
Primary Care
and various AIDS journals. Her travels take her from coffee with President Bush and, at his request, accepting a coveted seat on the National Commission on AIDS, speaking to ministers' groups, Congress, AIDS activists and to medical grand rounds at the University of Kentucky.

It is to a group of doctors and medical students at the University of Kentucky that Belinda is speaking in the second speech of this video tape from Appalshop. Her message to doctors about AIDS is a serious charge since “doctors, like journalists and media people, have the most to learn and are in the best position to institute real attitude changes, to lead people to water if not to knock them over the head and make them drink.”

She serves up to them a “scrubbed clean Southern style AIDS which allows listeners to avoid examining their own feelings about otherness.” In discussing the method by which she became infected with HIV, people are “spared confrontation with the messy realities of sex and drugs.” She drives home the message that “puritanical squeamishness” and “racism and homophobia” prevent this society, both professionals and the lay public, from effectively facing AIDS.

The demands for Belinda to speak became so numerous that she dreaded getting on an airplane because it meant separation from her family. Belinda's daughter, Polly, tiring of her mother's absences asked her how one gets to be “unfamous.” Then, when her mother was asked to speak at one more meeting, said, “I thought you weren't going to be famous anymore.”

Belinda's family is very dear to her. She has Polly who is 8 and Clayton who is 4. Her husband Steve, a musician, teaches at a local community college. He speaks of her in a soft voice as “articulate, a very unusual person.” She comes from an east Kentucky mountain family, the oldest of Barbara and Paul Mason's three children, having two younger brothers.

In the time before AIDS the Rainbow Room, her son's green and yellow painted nursery, was a place where any dreams could come true. Now that is a “distant and receding memory,” as she is “one of the people whose life I used to write about as a small town journalist.” Belinda carefully describes to these medical students that having AIDS gives one both “devastation and exhilaration in equal measure.” Devastation at the “wreckage of a simple and satisfying life with my family, exhilaration at finding myself alive at all.” With springtime coming, her children healthy and playing, the family safe, she says, “The grace of it all sustains me.”

As I remove the tape I think of Belinda's words during a recent telephone conversation. She talked about the irony of “the terrible beauty of AIDS. I have new eyes. I can see things different. Life is precious and rich. It's a tremendous gift.”

Then I think of this powerful little woman, her green eyes and childlike hands, and of her contribution to people with AIDS and especially to people without AIDS. Her plays and short stories have opened Appalachia to us, to the charm of our culture and a deeper way of viewing life. Her writing shows us who we are and from whom we came, and that as common people we are okay. She encourages us to live a passionate, caring life, to make the most of every moment, and to nurture a healthy sense of humor.

Belinda, a flower of life, is our tremendous gift. She lives one of her favorite Native American sayings, “The quality of life is not measured by length but by the fullness with which we enter into each present moment.”

Note: For more on Belinda Ann Mason, see the biographical note and sample of her work on pp. 386–90.