Listen Here (12 page)

(March 29, 1933–)

Florence Cope Bush is the daughter of Dora (“Dorie”) Woodruff Cope and Fred Cope. Born in Tremont, Tennessee, a small community between Townsend and Cades Cove, she lived there only three years before her parents' land was claimed by eminent domain to create the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. “I have no memory of ever having lived in the misty, blue mountains,” she writes. “But everything about the Smokies fascinates me, and I'm ever drawn back to the place of my birth.”

She spent many summers on her grandparents' farm in Sevier County, Tennessee, and to preserve something of their way of life, which she saw disappearing, she wrote the story of her mother's life,
Dorie: Woman of the Mountains.
Bush spent nine years collecting information from her mother and from libraries. She wrote the manuscript “as a gift” to her daughter and her mother. When a friend convinced her to publish two thousand copies, it sold well because “Dorie came to represent a female relative in almost everyone's life.” She often hears, “You wrote about my mother, my grandmother, my aunt.”

A former newspaper reporter and freelance writer in Knoxville, Tennessee, Bush has written an appealing account of her family's transitions in southern Appalachia in the early twentieth century. The book's six chapters cover the years from 1898 to 1942. In 1993, Bush won the Tennessee History Award, jointly sponsored by the Tennessee Library Association and the Tennessee Historical Association.

In this excerpt from chapter 1, the writer records her mother's memories of the family's Cherokee neighbors.

Nonfiction:
Dorie: Woman of the Mountains
(1992),
If Life Gives You Scraps, Make a Quilt
(1992),
Ocona Lufta Baptist: Pioneer Church of the Smokies, 1836–1939
(1990).

George Brosi, “Booklist and Notes,”
Appalachian Heritage
20:3 (summer 1992), 73. Jane R. Wilson, review of
Dorie: Woman of the Mountains, Appalachian Heritage
21:3 (summer 1993), 68–69.

In the early spring of 1899, Pa decided to move closer to his job. He rented a small farm near the Cherokee reservation. They loaded their few pieces of furniture on a wagon and moved in time for spring planting. Ma worked along beside him until her time to give birth. I was born May 8, 1899, almost an anniversary gift to them.

The Cherokee women were very curious about Pa and Ma. Many times Ma would look up and see a silent, unsmiling Indian looking in the window or open door. Sometimes, when working outside, she'd catch a fleeting glimpse of them behind the trees. They watched while she boiled and washed the clothing in a big, black wash kettle. The kettle sat on three rocks, over a fire. Ma would bring water from the river to fill the kettle and then build a fire under it.

Pa had driven two posts into the ground and stretched rope between them to hang the clothing out to dry. Some of the articles of clothing fascinated the Indians. They'd touch the white bran-sack sheets and wonder about the use for such a big piece of cloth. Indian women washed their clothes in the river and dried them by draping them over rocks and bushes. It wasn't long before Ma could see clotheslines beside the Indians' cabins. They learned fast.

Ma made friends with some of the women. They taught her how to make Indian bean bread and chestnut dumplings. The bread was made of cornmeal, like cornbread, with cooked dried beans mixed into the dough. Chestnut dumplings were chestnuts covered with cornmeal dough, shaped into a ball, rolled in corn shucks, tied on each end with a strip of shuck, and dropped into boiling water.

The Cherokees had many ways to eat corn. It was roasted, boiled, stewed, ground up, parched, popped, mixed with other vegetables and meat, and baked in many kinds of bread. Over half of the Indians' food was plant food. They favored deer meat and bear meat and caught fish with their bare hands.

They tapped maple sugar trees for sweetening. This, along with wild honey was used for trade. Scuppernong grapes, strawberries, huckleberries, gooseberries, crab apples, and persimmons were staples of their diet in the summer months. Persimmons were used with the corn to make a slightly sweet, cakelike bread.

There was one Cherokee delicacy Ma never tasted—they had a fond-ness for roasted wasp larvae. Finding a new wasp nest just before the young were hatched, they'd take a small stick and remove the white larvae and roast them over an open fire. It was considered an act of bravery to steal a nest from an angry swarm of wasps.

In the early 1900s it was still common for an Indian man to have more than one wife. Ma knew several families where there were three wives for one husband. The census taker said he had found one man with six wives. Two seemed enough for most men.

After Ma had won the friendship and respect of the Cherokee women, they began to share their legends with her. One woman told her:

At one time all living things were in the sky, on the sky rock, and this was before the world was made. All the animals could understand man; and man could understand them. Then man dishonored the privilege and was striken deaf to the talk of animals and birds. The Great One who was over the sky rock punished man so that he could only understand the talk of his own kind.

Ma loved to hear these stories. She had great admiration for the Indians and said you could learn patience from them. They never hurried with anything. They knew it took time for the giant white oak to grow from a tiny acorn. There was nothing man could do to rush the growth of the seed planted in the ground. Time meant nothing to them. Man must wait for some things to happen. Worry and work could only accomplish so much; the rest was left to the Great One in the sky.

(November 25, 1944–)

The daughter of a homemaker and a farmer, Kathryn Stripling Byer grew up in southwest Georgia. She graduated from Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia, in 1966 with a B.A., and earned her M.F.A. in 1968 at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, where she studied with Allen Tate, Fred Chappell, and Robert Watson. While there, she won the Academy of American Poets Student Prize for the University of North Carolina system.

“Most of my poetry is rooted in the earth of two poetic landscapes,” Byer explains, “each with its own particular voice and rhythm. One is the flatlands of Georgia, where I was born and grew up [in Camilla]. The other is the mountains of western North Carolina and Tennessee…. If the Deep South is a dusty plain haunted by childhood, these mountains are a crazy quilt of trails haunted by women's voices.” Byer describes the particular influence of her paternal grandmother, born in the Blue Ridge, who told her stories of belonging there and wanting to be there when she died. A persona named Alma speaks to Byer as a poet and “seems, in some ancestral way, to be speaking as a kinswoman, harking me back to those grandmothers and great-grandmothers whose stories I grew up hearing.” Her 1983 chapbook,
Alma
, reveals the importance of women's voices, as does much of her other work.

For
The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest
, Byer received a 1986 citation from the Associated Writing Programs Award Series.
Wildwood Flower
received the 1992 Lamont Award from the Academy of American Poets. Byer has also received the Anne Sexton Poetry Prize (1982) and the Thomas Wolfe Award (1992). She has received writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the North Carolina Arts Council. Her collection
Black Shawl
is dedicated to novelist Lee Smith and the late photographer Sharon Anglin Kuhne, a native of Kentucky. It was selected for the Roanoke-Chowan Award and the Brockman-Campbell Award.
Catching Light
won the 2003 Southeast Booksellers Award in Poetry. Composer Harold Schiffman has set
Wildwood Flower
to music in a cantata titled
Alma
, commissioned by the Hungarian National Symphony.

She served on the faculty of the M.F.A. Writing Program at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro in 1995 and as Poet-in-Residence at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina, from 1990 to 1999. In 2001, she received the North Carolina Award in Literature.

Poetry:
Catching Light
(2002),
Evelyn
(1999),
Black Shawl
(1998),
Wildwood Flower
(1992),
The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest
(1986),
Alma
(1983),
Search Party
(1979).
Selected essays:
“Deep Water,” in
Bloodroot
(1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 62–70. “Turning the Windlass at the Well: Fred Chappell's Early Poetry,” in
Dream Garden: The Poetic Vision of Fred Chappell
(1997), ed. Patrick Bizzaro, 88–96. “The Wind Passing Through,” in
Writing Fiction and Poetry
[Boson Books online, an e-book], ed. Sally Sullivan (1995).

Contemporary Authors
(1994), Vol. 142, 56–57. Joyce Dyer, “Kathryn Stripling Byer,” in
Bloodroot
, 61. Robert E. Hosmer Jr. “Poetry Roundup” [review of
WildwoodFlower\ America
(13 November 1993), 17–18. “Kathryn Stripling Byer Issue,”
Iron Mountain Review
Vol. 18 (spring 2002). Ann F. Richman, “Singing Our Hearts Away: The Poetry of Kathryn Stripling Byer,” in
Her Words
(2002), ed. Felicia Mitchell, 38–48.

from
Wildwood Flower
(1992)

I hoe thawed ground
with a vengeance. Winter has left
my house empty of dried beans
and meat. I am hungry

and now that a few buds appear
on the sycamore, I watch the road
winding down this dark mountain
not even the mule can climb
without a struggle. Long daylight

and nobody comes while my husband
traps rabbits, chops firewood, or
walks away into the thicket. Abandoned
to hoot owls and copperheads,

I begin to fear sickness. I wait
for pneumonia and lockjaw. Each month
I brew squaw tea for pain.
In the stream where I scrub my own blood
from rags, I see all things flow
down from me into the valley.

Once I climbed the ridge
to the place where the sky
comes. Beyond me the mountains continued
like God. Is there no place to hide
from His silence? A woman must work

else she thinks too much. I hoe
this earth until I think of nothing
but the beans I will string,
the sweet corn I will grind into meal.

We must eat. I will learn
to be grateful for whatever comes to me.

from
Wildwood Flower
(1992)

Under the thin flannel nightgown,
my daughter's ribs: frail
harp I stroke
as if I might make some lovely sound
of those bones. At my breast

she would cling to the nipple,
my milk like a sudden thaw straining
the downspout let down, oh
the stony earth blossomed, I saw
my pots brimming, my skirts full
of apples. I rocked her to sleep
singing, “Little bird,
little bird under my wing.” Hear

my voice crack! I cough
and keep silent. Now she is the one
in this house who sings, crooning
like wind in the chimney. My sweet songs
have all blown away,
one by one, down the mountain.

from
Wildwood Flower

This red hair
I braid while she
sits by the cookstove
amazes her. Where
did she get hair the color
of wildfire, she wants to know,
pulling at strands of it
tangled in boar-bristles.
I say from Sister, God knows
where she is, and before
her my grandmother you
can't remember because
she was dead by the time
you were born, though you hear
her whenever I sing,
every song handed down
from those sleepless nights
she liked to sing through
till she had no time
left for lying awake
in the darkness and talking
to none save herself.
And yet, that night
I sat at her deathbed
expecting pure silence,
she talked until dawn
when at last her voice
failed her. She thumbed out
the candle between us
and lifted her hand
to her hair as if what
blazed a lifetime might still
burn her fingers. Yes,
I keep a cinder of it
in my locket I'll show you
as soon as I'm done telling
how she brought up from
the deep of her bedclothes
that hairbrush you're holding
and whispered, “You
might as well take it.”