Listen Here (26 page)

(October 30, 1932–)

A native of eastern Kentucky, Sidney Saylor Farr is a poet, an essayist, an editor, and a writer of short fiction. A graduate of Berea College (B.A., 1980), Farr grew up near Pine Mountain, Kentucky, an experience she shares in her books,
More Than Moonshine: Appalachian Recipes and Recollections
and
Table Talk: Appalachian Meals and Memories.

She married at the age of fifteen, in part, she says, because the nearest public high school was fifteen miles away and her family didn't have the money to send her to boarding school. Determined to graduate, Farr took courses by mail and eventually earned her diploma.

In the early 1960s, Farr, her husband, Leon Lawson, and their two sons moved to Indianapolis, then to Berea, Kentucky, where she earned a degree in English. She and Lawson divorced in 1967; in 1970 she married Grover Vernon Farr, a counselor.

Farr was the associate editor of
Mountain Life & Work
from 1964 to 1969. In 1976, she became the assistant to the Special Collections librarian at Berea College and served as the editor
of Appalachian Heritage
from 1985 until her retirement in 1999. Farr's groundbreaking annotated bibliography,
Appalachian Women
, was published in 1981 by the University Press of Kentucky, and it remains an indispensable guide to the region's literature.

Farr's autobiographical essay “Shall We Gather in the Kitchen” appears in her collection
More Than Moonshine: Appalachian Recipes and Recollections.

Nonfiction:
Tom Sawyer and the Spiritual Whirlwind
(2000),
Spoon Bread Cookbook
(1997),
Table Talk: Appalachian Meals and Memories
(1995),
What Tom Sawyer Learned From Dying
(1993),
More Than Moonshine: Appalachian Recipes and Recollections
(1983),
Bered's Appalachian Ballad Collectors: James Watt Raine, John F. Smith, Katherine Jackson French, and Gladys V. Jameson
(1980).
Poetry:
Headwaters
(1995).
Bibliography:
Appalachian Women: An Annotated Bibliography
(1981).
Autobiographical essay:
“Women Born to Be Strong,” in
Bloodroot
(1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 112–19.

Contemporary Authors
, Vol. 114, 154. Joyce Dyer, “Sidney Saylor Farr,” in
Bloodroot
, 111.

I read the other day that a cook in an old-time country kitchen walked at least 350 miles a year preparing three meals a day. My mother, grandmother, and Granny Brock, as well as other women in the Appalachian Mountains, probably walked three times that distance as they scoured the garden rows and hunted the hills to get food. They did not have cash to buy much, and the corner grocery was miles away. They did not own a cookbook among them, just ancient knowledge and skillful hands, and an instinct born out of desperate need to feed their hungry children.

Families ate what they grew on the place or found in the hills. Busy from dawn to dusk, buying nothing that could be raised, cooked or handmade at home, Mother worked as her mother and grandmother worked before her. Father did outside chores, using handmade tools and methods that Grandpa and his father used.

In the years before and during the Second World War, the hills had plenty of huckleberries, blackberries, raspberries, elderberries, mulberries, strawberries—until timber and coal companies came and stripped the land. There were both orchard-grown and wild fruits: apples, plums, grapes, persimmons, and pawpaws. The trees in the mountains produced black and white walnuts, hazelnuts, beechnuts, and hickory nuts. Father hunted rabbits, possums, coons, squirrels, and groundhogs. He brought in wild ducks, geese, grouse, and quail. There were rock bass, trout, catfish, and other varieties of fish in the streams and rivers. Wild bees swarmed and settled, reswarmed and settled again, until numerous colonies were to be found in hollow trees. The honey was taken for use on the table, the bees put into new bee gums to start all over. The men planted cane and made molasses. They raised crops of white and sweet potatoes, squash, pumpkin, corn, and beans.

Each little homestead had its cornfield, its patch of cane, and its bee gums (hives). Somewhere along the creek there would be a watermill where corn was ground into meal. And somewhere in the hillside thickets there would be moonshine stills where corn was bottled, sold, and drunk.

The kitchen has been central to my life as a mountain woman. I was born and raised in Appalachia—on Stoney Fork in southeastern Kentucky. Straight Creek, one of many creeks and small rivers in eastern Kentucky, has its beginning on Pine Mountain near where Harlan and Leslie Counties join. For thirty miles or more it is fed by smaller streams and gets deeper and wider before it is lost in the Cumberland River at Pineville. Stoney Fork is one of the little creeks running into Straight Creek. From where it merges with the latter up to its headwaters at Peach Orchard, Stoney Fork is about ten miles long.

…

Wilburn and Rachel, my parents, lived on Coon Branch until they had three children; I was the firstborn. When I was five they moved a mile below the mouth of Stoney Fork and the one-room school we children later attended. Father bought logs and lumber at Sonny LeFever's sawmill and built a house in the center of an old orchard near a sulfur spring. Pine Mountain rose up steeply from our back yard.

Pine Mountain is one hundred miles long, running through three counties in Kentucky and on into Tennessee. It is filled with limestone caves and covered with scrub trees. A footpath ran up in front of our house across the mountain to the Cumberland River side. A cliff hugged the highest peak near the footpath, and from a crevice a pine grew, gnarled and twisted from endless winds. I loved to stand or sit on the rock, feel the sun on my face, the wind blowing through my hair, and listen to the sound in the pine branches. Far below, Straight Creek was a crooked silver ribbon and the buildings seemed like doll houses scattered along the road. On the Cumberland side, the railroad played a steel counterpoint to the river. Long trains filled to overflowing with Harlan County coal shuttled along to Pineville and points north and east, blowing their whistles at every small crossing.

When the train whistle sounded clearly on our side of the mountain, Mother said, “Children, it's going to rain.” Late that afternoon or early the next day it would cloud up and rain. I never questioned the relationship of the train whistle to the rain until I moved to Indianapolis in 1960. We lived near a railroad yard across White River in West Indianapolis. For the first week or so every time I heard a train I thought, “It's going to rain,” but the rain did not come. Finally I stopped expecting rain every time I heard a train. Mountain customs die hard.

Mountain people are criticized for leaving the industrial cities where they live and work and heading home almost every weekend. What people who live in today's transient society don't seem to understand about us mountain folks is that it's possible to put one's roots down so deeply they cannot be satisfactorily transplanted anywhere else. People who have lost an arm or a leg complain that they still feel phantom pain. I used to fancy it was that way for us mountain people. Take us anywhere in the world and there will always be pain in the missing part buried so deeply in hillside soil. Mountain people have a strong sense of place; they know where they belong.

It is always a joy to me to leave cities behind, to travel through the Bluegrass section of Kentucky and on to the hills. As the mountains unfold for me I have a feeling of belonging, of being protected, of wanting to settle down and stay forever.

My friend Jane Wilson, an East Tennessee woman, says it well: “I can walk back home from just about anywhere.” She and I both have a sense of place—a knowing that if all else fails, we can always walk back home and there will be space for us, and people who care about us.

from
Headwaters
(1995)

“Granny, is it gonna rain?”

“My bees worked in the clover early and late,
and the moon had a ring around it these past few nights.
There were red clouds in the sky this morning,
the wind turned tree-leaves underside over,
and redbirds called ‘wet, wet, wet' all day long.
That's a sure sign of rain,” she says.

“Granny, is it gonna snow a lot?”

“The woolly worms done give us their opinion,
and crickets're singing their lonesome winter song.
The cornshucks're thick and stiff this year,
and moss is growing on the north side of trees.
That's a sure sign of a bad winter,” she says.

“Granny, why's there so much trouble?”

“The east wind of trouble travels far and near,
and bad times come but they do go away.
Once I was younger in older times,
when a good day's work brought a good day's pay.
Back then was the dayburst,
now it's coming down dusky,
but it's not yet plumb dark in our land—
that's a sure sign,” she says.

from
Headwaters
(1995)

I know the mountains covered with snow,
and misty green of earth's awakening,
when they are drenched in summer storms,
painted with master colors
softened with Indian Summer smoke.

Mountains, so steady, and yet they change
when each determined morning climbs.
Some of night sneaks into hollows
but noonday sun blasts it out,
gold heat here but up there—trees.

I know the mountains when heat is gone
and sun challenges the regal night.
I know them when raindrops fall
and break, and wet the silver lichen;
and white mist tassels the trees.

Then dusky dark, its curtain silent;
the mountains grow star-ward
around us, and over us and
under. Even inside us.
Where do the mountains stop?

from
Headwaters
(1995)

Thank God for the mantling snow
He sends to caress the ravaged hills.
It covers the smell of the slag heap burning,
it hides the scars that mar the mountains,
and makes a shroud for murdered trees.
I wish the snow would never stop.

When father was a young boy
the mountains were like nurseries
for the creeks and the young rivers.
They were rich in green-gold bounty
and strong with wide black bones.
They held and nourished our people.

Now the people sit, slack-handed,
from chill, dark drawn to hopeless night.
They sit, dreamless and passive,
waiting for a sedative sleep
to come riding down on the snowfall—
I pray the snow will never stop.

(August 26, 1957–)

Nikky Finney is a founding member of the Affrilachian poets, a community-based group of Appalachian writers of African descent living in and around Lexington, Kentucky. Born in Conway, South Carolina, she is the only daughter of parents who both grew up on farms. Her mother, an elementary school teacher, grew up in Newberry County, South Carolina, and her father, a civil rights lawyer, grew up in Virginia. She was raised in South Carolina and graduated from Talladega College in Alabama.

Her poems have been published in a number of journals and anthologies, including
In Search of Color Everywhere, I Hear a Symphony
, and
Spirit and Flame.
She contributed to Kentucky's New Books for New Readers series, creating the stories in
Heartwood
for an adult literacy program. The author of two books of poetry,
On Wings Made of Gauze
and
Rice
, she has two books in progress: a collection of poetry,
The World is Round
, and her first novel. Finney received the Pen American Open Book Award in 1999.

Finney began teaching and writing in California, where she lived for nearly a decade. Since 1991, she has been a faculty member in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Kentucky. She frequently gives readings at schools, colleges, universities, and writers' workshops across the country.

Poetry:
Rice
(1995), On
Wings Made of Gauze
(1985).
Short stories:
Heartwood
(1997).
Autobiographical essay:
“Salt-Water Geechee Mounds,” in
Bloodroot
(1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 121–27.
Video:
Coal Black Voices: A Documentary
(2001).
Script:
For Posterity's Sake: The Story of Morgan and Marvin Smith
(PBS documentary, 1995).

Kwame Dawes, “Reading Rice: A Local Habitation and a Name,”
African American Review
31:2 (summer 1997), 269–79. Joyce Dyer, “Nikky Finney,” in
Bloodroot
, 120. Sally Lodge, review of
On Wings Made of Gauze, Publishers Weekly
228 (12 July 1985), 53. Louis McKee, review of
On Wings Made of Gauze, Library Journal
110(1 September 1985), 202.