Listen Here (29 page)

(March 28, 1909–June 1, 1979)

A native of Arkansas, Janice Holt Giles attended the University of Arkansas, as well as Transylvania University in Lexington, Kentucky. Her first marriage ended in divorce in 1939, and in 1945 she married Henry Giles, a Kentuckian whose family had settled in the state during the eighteenth century. The couple made their home on the Giles family farm near Knifely, Kentucky.

A prolific writer, Giles contributed short stories to
McCall's, Good Housekeeping
, and
Woman's Day.
Her first book,
The Enduring Hills
, was published in 1950. For the next decade and a half, Giles produced nearly a book a year, both fiction and nonfiction.

Her most popular works were a series of extensively researched novels about the American frontier. The first in the series,
The Kentuckians
, depicts the struggles of the earliest settlers who pushed westward into the Kentucky wilderness through the Cumberland Gap. It was followed by
Hannah Fowler
, which examined the harsh reality of frontier women's lives.
The Believers
depicted the communal life of Kentucky's Shakers.

Giles wrote, “If I only enjoyed writing these books as much as I do the research all would be well, but alas, the writing is a heavy piece of work.”

Two autobiographical works,
A Little Better Than Plumb
and
Forty Acres and No Mule
, detail life on the Giles's remote ridge farm. One reviewer declared that
Forty Acres and No Mule
did more “to bring alive the section of country now known as Appalachia than a half a dozen surveys.”

In 1996, the Giles Foundation was established to preserve Giles's literary legacy and to restore her log home. The Foundation plans to preserve the home as a museum and a writer's retreat.

In the following scene from
Hannah Fowler
, Hannah and her injured father, Samuel, have been befriended in the Kentucky wilderness by a woodsman named Tice who happened upon them. Because of the threat of Indian attack, Hannah and Tice take turns standing guard through the night.

Novels:
Act of Contrition
(2001),
Shady Grove
(1978),
The Believers
(1976),
Wellspring
(1975),
The Kinta Years
(1973),
Miss Willie
(1971),
Six-Horse Hitch
(1971),
The Great Adventure: A Novel
(1966),
Run Me a River
(1964),
Voyage to Santa Fe
(1962),
Savannah
(1961),
Johnny Osage
(1960),
The Land Beyond the Mountains
(1958),
Hannah Fowler
(1956),
Hill Man
(1954),
The Plum Thicket
(1954),
The Kentuckians
(1953),
Tara's Healing
(1951),
The Enduring Hills
(1950).
Nonfiction:
The G.I. Journal of Sgt. Giles
(1965).
Autobiography:
A Little Better Than Plumb
(1962),
Forty Acres and No Mule
(1952).

Contemporary Authors
(1967), Vols. 1–4, 368.
Contemporary Authors
, New Revision Series, Vol. 3, 228. Bonnie Cox, “Kentucky Women Writers: Lost, Forgotten, Overlooked, and Acclaimed,”
Belles Lettres
(spring 1991), 12–14. Dianne Watkins Stuart,
Janice Holt Giles: A Writer's Life
(1998). Dianne Watkins, “Foreword,”
Hannah Fowler
(1992). Dianne Watkins,
Hello, Janice
(1992).

from Chapter 3

It was black dark when she awakened. She rolled over and edged to the front of the lean-to, looked at the sky. She judged it was near midnight. Certainly the dawn was several hours off yet. She shivered as she crawled out of the warm bed and reached back for the blanket to wrap about her shoulders, yawning. Tice heard her and called out softly in the darkness, “You needn't to git up.”

She found her gun and made her way over to him. “I'd ruther to,” she said. “If you're aimin' to hunt in the mornin', you'll need a mite of rest yerself.”

He grunted and she could see a blur of movement by the trees. He was standing. “If they's e'er trouble,” he told her, “hit'll come from acrost the river. I don't look fer it, understand. Hit's jist best to take keer. You got yer gun?”

“Yes.”

“Well, then…. Yer pa ain't stirred. Reckon that rum purely knocked him out.”

“Hit must of. The sleep'll do him good.”

“Yes…well, come daylight, if I don't stir, call me. If
he
c'n stand bein' moved, we'd best make camp further away from the river.

“Ain't you aimin' on takin' the raft on up the river?”

“No, ma'am. That would be the last thing I'd aim on doin'. We'll move an' camp an' wait till yer pa c'n travel. Then we'll strike out through the woods. Well, I'll lay awhile now.”

Hannah settled herself by the tree. She was fully awake now, felt fresh and rested. There was an open spot in the trees just over the camp and by leaning her head back and resting it against the trunk of the tree she could see the stars, and a little, pale disk of moon off in the west. You could tell, she thought, the time of night by the stars and moon, when the night was clear. And you could tell, too, that the winter was over and summer coming on. They moved, the stars did, changing places in the sky with the hours, and changing places as the seasons passed them by. She thought about it, wondered about the stars and moon, wondered why they'd been put there to shine in the night…why they moved. It wasn't a thing she could study out, though. It was past e'er
human
body's knowing, she guessed. There were some things that couldn't be studied out.

She felt a breath of wind on her cheek. There, now…wind was one of them. What was it? Where did it come from? What moved it unseen around the world and across the land? It would stir through the night, ruffle the leaves and shake them, bend the limbs—but when the dawn was near, when the dark was just beginning to lift, not light yet but just ready to be, it would quieten as if it listened for the sun. As still as death it would be then, at that time just before the light streaked into the sky, so still that, if you were stirring then, you could hear your own breath coming and going in your throat, and hear your own heart beat. The way of wind…it went queer and odd to a human body.

And the way of rain, blowing up in the clouds, the clouds splitting and pouring it down. She named over to herself the things she could in no way study out…wind, the moon and stars, rain, sunlight, clouds, storm, the fall of rivers down the land, the rise and flow of water. There was a power of things, she told herself, no human body could ever know the straight of. You could, in time and with study, know the ways of birds and animals, and even folks. They had life inside them, they all bled and their hearts beat and they breathed in the air. One way or another they all moved, flew or walked, swam or ran. They all died, too. The sun, now, and the stars, the wind and the rain, the water in the rivers, those things went on forever. How could it be, she wondered, that a thing that lived should come to the end of its living, and those things that had no life in them should go on forever? “Hit ort,” she told herself, “to be the other way round, looks like.” Then she laughed, to think of the sun and stars and moon dying. “The folks would die fer sart'n, then,” she said.

She never talked about such thoughts as these. Once when she was a child she had tried to tell Samuel about the sound the branch back of the house made, running over the rocks. It went, she had told him, like singing, real soft. “You c'n hear the words, I reckon,” Samuel had said, grinning at her.

“I kin,” she had told him stoutly. “Hit's a singin' ‘Go to sleep, go to sleep, go to sleep.'”

Sam had not laughed then. Sternly he had bade her to keep such foolish talk to herself. “Hit ain't nothin' but water runnin' over the rocks,” he'd said. “Don't go gittin' foolish fancies in yer mind, Hannah. They'll make you go quare in the head…folks'll think you're tetched, an' they'll mistrust you.”

So she had never again named the things she thought to Samuel, or to anyone else. But she was always thinking them, just the same. It did no harm to
think
, as far as she could see.

Samuel moved in his sleep, stirred and muttered, threw one hand from under the blanket. She watched until he had settled, her thinking distracted, and when he was quiet again she thought about moving camp tomorrow…today, now. Wondered where Tice would pick. Wondered if Samuel could be moved. Thought of the problems and shook her head. Below, she could hear the liquid sound of the river, running shallow around the tongue of the beach. She smiled in the dark. In spite of Samuel, running water
did
make a singing sound.

(June 7, 1943–)

Nikki Giovanni was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, into a close-knit African American family. Although her parents moved the family to Cincinnati when Giovanni was an infant, she returned frequently to Tennessee to be with her grandparents, and she attended Austin High School in Knoxville.

Giovanni entered Fisk University in Nashville at the age of seventeen but was expelled after her first semester for leaving campus without permission. She returned to Fisk in 1964 and became an activist, leading two hundred students in a demonstration that forced the reinstatement of a campus chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. In 1967, she graduated, magna cum laude, with a B.A. in history.

After attending the University of Pennsylvania's School of Social Work, Giovanni enrolled in Columbia University's M.F.A. program for creative writing but left without completing her degree after publishing her first book of poetry in 1968 entitled
Black Feeling, Black Talk.
Hailed as a unique voice, Giovanni's revolutionary rhetoric won her many fans.

Over the years, Giovanni's poetic vision has grown to include themes of love and creativity alongside those of anger and revolution. Her son, Thomas, was born in 1969; since then, many of her works, beginning with
Spin a Soft Black Song
, have been for young readers. Once, when questioned about this transformation, Giovanni replied, “Only a fool doesn't change.”

She is the author of numerous books of poetry and essays, holds honorary doctorates from more than a dozen institutions (including Smith College and Indiana University), and has been given the keys to more than three dozen cities, including New York City. Giovanni is the first African American University Distinguished Professor at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia, an honor bestowed upon only one-half of one percent of the faculty. She is “Hokie proud.”

In her essay “Griots” from the collection
Racism 101
, Giovanni examines the interplay of family and memory. The term “griot” refers to an African elder who preserves a community's oral history.

Poetry:
Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea
(2002),
The Love Poems of Nikki Giovanni
(1997),
The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni
(1996),
Those Who Ride the Night Winds
(1983),
Vacation Time: Poems for Children
(1980),
Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day
(1978),
The Women and the Men
(1975),
Ego-tripping and Other Poems for Young People
(1973),
My House: Poems
(1972),
Spin a Soft Black Song: Poems for Children
(1971),
Re:Creation
(1970),
Black Feeling, Black Talk
(1968).
Essays:
Racism 101
(1994),
Sacred Cows—and Other Edibles
(1988),
Gemini
[autobiography] (1971).
Autobiographical essay:
“400 Mulvaney Street,” in
Bloodroot
(1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 133–39.
Nonfiction:
A Poetic Equation: Conversations Between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker
(1974),
A Dialogue: James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni
(1973).
Editor of anthologies:
Grand Fathers: Reminiscences, Poems, Recipes and Photos of the Keepers of Our Traditions
(1999),
Shimmy Shimmy Shimmy Like My Sister Kate: Looking at the Harlem Renaissance Through Poems
(1996),
Grandmothers: Poems, Reminiscences, and Short Stories About the Keepers of Our Traditions
(1994),
Appalachian Elders: A Warm Hearth Sampler
(1991),
Night Comes Softly
(1970).
Illustrated poems for children:
The Genie in the Jar
(1996),
The Sun is So Quiet
(1996),
Knoxville, Tennessee
(1994).

Alex Batman, “Nikki Giovanni,”
Dictionary of Literary Biography: American Poets Since World War II
(1980), Vol. 5, 286–89.
Contemporary Authors
(1978), Vols. 29–32, 237–38. Joyce Dyer, “Nikki Giovanni,” in
Bloodroot
, 132. Virginia C. Fowler, “And This Poem Recognizes That: Embracing Contrarieties in the Poetry of Nikki Giovanni,” in
Her Words
(2002), ed. Felicia Mitchell, 112–35. Joanne V. Gabbin, “Giovanni, Nikki,”
The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States
(1995), 349–50.
Great Women Writers
(1994), Vol. 2, 135–37. Lillie P. Howard, “Nikki Giovanni,”
American Women Writers
(1980), Vol. 2, 135–37.
Something About the Author
(1981), Vol. 24, 120–21.