Listen Here (48 page)

(May 31, 1935–)

A native of Norfolk, Virginia, Jeanne McDonald graduated from the College of William and Mary with a B.A. in English and had dreams of being a writer. When some of her early stories were rejected, she settled for occasional writing, coupled with marriage, motherhood, and a career teaching high school English. After raising her three children, she returned to the work force as an editor for the University of Tennessee's Center for Business and Economic Research in Knoxville, Tennessee.

When McDonald signed up for a creative writing class taught by novelist Alan Cheuse at the University of Tennessee, all of her old dreams resurfaced. “I couldn't stop writing,” recalls McDonald. “I stayed up until one or two in the morning, and took notes wherever I was—on the backs of grocery lists or sales receipts. All these stories that had been building for years just came out.”

In 1989, she won the Alex Haley Literary Fellowship, and in 1995 she was a finalist for the Faulkner Prize. Her stories have appeared in several anthologies, including
Worlds in our Words: Contemporary American Women Writers
(1996) and
Homeworks
(1996). McDonald and her second husband, journalist Fred Brown, have collaborated on two nonfiction works,
Growing Up Southern: How the South Shapes Its Writers
, and
The Serpent Handlers: Three Families and Their Faith.
Her first novel,
Water Dreams
, is to be published in 2003 by the University Press of Mississippi.

“The settings for my stories are often the East Coast,” says McDonald, “but the special rhythms of the Appalachian language, and the unabashed humility and humor of the people have drawn me to write more and more about this region.”

In the following excerpt from her essay “Up the Hill toward Home,” McDonald relates her experiences as a volunteer with a mental health program that assisted patients in gaining independence.

Novel:
Water Dreams
(2003).
Nonfiction:
The Serpent Handlers: Three Famdies and Their Faith
(2000), co-author with Fred Brown.
Growing Up Southern: How the South Shapes Its Writers
(1997), co-author with Fred Brown.
Autobiographical essay:
“Fantasy Meets Reality: Ah, the glamour of a book tour,”
Metro Pulse
[Knoxville, TN] (31 August 2000), 23, 30.

Jenny Nash, “You Never Know” [Interview / profile],
Tennessee Alumnus
(spring 1996), 29–31.

from Up the Hill toward Home

This is a story I've needed to tell for a long time, one that has rolled around in my mind for years now. In many ways it seems like a sad story, but finally I have realized that it has as happy an ending as possible under the circumstances, that it is really a saga of bravery and resilience and just plain determination. It's the story of Mildred Hale, a woman who kept fighting for her life under the most adverse circumstances—parents killed when she was a child, mental breakdown in young adulthood, thirty years in a state mental institution, and then, in the last twenty years of her life the slow, late blooming of the inner woman she had always been meant to be. But there wasn't enough time to reclaim the first sixty years of her life.

Mildred died in 1996, at the age of 84, having lived a long life, some might say, but one that was virtually lost to her because, for most of it, she lived under the influence of numbing medications, terrifying electroshock therapy, and nightmarish phobias. At the end of her life, she lived alone, and that's how she died. Alone. Knowing how frightened she must have been, I've asked myself over and over if I could have done something to save her. I remember my telephone ringing just once that night, in the small dark hours. I didn't realize until a couple of days later that it must have been Mildred.

Mildred was what some people would call a “character.” Anyone who saw her walking unsteadily along the street, wearing her polyester dresses and Indian moccasins, with her tightly-waved hair and an overabundance of bright and glittering costume jewelry, would think her odd, to say the least. But to me she was a heroine, because in a sense she was symbolic of millions of people in this country who are mentally ill, whose everyday lives are mired in fear, anxiety, and paranoia, and who, like Mildred, find even the simplest everyday acts painful—even impossible—to perform. Mildred was afraid to look anyone directly in the eye, as if in surrendering herself that way, she would somehow be swept away. She was frightened of new people, new places. She refused even to meet my new husband. And because she feared going to a beauty salon, for fifteen years I gave her home permanents in her apartment, twice a year—June and December. That was her schedule, not mine. Always, on those occasions, she would press a five- or ten-dollar bill into my hand for payment. When I gave it back, she would swear by “hell's fire” in her gravelly, cigarette-tainted voice that she would never speak to me again if I didn't take it. Of course she didn't mean it.

Mildred lived in a squalid apartment with hand-me-down furniture because her Social Security income couldn't buy her anything better. As her eyesight failed, the place became filthy because she couldn't see to clean. Sometimes church volunteers came in and washed floors and curtains and struggled with stains in the bathroom, but finally, they seemed to give up. Roaches, unnoticed by Mildred, scurried boldly in her refrigerator, and at the end of each of my visits, she would insist I take something home for the children. She would reach into the refrigerator and give me uncovered pieces of cake or pie, which I accepted so as not to injure her feelings, but tossed into the garbage once I got home. When mice invaded her apartment, Mildred stuffed steel wool under the molding to keep them out. Plants died on her windowsills and she didn't notice. Friends did her washing, and once I offered to pay for maids to clean her apartment, but she didn't want strangers there, and anyway, they would probably have left immediately when they saw the odds they would be facing.

Over the years Mildred gained the confidence to walk to the bank and the grocery store, where she made friends who helped her balance her account or find things on grocery shelves, and there was always someone in the neighborhood who would notice her struggling up the hill toward home and stop to offer her a ride.

There were happy moments, too. She loved her cigarettes, Moon Pies, Goo-Goo Clusters, chocolate-covered cherries, watching “The Price Is Right” on television, and listening to Red Foley and country music on the radio. She cherished letters and cards from friends and relatives back in West Tennessee, and she loved it when I brought my children to visit. This was Mildred's life, and it mirrored the anguished existence of millions of others like her, not only in East Tennessee, but in the entire country. Like Mildred, most of these victims have to rely on the mercy of social services, state and federal programs, and public agencies. Theirs is a life of waiting for help—in hospitals, in offices of doctors who serve the indigent, and in city and county agencies, always at the mercy of time and the people who are meant to assist them.

I first met Mildred back in 1977, when the government was slashing federal expenditures and one of the solutions was to dump people out of state mental hospitals and into the unforgiving streets of mainstream American life. Mental health officials tried to alleviate some of the trauma by setting up a program called “Community Friends,” which called on citizens to help patients become acclimated to living in an open and unprotected environment—in short, the real world. The plan was to help them find housing, teach them how to open bank accounts and write checks, and show them how to buy groceries—basically, to set up a support system to which they could turn for help.

The first meeting for volunteers was held in one of the main buildings at Eastern State Hospital in Knoxville, now called Lakeshore Mental Health Institute. The men and women who showed up that day practiced role playing (I'm still not sure why) and discussed problems the exiles might face outside the environment they were so accustomed to. But nothing prepared us for the tour through the upper floors of the state mental hospital. In that brief walk-through, I experienced an immediate realization of the pain and frustration that mental illness can create not only for patients, but for their families as well. We walked through areas where glassy-eyed men and women constantly shuffled up and down the halls, mumbling to themselves; we entered huge wards where elderly or unmanageable patients were tied to chairs with sheets, and we passed dismal rooms with gray, padded walls and floors, rooms of the last resort. Then, suddenly, I was jolted by a male patient who leaned into my back and pushed his face into my hair. “Don't be afraid,” said one of the psychologists leading the tour, “he loves the smell of shampoo.” No wonder. The building was permeated by the odors of urine, disinfectants, cooking grease, and—you somehow realize this instinctively—the unmistakable odor of fear. Part of that fear was my own. It was impossible to walk into such a place and not be afraid, not be sickened, not be traumatized by a strange man pushing his face into your hair.

I had a lot to learn.

When we left the building, the psychologists warned us about patients walking in the streets of the hospital complex. “Don't worry,” said these jaded caregivers, “they'll move when they see you coming. They're crazy, but they're not stupid.” I gradually came to learn that this seemingly careless attitude was a protective shield the doctors used to keep themselves from becoming overcome with despair at the emotional magnitude of their jobs.

My initial meeting with Mildred and three other women who were to begin their outside lives together was more frustrating than traumatizing. It took place in one of the bungalows on the hospital grounds. Those who lived in the bungalows were the luckier patients. To a certain extent, they had learned to take care of themselves—bodily, anyway, although their medication was overseen by an orderly. They had a certain amount of freedom; some of them could even ride the bus in to town. All had some sort of job in the hospital—waiting tables, cooking, cleaning, or washing dishes. They could watch television and smoke—a precious privilege and vice that Mildred had picked up in the hospital. She continued to chain smoke up until the very day of her death, and I was convinced that she would die by setting herself or her rooms on fire. Partly because of her poor vision and partly because of her preoccupation with something I could never see, Mildred always forgot the ash at the end of the cigarette, which grew longer and longer, until finally it surrendered to gravitational pull, dropped and burned yet another hole in her skirt, her sofa, her bed, or the battered secondhand coffee table in her living room. Once, she saw a television program about lung cancer, and at eighty-one or eighty-two, she asked me did I reckon she would die from smoking. I told her no, that if she was going to get lung cancer, she'd surely have contracted it by now, and though I feared her death by fire, I figured that she had had few enough pleasures in this world anyway without taking away her cigarettes. Let her keep smoking.

The meeting with the four women that day was tense, because as they say in the movies, what we had there was a failure to communicate. All of them were frightened about being displaced from the safe and familiar surroundings of the hospital and their now accustomed routines. The women were mostly quiet, and, as was her custom, Mildred exhibited her paranoia by sitting off by herself in a corner of the room, with her back to the wall. She never made eye contact with anyone, not for years, and the first time she looked me directly in the face, I went home rejoicing.

(September 12, 1956–)

Karen Salyer McElmurray was born in eastern Kentucky, “where my writing began,” she says. “When I was nine years old, I'd visit my grandmother in Johnson County during the summers and I became friends with Vicky Cantrell [now Hayes], the girl across the road. She played twelve-string guitar and wrote songs and poems. I wanted to do these things too, so I began to write poetry. Later, after I grew up in Frankfort, Kentucky, in the central part of the state, Johnson County remained my spiritual and emotional homeplace…. When I close my eyes and think of ‘home,' I think of my grandmother's house…. When I dream of houses and home, that's the place my subconscious takes me, the place for which I long.”

After earning her B.A. in philosophy and literature at Berea College in 1980, McElmurray earned an M.F.A. in fiction at the University of Virginia in 1986, an M.A. in contemporary fiction writing at Hollins University in 1989, and a Ph.D. in American literature at the University of Georgia in 1997. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the North Carolina Arts Council. She is currently a writing professor at Berry College in Georgia. “I have also worked as a cook, a landscaper, and a waitress,” she said. “All my lives have made my writing life.”

Her first novel,
Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven
, is set largely in Inez, a real eastern Kentucky mining town, fictionalized as the home of Ruth Blue Wallen, her husband Earl, and their son Andrew, characters who are searching for God, love, and redemption.

She describes her forthcoming memoir,
Mother of the Disappeared: An Appalachian Birth Mother's Journey
, as “my own story as a mother who relinquished her child to adoption” and as “also my own mother's story.” In 2002, McElmurray was reunited with her son, who was born in 1973; she discovered that his name is Andrew. The excerpt is the opening scenes from her memoir.

Novel:
Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven
(1999).
Memoir:
Mother of the Disappeared: An Appalachian Birth Mother's Journey
(2003).
Essay:
“Minimalism and Maximalism in the Creative Writing Classroom,”
Creating Fiction: Instruction and Insights from the Teachers of Associated Writing Programs
, ed. Julie Checkoway (March 1999). In
Leaving the Nest: Mothers and Daughters on the Art of Saying Goodbye
(2003), ed. Marilyn Kallet.

Reviews of
Strange Birds in the Tree of Heaven: Atlanta Journal-Constitution
(14 Nov. 1999).
Chicago Tribune
(30 Jan. 2000), sect. 14: 5.
Lambda Book Report
(Feb. 2000), 18.
Women's Review of Books
(July 2000).