Listen Here (58 page)

from
Counting the Sums
(1995)

In the days before air conditioning
we lay in the muggy dark
smelled our own sweat
no hope of sleep
while the fans roared
drowning the night chirp away.
In the next room my mother
lay swollen and weak
with her last child;
my father slept heavy as death
under a blanket of summer heat.

My childhood summers
are not memorable
just images
of swimming in coffee-colored water
sitting like a moth on the front steps
answering my neighbor's cattle call
riding and riding my bike
and long, long nights of heat
staring at the ceiling
trying to accept the idea of eternity
touching myself
fantasizing a life
where I was the star, a hero
not a secondrate extra.

And this:
the sound, an eerie sound
in the night six weeks
before my sister was born
of my mother crying in her bed.
How could my father not hear?
I heard no voice of comfort
I imagined his breath
steady as his will
her tears blown away by the fans.

On July 18, 1966
I learned this
about women and their crying:
tears belong to the nighttime
you must comfort yourself
your daughter will do her own weeping.

from
Counting the Sums
(1995)

Spending the days attending to bodily functions
our own and everyone else's
gives us a handicap.
Words crawl into the laundry basket
hide among the socks
circle and scream in the toilet
hang in the closet and beg
for freedom.
While my son warms in my arms
a line that could make me famous
leaps up in my face
spits and leaves by the back door.
I cannot throw down my baby
and chase into the air
I am too tired anyway,
too tired.
I dream words that have magic
I dream lines that make my heart
beat faster in the heat of recognition.
Today
a poem becomes a morning song
a psalm almost
but dies after a few verses
drowned in the everyday.
A lost poem swirling down
blurred like the face
of a childhood friend
lands on my doorstep.
In the morning
I open the door
and step on the poem.
Writhing, gasping words
try to cry out,
get off the page.
My children come to hover
while they watch my face
just watch and wait.

from
Counting the Sums
(1995)

I used to be a teacup
bone and gold-rimmed
thin-lipped and light
slim-handled
easy to hold.

Then I became a mug
heavy and practical
people warmed their hands on me
warm steam rising
scented the air
with home and good.

If I live I'll grow to be
a gravy boat
sailing around
smug and self-satisfied
filled with an imperfect, lumpy mixture
comforting and familiar
only brought out on special occasions.

from
October Dusk
(1987)

A skinny girl with cornstalk legs
and hair like straw
was mocked by her classmates
for her Goodwill clothes,
her self-pitying seriousness.
While they attended ballgames
and worshipped Max Factor,
she hid safely in her room
reading big thick books
full of questions
and very small print.
Kant, Freud, and Camus,
she still didn't understand
while the flames licked the posters off the wall
and the rug grew too warm for her feet.

At 16 she begged with adolescent fervor
for
THE ANSWER
until one Sunday afternoon,
the air wet with tears,
she said no to the easiest one.

It's a good thing—
for a curly-haired boy in overalls
with cat-gray eyes
and a wonderfully hard body
discovered her,
introduced her to the joy of unreserved excess
to a different kind of flames
convinced her
that it was not up to the 16-year-olds of the world
to answer the questions.

from
Appalachian Journal
(1997)

My students ask.
I only shake my head and stare at the floor.
I think:

He was a scratchy version
of “Cluck Old Hen” on a play-worn fiddle
with a touch of Hank Williams thrown in.

He was a cup of strong black coffee
and a dish of melting ice cream.

He was Rilke's evil twin.

He was the color brown and a throaty laugh.
He was fingers blunt as fenceposts
and wingtip shoes.

But this is poetic pretense that they would
confuse with profundity.
So I say,

Jim was his grandfather resouled.
He moved restless,
free and fluid in his own skin
as the old man's foxhounds,
plowed long, straight deep rows,
burned the ridges by moonlight,
waded hip deep in wild water by day,
walked always with his head down,
lived to fish, fished to live,
died too soon.

(December 8, 1922–)

The youngest of fourteen children, Jean Ritchie grew up surrounded by music. In the evenings, her family gathered on the porch of their farmhouse in Viper, Kentucky, to sing and to tell tales. Ritchie's father taught her how to play the lap dulcimer when she was only five years old.

Ritchie graduated from the University of Kentucky in 1946 with a degree in social work, then moved to New York City and worked in a settlement house, intending to return eventually to Kentucky to establish much-needed social services in her native state. While in New York, her music brought her to the attention of Alan Lomax, who was collecting recordings of folk artists for the Library of Congress.

Astonished by Ritchie's repertoire of more than three hundred traditional songs, Lomax not only recorded her but encouraged Ritchie to write a book about her musical childhood.
Singing Family of the Cumberlands
was published in 1955 and is still in print almost fifty years later. Said one Chicago critic, “Jean writes with such tenderness at times that one murmurs an apology for intruding on the family circle.”

Over the years, Ritchie has made numerous recordings and performed at folk festivals throughout the world with such artists as Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Doc Watson. In 1977, her album
None But One
was awarded the
Rolling Stone
Critic's Award. Her work is also featured on
Washington Square Memoirs
(2001), and
Contemporary Anthology of Music by Women
(1999).

She is known today, not only as a performer, but as an author, songwriter, and folklorist. Her many awards include a Fulbright, as well as two Honorary Doctors of Letters, one from the University of Kentucky and the other from Berea College. In 2002, the National Endowment for the Arts awarded Ritchie a National Heritage Fellowship: the Bess Lomax Hawes Award “for outstanding contributions as a ‘keeper of tradition.'” Ritchie divides her time between her home in Port Washington, New York, and a cabin in Viper, Kentucky.

What follows are the opening paragraphs of Ritchie's
Singing Family of the Cumberlands
.

Autobiography:
“The Song about the Story—The Story behind the Song,” in
Bloodroot
(1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 226–32.
Nonfiction:
Black Waters
(1983),
Jean Ritchie's Dulcimer People
(1975),
Apple Seeds & Soda Straws: Some Love Charms and Legends
(1965),
Folk Songs of the Southern Appalachians
(1965),
The Dulcimer Book
(1963),
Jean Ritchie's Celebration of Life, Her Songs…Her Poems
(1971).
Singing Family of the Cumberlands
(1955).
Selected recordings:
Mountain Born
(1999),
Kentucky Christmas
(1990),
Jean Ritchie and Doc Watson at Folk City
(1990),
None But One
(1977).

Beverly Boggs, “Religious Songs Remembered:
Sweet Rivers, Jean Ritchie,” Appalachian Journal
9:4 (summer 1982), 306–10. George Brosi, “New Books,” review of
Singing Family of the Cumberlands, Appalachian Heritage
17:1 (winter 1989), 72. Joyce Dyer, “Jean Ritchie,” in
Bloodroot
, 223. Loyal Jones, “Jean Ritchie, Twenty-Five Years After,”
Appalachian Journal
8:3 (spring 1981), 224–29.
Mountain Born: The Jean Ritchie Story
(Kentucky Educational Television [KET], 1996).

from Chapter One

I was born in Viper, Kentucky, in the Cumberland Mountains, on the eighth day of December 1922. I think I was a little of a surprise to my mother who had thought that if a woman had a baby in her fortieth year it would be her last. Mom had my brother Wilmer when she was forty, and she settled back to raise her thirteen young uns without any more interference. Then when she was forty-four, I came along.

It must have been hardest on Wilmer; he had himself all fixed to be the baby of the family for life. Mom says that the day I was born they found him, in the middle of all the excitement, away out behind the house all alone. He was leaning up against the old June-apple tree just crying his eyes out. He wouldn't tell what was the matter for a long time, but finally he snubbed and said that he never would get to sleep with Mommie no more.

My sisters laughed and made a great joke out of it, and shamed him and said that was a fine way to act when there was a pretty little sister in the house. But Mom told them to hush about it, and she told Wilmer to climb into the bed too. So that first night she slept with her girl babe and her boy babe and my Dad, all three.

Well, that was my introduction to this world, so they tell me, the way families will remember little funny things about a birth or a marrying or even a funeral, and tell about them a thousand times over the years on all those occasions when families start to recall old times. Whenever the Ritchie family falls into one of these sessions of telling tales on one another, it is sure to take up a long evening, because we have so much to remember and so many to remember about.

My very first memory is of our house—filled with crowds and noise and laughing and singing and crying. Beds, chairs, everything full and running over with people. There was never quite enough room even at our long homemade table for all of us to sit and have any elbow room, but we managed to get everybody around it by standing the little ones at the corners. When she saw us all ranged around the table like that, Mom would sometimes say out loud, in a sort of wonder,

‘Lordie, it's a mystery to me that the house don't fly all to pieces. I don't rightly know where they all get to of a night.'

Still, our house was thought a big and a fine one in the community, and we were proud of it. My father built it himself with his own hands and the help of the neighbors, and the day he moved his family and his goods and chattels over the ridges with his wagon and team, that was a fine day. Up to this time it seemed he just couldn't find a place he could be satisfied in for long. When they were first married, Mom and Dad went to live in the big old log house with Granny Katty, Dad's mother, on Clear Creek in Knott County, where Dad was born and raised. Two months later Dad finished building their first little house, away up on Clear Creek, and they lived in that until the family got so big that they had to find a place to spread out, farther down the creek. The next move was to the county seat of Hindman, and finally, five or six years before I was born, Dad brought Mom and the big family back to Mom's birthplace, Viper, in Perry County.

Viper is a tiny village whose fifteen or twenty houses string out like a chain around the hillside where it dips inward to follow the curve of the river. There are a few more houses built on the narrow strip of bottom land between the railroad and the river, but not many, for there isn't much bottom land. The mountains are part of the Appalachian chain called the Cumberlands, and in this section they rise in long, gently arching ridges, one following another and one beyond another as far as the eye can see. Because of their shapes they have been given local names like Razorback Ridge, Devil's Backbone, and Longbow Mountain.

To stand in the bottom of any of the valleys is to have the feeling of being down in the center of a great round cup. To stand on top of one of the narrow ridges is like balancing on one of the innermost petals of a gigantic rose, from which you can see all around you the other petals falling away in wide rings to the horizon. Travelers from the level lands, usually the Blue Grass section of Kentucky to the west of us, always complained that they felt hemmed in by our hills, cut off from the wide skies and the rest of the world. For us it was hard to believe there was any “rest of the world,” and if there should be such a thing, why, we trusted in the mountains to protect us from it.

The place Dad picked out to build our house was the prettiest piece of level land in the community, about three acres stretched out between the hill and the branch. The house when finished was a three-room frame building in the shape of an L, and then they built a separate kitchen in the back yard. In later years this “old kitchen” was torn down and three small rooms were added onto the long side of the main house, next to the hill, but it was in the first four rooms that the thirteen children were for the most part raised.

We managed it on a sort of dormitory plan. Mom and Dad and the babies slept in the front room that settled back into the hill. The other front room was the girls' room and extended out toward the branch. The boys' beds were in what we called the living room, the third and largest of the three, built onto the back of Mom's room, with a door between. It was here that we received strangers and fine-looking people—peddlers of rugs, herb cures, spices, dulcimers, and tintypes; travelers over the mountains, asking to take the night; and once or twice strange folks from away over the ocean in England, wanting to hear Mom and Dad and the girls sing the old ballads. Then we used the living room. If it was somebody we knew, though, he'd come into Mom's room, first off. That was our real living room.

The very nicest thing about the house to me was the porch that ran all around the house on all sides except the back of the kitchen and the living room where the house settles into the mountain. And my favorite part of the porch was The Corner, where the boys' room met the girls' room and made the ell. The branch, with its water always twinkling and making music, ran parallel to this side of the house, and so did the sledroad up the holler. If you sat in The Corner long, you would most surely see someone go up or down the road, Earl Engle on his mare taking a turn of corn to the mill, or Lee-up-on-the-Branch walking to his house at the head of the holler. He always had a little bagful of something, you never did know what, but it made your mouth water to think what it might be—peppermint or licorice sticks, or hoarhound drops, cinnamon “belly-burners,” or big round lemon cookies, maybe. Anyway, it was good fun just to watch folks go by, because they always nodded their heads and said “Howdy-do” to you, same as if you were a grown person.

Mom hated The Corner just about as much as I loved it. It was the handiest place to throw things in passing, and for that reason it was her everlasting despair. She was sure that everybody who passed in the road looked especially into our porch corner and said to himself, “What messy folks the Ritchies are, plum shiftless, to keep a porch looking like that in plain sight of the road.”

So, about once a week Mom would roll up her sleeves and call around her three or four young uns, and brooms would swish-swash and dust would boil and dogs would yelp and run, and the family would come and admire the clean, empty Corner. Next day Dad would all unthinking throw down a load of wood in The Corner; the little ones would bring their dolls and use the wood to make a playhouse; the boys, Raymond and Truman and Wilmer, would toss their apple and walnut sacks over behind the wood; and the dogs would come in and have pups on the sacks. It was just the most comfortable place in the whole house, and I loved it in the daytime, but Lord pity the poor chap who had to go past it on the way to bed after a long evening spent listening to Granny Katty and Dad and the old people tell stories of ghosts and hants they had seen in their time….