Listen Here (59 page)

(October 30, 1881–March 13, 1941)

Poet, novelist, and short story writer Elizabeth Madox Roberts was born in Perryville, Kentucky. She was one of eight children of Mary Elizabeth Brent Roberts, a teacher, and Simpson Roberts, a teacher, a store owner, and a surveyor. Her great-grandmother arrived in Kentucky on the Wilderness Road. When Roberts was three, she moved with her family to the place she considered her home for the rest of her life, Springfield, Kentucky. As poet George Ella Lyon describes her in the introduction to
Old Wounds, New Words
(1994), “Roberts…is a central Kentucky native whose work often deals with Appalachian themes and experiences.”

After withdrawing from State College of Kentucky (now the University of Kentucky) before completing her freshman year, she eventually enrolled in the University of Chicago in 1917, at the age of thirty-six. She became friends there with the future novelist Glenway Wescott and poet Yvor Winters, who encouraged her poetry. When she graduated cum laude, with a degree in English in 1921, she also received the Fiske Poetry Prize.

After her graduation, she returned home and had these words to say about her native Kentucky: “All young people wish to try the world and to find out adventures, but the young of Kentucky do not seem to look upon their region as a place from which to escape. A pride in the place where they were born stays with them when they go, if they must go, and often they return.” Her life reflects these sentiments; she repeatedly left Kentucky, but always returned. Recurrent health problems sent her for visits to Colorado (1910–1916), to the Riggs Foundation in Stockbridge, Massachusetts (1923–1924), and to Santa Monica, California (1927). She was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease in 1936.

Roberts spent winters in Orlando, Florida, and continued to write until her death in 1941. She is buried in Springfield, Kentucky.

She began her writing career as a poet and was published in Harriet Monroe's
Poetry
magazine, receiving its prestigious John Reed Memorial Prize in 1928. In 1930, she received the O. Henry Award for her short story “The Sacrifice of the Maidens,” and she wrote two collections of short fiction. But she is best known for her novels
The Time of Man
and
The Great Meadow
.

Cratis Williams describes
The Time of Man
as “a significant guidepost on the route traveled by regional literature from romantic local color to the more powerful realism of the 1930s.” This novel, translated into at least six languages, brought Roberts international acclaim. It is the story of a white sharecropper's daughter, Ellen Chesser. The fourteen-year-old protagonist marries young, bears a child, and manages to see beyond her heartbreaking poverty to the poetry in life. Roberts's stream-of-consciousness narration, her extraordinary female characterizations, and her poetic prose are primary strengths of her fiction.

Novels:
Woodcock of the Ivory Beak
(1981),
Horse
(1980),
Christmas Morning
(1950),
Black is My True love's Hair
(1938),
On the Mountainside
(1936),
He Sent Forth a Raven
(1935),
A Buried Treasure
(1931),
The Great Meadow
(1930),
Jingling in the Wind
(1928),
My Heart and My Flesh
(1927),
The Time of Man
(1926).
Short stories:
Not by Strange Gods
(1941),
The Haunted Mirror
(1932).
Poetry:
Song in the Meadow
(1940),
Under the Tree
(1922),
In the Great Steep's Garden
(1915).

Contemporary Authors
(1999), Vol. 166, 335–40.
Dictionary of Literary Biography
(1981), Vol. 9, 310–13. Earl Rovit, “Elizabeth Madox Roberts,”
Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary
(1979), 385–86. Earl Rovit,
Herald to Chaos: The Novels of Elizabeth Madox Roberts
(1960). Anne Rowe, “Elizabeth Madox Roberts,”
American Women Writers
(1988), 635–36.
Something About the Author
(1981), Vol. 33, 168–70. William S. Ward, “Elizabeth Madox Roberts,”
A Literary History of Kentucky
(1988), 150–59.

from Chapter III

Ellen milked her cow by the little gate which led from the dooryard to the pasture. In three days she had learned to make the milk flow easily, stroking the animal flesh with deft fingers. The cow was a slim tan Jersey with a bright face and quick horns. Her body was bony and full of knots—bone joints, and her sides were unsymmetrically balanced. She had slender short legs and small sharp feet. She seemed to Ellen to be all paunch, a frame skeleton supporting a subtended belly with buds of milk, a machine to produce milk hung under a bony frame. Ellen looked at her each milking time; she knew the wrinkles on her skin around the eyes and her wrinkled neck, her loud breathing, her corrugated tongue and lips, her moist muzzle, and her pathetic mouth with its drooping lower lip. The tight eyelids seemed scarcely large enough to fit over the large round eyes and the hair spread out from a center on her forehead, making a star. Her horns were like dark rough pearl and they slanted up over the big skeleton of her face. She moved about very slowly, turning away from the milking place when she had been drained dry, always humble and enslaved, or she walked off across the pastures joining many others at the feeding rick near the stock barns…

…

When Henry had burned his plant bed he plowed and hoed the ashes into the soil and made a frame of logs about the whole, a light frame to hold the canvas that would be stretched over the bed when the seeds were sown. There were more stones to gather after the plowing and these Ellen piled outside the bed. The rocks were dark with mould and moss, for this was a virgin hill. It was a mild March day, cool and clear, with winds worrying the hillside brush and leaping off across the farms in a great rush or beating gently now and then at Ellen's garments. Henry nailed at the frame while she worked with the stones.

“No plow iron ever cut this-here hill afore, not in the whole time of man,” Henry said.

“The time of man,” as a saying, fell over and over in Ellen's mind. The strange men that lived here before our men, a strange race doing things in strange ways, and other men before them, and before again. Strange feet walking on a hillside for some purpose she could never think. Wondering and wondering she laid stones on her altar.

“Pappy, where do rocks come from?”

“Why, don't you know? Rocks grow.”

“I never see any grow. I never see one a-growen.”

“I never see one a-growen neither, but they grow all the same. You pick up all the rocks offen this-here hill and in a year there's as many out again. I lay there'll be a stack to pick up right here again next year.”

“I can't seem to think it! Rocks a-growen now! They don't seem alive. They seem dead-like. Maybe they've got another kind of way to be alive.”

“Maybe they have. All I know is they grow.”

“Rocks have got shells printed on the sides and some have little snails worked on their edges and some have got little worms-like worked on. But once I found a spider with a dragon beast in a picture on its back. Some rocks, now, are shaped like little silos and some are all marked with little snails and waterbugs and some are open fans and some have little scallops on the edges. Rocks grow in ways that are right pretty now. It's a wonder, really.”

“I wish I could see a rock grow,” she said again. “I can't think how it is. You could watch a rock for a whole year and you'd never see any sign of it growen. The rock doorstep over at Bodine's didn't grow e'er bit all the time we lived there.”

…

She was working alone on the hillside. Henry had gone for the seeds and was long in returning. She gathered stones from the plowed soil and piled them in her neat mound, and the wind continued to blow off the hilltop. She found spotted ladybugs hidden under the leaves and the twigs; they shone out like jewels in the brown and black of the earth. Far away toward MacMurtrie's cedar trees doves were crying, and over the plowed field plovers went circling, singing on the wing. To the northeast the hills rolled away so far that sight gave out, and still they went, fading into blue hazes and myths of faint trees; delicate trees stood finer than hair lines on a far mythical hill. She piled stone after stone on the mound, carrying each across crumbled earth that the plow and the hoe had harried. The rocks fell where she laid them with a faint flat sound, and the afternoon seemed very still back of the dove calls and the cries of the plovers, back of a faint dying phrase, “in the time of man.” The wind lapped through the sky, swirling lightly now, and again dashing straight down from the sun. She was leaning over the clods to gather a stone, her shadow making an arched shape on the ground. All at once she lifted her body and flung up her head to the great sky that reached over the hills and shouted:

“Here I am!”

She waited listening.

“I'm Ellen Chesser! I'm here!”

(June 11, 1769–October 1, 1854)

Some sources identify Anne Newport Royall as the first female American newspaper journalist. A dubious legend has it that she once caught President John Quincy Adams skinny dipping in the Potomac and sat on his clothes until he agreed to an exclusive interview. Though their mutual friendship makes the story's credibility questionable, she had a reputation for being a strong-willed woman.

The daughter of loyalist William Newport, she was born near Baltimore, Maryland, before the American Revolution, and grew up on the western Pennsylvania frontier, in Westmoreland County. When her father died, her mother Mary, a Virginia native about whom little is known, remarried, had a son, and lost her second husband. The family then relocated to Monroe County, Virginia, now West Virginia, where her mother found work as a servant in the household of the wealthy Captain William Royall, reputed to be a friend of George Washington.

The teenaged Anne won Royall's attention, though he was at least twenty years her senior. He shared with her his extensive library, his deist ideas, his antislavery sentiments, and in 1797, when she was twenty-eight, they married. When he died in 1813, she decided to move south to the warmer climate of Alabama, where she lived for a decade before Royall's children succeeded in their quest to break his will and left her, at the age of fifty-four, without financial resources.

Had she not been faced with this hardship, she may never have become a writer. Motivated to support herself, Anne Royall began her career as a journalist. She traveled by foot, by stagecoach, and by steamboat in the 1820s, when travel was neither entirely safe nor very comfortable, and took copious notes on nearly every important American city and settlement, producing ten volumes, which sold fairly well. Her travel narratives combined documentary social history with her lively personal opinions and wry observations, spiced heavily by her rather bitter worldview.

Around 1830, Royall settled in Washington, D.C., where she began petitioning the United States Government for her widow's pension from her husband's Revolutionary War service (which she did not obtain until 1848). In the meantime, she acquired a printing press and took in printing jobs before beginning her own weekly newspaper, for which she served as investigative reporter, writer, editor, printer, and subscription manager. It featured political gossip and uncovered graft in public offices, in addition to editorializing for religious tolerance and the separation of church and state, as well as a number of other causes.

In one infamous incident she attacked a local group of Presbyterians, or “Holy Willies” as she called them, and a little-known law was evoked to convict her of being a “common scold.” She was fined ten dollars—in lieu of a dunking—and according to at least one source, President Jackson's secretary of war, John Eaton, paid her fine.

Earning both fear and begrudged respect, she boldly lobbied for her causes in her enterprising newspaper, first named
Paul Pry
, and then
The Huntress
, until she was eighty-five.

The first of her travel books continues to be her best known.

Mrs. Royall's Southern Tour
(3 vols., 1830–1831),
Letters from Alabama
(1830),
Mrs. Royall's Pennsylvania
(2 vols., 1829),
The Black Book: A Continuation of Travels in the United States
(3 vols., 1828–1829),
The Tennessean: A Novel Founded on Facts
(1827),
Sketches of History, Life and Manners in the United States by a Traveller
(1826).

Sarah Harvey Porter,
The Life and Times of Anne Royall
(1909). George S. Jackson,
Uncommon Scold: The Story of Anne Royall
(1937). Russel B. Nye, “Royall, Anne Newport” in
Notable American Women 1607–1950
, Vol. 3, 204–5. Don Dodd and Ben Williams, “‘A Common Scold': Anne Royall,”
American History Illustrated
, 10:9 (January 1976), 32–38.
Dictionary of Literary Biography
, Vol. 43, 402–8.