Listen Here (63 page)

(September 25, 1948–)

Essayist, poet, children's author, and playwright Anne Shelby is a native of eastern Kentucky. Both of her parents were schoolteachers, and Shelby notes that during her childhood, “Most of the people I knew were schoolteachers or farmers. I didn't know anybody who was a writer.”

Shelby received her B.A. in English from St. Andrews Presbyterian College in 1970, and her M.A. in English from the University of Kentucky in 1981. She has worked as an editor of the
Mountain Review
and taught creative writing for the Kentucky Governor's School for the Arts and the Kentucky Arts Council's Artist-in-Residence program. She is the author of several children's books, and her poetry has appeared in a wide range of publications, including
Appalachian Heritage
and
Appalachian Journal.
She was part of a collaborative effort to create the play
Passing through the Garden: The Work of Belinda Mason
, produced at Appalshop (1996) and at Georgetown College (2001). Shelby is also the author of
The Adventures of Molly Whuppie
, a play based on Appalachian folk tales featuring female lead characters.

“My family—on both sides—has lived in southeastern Kentucky for more than two hundred years now,” says Shelby. “The history and the landscape and the language of that region are inside me, like water in cells.” Shelby and her husband, Edmund, editor of the
Beattyville Enterprise
, live near Oneida, Kentucky, on a farm that has been in her family for generations. They have a son, Graham, who is also a writer.

Books for children:
The Someday House
(1996),
Homeplace
(1995),
Potluck
(1995),
What To Do About Pollution
(1993),
We Keep a Store
(1990).
Poetry chapbook:
Lines from Home
(1999).
Drama:
Passing through the Garden: The Work of Belinda Mason, The Adventures of Mollie Whuppie, Waiting for Daylight, Storehouse, Lessons.
Autobiographical essays:
“Piddlin',” in
Bloodroot
(1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 248–52. “The ‘R' word: What's So Funny (and Not So Funny) about Redneck Jokes,”
Confronting Appalachian Stereotypes: Back Talk from An American Region
(1999), eds. Dwight Billings, Gurney Norman, and Katherine Ledford, 153–60.

Contemporary Authors
, Vol. 151, 393–94. Joyce Dyer, “Anne Shelby,” in
Bloodroot
, 247.

from
Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel
(1997)

I.
Because teaching's too hard. I did have a job
as a waitress but I got fired. Can't work
in offices. They wear their clothes too tight.
Too nervous to sit through meetings, too fat
for a ballerina. Awkward and nearsighted,
I read too much as a child. There was a little career counseling
in high school. It's a cover
for excessive behaviors, for appearing late,
ill-mannered and inappropriately dressed,
for hanging out in stationery stores, fondling
the pads and pens. And what is one to do
with experience? Its the only time I feel
I'm doing the right thing. I avoid it when I can.

II.
It's ridiculous, really, filling all these notebooks,
these file drawers and diskettes. Who will read this?
Who will give you money? you could be making
a quilt or something. You could be out doing good.
But here you are again, moving words around,
mostly because it touches that one spot in your head
nothing else does, some microscopic junction of music,
religion and a good joke. There, yes, right there. Please,
don't stop.

III.
So that's it? You write because it feels good
and you can't do anything else? What about the Truth?
What about Helping Others? I don't know
what the truth is, though I've discovered a number
of lies. And don't come to me with a rotten tooth,
leaky faucets or a letter from the IRS. I do love you
and if words can heal you, take them. But I can't
overhaul your engine, set a broken bone or teach you
to forgive. Jimmy Fiechter. In sixth grade you looked
at his hair and knew he was destined to be a dentist.
The artist, at five, wouldn't play outside. He couldn't
stop looking at the Breughel. I stayed in at recess,
to spend more time with the alphabet. We do
what we have to, what we can, our part
of whatever the truth is.
I write.

from
Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel
(1998)

You could run over your television
set with the truck, or pitch it off the mountain
or shoot it like Elvis
or to create an unusual planter, line with gravel,
fill with dirt, peat and sand,
then top with a mulch of wood chips. Pine

is best. When I hear the word
pine
and think
fresh bathroom scent
, I blame television.
I rest before it like a sand-
bag, like a soft flickering mountain.
I'm cracking my teeth on gravel-
hard popcorn kernels. I'm fat as Elvis

at his last concert. Even then Elvis
could still make me pine
like a teenage virgin parked in a Chevy on a gravel
road. Remember when you first saw him on
         television?
So much for “She'll Be Coming Round the
         Mountain.”
So much for “Love Letters in the Sand.”

I left the sand-
box, saved my allowance for Elvis
records. We planted an antenna on the mountain,
metal tree from an alien planet, landed among pine
and poplar. We turned on the television
and let it settle over us like fine gravel

dust. Nobody bothered to pick beans or gravel
potatoes anymore, preferring a sand-
wich in front of the television.
Seasons changed. The Army got Elvis.
I grew up quick but crooked, a pine
in a wet spring. They stripped the mountain.

Now I'm too old and fat for mountain-
climbing. The neighbors' kids throw gravel
at me from my own driveway. I pine
for Lonnie, my high school boyfriend, warm sand
on the riverbank. I mourn for Elvis.
I microwave popcorn and turn on the television.

It said on educational television, gravel
in time turns to sand. When it does
I'll be with Elvis on Pine Mountain.

from
Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel
(1998)

It's handy, but not much account for writing
hillbilly poems with. It won't let you waller,
won't let you foller a feller up the holler,
makes you have titles where titties ought to be.

I'll go along with changing logwoods into dogwoods,
but before I could say Undo it turned
my housecat to a housecoat. Sallet, newground,
Junebug, graveyard—Not in Dictionary.

You can't have a grandbaby on this thing
without special arrangements. One spell
transformed my taters into tatters, served
me subpoenas when I ordered soupbeans.

Now it wants to replace the homeplace
with just someplace. Is this the same spell
that changed proud to poor, turned minnows
into memories? I need flies

buzzin in this poem, cool snap of beans
breakin on the porch, tenor of coonhounds
on a moonlit ridge. Exit.
Float a while on a honeysuckle breeze.

Spell:
How long to set
on a sycamore bank
with your feet in the creek.

(1898–1951)

Born in Andover, New York, Muriel Earley Sheppard, an English major with a degree from Alfred University, moved with her mining engineer husband to the mining town of Spruce Pine, North Carolina, in 1927. According to novelist John Ehle, who wrote the foreword to the 1991 edition of her work,
Cabins in the Laurel
, she viewed herself as “progressive.” As evidence, he offers that she read the latest magazines, entertained in ways foreign to her North Carolina neighbors, and wore men's trousers. She also had ambitions for a project that few in Mitchell County had ever attempted—she wanted to write a book. Intrigued by her new home, she collected regional history and folklore from friendly locals and wrote feature stories for the
Asheville Citizen
, the closest city newspaper.

By mid-1932, she had completed a manuscript she titled
Kim Thickets
, an early name for the community of Spruce Pine. Collaborating with portrait photographer Mrs. Bayard Wootten (1875–1951), she travelled the backroads to visit the remote homes of mountain families. Where they found people wearing store-bought clothes and using modern cookware, they asked them to change into homespun clothing and bring out their old things for the photographs that would accompany Sheppard's text. Ultimately, this “progressive” writer did not please her local subjects with her retrograde portrayal.

The 1991 edition of
Cabins in the Laurel
, however, has found greater acceptance among natives of the Toe River Valley and has earned comparisons with the landmark works of two other outlanders who attempted nonfiction portraits of the mountain people, Horace Kephart and John C. Campbell. Readers should judge for themselves how Sheppard's work compares to that of Emma Bell Miles.

In chapter II of
Cabins in the Laurel
, Sheppard records multiple accounts of the story of Frankie Silvers.

Nonfiction:
Cloud by Day: A Story of Coal and Coke, and People
(1947),
Cabins in the Laurel
(1935).

John Ehle, Foreword,
Cabins in the Laurel
(1991), ix—xi. Charles Alan Watkins, “Merchandising the Mountaineer: Photography, the Great Depression, and
Cabins in the Laurel” in Appalachian Journal
12:3 (spring 1985), 215–38.

from Chapter II

The most sensational murder case in the history of the Toe River Valley was that of Frankie Silvers, accused of killing her husband, Charles Silvers. The defendant, who was tried in Morganton two years before county government was established in the Valley itself, was the first woman hanged in North Carolina. It is an old story of jealousy and revenge, played out in a cabin in the Deyton Bend of Toe River, a story that keeps turning over and over and adding to itself like a snowball. There are half a dozen versions. Here is one recently told to an outsider, which will serve to introduce the story and show how a tale metamorphoses with oral repetition.

…

In her ninetieth year Aunt Cindy Norman, sister of the murdered man, gave W.W. Bailey, of Spruce Pine, the following account of the killing.

In the winter of 1831 Charles Silvers was living in the Deyton Bend with his wife, Frankie, and their baby daughter. Very early on the morning of December 23rd Frankie dropped in at her father-in-law's and found the family preparing to wash. “My washing is done and I've scoured too,” she boasted, and her mother-in-law marvelled at her smartness to do a day's work before dawn. Frankie went on to tell the reason for her visit. Charlie had gone over the river on the ice the day before for his Christmas liquor, and had not returned. She was worried and begged his people to look at the crossings to see if he had fallen through. They searched the river for a considerable distance, but there was neither trail nor break in the ice. When he was still absent after several days, other families joined in the search. Frankie shook the valley with her lamentations. Word of the strange disappearance seeped into the country around Bear Creek and Art'ur's Knob.

An old man named Jakie Collis determined to go and walk over the ground himself to satisfy his curiosity on certain points. He went first to the father's house, where Cindy Silvers, the eight-year-old sister of the lost man, offered to take him to Charlie's empty cabin. Frankie had by now given up on his return and refused to stay there alone with her grief. At the deserted cabin Jakie and Cindy and others who had joined them scrutinized closely the mantel and sides of the fireplace. There were fresh irregular chippings at intervals over the whole surface where someone had hewn lightly with an axe. It gave Jakie an idea.

“Help me lift the puncheons,” he said to one of the men.

The upper surface of the slabs was neatly scoured, but the rounded sides underneath were streaked at the cracks with old blood stains. There was a fresh layer of ashes between the puncheons and the earth. Old Jakie thrust his hand into them and found them clotted with what appeared to be dried blood. Just then Frankie, who had watched from a distance, pushed her way among the men like a mad woman and ordered them off. The men stood still, looking at her with horror in their eyes that told her what they suspected. Then they went on with their work. In a frenzy of despair she wept and swore and made wild protestations while she saw the men sift the ashes in the fireplace and find human teeth and the remains of bones showing hack marks. Somebody realized that the big pile of hickory wood that had stood by the door was gone. When they looked at the axe, its edge was dulled with chopping something other than wood. The facts were plain enough without Frankie's extraordinary behavior. They sent for the sheriff to take charge of her.

More evidence came to light as the weather grew warmer. The investigation of a hollow sourwood where a dog sniffed suspiciously revealed the intestines and other parts of the body that did not burn readily. The horror of the tragedy shook the Valley from end to end.

Judge Donnell sentenced Frankie to death at the June term, 1832. She appealed, but Judge Ruffin sustained the conviction. When there was no hope through the regular channels of the law, her kinfolks took a hand in the affair. They spirited her out of jail and took her through the streets in a load of hay. As soon as they were out of town, Frankie climbed off the wagon. Dressed in a man's clothes and carrying a gun, she tramped behind the hay. The sheriff's posse overtook the suspicious load too quickly for her to crawl back out of sight. She tried to brazen it out.

“Want to buy some hay?” she asked in the deepest possible voice.

“No. We don't want hay,” answered the sheriff, helping himself to the gun. “But we do want you, Frankie.”

It was no use. She went back to jail. In the beginning she had protested her innocence. Now when there was no hope she made full confession.

According to her story she had been goaded by jealousy to kill her husband, and was awaiting the first opportunity to do it. On the night of December 22nd, he came into the house tired and cold from a day spent chopping wood to last over Christmas. He had a big pile of hickory chunks laid by to show for his labor. After supper he took the baby in his arms and lay down on a sheepskin in front of the fire to get the chill out of his bones. The axe lay handy, and in her anger she longed to seize the chance to kill him. In case she should find courage to go through with it, she gently slid the sleeping baby out of his arms. He did not waken.

At last, to end the torment of indecision, she seized the axe and tried to sever his head from his body in one mighty stroke. The blow glanced, and Charlie, horribly mutilated, sprang up and thrashed about making noises that frightened her half to death. She jumped into bed and covered her head to shut out the sound until he commenced to grow quieter from loss of blood. There was no way but to go on with it now. When she could muster courage, she got out of bed and struck the blows that quieted him forever. The rest of the night she spent dismembering and burning the body. It took a hot fire, and in a single night she used the whole of the Christmas hickory. Then in that blazing, suffocating cabin she carefully whittled away the spatters of blood and grease from the mantel and sides of the fireplace and scoured every stain from the floor that had been generously smirched as the body thrashed about. She washed the spattered bedding. That was the washing of which she boasted to her mother-in-law a few hours later.

Frankie Silvers must have had some feeling, because in the last days of her imprisonment she contrived a long, gloomy poem which she recited from the scaffold before her execution, July 12, 1833.

…

The words of the poem were eagerly seized upon by a countryside familiar with the dramatic story. It became a song, but it could be sung only when no members of either family were present, lest they be reminded of the tragedy. This is not a feud country, and while neither family took up the grudge, everyone felt that it was better not to meddle with fresh wounds. The song survives today in an eerie, mournful tune whose urgent minor beat is the restless scurrying of unlaid ghosts in lonely places.