Listen Here (69 page)

(July 17, 1952–)

Poet Dana Wildsmith was born in Macon, Georgia. She grew up in rural Georgia, the daughter of a Methodist minister who was a social activist. She married at nineteen and attended Tusculum College, the University of Tennessee, and Virginia Wesleyan College, moving as often as her husband's duties with the Navy required. She graduated from Virginia Wesleyan College with a B.A. in sociology in 1986. She and her husband now live in north Georgia on her family's land, where their home is a one-hundred-year-old converted cotton barn.

She has worked as a writer, an editor, and a workshop leader throughout the Southeast. She has been a poetry fellow with the South Carolina Academy of Authors, a reader for
Kalliope: A Journal of Women's Art
, and an artist-in-the-schools for the South Carolina Humanities Council. She has taught through the University of South Carolina's Creative Retirement Center, as well as the Tennessee Mountain Writers Conference, and the Appalachian Writers Workshop. She says, “I might never have begun writing poetry again (after my teenage poems of angst) had I not gone to the Appalachian Writers Workshop at Hindman [Kentucky], where Jim Wayne Miller saw my poems and spoke to me about them. I feel a heart-connection to Kentucky, which plays itself out in my writing.” She has also studied with Fred Chappell and Jonathan Williams at the Atlantic Center for the Arts.

Wildsmith has two chapbooks—
Alchemy
, published by the Sow's Ear Press in 1995, and
Annie
, winner of the Palanquin Press Chapbook Competition in 1999. Iris Press has issued her audiotape of poems and commentary,
Choices
(1997). Her first full-length collection of poetry is
Our Bodies Remember.

Poetry:
Our Bodies Remember
(1999),
Annie
(1999),
Alchemy
(1995).

from
Our Bodies Remember
(1999)

The truth is,
love is a tune without words.
For instance, if he's still awake
and you're still awake
from leftover worry or fear,
then one of you
journeys two inches of mattress
to spoon the other one's back;
not for love or for money
could you explain
how a gesture as homely as that
could salvage a hopeless night,
but you know.
As sure as the hum
of your pulse,
you know.

from
Our Bodies Remember

First she finds out how much time it takes to be poor.
The path from some to less has to be planned,
even meals. Each meal must bleed to the next:
the whole roast to the hash,
yeast bread with toast,
toast with eggs.

This is a siege. She sits down to take stock, to deal
not with what is gone, but with what is left.
Each thing she names, she owns as a tool.
Milk and eggs can be two meals or
cake once. There is still tea.
In siege time,

old rules flesh out like a starch-fed child. Girls were
once taught to save back a bit to use when need came
(from a quart, the scant cup; from four eggs,
a yolk), to let bread pad out poor meat,
and that a whole sliced thin seems
more than it is.

Meals laid on the best plates take on a bit of grace.
When the siege was new, she mapped these hints as if
they were clues to a code. As if one day at last
each dear act of faith would add up to
some truth less stark than that
there are no tricks to use
on food that has
run out.

from
Our Bodies Remember
(1999)

Tell me the relation between
a May and a June with no rain

and your going away in April.
Today I cut half the grass,
every other blade

dead from drought.
Half the words I would have said
this spring died at their root

or shrank underground
to wait out another dry day,
another night shallow as dust.

I miss you like a shade oak gone.
Having you here was rain, and
the cistern full. I could

live my life twice then:
once in the doing,
once in telling you.

from
Our Bodies Remember
(1999)

“You don't have a body; you are a body.”

A Habit of the Blood
, Lois Battle

Sealed and stamped, but now I'm not sure
what I wrote
or didn't write, so I'm typing your letter over
in blank air
because fingers remember where they've been sent
and will walk
their previous walks when we let them. If we don't
trip them up
with our thoughts, fingers can touch-tone
phone numbers
our minds can't recall, and my grandmother's piano
couldn't care less
if I have a brain, so long as my hands
step lively.

I'm reminded of thirty years back, when
therapists
tested this notion of body memory
as a means
to imprint habits of movement on palsied
muscles. Their
technique, named “patterning,” called for
a circle
of volunteers who would position a patient's
arms and legs
to one posture of useful motion, and then
another—

choreographing progressive freeze-frames
of belief in
their power to animate, cell by cell,
tissues dulled
by a mind's misfires. I remember liking
the elegance
of patterning's slow pavane, and I thought then
how pleasing,
in a homey way, must be the patterner's work
of tidying
a jumbled body, as if straightening
bed covers,

the sort of job where you can see
what you've done.
But what had been done? I can't recall seeing
follow-up
stories with photos of birth-harmed children
now rooted
like willows in a neuron stream,
their movements
as thoughtless as wind. Does a body refuse
to forget
its history, even in favor of
a gentler
now? Many's the time I've watched you
flinch
from some teasing comment of mine—I
who love you,
who would no more say you a hurtful word
than I would
lay a live coal in your ear. Why
do you think
I rewrite my letters to you, checking each
gossips bit
for barbs and shafts? Knowing how words have
damaged you,
I keep an intention of placing my words
precisely,
like hands to muscle, hoping to heal your
troubles, but

there is no healing. My job
is not to mend
but to soothe. I remind myself how you'll look
when you open
my letter a few days from now—your legs
stretching out
as you read, your chair tilting back, and
line by line
your strict face relaxing, remembering
how to grin.

from
Alchemy
(1995)

You'll be a good driver, he'd say,
when you know how to take a curve.
Just go in to it easy.
Keep your foot away from the brake, see,
and hold off giving any gas
until right when the widening out
starts to elbow in. You'll feel it.
Lean in to it then. Feed the engine
a little, let the curve carry you.
Might as well enjoy these twisty roads.

Halfway home to Georgia she lets off
on the gas to cruise around
another jut of loblolly pines
but the car hesitates
and her daddy's box of ashes
comes sliding across the seat. Too soon,
he'd say. You've got to keep gassing it
until there's bend enough to maintain
the drive. There's more here than just
you and the car, Hon. Listen to the road.

(April 3, 1940–)

The only writer in this book to have served as a motorsports correspondent for
Autoweek
and as timer/scorer for Paul Newman's race team, Sylvia Wilkinson has impressively diverse interests and talents.

Born in Durham, North Carolina, to Peggy George Wilkinson and Thomas Noell Wilkinson, she excelled in horseback riding and painting as a child and won district tennis championships as a teenager. During her college years, she studied with and received the encouragement of noted writers Randall Jarrell and Louis Rubin. She completed a B.A. in painting and English at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in 1962, and an M.A. in English and writing at Hollins College in 1963, where she received a Hollins College Creative Writing Fellowship.

She began her second novel,
A Killing Frost
, while she held the Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship at Stanford (1965–1966). The recipient of a number of literary awards, Wilkinson has twice received the Sir Walter Raleigh Award for North Carolina Fiction (1977, 1968), a Creative Writing Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (1973), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (1977).

She has been a teacher in writers-in-the-schools programs, as well as a visiting writer in college and university classrooms since 1963. In addition to her six novels and three nonfiction books, she wrote a dozen books on racing for Children's Press between 1981 and 1986 and four juvenile mysteries for Grosset & Dunlap. She divides her time between Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and El Segundo, California. Currently she covers auto racing for
World-Book Encyclopedia
and is working on a seventh novel.

Her fictional protagonists are usually young girls or women from rural or small town communities who struggle for the freedom to define their own lives. As she explains, “A big part of my motivation to be a writer came from my mother's mother, Mama George. She was a farm woman with a third grade education from Sunday School who listened to soap operas, read newspapers and comic books. But she was a storyteller with a natural sense of form and drama…I became a writer out of an oral tradition, knowing I could never equal her standards.”

In her first, second, and fifth novels, Wilkinson is particularly interested in the effects of strongly imposed gender roles on her young protagonists. Even in
Cale
, a novel focusing on a young male character, Cale struggles with the expectations his family places on him to farm the land he will inherit.

In
Shadow of the Mountain
, Wilkinson's Jean Fitzgerald, a naive but privileged college girl, joins the 1960s federal War on Poverty by accepting a job with “the Appalachian Corps.”

Novels:
On the Seventh Day, God Created the Chevrolet
(1993),
Bone of My Bones
(1982),
Shadow of the Mountain
(1977),
Cale
(1970),
A Killing Frost
(1967),
Moss on the North Side
(1966).
Selected nonfiction:
Dirt Tracks to Glory: The Early Days of Stock Car Racing as Told by the Participants
(1983),
The Stainless Steel Carrot, An Auto Racing Odyssey
(1973).
Selected juvenile nonfiction:
I Can Be a Race Car Driver
(1986),
The True Book of Automobiles
(1982),
Can-AM
(1981),
Endurance Racing
(1981),
Formula One
(1981),
Sprint Cars
(1981),
Stock Cars
(1981).
Interviews:
In
Images of the Southern Writer
(1985), 90–91. In
Kentucky Review
2 (1981), 75–81. In
The Writer's Voice
(1973), ed. George Garrett (Morrow, 1973). In
Craft So Hard to Learn
(1972).

Fred Chappell, “The Unpeaceable Kingdoms: The Novels of Sylvia Wilkinson,”
The Hollins Critic
[Hollins College, VA] 8:2 (April 1971), 1–9. Joyce M. Pair, “Sylvia Wilkinson,”
Contemporary Fiction Writers of the South
(1993), 479–93. Review of
Shadow of the Mountain, Publisher's Weekly
(24 January 1977), 328.

from Part III

Two of the local women's club leaders stopped by to welcome me. They were bored and boring. They gave me a bank calendar, a Gideon Bible, and a free set at the local beauty parlor. On the way home I stopped off to see Mollie. We had a good laugh over which one of us should use the beauty parlor coupon, since we both have our thin frizzy hair in braids.

…

Today Mollie talked more of her mountain girlhood. She asked me if I was tired of listening to an old woman, that she would know she had run me off when I didn't stop by again. Mollie said she grew up scared of her daddy. She remembered him today, back when she lived in Kentucky, which was really her home, Hazard, Kentucky. There folks didn't think they were too good for her like the ones in Rocky Gap. The residents of that dismal Cumberland town knew they were in Little Hell and the poverty they were born with had sent them there
.

Her daddy plowed around the graveyard on the farm they settled for as many years as they thought people in the community would remember there was a family buried up there. Then came the spring of 1900 and he broke the graveyard land. Time for a new generation, he said, at the turn of the century, so he planted it in corn. If their bones were close to the top, they would be like powder, he figured. There was bone meal in fertilizer and it ought to be good for his crop, he told her with a laugh. If they hadn't been lazy and had planted their kin deep, he'd never reach them with his plow. The Lord would make him pay, Mollie's mother said, and his corn would grow dark green from their bones to spite him and have kernels on their ears as hard as a dead man's teeth. Mollie said her mama had strong feelings about laying aside room for the dead. But the corn didn't grow greener; the corn was the same as in the other fields. All that there was to spite her daddy was his little girl, Mollie, digging around his stalks with a spade. He snatched her up by the back of her dress and it made a tear, out loud, at one of the rotten arm seams. In her mind an animal had grabbed her, and she could never think of her daddy without being afraid to turn her back on him
.

“You going to leave the roots bare to the sun.” He scolded her and shook her until the spade fell from her hand
.

“No, Papa,” she said clearly, hiding her fear of him. “I'm going to dig out the grave of the little girl. She was near my age, they say, when she died of the pox and they buried her with a china doll. A real china doll with white slick legs and arms. Her dress might be all gone now in the dirt and even the blue eyes and red lips a-painted on might be wasted, but I figure that china lasts longer than bones.”

“I wanted that china doll bad,” Mollie told me seriously, and every spring at land-breaking time she walked the furrows looking for it. She had found it a thousand times in her dreams and it was beautiful. She ran for every white root and cutworm that turned up with the plow, thinking it was an arm or leg of her china doll. She was shamed for telling her daddy. He laughed loudly at her and teased her until he broke her doll dream to pieces in her head and she never had it again
.

I looked at Mollie's hands, wondering how she could ever have wanted a china doll or even felt its slickness, how she was once a soft child. The sides of her fingers are crusted from whittling in the winter, making toothpicks and sewing quilts without a thimble, or from pulling husks off corn. She is always doing something with her hands when we talk. Her skin looks like an old piece of wood that the water has run over for years; the hard flesh is left in ridges and the soft has worn away. It appears she could be snapped apart like the sticks she uses to kindle her fire
.

The women here are so different from those southern ladies that wear gloves for everything they do, church, washing dishes, gardening, as if their hands must never come in contact with anything coarser than they are. Gay MacKensie's hands were scarred and callused from her jack knife. I watch Mollie use her hands as tools. I've seen my mother buy tools for what Mollie does with her hands. Grandfather Fitzgerald's maids had far more money than Mollie. We used to give them lotions and perfumes for presents. The maids always had extra time to sit around and rest their bodies. I don't think Mollie has ever stopped being busy, even now when there's only her left
.

“Women here don't want what they never had because they don't know what they should be wanting,” Mollie said. It didn't offend her to talk about being poor. “I'm speaking of the hard-up ones. Some of them in town never wanted a day in their lives.” She went on to talk about how radio and television were presenting to people wants and dissatisfactions they never had before. To know that everyone wasn't poor was a bad thing; it didn't give you ambition, just bitterness. All boys wanted now was a fast automobile, and the girls wanted to marry the one with the fastest automobile whether he had a “lick o' sense or a dime in his pocket. They start a-thinking they ought to have what ever' body else has.” I listened for the edge in her voice, wondering if that comment was meant for me because I came from outside
.

I finally asked her about outsiders coming in, why there was such a resentment towards people from other places, was it because they came in fancy cars wearing nice clothes and built expensive houses? Mollie changed when I questioned her directly instead of letting her ramble. She tightened up her lip and told me what a fool I was. That it wasn't what the outsiders brought in; it was what they took away. She said the fruit was stripped from the plant and not even a seed was left. Their hills had been plucked clean by outsiders with no respect for who was there first. I felt the fool she called me
.

I'm attached to these hills in a different way from hiking. I think the mountain people have to go nowhere else to know that what they have is prettier or just as pretty as anywhere in the world. The Appalachians are special mountains, worn down and covered with vegetation. Often the houses are impractically located—the view from the porch not sacrificed to shorten the walk to the fields. That must be unusual for poor people, to consider the beauty of the surroundings before they consider water, land, wood, and whatever they need to survive. I don't think their placement of their cabins could be by accident, not from what I saw from the house windows in Lost Cove. I said that to Mollie and she just grunted and said, “They wont still there, now was they?” I better keep my idealistic dissertations to myself for a while
.

Mollie told me there were seashells printed in the rocks on the plateau, that she wasn't “pulling my leg.” This was all once an ocean, and when the ocean went away, it left the coal. Her daddy told her that. He never saw the real ocean and neither had she. But he hadn't told her that when they had taken all the coal away, they would leave the people buried under mud from the strip mine slides. He didn't live to see that. He thought the coal would never run out. Mollie gestured at the coalscuttle beside her fireplace as if the contents were so foul she didn't want it near her, instead of something to bring warmth from the cold. The slag, the mud slides, men coughing till they died, arms and legs gone from the explosions. There is no love from the mountain people for the black mineral
.

She told me one horror story after another. I had set her mind off churning up the bad memories she had buried. The men in Kentucky went down in the mines and worked in hell every day of their lives, hating what was bringing them what little they made, hating the coal and hating the owners. The owners took the coal away, and with it went a chunk of the life of the people for good. And in return they got barely enough money to stay alive and keep digging. Every railroad car that went out left the people and the land more wasted. It was hard for her to tell if it was worse after the coal was gone. She had left Kentucky and didn't want to see it again to find out
.

As I was leaving, she asked if I'd heard about the Reverend who was snake-bit. I had. He had died because he refused medical treatment. Mollie sat back in her chair at the news and hissed through her teeth without emotion. “The fool. He knowed a snake could kill you.”