Listen Here (70 page)

(May 31, 1946–)

Born in Clarksburg, West Virginia, Meredith Sue Willis spent her youth in the coal-mining town of Shinnston, West Virginia, where the residents, she explains, “were as likely to be Italian or Spanish or Lebanese as Scotch-Irish.” She has become an articulate, outspoken voice against homogeneous portrayals of Appalachian people.

Her maternal grandmother, Pearl Barnhardt Meredith, was a mining-camp midwife, and her maternal grandfather, Carl Meredith, was a coal miner. Her paternal grandparents tended coal company stores in Coeburn, Virginia; Burdine and Jenkins, Kentucky; and Owings, West Virginia. “This tendency to associate moving on with bettering yourself seems to be a part of my particular family heritage,” she admits, but “it is only one aspect of Appalachia” that “ties us to other immigrants.”

Her father worked in the mines between college semesters, and both of her parents became teachers. An accomplished teacher herself, Willis is author of three useful and popular books about the writing process, all published by the Teachers and Writers Collaborative Press.

After graduating from Shinnston High School and spending two years at Bucknell University, Willis dropped out to spend a life-altering year as a Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) worker in Norfolk, Virginia, before graduating from Barnard with a B.A. in 1969 and completing an M.F.A. at Columbia in 1972, where she spent her time studying, writing, and protesting the Vietnam War.

She and her husband, Andrew Weinberger, live with their son in South Orange, New Jersey. In
Contemporary Authors
she explained, “I have done a lot of odd jobs in my life and I value these very highly. I have worked with wheelchair patients, been a disc jockey for a college radio station, and given workshops for teachers and students of all ages in video tape and acting as well as creative writing…I have worked in a recycling center, and written painstaking letters in Spanish to dictators and other unsavory characters for Amnesty International. I like seeing everything—teaching, childhood, books I've read, jobs I've had, come together in fiction.”

Willis's first novel focuses on the family of a West Virginia preacher; her second introduces Blair Ellen Morgan, a character who rebels against the values of her West Virginia schoolteacher parents. In
Only Great Changes
, Willis continues the story of Blair Ellen Morgan, whose experiences echo Willis's own, as her fictional character travels from a small Baptist college in West Virginia to become a VISTA worker in a black neighborhood in Norfolk.

In the Mountains of America
, a collection of eleven stories set in West Virginia, celebrates the art of storytelling. In “My Boy Elroy,” a young female narrates her experience and her grandmother's, achieving a memorable balance of empathy and understanding.

Fiction:
Oradell at Sea
(2002),
Trespassers
(1997),
In the Mountains of America
(1994),
Quilt Pieces
, with Jane Wilson Joyce (1991),
Only Great Changes
(1985),
Higher Ground
(1981),
Space Apart
(1979).
Books for children:
Marco's Monster
(1996),
The Secret Super Powers of Marco
(1994).
Nonfiction:
Deep Revision: A Guide for Teachers, Students, and Other Writers
(1993). “Writing Out of the Region,”
Appalachian Journal
18:3 (spring 1991), 296–301.
Blazing Pencils: A Guide to Writing Fiction and Essays
(1990).
Personal Fiction Writing: A Guide to Writing from Real Life for Teachers, Students, and Writers
(1984).
Autobiographical essay:
“An Inquiry into Who My Grandmother Really Was,” in
Bloodroot
(1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 289–97.

Thomas E. Douglass, “Meredith Sue Willis” [Interview],
Appalachian Journal
20 (1993), 284–93. Gina Herring, “Politics and Men: What's ‘Really Important' about Meredith Sue Willis and Blair Ellen Morgan,”
Appalachian Journal
25:4 (summer 1998), 414–22. Nancy Carol Joyner, “The Poetics of the House in Appalachian Fiction,”
The Poetics of Appalachian Space
(1991), ed. Parks Lanier Jr., 17–20. “Meredith Sue Willis Issue,”
Iron Mountain Review
, 12 (spring 1996). Ken Sullivan, “Gradual Changes: Meredith Sue Willis and the New Appalachian Fiction,”
Appalachian Journal
14 (1986), 38–45.

from
In the Mountains of America
(1994)

My grandmother's store sat at a curve in the Wise Mountain road. It was a general merchandise store and mail drop-off for all the farms and hollows and ridges and folds of the mountain community of High Gap. People used to come down near noontime and wait for the mail. The store had so much open space that they pulled the kitchen chairs, nail kegs, and wooden dynamite boxes near the iron stove, even in the hot summer weather, just to localize the conversation.

When I stayed with my grandmother two summers in a row, her main stock-in-trade was Pepsi Cola, pink snowball nickel cakes, and canned lunch meat. She also sold a lot of pressed chewing tobacco: mostly Red Man and Day's Work, which looked like a yellow candy bar to me on some days, and like dried dung on others. She used to have staple goods in her store, too, bags of flour and meal, but over the years she found that the fewer large items she sold, the less she had to enter on her credit books; people tended to pay cash for Vienna sausages and Dreamsicles.

The people waiting for the mail used to tell stories. I loved the slowness of the telling. I would line up coins in the coin drawer, or sit on a sack of cornmeal and look out the window, letting their voices carry me along. They took turns speaking, never interrupting each other, using short blasts of words: quick-speakers, not Deep South drawlers, but mountain talkers, rat-a-tat followed by a space. After a decent appreciative interval at the end of one story, someone else would start. I loved to be a part of those stories. Sometimes I wished I could be big enough to sit on a nail keg and take a turn, but mostly I was a little awed by the people, and happy to watch them from a distance. They had mouths that weren't like people's I knew; cheeks that had collapsed around toothlessness, and the men sometimes wore their bodies bare inside stiff blue jean overalls. The women sat with their knees apart and discreetly waved their dresses up and down for ventilation.

So I stayed at the window, or behind the counter with my grandmother. She always kept a distance herself, never joining them in the circle. People called her Mrs. Morgan, even the ones she called by their first names, and no one ever came into the living quarters in the back of the store. When I asked why, if Mrs. Robinson was a good woman, she never came back into our kitchen, my grandmother said, “Oh, honey, you have to be real careful when people owe you money.”

To tell the truth, looking back, I think my grandmother's pride entered into it. She had sent her children to college, and while she didn't boast, people knew my father and my Aunt Ellen were both schoolteachers. My grandmother had a very precise line in her mind between good and bad. Educating your children and paying your bills were on the good side. Politeness was good, too, and she was polite to everyone, but she told me very clearly the difference between good people like the Robinsons who would give you the shirt off their back and the other ones you couldn't turn your back on for three seconds or they'd steal the varnish off the countertop.

And then there were the Possetts, who were in another category altogether. I first heard them mentioned in the course of someone's story around the stove. “Worthless as a Possett,” someone said. I asked my grandmother later, just what is a Possett?

“Euh, euh,” she said, in her special tone of humorous disgust that was supposed to make me giggle. “You stay away from those Possetts. They have cooties and they marry each other. Euh, euh.”

A few days later, Earl Robinson started telling a story about the Possetts, how they'd had a fire and lost a child, or maybe two. “They never could count that good,” said Earl. He paused then, and no one haw-hawed, but even I figured out the joke. “The ones that lived got burnt, too,” said Earl. “All but that big Elroy. He just hightailed it out of there, didn't lift a finger to help.” He went on and on, and then other people turned out to have Possett stories, too, many stories about this family that didn't have sense to pull each other out of a burning house.

One morning, shortly before my mother and father came to take me home that summer, the Possetts came to the store.

“Law, law, here come the Possetts,” said my grandmother, who had gone out front to sweep the little square of cement under the step. She ran and put a piece of canvas over the bags of meal. She told me to close the kitchen door and stand by the ice cream freezer. I was not supposed to get close to them, but if any of them wanted an ice cream, I could get it out of the freezer and scoot it across the white enamel lid.

I was as excited as if they had declared Christmas in August, watching through the big plate-glass window as the Possetts came down the yellow dirt road, past the one-room schoolhouse, across the asphalt, barefooted, one after the other: two full-grown men in overalls first, the old one with no teeth and a straw hat (but, to my shame, I couldn't see that he looked all that different from a fine man like Earl Robinson), and the younger one, chubby and round-shouldered, strawberry blond. After him came the old Possett woman, who wore a boat-necked dress with no sleeves or waist, as if she had simply stitched two rectangles of fabric into a garment. The young woman had a little baby in her arms.

“Look at them,” whispered my grandmother. “They think that boy Elroy is the smartest thing that ever lived. They buy him shoes in the winter and keep him fat. He got to second grade, too, before he turned sixteen and quit. I just wondered which one of them fathered that baby.”

I don't understand that, I thought to myself, but I understood more than I wanted to. I tried to pay attention to the children, counting them, examining them. The little baby, plus a boy, two girls, and another boy. My stomach wrenched and I stopped counting as that last boy came across the road. He seemed to have no chin; I tried to look away. I ran to my station by the ice cream freezer, but when I turned back, the little boy was only four feet from me. He had big eyes that seemed to roll all the time because his face was pulled down by terrible stretching from his cheeks over his lower lip area. His little white bottom teeth were as exposed as a bulldog's and you could see all the healthy red flesh that should have been inside his mouth.

My grandmother said, “Is that your boy that got burned?”

Mr. Possett said, “Ee-ah,” or something like that, grinning all the while, reaching behind him and grabbing the boy by the head, tugging him around for my grandmother to see. “Don't talk no more,” said Possett. “Still eats, though.”

My grandmother grabbed a handful of peppermint balls and maple chewies and gave them to the boy. It was as if her hands had to give to him, just as my eyes had to look. When he couldn't hold any more candy, it started dropping on the floor and the other children ran and picked it up. Mr. Possett bought himself an R.C. Cola, and after a while Elroy whined until he gave him a nickel for one, too. The mother Possett took some of the wounded boy's candy and shared it with the big girl and the baby. They sat on the kegs and boxes and looked at us, at the store. Once in a while Elroy would make a sucking noise with his R.C. Cola. Mr. Possett bought some chewing tobacco and two strips of licorice, which he tore into pieces for all the children, and then they left, back across the asphalt, up the road past the schoolhouse, into the pinewoods again.

My grandmother got a rag and wiped every wooden box a Possett had sat on, and rubbed the plate glass where a Possett had rested his cheek. She moved fast, as if she were doing something she couldn't have stopped if she'd wanted to.

I said, “What did they come down for?”

She said, “They came down to go to the store.”

It was almost time for the mail; Mrs. Robinson showed up, and Mary from down the road, and, after a while, Earl Robinson. This time my grandmother did the talking, more than I'd ever heard her say to her customers. She told about the Possetts coming, about the girl with the baby big as life and Elroy fat as the hog for winter, and the boy with no chin. She went on and on, and there was no climax to her story, just the necessity of telling it.

The next summer, I didn't go down to stay by myself with my grandmother. I didn't go down until our yearly visit, and everything seemed different. My grandmother directed all her remarks to my father; she called herself an old widow-woman, and said if things got much worse she was going to end up having to marry that dirty old fellow with the greasy black hat who had the tiny store down the road. “Euh euh,” she said. “He's so old and dirty. He sleeps in the same room as the store.” It seemed to her, she said, that the boys nowadays were getting worse and worse, and meaner and meaner, and all the time she was getting older and feebler and more of an old widow-woman.

It didn't make any sense to me at all, because she had never looked bigger and better to me. Her hair was still brown, and she moved briskly around the kitchen, and her eyes sparkled. My father didn't take it seriously, either, and he called her by her first name. “Now, Ella,” he said, the way he always did when he was being cheeky.

We were sitting around her kitchen table eating an apple pie she'd made for us from a bushel of Rome Beauties someone gave her on their bill. “You don't know,” she said.

“Come and live with us,” said my mother.

“You know you're always welcome,” said my father.

My grandmother said, “I didn't write you about the convicts, did I? I'm getting so forgetful nowadays.” My mother and father looked at each other, and then my grandmother settled in and told us about how a few weeks back, folks were sitting around waiting for the mail, and someone told about a certain Hines boy from Jenkins, Kentucky, who had broken out of jail in Pikeville. These Hineses, apparently, were the most evil-hearted bunch who had ever lived. They would shoot up churches and kill off people as soon as look at them. Especially old widow-women.

“Now, Ella,” said my father.

Well, anyhow, as it happened, people were worried about the Hineses coming over this way, and Earl Robinson was going to send down one of his boys to sleep in the store, but my grandmother said no, of course not, she was fine. “Well,” my grandmother told us, “that very night I had this evil Hines fellow pecking at this very kitchen door. And Elroy Possett the toadstool, too.”

Involuntarily, we all glanced at the door. It was a screen door to a little back porch, also screened, with a rocking chair where I loved to sit and read. She kept her brooms out there, the coal scuttle, and baskets of produce people gave her when they couldn't pay cash: the Rome Beauties, potatoes, peaches in season, and more tomatoes than she could ever eat. This porch had a door and three steps down to the garage and coal house.

The thing that frightened her that night, she told us, was that the knocking was on her back door instead of at the store door.

She had been watching Bret Maverick on television when she heard it, and she walked into the kitchen without turning on the light because she had a bad feeling and wanted to look at who was knocking before they saw her. She passed the telephone, thinking all the time she should call the Robinsons, but she didn't want her imagination running away with her. She didn't want to act like a timid old widow-woman, even if she was one.

“So,” she said, “I ended up with convicts at my back door and no help but myself.”

“Come and live with us, Mother,” my father said, not fooling around now.

“And do what? Set in a chair? No, I'll just keep on working and getting deeper in debt till some convict really does get me.”

She had stood in the dark kitchen, peering at the shape on the steps, pressing at her outer door. No friendly voice saying, Hey, Mrs. Morgan. Nothing she could recognize as a Robinson or an Otis. The television was still going in the background, cowboys shooting. She made out another man down on the ground at the bottom of the steps, and at a little distance, by the garage wall, a cigarette ash glowing. Three of them, she thought, and that was when her blood ran cold. Three men, and she was sure they were convicts. She spoke suddenly, harshly, as if the force of her voice could blow the man off her steps. “What do you want?”

“You the store lady?” he asked, without so much as a
good evening.

“Store's closed,” my grandmother answered, working on a plan in her mind. What she wanted to do was ease herself over to the telephone and gently give a message to the Robinsons. It was a party line, and with luck one of the girls would be on the phone already, talking to her boyfriend. She had heard the Robinson's ring just a little while before, and she thought she might be able to whisper that she needed help without these convicts hearing her over the television. “Store's closed, boys,” she said again.

The fellow pressed his shadow face into the screen wire, trying to see. He gave a slimy little laugh, and she thought she could smell whiskey. “Aw,” he said. “We was wanting something, too.”

“Who's we?” said my grandmother. “Do you think I open up to every Tom, Dick, and Harry?”

The snicker again. “I don't think you know us, ma'am.” She knew he could break the little hook and eye on the door in no time, and once he did that, once he started breaking her things, she would have lost the chance to do anything but scream.

A voice came from the cigarette glow. “Tell her to give us a drink of water, Ed.” She was sure the one staying back so far was the leader. He was the Hines. The dangerous one with his picture in the paper, standing back out of sight.

The third one, the big hulk, at the bottom of the stairs, said, “Naw, you said I could have a R.C. Cola to drink.”

My grandmother said, “Elroy Possett, is that you down there?”

A snuffle and a giggle. “Yes, ma'am.”

Well, my grandmother saw it all in a flash then. She saw the convicts running across Elroy, who was probably sitting on a rock by the side of the road, and them asking him who had money around these parts, and him saying, Oh, Mrs. Morgan, she owns a big store.