Oral History (9781101565612)

“Reality, legend, and superstition blend into a powerful pattern in
Oral History....
Lee Smith is a spellbinding storyteller. In
Oral History
she merges different perspectives that complement each other and form an intricate design not unlike that in a patchwork quilt whose pieces, even though faded with age, still hold the pattern together.”

âNewsday

“Lee Smith's achievement is to meld the psychological truth of mountain superstition with the day-to-day detail of Appalachian lifeâhog-killings, moonshine, working partiesâso that the tragic deaths and star-crossed love seem an outgrowth of the hills themselves.... None of her previous books could prepare us for the stunning authenticity with which she recreates a vanished way of life.”

â
The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Brings the storytelling gifts off the porch swing and onto the printed page with an often breathtaking vitality . . . A writer of rare talent.”

â
Publishers Weekly

“Smith's lyric simulation of mountain folkways and radiant scenery is laced with cutting ironies. . . . Folk porch-tales, pitch perfect, with light but potent satirical bite.”

â
Kirkus Reviews

Berkley titles by Lee Smith

THE DEVIL'S DREAM
FAIR AND TENDER LADIES
ORAL HISTORY

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP
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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

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ISBN : 978-1-101-56561-2

Smith, Lee, date.

Oral history.
I. Title.

ISBN : 978-1-101-56561-2

PS3569.M537607 1983
813'.54 82-18081

http://us.penguingroup.com

For Josh and Page

AUTHOR'S NOTE

For information about early Appalachia, I have found these books to be invaluable:
Our Southern Highlanders
by Horace Kephart (New York: Macmillan Co., 1922) and
The Southern Highlander and His Homeland
by John C. Campbell (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1921). Other source books I used include the following: the
Foxfire
books, edited by Eliot Wigginton (Garden City: Anchor Press/Doubleday);
What My Heart Wants to Tell
by Verna Mae Slone (Washington, D.C.: New Republic Books, 1979); Vol. I of
North Carolina Folklore
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1952);
Looking Back One Hundred Years, A Brief Story of Buchanan County and Its People
by Hannibal Albert Compton;
Tales of the Hills
by Arthur Ratliff, Jr.;
Old Town and the Covered Bridge
and
People of the Horseshoe
by Dan Crowe. The anecdote that Parrot Blankenship tells at the hog-killing is closely based upon an anecdote told by Vance Randolph, from
Folk-Say, A Regional Miscellany: 1931
, edited by B. A. Botkin, pp. 86â93. Copyright 1931, by B. A. Botkin, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. This tale was later included in Bantam's paperback edition of
A Treasury of American Folklore
, edited by B. A. Botkin, which is where I ran across it.

I want to thank, in particular, the following people, who have given me songs, tales and stories, ideas for sources, good lines (the “phone call from hell” is Dorothy's, for instance), and all kinds of support in general during the writing of this novel: Ann Moss, Dorothy Hill, Bland Simpson, Lou Crabtree, Louis and Eva Rubin, Charlotte Ross, Hal Crowther, Tom Huey, Cece Conway, Katherine Kearns and Grady Ballenger, Glenn and Gertrude Kiser, Mrs. V. C. Smith, Mrs. Ruth Dennis Scott, Martha and Wilton Mason, Ava McClanahan, and especially Ernest L. Smith. Thanks to Peggy Ellis for her help in manuscript typing and preparation; to Faith Sale, the editor; and to Liz Darhansoff, my agent.

FAIR AND TENDER LADIES

Come all you fair and tender ladies
Be careful how you court young men.
They're like a star in a summer's morning,
First appear and then they're gone.

If I'd a-knowed afore I courted
That love, it was such a killin' crime,
I'd a-locked my heart in a box of golden
and tied it up with a silver line.

Little Luther Wade just sits out there in the porch swing, swaying back and forth with his new suspenders on, a little bitty old shriveled-up man so short that his feet in the cowboy boots can't even touch the floor. He's got one leg shorter than the other, anyhow. And he's the oldest thing you ever saw. Every now and then he strums a little bit on his dulcimer. Every now and then when he slows down, he sticks one foot out, jerks himself forward and pushes off from a flowerpot, which sets him to swaying again. He's wearing his Western shirt with the flowers on it, too. He knows how cute he is. “It's time she was a-gettin' back now,” he says, looking up at Hoot Owl Mountain. “What time is it anyway?” he asks a while after that, but nobody will pay him any mind. Old Ora Mae sits in her chair making a brown and yellow afghan in the star pattern, her fingers busy, busy, busy, without her even looking down at her hands. She's looking off to the side yard where two of her grandsons, Al's children, have tied string on some june bugs they are swinging around and around through the hot evening air.

Ora Mae gives a long sigh. She sits as big and shapeless as a rock in her green easy chair, pushed up against the house wall. This is Ora Mae's all-time favorite chair; they moved it out of her house for her and brought it down to put on the porch when she and Little Luther moved in here with Al and his family because their own house up in Hoot Owl Holler was haunted. But it is not a porch chair, never was. Al's wife Debra will not have it in the house, though, because it doesn't go with her and Al's living room suite, which is Mediterranean.

“I went down to the Saint James Infirmary, I saw my sweetheart there. All stretched out on a long white table, so coldâso sweetâso fair,” Little Luther sings in a high bluegrass falsetto, strumming. Ora Mae sighs again: old fool. She feels a heaviness in her bosom which means that something bad is going to happen.

Debra comes out of the house wearing pink knit slacks, tight, and a black T-shirt with “Foxy Lady” written on it in silver glitter. Debra has curled up her long yellow hair like a movie star. She sits down on the steps and paints her fingernails silver and then waves them around in the air to dry. Once, Debra was Miss Tug Valley. Now she has three children like stairsteps, and all of them blond as you please. “Suzy Q!” Debra hollers. “Come over here, honey. Come sit down here a minute and let Mama do your nails.” Suzy Q, five, comes running and sits down next to Debra and spreads her fingers out pudgy and wide. “Hold still, now,” Debra says. Out in the yard, Roscoe and Troy throw down their june bugs with a whoop and head toward the house.

“It's time for
Magnum
,” Roscoe says.

“You Roscoe! Watch out for Daddy's cord!” Debra yells. Roscoe and Troy just miss tripping over it, thick and black where it curls out the front door like a blacksnake.

“Let her go, let her go, God bless her,” Little Luther sings, “wherever she may be. She can look this whole wide world over and never find a man sweet as me.” Debra gives one of Suzy's fat white hands a little smack. “I said
hold still
,” she says. “Anybody else want to watch
Magnum
?” Roscoe yells out the front room window. Roscoe likes TV so much he could watch it all day, he even likes the game shows. That's why he's so smart. Ora Mae sighs and wipes one eye, where a tear comes trickling out. “I just don't like it,” she says.

“Well, why did you say she could go up the mountain, then?” Debra is always right down to earth.

“I never,” Ora Mae says, nodding her head at Little Luther. “He done it. He done it all by hisself.”

Little Luther gives his famous cackle. “Now honey,” he says.

“Now blow on them,” Debra tells Suzy, and leaves the child sitting on the steps blowing on her little silver nails while she gets up, pulls down her T-shirt, and follows the black cord out to the van. Al is inside, putting orange shag carpet all over the place. He's got that cord out here because he's been doing something electrical, and also because he's got a high-intensity light in there to work by. Alâthat's short for Almarineâis a big, heavy, blond-haired man, six-three, with a streak of the devil in him. He made All-State Guard in high school football. He used to have a concrete business in Black Rock, before he and Debra got into AmWay. Now they do AmWay full time. Al has three kids, a van and a bass boat and his parents living with them, and he can handle all of it. Al has never been one to stand in the way of progress. He carries a calculator around all the time, for instance. He is a member of the Lions Club too, as well as the Junior Toastmasters Club.

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