Oral History (9781101565612) (2 page)

IMPRESSIONS

The picturesque old homeplace sits so high on the hill that it leaves one with the aftertaste of judgment in his or her mouth. Looking out from its porch, one sees the panorama of the whole valley spread out like a picture, with all its varied terrain (garden, pasture, etc.) stitched together by split-oak fences resembling nothing so much as a green-hued quilt. It is not as humid up here on the mountain, one notes, and one is led to wonder if that or perhaps other reasons led my ancestors (yes, mine!) to build up here, so high above the lush quiltlike valley with its gaily roaring creek.

The porch steps of the old homestead sag and the porch itself is falling in, rotting, with ivy climbing sensuously up through the floorboards. Yet this old place appears in no way haunted as in the stereotyped versions of haunted houses one sees perhaps on late-night TV. The door slid open with a somewhat melodramatic creaking effect when I turned the key in the lock. It did sag inward as if exhausted also. But the parlor inside was empty of theatrical cobwebs or any other stirring items. It resembled nothing so much as a house before someone moves in. Empty—not evil! True, dust was spread like an even lacy carpet on the floor. True, the handmade rocker I had heard about sat forlornly before the blackly yawning fireplace, in the place where I had been told it would be, but it resembled nothing so much as some old dilapidated relic left behind in the hustle and bustle of someone's Moving Day. It certainly did not look significant. I wandered all through the six-room house. Originally it was but a cabin—you can see where they have paneled over the old logs, where they have added on. The kitchen, of which little remains, must have been
primitive
!, but it was very difficult for me to visualize my real mother as a little child gaily playing in these rooms, or her cousin Billy (the ghost?) or Al or Lewis Ray and Sally whose acquaintance I have not even made.

I turned the tape recorder on and left it beside the fireplace, near the rocking chair. I looked back at it from the doorway as I was leaving, at its plastic spools silently spinning in the empty room, where it resembled nothing so much as a conscious anachronism in some kind of folklore film on ETV. As I stood there in the doorway, I received a chill which caused me to pull my sweater around my shoulders. Yet was this a premonition, or the real chilliness that comes in these mountains even in June as the sun dramatically sets, spraying its brilliant hues across the western sky?

I cannot say.

Meandering back down the rocky hillside, I come upon a strand of green glass beads shining in the weeds. I pick the beads up, turning them this way and that in my hands, letting the sun play over them, before letting them drop again to earth. They are cheap, half broken. Suddenly they seem to me symbolic of this whole enterprise which strikes me as silly, a fool's errand, even though my grandfather told me in such detail on the telephone about the rocking chair, the terrible banging noises and rushing winds and ghostly laughter that began every day at sundown, driving them at last from their home. One feels that the true benefits of this trip may derive not from what is recorded or not recorded by the tape now spinning in that empty room above me, but from my new knowledge of my heritage and a new appreciation of these colorful, interesting folk. My
roots
.

I think this is why Dr. Bernie Ripman urged me from the beginning to choose this as my oral history project: he wanted me to expand my consciousness, my tolerance, my depth. I wonder how I shall ever be able to repay him for the new frontiers of self-knowledge I have crossed.

I stray. From where I now sit, with the warmth of this sun-warmed old primeval stone soaking into my body, I feel nothing so much as an outpouring of consciousness with every pore newly alive. I shall descend now, to be with them as they go about their evening chores.