Oral History (9781101565612) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Part One

  GRANNY YOUNGER

  PRICEY JANE

  ALMARINE

  ROSE HIBBITTS

  AT THE BURYING-GROUND

  Part Two

  RICHARD BURLAGE: HIS JOURNAL, FALL 1923

  Part Three

  LITTLE LUTHER WADE

  MRS. LUDIE DAVENPORT

  AT THE SMITH HOTEL

  JINK CANTRELL

  ORA MAE

  RICHARD BURLAGE DISCOURSES UPON THE CIRCUMSTANCES CONCERNING HIS COLLECTION OF ...

  Part Four

  SALLY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PRAISE FOR

  Oral History

  “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.”

  —Newsday

  “Lee Smith’s achievement is to meld the psychological truth of mountain superstition with the day-to-day detail of Appalachian life—hog-killings, moonshine, working parties—so 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.”

  —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.”

  —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.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  Berkley titles by Lee Smith

  THE DEVIL’S DREAM

  FAIR AND TENDER LADIES

  ORAL HISTORY

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand

  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196,

  South Africa

  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.

  Copyright © 1983 by Lee Smith. Cover art: Farmhouse copyright © by Punchstock. Cover design by Royce M. Becker. Interior text design by Tiffany Estreicher.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  BERKLEY® is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  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. 86–93. 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 cold—so sweet—so 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. Al—that’s short for Almarine—is 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.

  “C’mere a minute, honey,” he calls to Debra from inside the van. “We’ve got all this carpet here left over. I think what I’ll do is just put it right up the sides like this.” Debra sticks her head in to look.

  “I said c’mere,” Almarine says, but when she climbs inside the van he grabs her and sticks his hand up the T-shirt to feel of her breasts in the pointy bra.

  Debra starts giggling.

  Back on the porch, Ora Mae stands up slowly, holding onto the arm of her chair. She goes and stands by the steps and looks up at Hoot Owl Mountain, shading her eyes with her hand. It’s getting dark now, down here by Grassy Creek, but high up in Hoot Owl Holler it’s still light. There’s sun in the tops of the trees. Ora Mae sees the house up there with the grass grown high all around it, her flowers gone to seed by the fence. She sees the cedar trees and the outhouse, the steep and weeded slope where the garden grew. But Jennifer is coming down the path now, thank God, stopping along the way to write things down in her notebook. Ora Mae feels old. She has a heaviness in her bosom like the end of the world, so she goes inside for a Rolaid.

  Jennifer picks her way down the mountain with beggar’s-lice stuck to her jeans. All the weeds are so high and they grab at her. Jennifer thinks it is just beautiful in this holler, so peaceful, like being in a time machine. She can’t understand why her father never would let her come here when it is so plainly wonderful, when it was her real mother’s home, after all. And these people are so sweet, so simple, so kind . . . they are not backward at all! And Little Luther, what a character.

  The salt of the earth, Jennifer writes in her notebook. Then she stops. Please pass the salt of the earth, she writes, which will be even better if she can work it in. Dr. Ripman is bound to love it; she knows she’ll make an A for the course. When Jennifer thinks of Dr. Ripman, her heart does a little jump. He has opened up new worlds for her—whole new worlds! Even though he came to the community college from Miami, Florida, Dr. Ripman is still a Yankee. He talks real fast, and jumps around, and he has frizzy black hair and horn-rim glasses. Jennifer was nothing when she signed up for his Oral History course. She didn’t know a thing. All her life, she looked down on her real mother’s family, the way she was taught by her father and her stepmother, Martha, who might as well have been her mother anyway for all practical purposes, since she’s the only mother Jennifer remembers. Jennifer knows she lived up here in Hoot Owl Holler once, when she was little, but she can’t remember anything about it.

  Jennifer’s stepmother Martha is the president of an amateur drama group which is rehearsing right now for Our Town by Thornton Wilder. Jennifer’s father is an upholsterer, quite successful. He has his own business in Abingdon, about fifty miles east of this holler. He is a dim sweet man who has never discussed Jennifer’s real mother with her in all her life. “The subject is closed,” he used to say when she asked him, but now Jennifer hasn’t asked for years. She grew up loved and petted, sensitive and nervous and “artistic,” a shy little girl with bronchial asthma and a collection of forty-two dolls from foreign countries and a giant dollhouse that her father made himself, with tiny little upholstered chairs in it. Her father has given Jennifer every advantage all along, in fact, including—for her birthday—that baby blue Toyota which is parked right now beside Al’s van. Looking down, Jennifer can see it, see the van and the ranch-style house and the garden behind it, and over Black Rock Mountain, she knows, is where her Aunt Sally lives with her husband Roy. Another uncle, Lewis Ray, lives near here too. It’s weird to think of her kin, strangers, sprinkled out like salt over Appalachia. Jennifer doesn’t know any of them. She sees her grandfather like a tiny little doll in the front-porch swing. The van and the Toyota look like toys.

  Jennifer wonders what her father will say if he finds out she has driven over here. But what can he say? It’s a free country. Besides, Jennifer never would have thought of this if she hadn’t happened to overhear Martha telling a couple they played bridge with, over a bridge game, how backward his first wife’s people were and how of course they’ve lost contact with them now, but listen, this is really a riot, the last Martha heard, her parents had moved out of their house because it was haunted. Haunted! In this day and age! Martha’s shrill theatrical laughter had pealed out over the bridge table, over the gin and tonic and chips and dip. “Now Martha,” Jennifer’s father had said in his quiet-quiet voice. “I really think . . .”

  But that was two years ago, and now Jennifer can’t remember any longer exactly what it was that her father had really thought. It do
esn’t matter. What matters is that Dr. Bernie Ripman unexpectedly invited Jennifer to have a beer with him after class one day—her, out of all those girls! What matters is that the class had been talking about common superstitions that day, and that when Jennifer told him—laughing, to show she was embarrassed because she was even so slightly related to people like that—about her real mother’s family and their haunted house in Hoot Owl Holler near Grassy Creek, Dr. Ripman’s eyes lit up like big Miami stars. “No kiddink!” he had said. “No kiddink!” So here she is now, halfway down the mountain, and behind her, in the empty old house on the hill, the tape recorder is set to record for one hour. Jennifer finds a flat rock like a table and sits on it. The rock surprises her, it’s still so warm from the sun. She can feel its heat through her jeans. She looks back up the mountain where she has come from, and then back down at Al and Debra’s house. She opens her notebook and writes:

  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.