Read Oral History (9781101565612) Online
Authors: Lee Smith
Oral History (9781101565612) (2 page)
“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.
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 herâwhole 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 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 herâwhole 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, includingâfor her birthdayâthat 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.
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, includingâfor her birthdayâthat 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 doesn't matter. What matters is that Dr. Bernie Ripman unexpectedly invited Jennifer to have a beer with him after class one dayâher, out of all those girls! What matters is that the class had been talking about common superstitions that day, and that when Jennifer told himâlaughing, to show she was embarrassed because she was even so slightly related to people like thatâabout 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.
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. Emptyânot 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 cabinâyou 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.
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
.
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.
Jennifer shuts the notebook and picks her way down the hill. But when she reaches her uncle's house, nobody is doing any chores. Everything from dinner has been put away. Even the smell of fried chicken has disappeared. The big old woman who is her grandmother, Ora Mae, has gone from her easy chair on the porch. Little Luther has fallen asleep with his head cocked over on his shoulder like a bird. TV sirens shrill out the open front door. Little Suzy, dragging a Charlie's Angel doll by the hair, stands crying in front of the closed van with its ornate custom painting jobâmaroon palm trees, golden waves, a black death's head on the back. Every now and then Suzy bangs her dolly on the closed door of the van. Her crying is like a cat mewing, and it s getting dark already down here, and lightning bugs are coming up everywhere out of the grass. You can hear the creek from out of the darkness beyond the yard.
Then Ora Mae comes out of the house, huge and pastel and shapeless in her housedress, and gets Suzy by the hand because it's bedtime.
“Can I help you with anything?” Jennifer asks, standing by a tire full of blooming begonias in the yard. “That dinner was so goodâI know you must be tired.”
Ora Mae stands still in the yard, breathing hard, while Suzy pushes crying against her legs. Ora Mae stares at Jennifer. “I don't reckon,” she says.
“Good night, Suzy,” Jennifer says, reaching for the little girl's hand, but Suzy just cries and pulls away. With a start, Jennifer sees Suzy's fingernails shining up at her, phosphorescent silver in the dusk. Ora Mae takes Suzy into the house while Jennifer stands in the yard by the tire. “You can set on the porch if you want,” Ora Mae says back to her from the door. Ora Mae thinks Jennifer is a lot like her mother Pearl, even though Jennifer has been raised by strangers. Pearl never knew what to do with herself either. Jennifer even looks like Pearl, pale blond hair and white skin, slight, with too-big blue eyes and the kind of face that asks a question all the time. Jennifer goes and sits on the porch and listens to her grandfather snore, a soft rattling noise. Resembling nothing so much, Jennifer thinks, as the wind blowing through a tree full of autumn's dead leaves. She sits in an aluminum chair on the porch and writes that down. After a while Ora Mae comes back out to sit in her easy chair. She takes up her yarn again. The boys watch TV and Little Luther sleeps, all dressed up. Up on the mountain, that tape rolls on in the empty house.
“How can you see to work?” Jennifer asks, trying to start a conversation. It enters her head that her grandmother is not as friendly as someone might have supposed. She doesn't seem pleased at all to have a new-found granddaughter turn up after so many years.
“Don't need to see much,” Ora Mae says, but she has some light anyway from the front-room window behind her. Her fingers, large and twisted, move in the light, but Jennifer can't see her face.
“I think it's just wonderful the way all of you still live right here in this valley and help each other out,” Jennifer says. “It's remarkable. Not many people live that way anymore.”
Extended family situation
, she thinks, but it's too dark to write in the notebook.
Extended family situation
, she thinks, but it's too dark to write in the notebook.
Ora Mae says nothing.
“I was wondering,” Jennifer says after some time has passed and the boys have switched the channel, “if you could give me a little more precise information. Now, Grandfather told me all about the rocking and the laughter and the wind. And of course I know how my mother came back here when I was little, after she and my father separated, and then she got pneumonia and went to the hospital and died. But it must have been about that time too that my uncle Billy died, wasn't it, if I've got it all straight in my head. Uncle Billy was murdered by a mentally ill teen-ager, isn't that right? An escapee from a home of some kind? At least that was the information I got from Little Lutherâyour husband,” Jennifer adds crazily, since her grandmother is giving no sign of even hearing her, just moving the brown and yellow yarn in and out of her fingers. “Grandfather said that Uncle Billy was killed in the rocking chair because that's where he sat all the time after my mother died and even before. So I was wondering if you could tell me some more about that time, which must have been very difficult for you, coming so soon after the death of
my
mother. Maybe you can tell me something about what Billy was like as a child, so I could gain some insight into why he sat in the chair for so long.” Jennifer is all out of breath when she finishes, but Ora Mae doesn't say a word. The silence stretches out. Jennifer squints at her watch: 7:30, only one half hour to go. Ora Mae works the yarn. Jennifer wishes she was back at the college, or back in her father's house watching
Masterpiece Theater
with Martha or making popcorn for her little sisters.
my
mother. Maybe you can tell me something about what Billy was like as a child, so I could gain some insight into why he sat in the chair for so long.” Jennifer is all out of breath when she finishes, but Ora Mae doesn't say a word. The silence stretches out. Jennifer squints at her watch: 7:30, only one half hour to go. Ora Mae works the yarn. Jennifer wishes she was back at the college, or back in her father's house watching
Masterpiece Theater
with Martha or making popcorn for her little sisters.
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