It was Little Burl, of all people, who helped me to understand that rather it was my privilege to try to like everyone, at least to make an effort to see the good in each individual.
One morning we had interrupted our spelling lesson to watch the birds at our school feeding station. At my suggestion Mr. Spencer had built this for us and placed it atop a pole close to one of the schoolroom windows. As spring approached, a greater and greater variety of birds were appearing. My pupils were fascinated. This morning we had seen several juncos and some titmice. Now a pair of cardinals, the male with the most brilliant red feathers I had ever seen on a bird, were stuffing themselves on the crumbs and sunflower seeds.
Looking at that glorious red plumage, I exclaimed, “Isn’t it great how many different kinds of birds there are, each one so special! God must have cared about them or He wouldn’t have made them so beautiful.”
Then I couldn’t help adding, “He loves everything He’s made—every bird, every animal, every flower, every man and woman, every single one of you, loves you extra specially.”
As the children reluctantly turned from the birds back to preparation for the week’s cross-spelling bee, I noticed two men crossing the schoolyard heading toward the back of the building. Shortly they were retracing their steps in the direction of the road, striding—not sauntering as most of the mountain men did. As they passed the school windows the second time, I saw their faces and felt sure that they were strangers. I tucked the incident into my mind to tell David, then turned my attention back to the spelling bee.
Little Burl was not working on spelling at all, but sitting at his desk staring up at the ceiling, his cowlick standing straight up, his funny little face puckered into a look of intense concentration. Something I had said had made an impression on him; I hoped he would let me in on his secret thought.
I had reached down to get fresh papers out of my desk drawer when I felt arms around my neck hugging me fiercely. It was Little Burl. He put his bare feet on top of my larger ones, locked his two hands behind my neck, stretched his head up to look me full in the eyes. “Teacher, Teacher, hain’t it true, Teacher, that if God loves ever’body, then we’uns got to love ever’body too?”
I looked at the six-year-old in astonishment. “Yes, Little Burl, it is true.” Forever and forever and forever.
So once I shut down my privilege of disliking anyone I chose and holding myself aloof if I could manage it, greater understanding, growing compassion came to me, more love for the children and as time passed, for the older people too. And suddenly I woke to the fact that smells in the schoolroom no longer seemed a problem.
My new life was a stretching process all the way. I had always thought of myself as shy, not naturally a leader, and Miss Alice saw this tendency to draw into myself and would have none of it. But Miss Alice was not one to dissipate energy in theorizing. Rather she was that rare combination: an idealist who could deal in specifics. So her first dictum designed to force me out of my reserve was her insistence that I visit the family of each of my school children in their homes.
Since I was already overwhelmed with schoolwork, at first the visiting looked like an impossible task. Still, I knew that Miss Alice was right to ask this of me. Knowing the children at school could never substitute for seeing their settings for myself, and more and more I was realizing what a far step it was from the Huddleston family home on Montford Avenue in Asheville to these mountain cabins.
But then I wondered how I could make these calls more than a perfunctory gesture on the part of the new teacher. For there was a wall of reserve around the mountain people not easy to penetrate; friendships were not made quickly in these parts.
I had yet to see any glad-handing or backslapping or the making of small talk for the stranger in Cutter Gap. How often already I had struggled with this situation: the atmosphere of cool unhurried courtesy as the highlander held his hands quietly at his sides while his eyes, with a glint of curiosity and humor, appraised me, the “outlander.” He was forming no hasty judgments, but neither was any least effort being made to impress me. If the mountain man or woman had nothing to say he considered worth saying, then he said—nothing. Sometimes I would squirm uncomfortably at this and strain to fill the silence with talk because I sensed that the highlander’s silence was more than shyness: there was too much composure along with the diffidence. I kept wondering how long it would take the Cutter Gap folk to stop thinking of me as a foreigner. Perhaps years and years. Not until I got married and had reared children and grandchildren. I wondered if there was anything I could do to be accepted?
Plunge in, I supposed. So I decided to make my first call on Ruby Mae’s parents. Her relationship with them was not of the best. Perhaps I could be an intermediary.
The Morrison cabin on the other side of Coldsprings Mountain looked no different from most except that the cornfield back of the house was tilted at about a forty degree angle. It strained my imagination to picture a man pushing a bull-tongue plow up that hillside. An old man and a much younger woman were sitting idly on the porch.
“Hello,” I began, more heartily than I felt. “I’m Christy Huddleston, the new teacher at the mission.”
The old man had his feet on the railing, his long white beard sunk on his chest. “Howdy.” The feet did not move. The woman said nothing, sat staring at me.
I was still standing on the top step. The old man must be Ruby Mae’s grandfather, I decided. “Is Mr. Morrison at home?”
There was no answer. My words might as well have been dropped into a bottomless hole. Finally they struck bottom. “I’m Duggin Morrison.”
“You are Ruby Mae’s stepfather?”
“Aye.”
“I’m glad to meet you, Mr. Morrison. Ruby Mae is—I’ve gotten to know your daughter well.”
The old man’s eyes were on the scenery. He lifted his feet off the railing, leaned forward and let go a stream of tobacco juice. Fortunately, the spittle missed the long white beard. “Settin’ chair over yan,” he volunteered, relaxing back into his own.
I picked up the chair and set it beside the woman. She was barefooted and had coarse features with hard lines in her face. Her eyes were like steel balls, so calculating that I could not tell their color. “You’re Mrs. Morrison?”
“Yep.”
These people are taciturn and I’m shy. So what are we going to do, sit here in a row staring straight ahead? When two walls meet head-on, something has to give. I suppose I’m the one to make the supreme effort.
“Mr. Morrison . . .” my voice sounded too loud in my own ears, so I cleared my throat and began again more softly, “Your daughter is unhappy because you asked her to leave home. She’d like to let bygones be bygones.”
“Which?”
“She wants you to forgive her, let her come home.”
“She’s stiff-necked. Needs to be took down a peg.”
“But I think you’ll find Ruby Mae different now,” I said eagerly. “Won’t you talk to her?”
He appeared not to have heard me. “Wouldn’t mind her Maw here, so I locked her in the smokehouse. Ornery young’un.”
“Well,” I said lamely, “it would be nice if you and Ruby Mae could get back together.”
No reply. I tried another direction. “Mrs. Morrison, have you seen our new school building?”
“Naw.”
“I hope you’ll look in on us sometime.”
“Wel-l—”
“How about you, Mr. Morrison? Come see us at the mission house. We’d be so happy to have you.”
“The which? Oh, I don’t go round no church-houses. That thar’s fer the wimmin.”
I thought about that for a moment, then plunged ahead recklessly. “Mr. Morrison, every church I’ve been in has been run by men. The church doesn’t mean anything in a community unless the men are a part of it. We have a wonderful man named David Grantland in our mission. I think you’d like to meet him.”
“Don’t take no stock in a
brought-on city fellow comin’ here, a-tellin’ us how to live.”
Heated words leapt to my tongue. I managed to stop them just in time. It was no use. These people were suspicious of me. I could not say anything right. As a caller, I was a catastrophe!
I rose, but still they did not move from their chairs. “It was nice to meet you. Well, good-bye.” And I got away from there as quickly as I could.
Of course, the visiting was easier when David went with me. Most of the folks knew him by now and responded to his liking for people generally and his easy way with them.
David offered to go along on my first official visit to the Spencer cabin since he was afraid I would never find it on the back side of Lonesome Pine Ridge—and he was probably right.
There was such a warm touch of spring in the air this last week of March that I suggested to David that we walk instead of ride. The evergreens were tipped with vivid green and the willows overhanging the streams were a whisper of green lace. Here and there in the fields of the valley, spicewood bushes waved yellow plumes. It was spring and I felt light and carefree. Nor did I fear being tongue-tied with the Spencers as I had with the Morrisons.
As we reached the top of the ridge, I realized that I would never have recognized this as the same cabin into which Mr. Pentland and I had crept for shelter from the howling wind and the stinging cold during my first trek from El Pano to Cutter Gap. In the charm of this sunlit cabin, it was hard to recapture the eerie quality of that day of Bob Allen’s brain operation.
For there was charm here. It was in the site which must have been chosen carefully by someone a long time ago. I felt almost on top of the world. I was standing now on one of those peaks to which I lifted my eyes every morning and every evening from my bedroom window. Here with the silent gaze of the mountains upon us, trivialities and pettiness and meanness faded and dropped out of sight. All around us were the rich odors of sun-baked earth and pine and spruce and balsam. A clean cool quality of the woods and of the mountainsides where spring was burgeoning had crept indoors. Entering the cabin was like sticking one’s nose into one of those souvenir pillows filled with balsam needles or cedar chips they made for the tourists back home in Asheville.
Fairlight Spencer had arranged galax leaves in two old pewter bowls, the leaves mostly bronze and winey-red from the winter, here and there new green; and in a chipped cup she had put trillium and violets.
“The very first,” she told us, and unself-consciously reached out slender fingers to caress the flowers. “The least’uns of the springtime.”
The grace of the gesture and the long tapering fingers (even though they were red and rough with chipped and broken nails) caught my attention. I stood there thinking that these should be the hands of a lady handling an ivory fan or smoothing her skirts of velvet or satin. They were the hands of an aristocrat, and here they were on a mountain woman, buried at the back of beyond.
Nor could I see in this woman any trace of that shrinking Fairlight, rigid with fear, who had stood beside me watching the sun sink behind the far peaks while the operation went on inside the cabin. Today she was eager to show me everything, including an unusual quilt stretched on a quilting frame near the hearth. So while David was talking with fifteen-year-old John, teasing him, rumpling his hair, I was examining the quilt. It was not the commonplace hit-and-miss patchwork, but a moon-and-star motif. When I asked Mrs. Spencer about it, she pointed to a small window set high in the wall to the right of the fireplace. “See that lookout? I get a heap of joy from that. When I’m lonesome-like, it pearts me up to look up there and see the sun-ball or the moon and stars. So thrice one night I drawed me an idea—three picture-pretties of the new moon and a star.”
I looked at her in astonishment. “Mrs. Spencer, you mean you drew a picture of the new moon at three different positions and then copied that onto your quilt?”
She nodded. “Weren’t much work. Seems right nice to have the starry heavens on my counterpin.”
“Mama aims t’make me a counterpin after a spell.” It was Clara’s voice. She and Zady had just come into the room carrying heaping plates of gingerbread. David grabbed a piece as it went past and the girls giggled, delighted at his eagerness.
“Say! This is good. Tastes different. What’s in it?” he asked.
“Made out’n sorghum and wheaten flour,” Zady explained.
Then John brought in a cedar pail filled with roasted chestnuts. And when their father appeared with an antique-looking musical instrument under his arm, I knew this was to be a real party which the Spencers had been planning for days. There would be no sitting and staring silently and answering in monosyllables here!
Mr. Spencer’s “Howdy-do, Ma’am” to me was so courtly that it could have been a bow to one’s sovereign or the opening of a performance on a stage. “Howdy, preacher.” He shook David’s hand vigorously. “How’s the steeple-makin’ and the road-buildin’?”
“Coming along, Jeb. Much too slow to suit me though! And now I’ve got to knock off on the steeple for a while to string telephone wire. Say, Jeb, how about giving me a hand with the wire-stringing?”
“Aye. Been thinkin’ I mought lend you a hand-up with something. Truth is, I’d kinder like to speak into that new-fangled contraption myself.”
This was my first chance really to know Jeb Spencer—blond, debonair. Lively too, as I realized from the moment he began plying the goose quill back and forth across the strings of—a dulcimer. Yes, that was it! One of those old-time dulcimers Miss Alice had described to me.
“Oh, as I went down to Derby Town
All on a summer’s day,
It’s there I saw the finest ram
That was ever fed on hay . . .
Oh, the wool upon this ram’s back
It drug to the ground,
And I hauled it to the market
And it weighed ten thousand pounds . . .”
Something about Mr. Spencer’s exuberance must have made the girls feel that their father was “of a real song-ballad-singing mind,” as they would have expressed it, because they were squealing with delight. John would have no part of girlish giggling, but I noticed that his eyes were glowing as he coiled his big frame and settled down beside his father.
This dulcimer had four strings. Shaped differently from a guitar, with a slender waist and heart-shaped holes, the tone was clear, flutelike with a plaintive quality. It would never take the place of the fiddle for foot-tapping rhythms, but already I could see that it was the perfect accompaniment for the half-singing, half-talking ballads.
“O rise you up, ye sev’n breth-e-rens,
And bring your sister down;
It nev-er shall be said that a Stu-art’s son
Had taken her out of town.
He mounted her on a milk-white steed,
He rode a dap-ple gray.
He swung a bu-gle horn about his neck
And so went blowing away . . .”
As the story of Earl Brand went on for eight verses, twelve, sixteen, it was like a door opening for me. I was ushered into a new land with an assortment of new images and ideas crowding in. I realized that in these cabins where there were few if any books, the tales handed down by word of mouth through ballads and tall tales must have been the only substitute for story books. I’d only to look at the eager faces of the Spencer children fastened on their father to see how hungry they were for stories.
As for the music, I thought of how hard my parents had tried to give me some appreciation for good music. Yet somehow I could not deprecate the homespun minstrelsy I was hearing now. I sat there thinking about how all real music has to be born in the human spirit. Well, these ballads surely had been. There was something childlike and basic about them, an absence of sham or pretense. And something else even behind that—some rare race knowledge. Listening to them was like looking into the exposed hearts of folks everywhere, of all of us with our common heritage on both sides of the Atlantic.
Jeb Spencer w
as enjoying himself, relishing the enthusiastic reaction of his audience as he watched the witchery of the old tales reach out and capture David and me along with his family. Effortlessly the ballads recreated the atmosphere of other centuries for us—snow white steeds and dapple grays; bugle horns and broad swords; fair maidens at casement windows listening for the beat of a horse’s hooves on the wild moor; castles and porters and the peel towers of the border country between England and Scotland. Now to these had been added the buffalo hollows and the Indians of the American frontier; horses and buggies; bed quilts and rocking chairs; cornbread and biscuits; raccoons and possums and mules—and always there seemed to be plenty of blood flowing and of men being hanged. But then the ballads were honest about that too, for life in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain and on the American frontier later on must always have had its gory side.
Suddenly David injected a new note, “Now I’ll match you with one of the latest hit tunes. Wish I’d brought my ukulele. I’ll sing it once, Jeb, then you can pick it up:
‘You tell her, I s-s-s-stutter—’ ”
“Oh, a foolery song,” Clara enthused. And soon the children were tapping and pretending to stutter the words along with David. He went on from that one to “Swingin’ Down the Lane” and then to one of his favorites:
“Under the Yum Yum tree,
That’s the yummiest place to be . . .”
Then the impromptu concert ended with Jeb singing a song that was going to haunt me forever:
“Down in the valley,
the valley so low
Hang your head over,
hear the wind blow.
Hear the wind blow, love,
hear the wind blow;
Hang your head over,
hear the wind blow . . .”
How is it that sometimes a melody and a lyric will wing their way into mind and heart to lodge there like a homing bird? Here in these astringent lines someone had captured what I had felt so deeply, especially about the plight of the mountain women. There was something about Fairlight Spencer that brought my feelings about them into focus.
Christy Page 18
