To her credit, nobody went hungry in Mollie’s house, and nobody saw her struggle. Her method was making do, but her real genius was adding flavor to a meal. Every circuit-riding Methodist preacher in the area knew where to go for Sunday dinner; they’d even come scratching around Mollie Carter’s door on weekdays, right around noon. When a preacher put his feet under Mollie Carter’s table, he wasn’t disappointed. She always set aside something special for the man of God. On Sundays, she made sure there was icing on her cakes.
Mollie wanted everything to be just so. If she turned out a corn bread that wasn’t to her standards, she’d start over. Not that it went to waste! She’d open her door and fling it into the yard, “The chickens can have that.” She never could get her biscuits to rise just right, so she stopped trying. But for blackberry jam, molasses cake, or apple butter, nobody could match her.
And it wasn’t only the table that benefited from her care. She kept her yard swept and flowering, with the glorious aid of her chicken litter. All around her house were gladiolus, lilies, sunflowers, baby-rose bushes, elephant ears, and dahlias. She even talked Bob into building diamond-shaped beds to hold her most precious flowers and plants. Mollie’s granddaughters, great-granddaughters, and great-great-granddaughters still have portions of a Christmas cactus she started more than a century ago, and to this day, that plant blooms in houses up and down Poor Valley.
Besides her gardening, Mollie loved music. Her grandfather, after all, had been Fiddlin’ Billy Bays, and her brother Charlie Bays could saw a few tunes, too. “He played his fiddle around the house,” remembers one family member. “He’d go hunting for a note to get it to sound just right. Sounded like a chicken plucking on that neck. He played ‘Hog Molly,’ a hoedown tune, and he played ‘The Eighth of January,’ which was the fiddle tune for the Battle of New Orleans. A lot of that music came out of Ireland. It was jig music.” Mollie had seen jig music promote some un-Christian behavior at many a dance, so she was wary of the fiddle. But while she went about her daily chores, Mollie Carter would sing the hymns she loved best: “The Land of the Uncloudy Day,” “Amazing Grace,” or “The Gospel Ship.” But she also sang traditional ballads, known as “English” songs, because the form—if not the songs themselves—had crossed the Atlantic with the English and Scotch-Irish who settled the southern mountains. These were story songs, hemmed and tucked and remade to fit each new generation, like the story of the Scotsman who met his beautiful Cherokee bride at the river and ended up with a slew of children. “White man wishing he’d never gone fishing . . . still, you are my pretty little Naponee.” “The Wife of Ushers Well,” Mollie would sing, or “Brown Girl,” or one that was particularly close to home:
Single girl, single girl
She goes to the store and buys
Oh, she goes to the store and buys
Married girl, married girl
She rocks the cradle and cries
Oh, rocks the cradle and cries.
Single girl, single girl
She’s going where she please
Oh, she’s going where she please
Married girl, married girl
Baby on her knee
Oh, baby on her knee.
For nearly twenty years—and without respite—Mollie Carter had a baby to contend with. Alvin Pleasant Carter was born in 1891, then came Jim (1893), the twins, Ezra and Virgie (1898), Grant (1900), Ettaleen (1901), Ermine (1906), and Sylvia (1908).
After a while, there wasn’t much room in the Carters’ little one-room cabin for anything but four beds (they slept two and three to a bed) and the supper table. Another family with five strong boys might have been in the money. But taken as a whole, the growing Carter boys were a net loss. Maybe after a while, Grant held his own; he learned to work. But only Ermine inherited his mother’s willingness. From the beginning he could put his head down and work like a mule. Once, before he was even a teenager, Ermine raised a potato patch that kept the family going an entire winter. As for the rest of the Carter brood, they kindly resembled Bob.
There were, however, two Carter boys who had ambition, if not focus. Those sons seemed to understand that the old mountain ways were about to be overrun, and some folks were going to get run over, and some were going to hop on the train. Those boys were Mollie’s oldest, who was called Pleasant; and Ezra, called Eck. Eck was shy; he didn’t speak a word until he was three, and not many more after. But from the jump, he had a gift for invention. “Oh, Lord,” says his niece, Lois Hensley, “Ezra had a busy mind.”
Eck was also a quiet, sneaky prankster, and his mischief might have gone entirely undetected if it weren’t for his twin sister. Eck and Virgie had divided their father’s personality right down the middle. Eck was restless, another wanderer. Virgie could sit still for hours, gathering news and gossip. In fact, Virgie took particular pleasure in keeping everybody up to date on Eck’s high jinks. Sometimes, when Virgie would claim to be the older of the twins, Eck would counter, “Yeah, you got out first so you could tell everyone else I was coming.”
Growing up, Eck seemed to be always looking for a way out of Poor Valley. Among the Carter children, only Eck finished high school—and that took some doing. The only school in the Valley was down through Jett Gap, on the way to Neal’s Store. It was a two-story log building that doubled as the Friendly Grove Methodist Church, so during the big revival time, school would shut down for a week or more. And during the harvest season, attendance was sparse. Worse yet, the school went through only eighth grade. So when he graduated there, Eck was forced to walk up the Valley—four miles each way, every day—to attend high school in Hiltons.
His mother was the only person who really understood what Eck was aiming for. One day he was with Mollie at Neal’s when the train went through. People were always milling around Neal’s place, trading, getting the news, having a coffee, playing cards by the big potbellied stove, or just plain “meeting the train.” Waiting for the train in the Valley was like waiting for the big paddle-wheel steamer to come rolling into port in young Sam Clemens’s Hannibal. The buzz in the store always increased as the posted arrival time neared. Even if it was only a few people getting off, anybody at Neal’s would be the first to know that the Hensleys had a cousin visiting from Roanoke, or that Mandy Groves just got something called a “player piano.” There was no telling what treasures were inside those canvas pouches stamped U.S. MAIL. Disappointment was palpable when the train edged past Neal’s Store, slowing but not stopping. If there were no passengers for Maces Springs, the railway mail clerk would make his pass on the move, tossing off a mail pouch and grabbing the outgoing mail from a swinging metal arm. The train would just keep on toward Bristol and Roanoke, then up to the state capital in Richmond and the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. Eck knew about those places; he’d read about them all. “Someday,” Eck quietly told his mother as the train pulled through the station, “I’m going to put mail off that train.”
The strangest case of the entire Carter brood was the firstborn, Alvin Pleasant Carter. Pleasant shook, all the time. From the day he was born until the day he died, he was possessed of a slight tremor, most noticeable in his hands. The family named it “palsy” and never saw cause to better Mollie’s own theory. Like most mountain women, Mollie turned for answers to God and nature. Whenever anybody asked about this odd, shaky child, she would tell them about the day when she was pregnant with Pleasant and got caught outside in a thunderstorm while gathering apples fallen from a tree. A crack of lightning hit the tree she stood beneath and traveled like wildfire along the ground all around her and, as she reckoned, shot such a bolt of fright into her swollen belly that the baby inside would be afflicted with that very nervous energy for each and all of his days. Sometimes Mollie would say her eldest son had been marked. What that meant nobody was quite sure, but it must have given some comfort to a little boy with a difficult row to hoe.
Like the cause, the consequences of this affliction were not altogether worked out.
There were some things about Pleasant that were laid squarely at the feet of this encounter with the lightning. He was odd. Even when he was a child, it seemed like Pleasant was always humming, or giggling quietly to himself in contemplation of some private joke. He wasn’t much good in school, easily distracted, self-conscious about his shaky handwriting. In the classroom, the other kids did the giggling—constantly—at Pleasant’s strange ways and shortcomings. By the time he was ten, Mollie had relieved her emotionally bruised son of the chore of going to school.
Another thing people put down to the lightning was how Pleasant appeared to be hooked up to some source of energy from which he couldn’t unplug himself. The boy never could sit still. Even after he grew to his full height of six foot two, lanky and gaunt, all joints and Adam’s apple, he could still unfold himself and raise up from a chair faster than a man half his size. He never stayed in one spot long; he’d jump off the porch, head out past Neal’s, and down the trace, perambulating alongside the railroad tracks. In those days, most folks walked wherever they needed to go. And, like Eck, they might walk miles every day just to get where they had to be. But Pleasant Carter never appeared to be heading anywhere in particular. Neighbors would see him walking up and down those tracks, bent slightly forward as if walking into the wind, his hands folded behind his back, his long, thin legs taking the railroad ties two or three at a time and his jug-eared head bouncing atop his skinny neck.
It was matter of wide speculation whether his head bobbed from the act of walking or the act of thinking. Pleasant took so many notions that they tumbled over one another and fought for space at the front of his mind; he had a hard time ever keeping a single idea front and center and rarely saw one through to completion. He was forever leaving chores undone. As a grown man he would practice a variety of trades: farmer, sawyer, fruit-tree salesman, choir leader, carpenter, music-recording professional, and proprietor of a general store whose hours were neither regular nor predictable. He never did seem to care much about his income. When he found himself in some personal bonanza, he’d buy more land, or a sawmill. Forty years after his death, his family still doesn’t have a definite inventory of the sawmills he owned. “A.P. was always a step out in left field,” one of his nephews remembers. “Wifty” is how one niece describes him.
Finally, and most notably, the ever-present tremble gave A.P.’s voice a slight quaver, so that when he spoke, it was like a ripple on a pond, and when he sang, it was faster, like the shimmering rush of a mountain creek over mossy rocks below. All these things, everyone in the Valley agreed, were on account of the lightning.
Then, too, there were things about Pleasant that were not so clearly consequences of the thunderbolt but seemed, unlike the tremor, to come from the deepest part of him and simply were him and would have been there regardless. First there was his stubbornness, which could flare into real, and occasionally frightening, fits of temper. Then there was his need to see things of the world out beyond his ancestral valley, and to make himself known in that wider world. And, on the other side of that very ledger, there was his fear of leaving and not being able to double back home. Those conflicting impulses fused over time into a single inchoate longing that takes hold of boys and girls in the most isolated parts of this country, a longing for something they cannot put a name on, or that has yet to be named, or whose name simply hasn’t reached their valleys. The longer Pleasant lived without knowing what to call that longing or how to act on it, the more enervated and absentminded he became. Even as he passed into adulthood, even when he had been up on the sill a good while and ought to have mellowed, Pleasant Carter, it was agreed, was strung a hair too tight.
The other thing Pleasant seemed to have deep within him was music—and it was music that brought him his first notice. Bob had quit playing dances at Mollie’s request, but he’d still occasionally scrape out a tune around home. And when they were just boys, Pleasant and Jim got a fiddle to share between them. Jim practiced obsessively, but the only song he really mastered was “Johnny Get Your Hair Cut Short.” So it wasn’t long before everybody in the tiny cabin was sick of that tune. Pleasant showed a more supple feeling for the instrument and seemed to have a real ear for music. If he heard a new song, he could generally chord it out on the fiddle by the end of the day. But Pleasant’s tremor continued to vex; he could barely keep his bow steady. It was his singing that got him recognized. When he became a teenager, his voice ripened into a deep, rich bass, and the tremor gave him what the locals call a “tear,” embroidering his singing with an almost otherworldly tenderness. It was one mighty fine church voice—and that’s where he had his first triumphs.
* * *
The church was the most important institution in Poor Valley. It served as a family of families and helped that larger family push back against the uglier potencies of nature: weather, disease, death, and the darkness in one’s own heart. For Mollie Carter, it was the rock that held fast. Mollie had figured out early in the marriage that she wasn’t going to inject any real drive into her husband, or take the edge off his stubbornness. But she did carry him to church and bring him into the larger community. First they attended the Friendly Grove Methodist Church with Mollie’s own family: her sister Martha (who married Bob’s half brother Lish Carter) and her brothers Charlie, Will, and Flanders Bays. In March of 1904, one of Mollie’s uncles donated land for a new church building and a cemetery behind. Bob Carter and the other Sunday-school men felled trees and hewed out logs on Clinch Mountain. Pleasant and his uncle Charlie Bays ran teams of horses and mules, skidding the logs off the mountain and up a hillside to the building site. It took four horses to drag the colossal tree chosen for the church seal, and Mollie was in her glory: The chosen tree came from her farm.
In the spring of 1907, fifty-plus members climbed onto the hilltop overlooking the old Friendly Grove church and schoolhouse, and dedicated Mount Vernon Methodist Church and its cemetery. At Mount Vernon they continued a traditional worship, with the complicated, Old World King James Bible as text. Religion on the hilltop church was still practiced as a stalwart barrier against the forces of nature. One Sunday at Mount Vernon, in the middle of a crop-choking drought, an old farmer stood up and beseeched his maker: “Oh, Lord God, please send us a good clod-soaker. But oh, Lord God, don’t send us no damned gully-washer!”
They talked to God, together, in that church. First they’d testify to faith in their personal savior, Jesus Christ, and to the glory of the Father. Then they’d plead for Him to walk with them in their daily struggles, to deliver them from the pain—and not just in the peace of the hereafter, but right now, on this earth, in this minute. They’d beg for His healing power. And from the start Bob Carter proved himself a prodigious voice in that church; his prayers were pleading and, in extremis, emotional to the point of weeping. Ruby Parker, who grew up in the church, still remembers: “Bob Carter just said a good old humble prayer—and he didn’t leave nobody out,” she says. “The saved, the sinner, sick, afflicted, everybody. Especially the sick. He always remembered them in prayer.” One of his own granddaughters thought Bob’s longer perorations timed out at about an hour, but Ruby would only offer that Bob “could pray on and on.”
Prayer might have given Mount Vernon foundation, but music gave the church lift. The congregation rang in the service with song, and rang it out with song. So while Bob’s solemn prayers were Mollie Carter’s personal comfort, the songs were her joy. When the congregation sang her favorites, Mollie belted them out. Her granddaughter June Carter Cash once claimed that when Mount Vernon broke into “The Land of an Uncloudy Day” (and the wind was just right), you could hear Ma Carter at Neal’s Store, nearly a half mile down the road.
So Mollie’s face must have betrayed her motherly (if not altogether Christian) pride when her own son Pleasant showed himself to be the finest bass in the entire church and ready for the exalted church quartet. He’d been handpicked for that quartet by Mollie’s brother Flanders Bays, who served the church a
s musical director. But nobody in the congregation thought to call it favoritism. Pleasant’s talent was unquestionable.
Pleasant heeded his uncle’s direction—and not just in the church. In fact, Flanders Bays proved to be the lodestar for Pleasant Carter. Fland was just nine years older than his nephew; he was of the Valley but somehow above it, too. Fland was a solid citizen in Maces Springs; he would also sit with the sick and dying, though he’d often put a dab of turpentine on the tip of his tongue to ward off germs. Like most people in the Valley, he worked a small farm, but he maintained a seigneur’s dignity. He was nearing six feet, with dark hair and a patrician nose, and he wielded a wheat cradle (which was something like a scythe) with practiced precision. His sons claim that nobody in the Valley could work one faster, even while he sternly counseled them on method: “Keep your right elbow locked, or you’ll really feel it in your arm.” But it wasn’t his uncle’s handiwork with farm implements that fascinated Pleasant. It was the simple, stark fact that Flanders Bays was the first person he’d ever seen who could make a living away from the farm—and with music. Flanders had learned shape notes from a singing master at a normal school in Nottingham, Virginia. Based on a four-note scheme (diamond, square, triangle, heart), which made it easier for congregants to follow along, shape-note singing began in New England churches in the eighteenth century. By the turn of the twentieth century, shape-note singing had died out in New England, but in the South, it had evolved into a slightly more elaborate seven-note format taught at singing schools sponsored or encouraged by the South’s efflorescent gospel publishing industry.
Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone? Page 4
