Anybody Shining

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

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  To Joy Salyers and Deborah Miller, my own true friends at the N. C. Folk Life Institute

  Dear Cousin Caroline,

  This morning I told Mama how I might have to run away and marry a bear if I don’t find someone to call my own true friend. These mountains are near to spilling over with children, and none of them is worth two cents. They are all too old or too young or just plain disappointing.

  It’s the least fair thing in the world. James has got Will Maycomb down the road who is full of fun and mischief, and Lucille’s friend Ivadee is a year younger but seems just the same as Lucille, wanting to play House and School Teacher all the day long. Baby John is too young for friends, but when the time comes I am sure he will have a gracious plenty and I will still be sitting here on this porch by myself with so many things to say and not a one to say them to.

  If you are a twelve-year-old girl looking for a friend in these parts, you are in a sad and sorry way.

  The trouble about saying such things to Mama is that she’ll make you regret it. “You have a nice cousin in Raleigh your age you could be friends with,” Mama said. “It is a sin and a shame that you two don’t know one another.”

  Daddy was sitting at the table working out a knot in Old Dan’s harness. He looked up at Mama and said, “The reason they don’t know each other, Idy, is because your sister don’t want nothing to do with us, and she don’t want her children to have nothing to do with our children. That’s the sad but true truth.”

  Well, that set Mama to crying and moaning and groaning about how she was an orphan girl, her mama and daddy being dead and her only sister gone off the mountain to Raleigh to be a rich doctor’s wife.

  I could see that I was not helping matters by standing there, so I went out to the porch, where I do my best thinking. I sat on the steps and wondered how was I supposed to make friends with someone who I never even laid eyes on. That seemed fairly unlikely to me, especially if that person’s mama was against the idea from the get-go.

  Could that be true, Cousin Caroline? Does your mama really not want us to know one another? I’ve never heard of someone not wanting to know me. I surely want to know you.

  I believe this is a matter that needs to be cleared up.

  Here is how I come up with the idea to write my cousin Caroline a letter. I was out feeding the chickens a few mornings later, happy to be outside, since Mama was in the kitchen, her face still full of gloom. I knowed that until we got Mama cheered back up again, life would be miserable for all of us. She’d forget to put sugar in her pound cakes and make us take baths twice a day. Why, she’d probably serve us bowls of water for Sunday dinner instead of chicken stew.

  I felt so strongly that if I could just meet my cousin, we would become the best of friends, and that would make Mama happy. Maybe the thing to do was steal away on Old Dan and ride to Raleigh. The problem with that plan was Old Dan was not a good riding horse. He had ideas of his own about where to go and how fast to get there. Another problem was that I weren’t quite clear on how to get to Raleigh, which would slow down my trip considerably.

  Then I thought about how maybe I could hop the train that went down the mountain to Morganton, and then catch another train to Raleigh. Then, when I got to Raleigh, I could buy a map and find my way to Cousin Caroline’s house. But what if she weren’t home? And what if I got caught riding the rails like a tramp? Didn’t a person go to jail for that? Did they put twelve-year-old girls in jail? I reckoned they might, and then Mama would cry even more, and everybody would be more miserable than before.

  And then it come to me. Why, making friends with my cousin was the easiest thing in the world! I stomped up the front steps to the house and found Mama in the kitchen.

  “I am going to write Cousin Caroline a letter!” I told her. “Just give me a piece of paper and consider it done.”

  That cheered Mama up tolerably well.

  Pencil and paper in hand, I walked out to the porch, sat down on the top step, and commenced to writing. After my introductory remarks, I added some things I thought Cousin Caroline ought to know about me straightaways. I thought it best to mention that I have light-red hair that some call strawberry, but no freckles, and there are some that say I am cursed because of it. I don’t believe in such a thing as curses. Dreama Brown’s granny told us a tale of conjure ladies who live on the far eastern shores and wear gold hoops in their ears and put spells on folks. That sounds interesting to me, but I don’t believe in it.

  After I wrote about curses, I wondered if that was the right way to fill up a letter. What did children down in Raleigh talk about and think about of a day? How did they fill the hours? Did they have chores that kept them busy all morning, the way that me and James and Lucille did? Might could be that if your daddy was a doctor, you didn’t have to do a thing in your life, just lean back on your fancy bed and eat candies that your butler handed you one by one.

  What did I have to say of interest to a girl with a butler and probably a maid who buttoned the back of her dress every morning?

  Well, I told myself, Lucille buttons my top back button for me, so that’s almost like having a maid. I laughed to think of what a sad and sorry maid Lucille would make, bossing everyone about and saying, “You’uns pick up your own mess, I’m off to play tea party with Ivadee!”

  Lucille would not think twice about sending a letter to our cousin, no matter how many butlers and maids they might have down there in Raleigh. That thought give me courage, and suddenly I had so many things to say, I didn’t rightly know where to start.

  My pencil raced down the paper as the words tumbled out. I wrote about the time Will Maycomb brought a live chicken in a flour sack for Sunday offering, and I wrote about the summer I was nine and went through a spell of sleep-walking, how I kept climbing out on the roof and Daddy ended up nailing my window shut, even though I never once fell off.

  I wrote about how James got a fishhook caught in his hand this past May and made me pull it out because the sight of his own blood causes him to faint straight to the ground. I wrote about our old dog, Bob, who run away when I was four and who I have never once forgotten.

  I had about a hundred stories at the tips of my fingers, and I decided to write down every last one and let Cousin Caroline pick out her favorites. I sat there on the steps until supper, telling one tale after another, sure that once she read my letter, my cousin would certainly want to be friends with a girl such as myself.

  I hope you will write me back, Cousin Caroline, and tell me such things as the color of your hair and when your birthday is and whether or not you like to read as much as James does. I don’t care for reading myself, as I get squirrelly sitting all alone. But I like it when Mama reads to us of an evening from the books of Charles Dickens and Sir Walter Scott, which a missionary lady give to her when she was but a girl over on Cub Creek Mountain, and your mama was also a girl sitting by her side.

  Signed,

  Your Cousin,

  Arie Mae Sparks

  Dear Cousin Caroline,

  It has been a week since I sent my last letter. Now I am writing to wonder if you have received it. Was it too fancy and now you’re shy about writing a letter back? Miss Sary says I am a good writer and have a head full of interesting notions, though there are folks in these parts who believe my
ideas strange and far from sound.

  That is what happened with Luranie Simms, who was a girl I thought I might be friends with once upon a time. By the end of our first meeting, I fear she thought me awful odd. She lives over to Bakersville, and one day last May my daddy was fishing in the Toe River and come across her daddy, and they got to talking. They found they had daughters of near about the same age and decided we should meet.

  So on the following Saturday, after chores, Mr. Simms brung his Luranie over to the home place to visit. I had spent the week in a state of pure excitement and decided for the special occasion to write and perform a play for my guest. It was the story of the haints in our barn, and I called it The Headless Haints and All Their Little Headless Haint Children. I believed Luranie Simms would surely feel welcomed by having a girl such as myself write a play for her enjoyment and would want to be my friend and sit and talk and talk.

  Sad to say, this is not how things turned out.

  I wished I had some pictures to send to Cousin Caroline, so she could see in her mind everything I was telling her about, such as the Toe River and the plain-faced Luranie Simms. I think pictures make a story better, but since I didn’t have a Brownie box camera like Doc Weems nor the talent to draw more than sticks and circles, I would have to draw my pictures with words.

  The very minute Daddy told me that Luranie Simms was coming, I knowed we had to make a grand occasion out of it, and a grand thought come to me. I could put on a play! Wouldn’t that just make Luranie Simms so happy, and wouldn’t she see how good it would be to be friends with one such as me? Besides, I had the perfect story to tell. At last having a barn filled to the rafters with haints was going to come in handy.

  I’d not seen the ghosts myself, but Daddy was all the time telling stories about them. He’d come in of an evening and say, “Well, if I didn’t see Sam and Joe in Old Dan’s stall smoking their pipes this afternoon! I was about to put up a fuss about the foolishness of smoking in a barn full of hay, but then them two old fellers just plain disappeared and took their pipes with ’em.”

  When I sat down to write my play, I started to tell about Sam and Joe, but I realized something pretty quick. For haints, Sam and Joe weren’t all that interesting. Mostly, according to Daddy, they smoked their pipes in the barn or slapped Old Dan’s flanks and spooked him. There weren’t much of a story to that. But what if our barn was haunted by other spooky things? The more I thought about it, the more I convinced myself it must be true.

  I went to find James, who was getting ready to go fish the creek. “What is the scariest kind of haint you can think of? So scary you’d run a mile in the other direction if you saw one.”

  “I think if I walked into the barn and saw old Sam and Joe, only they didn’t have heads? Why, I’d probably fall over dead right there.”

  Now, James is a strong and sturdy boy who ain’t scared of much other than the sight of his own blood, so I reckoned headless haints must be the scariest things going. But even better to my mind than a headless Sam and Joe was a headless Sam and Josephine and some headless little babies. Oh, I liked that idea just fine!

  To give credit, Lucille come up with the idea for costumes. I had planned on me by myself telling the story of Sam and Josephine and all their headless young’uns, acting out all the parts myself. When I told this to Lucille, she said, “Only problem is, you got a head.”

  We was on our way back from the schoolhouse, and I was trying to shake all the new learning out of my mind so I could get back to the business of writing my play. “Why is that a problem?” I asked.

  “It seems to me your play would be a lot scarier if somebody without a head was part of the goings-on. ’Cause otherwise, it’s just you telling a scary story and doing different voices. But if a headless person wandered out behind you while you was telling the story . . . well, that could have an effect on your audience, don’t you think?”

  “There’s only one problem I can think of.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Everybody I know has a head. And I can’t rightly imagine them agreeing to get their head chopped off for my play.”

  Lucille rolled her eyes, like she couldn’t believe how foolish I was. “You just need the right costume, Arie Mae. Like, say if James put on one of Daddy’s shirts, only before he put it on, he buttoned all the buttons and strung the neck closed. Then he could pull it on and the collar would sit on the top of his head, like he was Headless Sam.”

  I could just picture it. “And you could do the same with one of Mama’s dresses. Only, how would you be able to move around without being able to see?”

  “I could use a dress she put in the play-pretend box, and I could cut tiny holes where my eyes will be. And then I can hold James’s hand while we’re walking around behind you so he won’t trip.”

  Well, didn’t it work out exactly the way Lucille featured it? And weren’t it the scariest thing in the world when we practiced my play with James and Lucille walking around without their heads?

  It seemed like a hundred years between the time I woke up Saturday morning and the time Luranie Simms come walking up to the house. She was a drab-looking sort of girl, pale with skimpy brown hair, but her face warmed up with her smile, and I just knowed we was going to be the best of friends!

  “I’ll show you my room I share with Lucille and Baby John,” I told her, “and then we can have a bite of something to eat, and then I’ll do my play for you.”

  “You’re going to do a play?” Luranie asked, sounding confused. “Don’t you need all sorts of folks to do a play?”

  “Oh, just you wait! You’ll be surprised like you ain’t never been surprised before!”

  It’s a funny thing to put on a play. Even if you have practiced it a hundred times, you will still fill up with butterflies before the show begins. Me and James had strung a sheet across the front porch to make it look like what we thought a real, live theater would look like, and we placed a chair facing the stage for Luranie to sit in.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” I announced, coming out from behind the curtain, even though it were just Luranie in the audience. “Welcome to our show, The Headless Haints and All Their Little Headless Haint Children!”

  Luranie got a pale look about her, and she scooched her chair back, like she wished to be as far away from the stage as possible.

  “This is the true story of the headless haints that live up yonder in our barn,” I continued, and I thought I saw a green aspect come to Luranie’s pale face. “They are named Sam and Josephine, and they have a right fine passel of headless haint babies.”

  That’s when Lucille come out from behind the curtain, her head hid underneath the collar of Mama’s old dress. In her arms she carried her most wore-out and least loved baby doll, whose head she had detached for this occasion. A moment later, a headless James followed her out and bellowed, “Hello, Josephine, I’m home from the fields!”

  Right about then is when Luranie commenced to crying, and then she run down the porch steps to the yard. She made a right good number of funny noises before she leaned over and was sick across the tops of her shoes.

  It turns out that Luranie Simms is very scared of haints and all manner of spooky things, such as poltergeists, boogers, and most of all, the Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow. So I guessed I could see how my play might have troubled her.

  Cousin Caroline, at first I felt as sorry as could be that I’d picked the wrong theme for my play. But while I was helping Luranie clean the sick off her shoes, it come to me that I couldn’t have true friendship with a girl who turned green over a headless haint. I am as refined as any other girl you might meet, but I’m not a scaredy cat, nor can I abide one. I hope that you ain’t scared by ghosts, poltergeists, haints, boogers, or made-up things that don’t have heads. If you’re scared of true living things that don’t have heads, well, we are alike in that way.

  Mama says she’s worried she don’t have the right address for you in Raleigh, but Daddy said
that your daddy’s people is high stock and fancy, and all my letters sent to Raleigh will reach them sooner or later.

  If you’re thinking my daddy don’t like your daddy nor your daddy’s people, you’re right, but that don’t mean you and I can’t be the best of friends.

  Signed,

  Your Cousin Who Hopes You Will Write Back Soon,

  Arie Mae Sparks

  Dear Cousin Caroline,

  I am still awaiting your fine letter. I think you must be on a trip, as it’s summer and some folks like to travel during the pleasant warm weather. I have never took a trip except for the time we went to see Daddy’s brother Roland over in Buncombe County, who had such pretty red horses. We have but the one horse, Old Dan, and he ain’t in the least way pretty nor is he nice.

  Today one of the songcatcher ladies, Miss Pittman, come to visit. When she was talking to Mama, I thought, I best remember everything she says and does so I can tell it to my Dear Cousin Caroline in a letter. I have found that since I started writing letters to you I’ve been paying close attention to all the doings and comings and goings of a day. It’s like saving secrets to share with a friend late in the evening, when the lights are dimmed but for a single lantern hanging on a neighbor’s porch across the holler.

  Do you have songcatcher ladies in Raleigh? If you don’t, well, they are folks who come to your home place and write down the songs you and your family has been singing all through the years. Not only that, they have a machine the likes of which you ain’t never seen. You sing into a big horn and the sound of your voice gets captured on a wax disc. Mama has done this two times now, and the first time we heard that wax disc played back to us, the sound of Mama’s voice coming through the machine, why, I thought all of us was going to topple over from the shock.

  Of the two songcatcher ladies, Miss Pittman is the friendliest. She don’t look friendly, but that’s because she wears her hair too tight on her head. It’s pulled back like Samson himself took aholt of it and yanked. Lucille says it gives her a headache to look at Miss Pittman’s hair. She is afeared that one of these days Miss Pittman’s eyes are going to pop straight out of her eyeball pockets, her hair is pulled back so tight.