Fair and Tender Ladies (54 page)

With very special thanks to Kathryn Stripling Byer, whose fine poems inspired this novel and sustained me while I wrote it; to Dan Patterson, for his help in finding old-time gospel music; to my cousins Randy Venable Sinisi and Melissa Venable Poynter; to Anna Jardine, for her heroic copyediting of the manuscript; to Clyde Edgerton and Wilton Mason; and to Hal, for everything.

I have gathered Appalachian legends, history, songs, and tales from people I know and also from the following sources:

More Than Moonshine,
by Sidney Saylor Farr, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Reminiscences and recipes: a wonderful book.

Our Southern Highlanders,
by Horace Kephart, University of Tennessee Press, Knoxville, 1976. Original copyrights 1913, 1922, The Macmillan Co., New York.

Grandfather Tales,
edited by Richard Chase, The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1948. It was in this volume that I came across the stories of Whitebear Whittington, Mutsmag, Old Dry Frye, and Chunk O Meat.

The Southern Highlander and His Homeland,
by John C. Campbell, reprinted by The Reprint Company, Spartanburg, South Carolina, 1973, from a 1921 edition in the North Carolina Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. With permission of the Russell Sage Foundation.

Growing Up Southern:
Southern Exposure
Looks at Childhood, Then and Now,
edited by Chris Mayfield, Pantheon Books, New York, 1980.

Such as Us: Southern Voices of the Thirties,
edited by Tom E. Terrill and Jerrold Hirsch, University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1978.

My Appalachia,
by Rebecca Caudill, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, New York, 1966.

Voices from the Mountains,
collected and recorded by Guy and Candie Carawan, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1975.

Where Time Stood Still,
by Bruce and Nancy Roberts, Collier Macmillan, New York, 1970.

Our Appalachia: An Oral History,
edited by Laurel Shackelford and Bill Weinberg, Hill & Wang, New York, 1977.

Lee Smith
is the author of fifteen works of fiction including
Oral History, Fair and Tender Ladies,
and her recent
Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger.
She has received many awards including the North Carolina Award for Literature and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; her novel
The Last Girls
was a
New York Times
bestseller as well as winner of the Southern Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in North Carolina.

THE DEVIL'S DREAM
FAIR AND TENDER LADIES