Listen Here (19 page)

I wasn't sick. Maw knew it. Bud knew it.

Days went by, to a day when I went down for a look in the hogpen. The hogs grunted, pointed their ears, and looked up at me with their little pig eyes close together.

There under the slop trough I saw it. The proof I was not seeking. I saw a piece of old sack. I screamed what the whole world already knew. “They threw the sack and Homer in it into the hogpen. The hogs ate up Old Homer.” I leaned against the pen and I retched until I spit up. I was really sick. The hogs saw it. Bud did, too, for he was in the plum grove, spying as usual. I started running, jumped some puddles, got tired, and came to stop where some daisies covered with dust were beside the road.

I began feeling nice. The daisies were nice. Old Marth's place behind me was nice. Up overhead the fleecy sheep clouds stood stock still to become masses of daisies. Over to the left was a patch of red sky clover. Then the sheep clouds moved together and formed a maze and across the sky was a swath of daisies. Just like the swath Homer had traveled up the trace to the top of the ridge. I was delighted and looked a long while. I know I saw it. There placed in the maze of daisies he loved so well was Homer-snake. He stood upright on the end of his blunt tail and looking over the daisies, he laughed at me.

I laughed and went home.

Maw's kitchen was nice with smells of sassafras tea, spicewood, ginger-root, milk cheeseing, and cold mint water fresh from the spring.

Bud came in the door, reporting on me. “Maw, I saw her. She has been down to Old Marth's hogpen.”

“Whatever for, child?”

Maw didn't expect an answer, and I had already turned my back on Bud. I felt something new in my life. The day was coming soon when I could handle Bud. Maw refers to it as
patience.
Patience was something Bud did not have. Bud hung around, waiting on me to start talking and telling everything. I sat until Bud gave up and left, then I told Maw, “I saw Old Homer-snake among the daisies in the sky. He stood up on his blunt tail and laughed at me.”

Maw left her dough-making and with flour up to her elbows, she took my head in both hands. “Precious. You saw what you hoped for, for Homer. Homer-snake is all right. You are all right. Find your little pan. You can come help me make up this bread.”

from
The River Hills & Beyond
(1998)

It was not that I minded
being old

I just never thought of her
that way

She came and found my bed
to talk

She said of old sad things

And scars left on us all

My arm found the curve
of her

And we were young again

In a cold bed on a cold night

My cold feet moved away
from hers

It was not I minding
being old

That I shivered as my
little sister slept

And in the dark she did not know
I wept.

from
The River Hills & Beyond
(1998)

Got anything you want to say
before the season starts?

Ball one. Ball two. Three games going
Two tv's and a radio
My God there are reruns

Boredom. Trouble, you light
on the sports widow

Bring me a beer
in his stocking feet
he stomps his hat upon the floor

Kill the umpire
O God he is killing me

Rattle pans slam the door
step on the dog's tail

How do I like trying to talk
to a peacock

Sam, I am going to leave you

how would you like to
kiss a crocodile

You know what I am telling
you to kiss

He won't move out

(January 11, 1869–January 22, 1968)

Olive Tilford Dargan's literary career spanned half a century and embraced numerous genres, including poetry, drama, short stories, and novels. Dargan was born on a farm near Litchfield, Kentucky, and spent her early childhood there. When she was ten, her schoolteacher parents moved the family to Missouri. Dargan earned a degree from Peabody College in Nashville and subsequently taught in Arkansas, Texas, and Nova Scotia.

From 1893 to 1894, she attended Radcliffe, where she met Harvard student Pegram Dargan, whom she married in 1898. While in Boston, Dargan worked as a secretary for the president of a small company being taken over by the United States Rubber Company. The experience gave her an insider's view of big business, and the material she gathered during this time figures prominently in her fiction.

In 1906, Dargan and her husband bought a farm in Swain County, North Carolina, which was paid for by income from her writing. Dargan's reputation was initially based on her poetry, including
Path Flower
and
The Cycle's Rim
, a tribute to her husband, who drowned in 1915.

A recurring theme in Dargan's later work was the exploitation of Southern workers by American industry. In the 1930s and 1940s, using the pen name Fielding Burke, she wrote several novels exploring the inhumanity of America's economic system. As
New York Times
literary critic Donald Adams noted, “there is no hatred of capitalists in her conviction that the capitalist system must end; simply an overwhelming sympathy for those whom the system crushes.”

From 1925 until her death in 1968, Dargan made her home in Asheville, North Carolina, though she continued to travel extensively in the United States and Europe. Dargan's final book,
Innocent Bigamy and Other Stories
, was a short story collection published when she was ninety-six.

In her novel
Call Home the Heart
(written under her pseudonym, Fielding Burke), Dargan describes the plight of Ishma Waycaster, a mountain woman who, along with her husband, Britt, struggles valiantly to make a living on her mother Laviny's worn-out family farm. Ishma, who is expecting her first child, resents the lazy ways of her brother-in-law Jim, her sister Bainie, and their seven children.

Novels:
Sons of the Stranger
(1947),
From My Highest Hill
(1941),
A Stone Came Rolling
(1935),
Call Home the Heart
(1932),
Highland Annals
(1925).
Drama:
The Flutter of the Gold-leaf, and Other Plays
(1922),
The Mortal Gods and Other Plays
(1912).
Poetry:
The Spotted Hawk
(1958),
The Cycle's Rim
(1916),
Path Flower and Other Verses
(1914).
Short stories:
Innocent Bigamy and Other Stories
(1962).

Contemporary Authors
, Vol. 111, 132. Nancy Carol Joyner, “Olive Tilford Dargan,”
Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States
(1995), 233–34. Virginia Terrell Lathrop, “Olive Tilford Dargan,”
N.C. Libraries
18 (spring 1960), 68–76.
New York Times
[obituary] (24 January 1968), 45, col. 1. Richard Walser, “Olive Tilford Dargan,”
Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary
(1979), 113–14.

from Chapter 3

When that first year's crop was harvested it proved as abundant as its promise. Britt walked among his neighbors feeling their commending eyes upon him. Gaffney [the storekeeper] shook his hand when he brought his first load of corn down to pay on the family debt. That debt was larger than Britt expected to find it. There were twelve in the household, not counting the company that Jim's affliction brought in, and four of the children were going to school. However inexorably they limited their spending, some needs had to be met. And Gaffney, always liberal of heart, had met them. Britt and Ishma decided to pay him in full, and do without any new winter clothes. They had to buy a cow, but cows were cheap that year, and Abe Marsh let them have one with a heifer calf for thirty bushels of corn. That was as far as the crop would stretch, aside from the part they must keep for bread and feed. But Jim was getting well, and wouldn't need any more money for medicine and liniment and invalid's kickshaws. The doctor had told them two months before that he wouldn't have to come again, and that immense drain was stopped. Britt sold his gun and laid the money away for the time when Ishma would need it. They felt even with the world, and were not afraid to start a new debt at Gaffney's. This was necessary because Britt intended to put in most of the winter clearing new-ground. They knew that the old fields would not repeat their generosity another year. It wasn't possible to put all of the “stalk land” in orchard grass and sweet clover as they had planned, for seed was too costly. Orchard grass would make good summer pasture, and when it died down there would be the green winter clover for the cattle. They expected to have their own ox-team to feed the next year, and not be dependent on neighbors for plough-brutes. But it would take fifty dollars to seed the land. That would have to wait.

It was February and bitter cold when Edward Britton Hensley was born. Ishma knew she would never forget how cold it was, and how cramped they were for room. She had wanted Laviny to give up her bed in the middle room and let her be sick there, but her mother said there was no use beginning to humor her, she'd have to get used to things like any married woman. So Ishma kept her own bed in the corner of the big room where Jim and Bainie, with their two least ones, occupied another corner, and Sam, Andy and Ben, another. Nettie and Ellie slept with Laviny in the middle room. When Ishma's hour approached, the children all were sent off to the neighbors for a day and night. But they trooped back too soon for Ishma's peace.

“Can't you send them out a little while?” she asked Bainie, feebly hopeful.

“They've jest been out. I kain't send 'em right back an' the air hangin' with ice. They're all keepin' back there in the kitchen. I reckon you don't want the whole house.”

“Sounds like they're right on the other side o' the wall, banging and yelping.”

“You'll have to git aholt o' yersef, Ishmalee,” said her mother, “an not let Britt make a fool o' ye.”

Britt went up to the barn where he could swear unimpeded. He wouldn't let Ishma sit up for two weeks, although Laviny insisted on her “comin' out of it” the ninth day. He and Laviny had their first quarrel, but Britt suddenly became very quiet when he saw tears pushing from under Ishma's eyelashes. He went to her and whispered, “Next time we'll be to ourselves,” and with a vehemence that bewildered him she had answered, “There'll be no next time!”

Ned was the finest baby that had ever come into the family. Laviny admitted it, and when he was old enough to return her attachment, she pushed Ishma aside and took possession of him. “You'll have plenty more,” she said. “I'll look out fer this'n.”

Within a month after his birth, Ishma had regained her bloom and her strength, though she was a little confused in her thinking. Life, the future, her plans, were not so clear as they had been. She felt mentally clamped down, in the way that she had felt physically cramped the night Ned was born. How she had wanted room for her body! The walls had pressed in against her, the presence of the people, taking up good space, smothered her.

Jim, who could hobble about by February, came in one night saying that he had fastened the cow in a stall where she couldn't thrash around. She'd find a calf before morning, and if they left her out she'd go to the very top o' the pasture and they'd have a masterous time getting her down. Cows always wanted the whole earth an' sky too when they's droppin' a calf. He'd shore fixed this'n until she couldn't more'n switch her tail.

That night, while Jim and Bainie were snoring, Ishma slipped from the side of Britt, climbed up to the barn, and let the moaning cow out of the narrow, unclean stall. Next morning the cow was found with her calf at the head of the pasture, and great was the stir over the trouble she gave them. Jim had a mind to give her one good lashing, but he didn't; and it was Britt who finally coaxed her down to the barn lot. Ishma sat by the fire, holding Ned, and smiling.

(January 29, 1949–)

Born in Gainesville, Florida, Doris Davenport lived in Cornelia, Georgia, from age five until age fifteen, when people, experiences, and landscapes of northeast Georgia began to shape her identity. The oldest daughter of Ethel Mae Gibson Davenport and Claude Davenport, she attended the “Cornelia Regional Colored High School, one ‘magnet' school which included grades one through twelve and all the African American children from five adjoining counties (bussed in, daily).”

She began college at sixteen and graduated in 1969 with a B.A. in English from Paine College in Augusta, Georgia. She earned her M.A. in English from State University of New York in Buffalo in 1971, and completed her Ph.D. in African American literature at the University of Southern California in 1985.

She describes herself as a “lesbian-feminist anarchist” and an “Affrilachian” (Southern Appalachian African American) poet. She has taught at colleges and universities in California, Iowa, Ohio, North Carolina, and Alabama. Her work has been supported by the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Syvenna Foundation for Women, and the Georgia Council for the Arts. She is a performance poet and a member of Alternate ROOTs, an Atlanta-based organization for artists/activists.

Poetry:
madness like morning glories: poems
(2004),
Soque Street Poems
(1995),
voodoo chile: slight return
(1991),
eat thunder & drink rain
(1982),
it's like this
(1980).
Autobiographical essay:
“All This, and Honeysuckles Too,” in
Bloodroot
(1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 88–97.

Joyce Dyer, “Doris Diosa Davenport,” in
Bloodroot
, 87. James A. Miller, “Coming Home to Affrilachia: The Poems of doris davenport,” in
Her Words
(2002), ed. Felicia Mitchell, 96–106.