Listen Here (21 page)

(January 19, 1930–)

The daughter of Robert and Alice Webb Fleming, Ann Deagon was born in Birmingham, Alabama. She earned her B.A. from Birmingham-Southern College in 1950 and her doctorate in classical studies from the University of North Carolina in 1954. In 1951 she married Donald Deagon and is now the mother of two daughters.

After beginning her career as a classics professor at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, she joined the faculty at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1956 and served as Professor of Humanities and Writer-in-Residence there until her retirement in 1992.

Beginning her writing career in 1970, Deagon worked actively with regional and national writers' groups and in 1980 founded Poetry Center Southeast, a forerunner of the North Carolina Writers' Network. She was editor of
The Guilford Review
from 1976 until 1984, and in 1981, received a National Endowment for the Arts Literary Fellowship.

She and her husband spent a dozen summers during the 1950s and early 1960s on the Qualla Reservation in Cherokee, North Carolina, working on
Unto These Hills
, an outdoor drama about the forced removal of the Cherokee to Oklahoma over the infamous Trail of Tears. She wrote her first book-length poem,
Indian Summer
, to honor Jonah Feather and to pay tribute to “the humane vigor of the Cherokee people as well as to the humor and stubborn dignity of one man.”

Novel:
The Diver's Tomb
(1984).
Poetry:
The Polo Poems
(1990),
There is No Balm in Birmingham
(1978),
Women and Children First
(1976),
Indian Summer
(1975),
Poetics South
(1974),
Carbon 14
(1974).
Short stories:
Habitats
(1982).

Contemporary Authors
, Vols. 57–60, 161–62. James F. Mersmann, “Erotic Hyphens: Ann Deagon's Centers That Hold,”
Poets in the South
1:1, 72–83. A. McA. Miller, “Conversation with Ann Deagon,”
Poets in the South
1:1 (1977), 67–71.

from
Women and Children First
(1976)

Having readied our instrument
(a cardboard box, white paper
taped inside, two pinholes)
we lead the children
warily into the unexpected
twilight. Not
looking up, we are aware
of a great absence. Its chill
silences the jays. We show
each child the obscured sun
in camera obscura. See:
I give you the sun in a box—
a small love inside four walls.

from
Women and Children First

At nine I dug a hole behind
the rabbit hutch, four feet
across and getting deeper. I didn't
want to find China, only
to dig in. Every red
shovelful unmade Alabama.
Squatting in the clay chalice
its tight horizon all mine
I drank the sky, the sky
drank me. Between my toes
I felt dirt quiver, felt
an hour-glass running suck me
through earth's center out
onto a blue beach. It never
happened. So how did I
get here on the other
side of the world, my childhood
under my feet?

from
Women and Children First
(1976)

Sears' Dial-Your-Twin Dress Form duplicates
your figure with amazing accuracy. Simply use
any suitable coin or screwdriver to adjust screws
at bust, waist, and hips…

When I moved out, back in '50,
my twin stood in for me at home. Clothed
in a tasteful smock she always fitted
in. Over the years (twenty-five)
she kept her figure. (Someone with
an unsuitable implement had screwed
mine out of shape.) To compensate
they taped shoulder pads under her breasts,
diapered her hips and belly. By slow
accretion Art kept pace with Life.

Sears' Best is better, allows
instant adjustment to reality.
An extra slice of cheesecake, or conception—
insert a coin and twist to
FULL
.
Diet or abortion—a turn of the screw
pulls us back in shape. Say cancer—
screw the left breast till it buckles.
Say you don't make it—the next
wife has only to readjust the screws:
bust, waist, and hips. What other
dimensions does a woman have?

from
Poetics South
(1974)

You flat poets
grey on grey
in magazines like long front porches
rock chaw whittle
sometimes spit
alike as board and board—

you listen now:
in Centreville I saw a billy goat
a yearling flush with foraging cavort
maverick down a porch of country cousins
propped to the wall, and on that primal stage
kicking his heels between panic and April
let loose a hail of planetary pellets
hot tumbling in orbit reeking of creation,
vaulted the rail and left those whittlers gasping
a universe of stink.

That's poetry, boys—
like it or lump it.

from
Poetics South
(1974)

My grandpa hollowed
like a gourd
beside the produce counter.
Disdaining chairs
he propped his eighty years'
fragility
against a grocery cart
for grandchildren
to drink of dignity.

I hang him hollow
in the wind of memory
for poems to nest in.

I never lust
after a man
as much as
before one.

(December 7, 1949–)

Playwright, actress, and storyteller, Angelyn DeBord grew up in western North Carolina. “The music and language of Appalachia has been the inspiration for all of my writing,” says DeBord. In an interview in the Appalshop film
Strangers and Kin
, she tells of moving to the North Carolina Piedmont for her dad to find work when she was a child. The whole family suffered from such homesickness that they soon moved back to the mountains.

A founding member of Appalshop's Roadside Theater, based in Whitesburg, Kentucky, DeBord has spent the past twenty-eight years performing and leading workshops all over America and Europe. She has performed at the London International Theater Festival, Lincoln Center, and Kennedy Center.

DeBord views her writing as a means of “examining in a microscopic way, the fabric, texture, weaving and stitches that hold together the patterns of this Appalachian world I've always inhabited. Coming from a background with a very strong oral tradition, my work centers around the importance of being able to tell your own story with pride and confidence.”

Her critically acclaimed play
Praise House
was featured at Charleston, South Carolina's Spoleto Festival in 1990. DeBord wrote the play for the Urban Bush Women, a New York City theatre group. “I pulled so much of the information for this play from extended family stories,” says DeBord.

In the following scene from
Praise House
, we see three generations of African American women from the same family. Moma is a domestic worker trying very hard to deal with daily realities of survival. Her daughter, Hannah, has visions, sees angels. Hannah's grandmother, Granny, born in Africa, is a freed woman who totally understands young Hannah's absorption in the spiritual world. DeBord explains, “Most of us can choose whether to see or hear angels. Some of us have no choice. This play is about those who have no choice.”

“The Making of
Praise House,” Spoleto Festival U.S.A. 1990 Souvenir Program
, 36–39.
Videotaped performances:
Praise House
(Third World Newsreel, 1991),
Strangers and Kin
(Appalshop, 1984),
Three Mountain Tales
(Appalshop, 1982).
Drama:
Lessons on Becoming a Woman
(1996),
Homeade Tales: Songs and Sayings of Florida Slone
(Appalshop, 1993),
Stubborn Memories
(1993),
Praise House
(1990).

Adora Dupree, review of
Homemade Tales, Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine
11:3 (fall 1994), 39.

MOMA
(Enters, normal weary posture):
What are you, goin on about your purple dress. You sure don't need your purple dress
TONIGHT
! Lord, it is
HOT
!

(Moment of silence as MOMA fans, GRANNY rocks, HANNAH stands uncertainly)
Mother, you remember that purple dress you made me when I was little?

GRANNY: I remember a pretty little girl out in that yard, her purple skirttail aflyin.

MOMA: I thought I's a whirlwind in that dress.

GRANNY: My sweet little lilac.

MOMA: I liked to flip the skirttail til my drawers would show.

HANNAH: M
OMA
!

GRANNY: Never still one minute!

MOMA: And I still don't stop and my feet, they ache.

GRANNY
(Studies MOMA as she rubs her feet):
That weren't the only purple dress I ever made you.

MOMA: O, yeah. That un. That was later.

GRANNY: For your grownup self.

MOMA: I only wore that dress one time.

HANNAH: Why, Moma?

MOMA (
ignoring Hannah
): My, it's a hot night. Reckon it's EVER gone rain?

GRANNY: It was a pretty dress. And you was just flickerin. MOMA: Flickering?

GRANNY: From a child to a woman and back again. You was on the edge. I would just stare and stare at you. Wonderin which side you'd land on. Flickerin. Like heat lightnin. You wuz somethin in that purple dress. It was the strangest color. Like the sky of a summer's night…

MOMA: When the stars first come out.

GRANNY: You wuz all ready for the world.

MOMA: And the world, it come straight to me that night. He moved right out of them shadows…

ANGEL VOICE
(singing):
Purple shadows of a summer night.

MOMA: Tall, quiet man…

hands like…satin…

ANGEL VOICE
(sings):
Satin, he has hands like satin

Make you feel like they're made

to make you feel fine

Kisses like juice running out of a cauldron

Run down your throat and set you on fire.

GRANNY: You was on the edge. Just flickerin.

MOMA: In a flash it wuz decided. I was a woman. I didn't hardly know what hit me…a flash like…

HANNAH: Like a shooting star.

MOMA: He was there and then gone.

ANGELS: Gone. Gone.

GRANNY: A dark empty sky.

MOMA: And I was back at my Moma's again. A little girl again.

GRANNY: You wuz just a child.

MOMA: But there was a child within this child.

GRANNY: Another little shinin star soon shone.

MOMA: Little Hannah. Is she the daughter of a star? A fast-shooting, son-of-a-gun-disappearing-type star? Are you a little star?

GRANNY: A rising star. So bright.

ANGEL I: A child comes from a child.

ANGEL II: Where does the first child go?

ANGEL III: Right up into heaven.

ANGEL I: Maybe.

ANGEL II: Maybe.

ANGEL III: Who knows.

MOMA: Do I still flicker, Moma?

Do I ever still shine?

Who knows.

Who cares. There is so much to do.

HANNAH: Do you ever hear the stars asingin at night?

I do.

ANGELS: I do. I do.

MOMA: Lord child. Why don't you go in yonder and wash them dishes. That'll get them feet of yours back down to this ground. Give you a good job to do.

GRANNY: God give everbody a job but not the same job.

Give us a time.

Backwards and forwards

It's all one time.

One long string of beads.

HANNAH: A string a stars.

GRANNY & HANNAH: All shining.

MOMA: O, you two! Mother, you're as bad as she is. You could help me make this child see…

GRANNY: The child has a gift. Hannah CAN see.

MOMA: She can see herself in yonder and wash them dishes. I swear to my soul.