Listen Here (28 page)

(October 25, 1951–)

Born in Bluefield, West Virginia, Denise Giardina (pronounced jar-DEE-na) is the daughter of Leona Whitt Giardina, a nurse who grew up in eastern Kentucky, and Dennis Giardina, an accountant whose family came from Sicily to work in the mines. She grew up in the coal mining camp of Black Wolfe in McDowell County, West Virginia, where most of the men in her family worked for the mining companies. Her grandfather and uncles were miners; her father was a bookkeeper for Page Coal and Coke Company. When she was thirteen, the mine that employed her father closed, and she witnessed the dissolution of the community. Her family moved to Charleston, West Virginia.

She earned her B.A. from West Virginia Wesleyan College in 1973 and spent several years in Washington, D.C., as part of the ecumenical Christian activist community known as the Sojourners Fellowship. In 1979, she completed a Master of Divinity from Virginia Theological Seminary and was ordained by the Episcopal Church as a deacon. During her ministry in McDowell County, West Virginia, a bishop tried to discourage her from becoming involved in political issues like speaking out about absentee landowners not paying property taxes, and such censure helped her decide to channel her creative energy into becoming a writer and activist.

She describes herself as “an Appalachian writer, interested in the affinities between Appalachia and other exploited places like Poland and Central America,” and she adds, “I am also interested in writing that includes the political and spiritual dimensions in life and am not much interested in fiction that pretends these areas do not exist.”

Her first book,
Good King Harry
, is an antiwar novel set in fifteenth-century England, exploring crises of conscience faced by young Henry V and introducing moral dilemmas that are a hallmark of Giardina's fiction.

Storming Heaven
focuses on West Virginia and Kentucky mining communities and the conflicts between coal companies and miners that led to the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921, when coal barons convinced President Harding to send U.S. troops to put down the union. This novel was a Discovery Selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and received the 1987 W.D. Weatherford Award for best book published about the Appalachian South.

She uses multiple narrators in
Storming Heaven
and in its sequel,
The Unquiet Earth
, to span the years from the 1890s to 1990 and explore the public and private crises of the generations of characters in World Wars, mining strikes and layoffs, and the War on Poverty in her fictional Justice County, West Virginia. For
The Unquiet Earth
, Giardina received an American Book Award and the Lillian Smith Award for fiction.

Saints and Villains
takes readers from West Virginia mountains to European ones, examining the life of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and its moral complexities. For it she won the 1999 Fisk Fiction Prize awarded by the
Boston Book Review.

Giardina is the only writer in this book to have been a candidate for governor. In 2000, her gubernatorial campaign as a candidate for the Mountain Party in West Virginia succeeded in establishing a third party based on environmental and community-based issues.

Novels:
Fallam's Secret
(2003),
Saints and Villains
(1998),
The Unquiet Earth
(1992),
Storming Heaven
(1987),
Good King Harry
(1984).
Selected essays:
“No Scapin the Booger Man,” in
Bloodroot
(1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 129–31. “Appalachian Mirror,”
New York Times
(31 October 1992), L21. “Solidarity in Appalachia,”
The Nation
(3 July 1989), 12–14.
Interviews:
W. Dale Brown, “True Stories: A Conversation with Denise Giardina,”
Carolina Quarterly
47:1 (fall 1994), 40–51. Thomas E. Douglass, “Interview: Denise Giardina,”
Appalachian Journal
20:4 (summer 1993), 384–93. Susan Koppelman and Janet Mullaney, “Belles Lettres Interview: Denise Giardina,”
Belles Lettres
(spring 1989), 11, 21.

Tim Boudreau, “Fighting Back: Denise Giardina talks about
Storming Heaven,” Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine
5:1 (spring 1988), 9–10. Aviva L. Brandt, “Region's Untold Tales Bring Writer Home,”
Charleston
[WV]
Gazette
(16 May 1993), E9.
Contemporary Authors
(1987), Vol. 119, 118–19. Joyce Dyer, “Denise Giardina,”
Bloodroot
, 128. “Denise Giardina Issue,”
Iron Mountain Review
Vol. 15 (spring 1999). Laurie K. Lindberg, “An Ethical Inquiry into the Works of Denise Gardina,”
Appalachia Inside Out
, Vol. 2, 664–72. Lillian S. Robinson,
Coal Miner's Daughter
[review of
The Unquiet Earth], The Nation
(28 December 1992), 816–18. Teresa K. Weaver, “Moving Mountains: West Virginia Novelist Runs for Governor…,”
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
(24 October 1999), Ml, M3. Meredith Sue Willis, review of
The Unquiet Earth, Appalachian Journal
20:2 (winter 1993), 204–6.

from Chapter 3

You have seen old photographs, brown and sweet-looking, as though dipped in light molasses. My memories of the Homeplace in Kentucky are like that. Sweet, bitter-sweet.

When I was ten years old, Ben Honaker lent me his copy of
Wuthering Heights.
I loved it, just for the name of it, even before I read it. It has the sound of a lost and precious place, Wuthering Heights. I learned from that book that love and hate are not puny things. Nor are they opposed. Everything in this world that is calculating and bloodless wars against them both, wars against all flesh and blood, earth and water.

Even now, when I whisper that name, Wuthering Heights, it is the Homeplace I see. My people crowd around me, Ben and Flora, Miles, Daddy, Aunt Jane and Aunt Becka. And I see myself, waiting for Heathcliff, waiting for someone to come from outside, bearing with him both passion and menace.

I knew he would come from the outside, because Daddy and Aunt Becka said I would never find a man on Scary Creek or Grapevine. I was too forward, they said, too stubborn. I was not pretty like Flora. Flora looked like the princess in children's stories old folks tell—white skin, rosy cheeks, and black hair. She took after Daddy and Aunt Becka's side of the family, which was part Cherokee. I took after my dead mother's side. Freckles splashed my face, my shoulders, my arms. My nose was a trifle large, my hair drab brown.

“Carrie takes after the Mays,” Aunt Becka said to Daddy one night when we were in bed before the hearth and supposedly asleep. She was Daddy's oldest sister. “She's even got her Papaw Alec's nose, poor child. Hit wouldnt look so bad on Miles.”

I couldn't sleep for worrying and went straightway up the river the next morning to the Aunt Jane Place. Aunt Jane May lived at the mouth of Scary Creek where it flowed into Grapevine. Aunt Jane was both my grandmother and my great-aunt. She was Daddy's aunt who had married Alec May, and their daughter Tildy was my mother.

I cried out my hurt feelings to her. She sat composed, her hands laid flat on her lap so the blue veins stood up in ridges.

“Dont you pay no mind to your Aunt Becka,” she said. “That woman will wrap her tongue around any kind of silliness. You're the picture of your mother, and I love to gaze on you for it.”

“Am I ugly?”

“Course you aint ugly. You favor your Papaw Alec a heap, too. His face had character. They wasnt no forgitting what he looked like, no more than you could forgit the mountains. When I stand on my porch and look at those mountains, I still yet see him everywhere.”

Uncle Alec had been dead for a long time, killed in the War Between the States.

“You think he's a ghost?” I asked. “You think he still yet comes around here, and that's why you cant forgit him?”

Aunt Jane smiled. “Maybe. Sometimes I feel him close. But ifn he's a ghost, he's a contented one. He walks for joy, not for disquiet.”

I began to watch for him then. I thought he walked abroad in the fog. The mists rose from the river each morning to cling to the mountaintops, and in the evenings, after a rain shower, patches of fog ran like a herd of sheep up the hillsides. I would go out then, breathe the air and feel it clean the bottom of my lungs. A path wandered behind the cabin down the riverbank. Grapevine was broad and green, slow running, never more than waist deep on a grown man save during the spring thaw. I waded into the water, my skirt hiked to my thighs. Silver explosions of trout churned the water and minners darted fearlessly about my legs. I came abreast a stand of cattails and halted. The sweep of Grapevine curved away north, its path to Shelby and the Levisa hidden by the far mountains layered one after another, the mist dancing up their flanks. Every way I turned the lush green peaks towered over me. Had it been winter or spring, they would have been iron gray, or dappled with pink and white dogwood, sarvis, and redbud, but always they would be there, the mountains, their heights rounded by the elements like relics worn smooth by the hands of reverent pilgrims.

I swept my arm up and flung water like beads of glass.

“Hey, Uncle Alec,” I whispered.

from The Ice Breaks, 1930
s

When my daddy died I was an infant, lying on his chest with his thumb caught tight in my fist. I try to remember properly. I try to remember to hold on tighter to that thumb, to keep the warmth from seeping out. If I squeeze hard enough I'll recreate him, thumb first, then the rough hand, the forearm with its thick brown hair, the soft fold of skin over his throat, the chin stubbled coarse with beard. But I stop there because it is all I can bring to life. I don't know his face. And the quickening wanes again until only the thumb is warm, and then not even the thumb.

Me and Mom still live in the cabin where he died. She dragged the deathbed outside and burned it like a funeral pyre. He was already buried in the Homeplace cemetery with the rest of her people. But it was like she had to see something go up in flames. She wouldn't have dreamed to throw herself on the fire, though, like Teacher says those women do over there in India. My mother, Carrie Freeman, wouldn't turn her back on life for nobody, not even a man she loved so desperate she slept with him and them not married and traipsed over mountains to be with him.

I am the child of that love. A woods colt, as we say in these Kentucky mountains. Nobody troubles me over it. Nobody dares because I am a steady fighter. People here don't get het up over such things anyway, except a few of the meanest church women. Besides, my mother was married to a preacher before she and Daddy made me, and I ended up with the preacher's last name, so that as good as sanctified the whole proceedings.

My daddy was a union organizer over in the West Virginia coalfields, and he was in a battle with the state police and company thugs and took a bullet that snapped his spine clean in two. That's how he came to die slow and in bed with me sprawled atop him. Rachel, who is my cousin, says she recalls him. I don't believe she could recall much, she was barely two. But she says she remembers being scared of the Aunt Jane Place because a mean man lived there. Mom says Daddy was bad-tempered for being paralyzed and Rachel was skittish of him. It does put me in awe of Rachel a little, it makes me jealous because I should be the one to remember him. I should remember grabbing onto that thumb. But I don't hold Rachel's memory against her. I just stay as close to her as I can.

Rachel gets uncomfortable when I talk about Mom and Daddy making me. She was raised more proper. Rachel is a Honaker, and she lives on the Homeplace just down Grapevine nigh to the shoals. We are first cousins—our mothers are sisters, Carrie and Flora. Me and Mom live at the Aunt Jane Place. It is all the same land, just two different houses, theirs the white wood farmhouse, ours the cabin that creaks in the wind and smells of woodsmoke. Uncle Ben says move down to the Homeplace, he'll build on an extra room and the older younguns will be moving out soon, but Mom won't hear of it. I think she wants to stay in the house of Daddy's last breathing.

Uncle Ben is worried about whether we can live on our land at all. He says the taxes have gone up because the coal companies are buying land, and he has taken out a mortgage to pay them. Then he opened a general store at the mouth of Scary to help pay the mortgage but the store is not doing any good. Mom says Ben would pick the depths of the Depression to open up a store. Uncle Ben is a smart man but him and Aunt Flora have got no business sense, Mom says, and they give too much credit. In these times we are living in, lots of folks need credit. So the sacks of flour disappear from the dusty shelves as soon as they are set out, and Ben cannot keep the pokes of already baked-and-sliced lightbread that caused such a stir when they first arrived. A poke of sliced lightbread is prized, for it means you can afford to spend money to replace the biscuits and cornbread people bake themselves, but Ben even gives credit for lightbread, so everyone is the same.

At school Rachel has fried egg sandwiches on lightbread with store-bought mayonnaise or sometimes mayonnaise by itself which nobody else has. She doesn't take on about it. Mom will not have lightbread in the house, she says even if we had the money it's just as tasty as a handkerchief and she sends me to school with yellow cornbread. Some younguns who bring cornbread hide what they have because they are embarrassed to be poor but I won't do that because it would shame my Mom.

Mom says she gives the store less than a year, then she smiles and says, “That Ben, he'll feed the hollow while it lasts.” There's things we don't get from the store. We grow our corn and vegetables and raise our own pigs and chickens and milk cows. We put up preserves in mason jars for the winter, or I should say the women do. They stand over the cast-iron stoves in the heat of summer and stir the great boiling pots of tomatoes and beans, dip their ladles into the roiling red and green liquid, and wipe the sweat from their faces with one corner of their aprons. They slice the apples and sun-dry them into leather-sweet strips. They take a needle and thread to the beans and hang them in rows to dry from the porch rafters. Me and Uncle Ben and his big boys plow and hoe and plant and haul. Rachel tends the chickens and cows.

But we get lard and salt from the store, and baking soda and flour, and nails and needles for piercing. And Goody's Headache Powder that Aunt Flora eats like it is candy.

Sometimes when the hens are laying good, Rachel has two eggs to trade at the store. Aunt Flora makes her trade even though the store is theirs, because she says it is proper. Rachel trades for a Three Musketeers. Each of us pops one chocolate Musketeer in our mouths and we break the third exact down the middle. I like to see the nougat heart. Or Rachel trades for a CoCola in a little green bottle, what some call a dope and others call a sodypop but Rachel always calls by its right name. Ben's store has a big metal sign nailed to the front wall with a raised red oval that reads Coca-Cola in curlicued white letters. The red paint has faded in the sun and there are dents where younguns throw pebbles to hear the clang. The best sodypops come from Ben's ice chest and you sit on the front stoop where the bottle catches glints of sunlight and you look at the green mountain that hovers over the store. It is best when your feet are dusty from the road. Rachel and I share sodypops and the neck of the bottle is warm and tastes the way I guess her mouth would taste.

A long time ago Uncle Ben was the teacher at the Scary Creek School. I am glad he doesn't teach anymore because I despise school and if he was the teacher I'd have to despise him. I am not a bad student, I learn what I am supposed to, but still I don't care for it. You have to hold your pencil a certain way even though it's cramped as hell and if you don't do it right, Teacher wraps your fingers around the pencil hard and like to breaks every bone in your hand. You learn spelling rules and grammar rules and that the way you talked all your life is ignorant even though it seems to suit most people fine, and when Teacher goes on and says we live in a free country it's just a little hard to believe. Nobody admits it but school is to teach you how to get bossed. I reckon I could read some books on my own and learn what I want, but my mom sets a store by school.

Rachel is the best student. She is sixteen and I am only fourteen-and-three-quarters. But I am right behind her at school. Rachel is very thin and has wavy light-brown hair that come to her shoulders. She wears very nice clothes because Aunt Flora cuts pictures from the mail-order catalog and makes dresses to look like them. My mom says it's a good thing I'm a boy because she can't sew and she would send me to school in potato sacks. Most of what I wear is hand-me-downs from Uncle Ben's boys.

Once Aunt Flora got hold of some old window drapes and clothes from a missionary box. Missionaries from up North are always sending us boxes of old things like we aren't even Christian. I wouldn't touch a thing in those boxes nor my Mom neither, but Aunt Flora says why waste, she can make the things nicer than when they were sent. She took some drapes of slick red material and made Rachel a coat that looked like the Chinese wear. Then she cut down a big white wool skirt and jacket into a dress with a high collar and red buttons down the front. Rachel wore the red coat and white dress to school on Class Day when we all had to recite poems. Rachel's dress had long narrow sleeves and a long skirt down to her boot tops. When she stood up to recite, she looked like a queen.