Listen Here (34 page)

(December 23, 1948–)

Ellesa Clay High was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, but has chosen to reside in Appalachia for most of her adult life. Her mother was a teacher and poet who, High says, “grew verse as abundantly as the beans she raised in her garden,” and was a major influence on her daughter's lifelong love of words.

High received a B.A. from Butler University in 1970 and an M.A. from the University of Louisville in 1972. She completed her Ph.D. at Ohio University in 1981.

A writer of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, High's best-known work,
Past Titan Rock
, weaves all three genres together to tell the story of a remote section of eastern Kentucky called the Red River Gorge. Her work has won numerous awards, including a James Still Fellowship in Appalachian Studies and an Andrew W Mellon Foundation Award.

High is an Associate Professor in the English Department at West Virginia University, where she teaches courses in creative writing and Appalachian literature. She is also the coordinator for the university's Native American Studies Program.

High lives on an eighty-five-acre farm in Preston County, West Virginia, with her son. “Grounding in this place now called Appalachia always has been central to my work,” she says. “Who I am, what has influenced me, and where I'm going might best be understood by a walk around this farm.”

In this scene from
Past Titan Rock
, High recounts the beginning of her sojourn into a section of Kentucky known as the Red River Gorge.

Books:
Past Titan Rock: Journeys into an Appalachian Valley
(1984).
Autobiographical essay:
“The Standing People,” in
Bloodroot
(1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 147–52.

Essays:
“A Tribute to Lily May Ledford,”
Appalachian Heritage
14 (spring 1986), 5-6. “The Coon Creek Girl from Red River Gorge: An Interview with Lily May Pennington,”
Adena: A Journal of History and Culture of the Ohio Valley
2:1 (spring 1977), 44-74.

Joyce Dyer, “Ellesa Clay High,” in
Bloodroot
, 146. Norman Julian, “Purest Water, 18th century spring house shows perfect stonemasonry,”
The Dominion
[WV]
Post
(8 July 2001).

June 14, 1979

Time depends on the river here. To go where I want in the Gorge usually doesn't take long in the bone white heat of summer. You follow the asphalt highway through part of the Gorge, then veer onto a graveled, one lane road with passing places. If you know where to look, after a while you'll see a wash with tire tracks leading between two corn fields. When it's dry, you can skid down this gulley to a ford in the river. Once across, you're on the farm I'm aiming for, and it's only a few minutes before you pull up next to the yard.

But this summer has begun as the wettest on record, and the river is in no mood to be driven through. Its currents are quarrelling with its banks, the banks rank and feisty in return. So Red River is named after mud, I think, watching the clay-thick water sweep by. I don't dare try it. Though my Volkswagen bus sits high off the ground, today it's loaded with supplies. My dog, a black-and-white Llewellyn setter, is pacing the middle seat, tired of being cooped up. If I could just use what's left of this old country road which passes through the farm and beyond it, my trip would be finished. I look once more at the far bank, less than twenty feet away, and wonder how long it will take me to reach the other side.

Using high weeds for traction, I turn back on the gravel road and swing past the farmer's other house, the convenient one where he lives. He's not home. My only guide will be the instructions in his letter. I anxiously check them and the sky. Much of the afternoon is gone, and the sun doesn't linger in the hollows. I stay on this road until it crosses the river at Bowen, then head east, passing through the next jumble of houses called Nada, and up Snakey Holler to Nada Tunnel. Driving through the tunnel is like being swallowed whole by the mountain, with barely enough room to squeeze through. Cars at the other end, seven hundred feet away, must wait or back up. But today I'm alone in this unlit passage. I flash on my headlights and the mountain crowds in, its jagged sides playing tricks with my eyes. The ceiling seeps water and seems barely high enough for a van like mine.

Originally built for a standard gauge railroad, the tunnel was constructed some seventy years ago by logging companies eager to reach the vast forest in the lower half of the Gorge. This signalled a boom period for the area, opening jobs for loggers, blasters, railroaders, mechanics—virtually anyone willing to work for twelve or more hours a day. As the railroad grades and tracks were laid and the forest cut, shanties and log houses cluttered the new clearings and relatively prosperous times prevailed until the logging operations
were finished. Then the tracks were removed, though the tunnel remained open to foot and wagon traffic. I remember once hearing a man say that he had driven through the tunnel with fireflies for lights and mud up to his team's knees. Aside from asphalt replacing the mud, little else has changed in the tunnel, conditions which excite tourists and create traffic jams on weekends.

I've got a feeling I won't have to worry about traffic where I'm going. I pass Titan Rock, a hulk of stone jutting from a ridge like the prow of a ship, and take what I hope is the right turnoff. This narrow road climbs a ridge so steep my van barely tops it in first gear. Then I'm in part of the Gorge I've never visited before. The road descends close by the river, its asphalt crumbling to gravel. In a mile or two it shrinks to a dirt path bristling with rocks and pocked with mud holes. I stop and recheck my instructions. I haven't seen a house in quite a while, but this might be right. I creep forward again, slow enough not to rip the car bottom on rocks, though I hope fast enough not to get stuck in the mud. Anyway, that is my strategy.

Now it's the forest that squeezes close, branches slapping my windshield. If there were a place to turn around, I would, but there is none. The road is dangling on a ridgeside which drops some fifteen or twenty feet to the river. Just in front I see a slippage. There is still space to pass, I judge, though no room for error. Despite the slick mud, I decide to try it. Crossing over, I glance down. Toward the bottom a car lies half-buried, half-pillowed in the slide. Corroded and crumpled, it looks as if it's been there for a long time, but who can tell.

All now is trees, or the shadows of trees. And mud and gloom. I'm sure I've made a terrible mistake, and one I can't back out of. The trees thin, and up ahead the road looks blocked by a massive cliff. This miserable path must dead-end there, and I name the place “Face to the Wall.” Finally, I see where the road eases past to the left. I follow, and the land spreads out again. I drive through an open gate and over a cattle guard. A hay field extends to one side and around one more curve a barn and house swing into view. As I stop by the yard fence, a big, fleshy man pushes to his feet from the front porch steps. It's the farmer. I open the car door, hot and relieved, and my dog jumps out to explore the new territory.

The farmer walks toward the gate, a deliberate, slow smile on his face. He says, “I just about gave up on you. What took you so long?” And he chuckles, because he knows. This man I've quickly met twice and not seen for a year, but he nevertheless will generously let me use his tenant house on the far side of his property. I can see that already I amuse him, provide a pleasant interruption to his routine—one reason I imagine he's letting me stay. Another is as a favor to Lily May Ledford, an old friend of his and of
many people still living in and around the Gorge. Without her introduction, I wouldn't be here.

He shows me around the yard. It is neat and uncluttered. The grass has been freshly mowed, some weeds giving off a strange skunky smell. The house looks well cared for on the outside, its wood protected by clean white paint. He points out the well and nods toward the privy, which totters on the hillside beyond the fence. Then his eyes return to me, slow and brown as molasses, yet sharp. I doubt that he misses much. He says, “This house has been empty for seventeen years. Sometimes people get back in here that got no business poking around. I figure it wouldn't hurt having somebody watch the place for the summer.” He pauses. “If you think you can handle that,” he adds, chuckling again.

I assure him that I'll manage.

“That's good. That's real good,” he says.

(July 1, 1944–)

Mary Bozeman Hodges grew up in Jefferson City, Tennessee, the daughter of Charlie Mae McGill Bozeman and Paul Bozeman. She credits both her parents with influencing her love of language. “My mother always read to me from the classics. Even when there were words I didn't understand, she read with so much feeling and expression that there was no question as to the meaning. Very early in my life, I read Dickens, Mark Twain, Tolstoy, Alcott, and others, at her insistence.” Hodges adds, “She was a secretary and a stickler for correct grammar.” But Mary Hodges's father was the family's oral storyteller: “He saw everything as a story.” From him, she learned family history, stories of the Civil War, his stories of the Depression, of World War II days, of work on the farm and in the local zinc mine. “I realize now how much my parents helped me to become a writer.”

Through the mining company where her father worked, she got a scholarship to Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where she graduated in 1966 with a B.S. in English and secondary education. She earned a Master's degree in English at the University of Tennessee in 1971.

She taught secondary education classes in Tennessee, South Carolina, Florida, and Hawaii, as her husband's job with the federal government required transfers and relocation until he retired, and the couple then returned home to East Tennessee. Mary Hodges lives with her husband, James, in Talbott, Tennessee, and since 1990, she has taught English at Carson-Newman College. They have two grown children and a granddaughter.

“Most of my writing reflects the region I grew up in,” she says, “but I didn't write seriously about it until I had lived away from it for many years and returned there to live with a renewed appreciation for its natural beauty, its culture, and its people.”

Short Stories:
Tough Customers and Other Stories
(1999), includes “An Interview with Mary B. Hodges” 141–51.

Gurney Norman, “Introduction,”
Tough Customers and Other Stories
(1999), 7–11.

from
Tough Customers and Other Stories
(1999)

What do I want you to call me? Why, everybody just calls me Ida Mae. “Mrs.” kinda runs against my grain right now, don't you know. And, course, I ain't no “Miss.” But, you can tell that from my ring, can't you? Or maybe you got that off the form your nurse had me fill out. The one you got there in front of you. I do kinda like that new “Ms.” Maybe you can just call me Ms. Jenkins—no, make it Ms. Ida Mae. Call me Ms. Ida Mae. Jenkins ain't the name I was born with, noway.

I guess you're wondering what I'm doing here. I mean, it's obvious I ain't crazy or nothing. I guess you must see some real lulus. But, I'm not sick, you understand. Course, I know you ain't no real doctor, neither, even if I was sick. But, anyway, I just want you to know. I don't need no—no—well, doctor. It, uh, it is okay if I parked down the street at the Bigger Better Burger, ain't it? I mean they won't tow my car or nothing like that, will they? I think it ought to be okay. Course, I know they's parking out front of your office; but, well, you know, I just thought I'd park down there. And, after all, I am going in there when I leave here. They can't tow my car if I go in there when I leave here, can they? Have you ever had one of their bigger better bacon burgers? You ain't lived till you have.

Well, anyway, about why I'm here. It all boils down to this: I got to have me somebody to talk to, you know? I can't talk to my folks. On the other hand, maybe I should talk to Mama; she'd certainly have all the answers. She'd sure enjoy telling me what I shoulda done different, namely not to a married Hubert. Hubert, that's my husband. And then she'd know what I ought to do now, and that would be to get rid of him, like she's been telling me for years. The way I see it, if she'd a done everything right herself, she'd have something better to do than preach to me, wouldn't you think so? Anyway, I ain't listening to that. And Daddy, well, let me tell you. Daddy's solution would be to blow Hubert's head off. Now, that'd really help a lot, wouldn't it? Then, instead of having an unfaithful husband, I'd have a dead one—and a convict for a Daddy to boot.

I used to tell everything to Imogene. Imogene, she's my best friend. Well, except for Hubert. I guess he's my really best friend, but he's my husband. Imogene's my best girl friend. Well, she's also Hubert's best friend—girlfriend, if you know what I mean. It's hot in here, ain't it? Maybe you
ought to adjust the thermostat. It ain't healthy to be in a room that's too stuffy. Anyway, can you believe that they both talk to me. Like I'm just some person sitting between them in a movie and they're explaining the show. And then there's Imogene's husband George. You want to talk stupid—he's just like the three monkeys—See Nothing, Do Nothing, and Know Nothing. Well, you can see as how I can't talk to Imogene. You know, you really ought to consider changing this chair. It's not very comfortable. I'd think it'd be important for folks to be comfortable when they—when they, well, you know, come in here. I thought you was supposed to have a couch. Why don't you have a couch?

Actually, you know, I ought to just go talk to Brother Shepherd. He's our preacher. I've thought of that. He's been our preacher for some fifteen years. Ain't that funny? Shepherd—you get it? Like with sheep, and he's the pastor. Just like Jesus in the Bible. He's the Shepherd. And his name is Shepherd. And he's the pastor of the sheep. I mean, you just know this man was meant to be a preacher.

Well, ah, anyway. I can't go talk to him cause Imogene, she goes to talk to him all the time. She does. Talks to him, right there in his office in the church. At least once a week. Can you believe it? Just baring all our dirty laundry to God and all. Course, she talks to him cause she knows he won't say nothing to nobody, and he don't cost her nothing. And she just talks to him like it's perfectly all right and like all her sins are forgiven, washed away. Poor man, he's just too nice and won't say nothing. She's hoping he'll sympathize with her and tell her love is from God and all that, make her feel better. Well, let me tell you, there's love and then there's love. Anyway, she says he just nods and don't really make no comment one way or the other.

She thinks cause he don't directly tell her she's going to hell—do not pass go, do not collect $200, for a breaking one of them ten commandments—that she ain't going. She thinks it's one of them things in the Bible that you ain't supposed to take literal—like Jesus turning the water into wine. Well, I know you ain't supposed to take that literal. Of course, Jesus didn't make no wine, but them ten commandments—now I don't know no way they can mean nothing other than what they say, “Do not commit adultery.” That's what it says. Plain as the nose on your face.

Lord, bless us all, you can see I can't go talk to Brother Shepherd. Mercy, I can't even look the man in the eyes at church anymore. All through the sermon I have to look over his head at the plastic clock with Jesus in the middle. The minute hand and hour hand is nailed in at his nose, you know, and a different miracle is on each hour. And I just watch that slow little hand creep like Methuselah from the miracle of loaves and fishes to the miracle of
the turning the water into wine. But you can't really tell about the wine on the clock. You just see Jesus with a pitcher in one hand and a cup in the other. Anyway, all the time while I'm sitting there a watching the miracles and a worrying about the wine, she sits up in that choir loft just as big as Ike. Like it's all okay, cause she talks to Brother Shepherd ever week. Just like she wasn't going to hell in a handbasket and taking my Hubert right along with her.

Well, I tell you what, this conversation has done me a world of good. I guess there is something to having a—professional person—tell you what to do about your problems. Course I don't know if I can do what you would do. I know I should dump Hubert, but, well, we been married a right long time. And, I know I should tell Imogene to jump right on that express train to the lower regions, but, you know, we been friends since we been in diapers.

Anyway, I know I don't need to come back here no more. I reckon I'll live through this, and Hubert will, too, if I don't kill him. But, let me tell you, you really ought to get you a nice couch for in here—you know, for your real patients.