Listen Here (38 page)

from Chapter III

But with the growth of this harmony with natural things, Judith developed a constantly growing tendency to clash with the life of the school and the home kitchen and the kitchens of the various relatives with whom the Pippingers visited. She was considered by her aunts and other female relatives “a wild, bad little limb,” and her contempt for the decent and domestic scandalized them more and more as she grew older. Lena Moss could not for her life understand how it was that Judith had learned to read and write and figure better than almost any other child in the school; for she was anything but studious. In fact she never seemed to pay the slightest attention to her studies. She flatly refused even to try to learn Lena's long and carefully prepared list of counties and county towns in Kentucky; and the battles of the Revolutionary and Civil wars, with their accompanying dates, found no lodgement in her mind. Instead of applying herself to these, she munched apples, chewed slippery elm and sassafras, stared idly out of the window, bedeviled the child who sat in front of her, cut folded bits of paper into intricate designs or drew pictures on her slate, the desk, the seat, the floor, the back of the pinafore of the girl in front, any available space within her reach.

These pictures were the curse of Lena's existence. They were to be found everywhere: on the desks, the walls, the floor, the blackboard, the window casings. Outside they decorated the whitewashed wall of the school building, the tops of big flat stones, the fences, the trunks of trees where the bark had been stripped away, every place where a piece of chalk or a bit of black crayon could function.

The pictures, invariably of human beings or animals, were usually comic, satirical or derisive. That they showed great vigor and clarity of vision would have meant nothing to Lena even if she had known it. They were, in her phraseology, “not nice!” They were frequently disrespectful. The morning after the visit of the county superintendent, a large picture in white chalk was found on the blackboard wickedly caricaturing the features of that august personage. The picture was done in profile and exaggerated irreverently the large, bulbous nose, the receding forehead, and the many chins reaching around to a fleshy, pendulous ear. Poor Lena was hard put to it to find a way to control this unruly member of her school. Having much less force of character than her pupil, the advantage of years and vested authority availed her little.

When asked why she had done thus and so, Judith's almost invariable reply was: “Cuz I had to.”

“Judy, why hain't you a better gal at school?” Bill asked one morning, trying to look sternly at his favorite daughter across the mush and milk. “Lizzie May says the teacher has a heap o' grief with you. Why don't you mind the teacher, Judy?”

“I do mind her, dad—all I can,” Judith returned without looking up. She had the syrup pitcher in her hand and was absorbed in pouring sorghum onto her plate in a very thin stream. Presently she set the pitcher down and handed the plate across the table to her father.

“There, dad, ain't that a good mule? I drawed 'im with the blackstrap. Lizzie May couldn't draw a mule like that.”

“Ner I don't want to neither,” put in Lizzie May disdainfully. “You otta see, dad, sech pitchers as she draws all around the school, an' makes fun of everybody: the teacher an' the sup'rintendent an' her own relations an all. She'd otta think shame to herse'f!”

Bill was proud of his girl's ability to draw, but felt it his duty to discourage her choice of subjects, seeing that the same seemed to be so universally condemned.

“What makes you draw them kind o' pitchers, Judy?” he asked.

“Cuz I want to,” replied Judith a little sullenly. “I see things; an' when I see 'em I want to draw 'em.”

“O law, she don't see no sech things, dad! Haow kin she? Nobody else sees 'em!” exclaimed Lizzie May, outraged. “Why, the idea of her sayin' she sees sech things!”

“Aw, shet up, Liz, an' tend yer own business!” snapped Judith, flushing red with sudden anger. “Jest cuz you don't see nuthin don't mean nobody else does.”

(June 27, 1949–)

Poet Leatha Kendrick was born in her mother's hometown of Granite City, Illinois, but spent most of her childhood in her father's native Kentucky. “I have always had this dual sense of ‘home,'” says Kendrick. “I come from farming people, so I felt rooted in both the red clay of Kentucky and the black loam along the Mississippi.”

Kendrick earned a B.A. in English, Phi Beta Kappa, from the University of Kentucky in 1971, and an M.A. in English from the University of Kentucky, in 1977. In 1994, she received an M.F.A. in poetry from Vermont College.

Kendrick has taught at Morehead State University and at the University of Kentucky, and has been active in the Kentucky Peer Advisory Network, a network of arts consultants created by the Kentucky Arts Council. She has also developed a course called “Writing Through Crisis,” which reflects her “experience with writing during my cancer diagnosis and treatment.”

She has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including a poetry grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, and the Al Smith Fellowship in Poetry from the Kentucky Arts Council.

“Family, home, and relationships ground the Appalachian culture—as they do my poems,” says Kendrick. She and her husband, Will, a lawyer, have three daughters. They make their home on George's Branch in East Point, Kentucky.

In this excerpt from her essay “No Place Like Home,” Kendrick examines the tension between family and a woman's need for self-expression.

Poetry:
Heart Cake
(2000).
Autobiographical essay:
“No Place Like Home,”
The American Voice
49 (1999), 96–106.
Co-edited book:
Crossing Troublesome: 25 Years of the Appalachian Writers Workshop
(2002).

Michael McFee, ‘”The World So Vivid, Nothing Ends': A Conversation with Leatha Kendrick,” in
Her Words
(2002), ed. Felicia Mitchell, 152–64.

The American Voice
(1999)

It's August now. Two months since I started this essay. My daughters are home, briefly, between summer commitments and school. I cook. I wash. I set my real work of writing aside. Devoured by the all-consuming work of “caring-for”—that gaping maw of giving, a mouth like those eager ones that once enclosed my breast—I know again both the peace of self-forgetting and the
waiting
that lies within it. “Home” suddenly seems a frayed and frowzy imitation of its former self. “Home-making is no longer my number one occupation,” I laughingly apologize to an old friend who stops by to stay overnight. She and I both remember other days when keeping house battled with our need to prove we were more than “just housewives,” even when that was what we mainly were. Without those struggles and the friendships forged with women during my children's infancies, however, I might still be very much the arrogant woman I was as a graduate student, unable to embrace the mundane messiness of mothering without feeling diminished by it.

During the weeks when the girls are home, I write in thirty-minute snatches and jot in the margins of newspapers or on the back of envelopes in the kitchen. I read a lot (as if I were more “available” when absorbed in a book!). I am reminded of my high school days and my mother's absence, her body going through the motions. Books, alcohol, sadness, sleeping—there are plenty of ways to leave without going anywhere. Plenty of ways to be alone and have no solitude. My mother lived in a kind of vibrating stasis—keeping a grip on herself so tightly the strain told on all of us. She didn't allow herself to consider what kind of life she might really want to have. Adrienne Rich says in
Of Woman Born
, “The quality of the mother's life…is her primary bequest to her daughter.” It reminds me of Jung's statement that there is no more powerful influence on any of us than the unlived life of our parents. Most of us daughters struggle under the weight of the unlived lives of our mothers and of their unacknowledged woman-hating (a form of self-hatred), which are their primary bequests to us.

I remember another August and my “beanfield epiphany”: the smoldering weight of damp air, the falling dusk in the garden that seemed like an encroaching blindness, the sense of lifting something with my back as I stood up between rows and declared, “I've got to
do
something! I want to get an MFA.” My husband, Will, picking beans a few rows over, was puzzled by this outburst. “Why would you want to do that?” he asked. Though I don't think I ever adequately wove together all the strands of regret I felt for my mother's life, and the fears for our daughter's future (that weight of my unlived life which I did not want any of us to bear), he did eventually understand that for me, at least, this was a life-and-death decision—it was my very existence at stake.

And so I started off to seek my fortune—which for women is too often characterized as running away from home. I managed to keep all the balls in the air, to live my double life (writer/mother) without breaking apart (at least on the outside) or breaking anyone else. The benefits? Though I have gained no certain answers as to “the self,” for my daughters at least there was some freedom from the demand that they justify my existence with their own. Each of them has ended up choosing to go away to boarding school to finish high school—partly because my leaving convinced us all that there were many possible opportunities which had seemed beyond our reach before. Perhaps they will have the freedom and the courage to find their real work, to find a self and love her more quickly than I have been able to.

Meanwhile, when we are together I experience moments of real, unconstrained joy—all of us around the table some nights, the imagined weight of them in their beds, and those few unexpected moments of talk at odd times through the day. Even the endless laundry comforts me and makes me laugh at its recalled dominance—a real weight to be lifted over and over. I know it's only temporary this time. The beginning of school, like a door at the end of this hallway of time, promises release, focuses my attention. Even in the most serene of moments, though, inside me the writer woman fidgets. The purity of my love affair with words wrestles with the daily demands of my equal love of the girls. Unwilling, almost unable, to shut the door to her children's presence, my writer self is just as incapable of closing off to the needs of the solitary me. I cannot quite shake the guilt that says I should not want to have a life that does not center on (or even include sometimes) my family, nor can I go back to being the woman who had not realized that she needed a life of her own.

from
Heart Cake
(2000)

She shows us how to stretch paper so light
it should have torn, and how to tie the rags
in tails to make the weight that keeps the flying
true. At first our kites will fall.
“Too long,” she says. Then we untie some strips,
speechless against the wind
that whips her hair around her face,
and uneasy with her giddiness.

She stumbles often, even falls,
but smiles! in this field that is our father's place,
as if she rides a bubble rising through her,
a buoyancy that cannot gather
inside the kitchen walls.

“I was born on the equinox,” she says
above the wind. It seems some light place,
this point on which the year is held—
balance of daylight and night.
(An egg will stand up by itself that day.)

Feet planted wide on rough clods,
Mother stands at last, the kite held firm
in air. Wind fills our open mouths. We rise
on tiptoe—
Fly!!
we want to scream. Gravity's string
slings a low curve toward earth.
Hold on.
We know that tug, that lift, and we're afraid.
Her lightness frightens us. We crave
the familiar level of the kitchen floor.
She motions to us—hands across the line.

from
Heart Cake
(2000)

Six years old and pale that night, I was already experienced
in surgery—days in my father's clinic,
evenings when he let me ride along.
This night the cow stood quiet,
straining and her backside bulging as if to split. I screeched,
“Something's wrong!” I knew something had to be
sideways when she hadn't waited for Dad to cut
the clean window in her side and pull out
the soaking calf and neatly sew the edges
like two halves of a blanket
hem-stitched. Not this mix
of shit and straw, cobwebs greasy with old dust
the one raw bulb hanging brown
with fly droppings, her baby falling finally
onto the slime.

No wonder

the doctor said to me twenty-one years later
when I requested natural childbirth
(me in the chair and him behind the square
expanse of desk in the right
angles of his well-lit office, walls
blazing with white rectangles)—no wonder
he said to me that he could not understand
why some women wanted to have their babies
like cows in a barn. It was then
I saw again the liquid gleaming
globe of the cow's eye, the patient
rhythm squeezing her sides, the calm
heaving and the pale tips
of the calf's hoofs tender as tulips
as he left her, the swell
and rush of water, the newborn swimming
out into the half-dark of the barn.

I could not speak

in that white room, was sobbing so hard as I left
that my friend had to ask, “What's wrong? Did the baby die?”
I could see my father watching from the shadows,
hear the rough scraping of the cow's tongue,
regular as a heart urging the newborn
onto his feet, her sudden lowing,
so loud it startled me. My father
loved to blast our ignorance, loved to laugh
at any fear whiting our eyes. Running
his hand along the sharp ridge of her spine,
he said, “
This
is how things get born.”