Listen Here (4 page)

(March 18, 1953–)

Sheila Kay Adams is a seventh-generation ballad singer who has participated in the tradition of learning and singing English, Irish, and Scottish ballads from her ancestors who arrived in North Carolina in the late 1700s. Adams and her family live in Madison County, North Carolina, where she was born. She has three children and is passing the ballad traditions to them. Her primary teacher was her great aunt Dellie Chandler Norton, her “Granny,” who said about Sheila, “She may not always know where she's going, but she sure knows where she comes from.”

After completing her B.A. in education at Mars Hill College in 1974, she worked for seventeen years in Madison County public schools as a schoolteacher, like her mother Neple Norton. In 1991, she quit teaching to begin a career as a musician, storyteller, and writer. She has traveled widely, performing at music festivals and university campuses all over the United States. She served as singing coach for the film
Songcatcher
, and most of the ballads performed are her versions.

Encouraged by novelist Lee Smith to write her collection of stories,
Come Go Home with Me
, she won the 1997 North Carolina Historical Society's award for historical fiction. In 1998, she received the North Carolina Folklore Society's prestigious Brown-Hudson Award for her contributions to the study of North Carolina folklore.

About her longtime love of writing songs, poems, and stories, she says, “I love writing, using the language of my home. I get lost for hours in the rhythm, the lyrical sound of the mountain dialect. And there's such a richness of material just waiting to be plucked from the strong oral tradition…in my family.” She is currently at work on a novel.

Short stories:
Come Go Home with Me
(1995).
Folk music and storytelling recordings:
What Ever Happened to John Parrish's Boy?
(2002),
My Dearest Dear
(2000),
Christmas on the Mountain
(1998),
Don't Get Above Your Raising
(1993),
A Spring in the Burton Cove
(1991),
Loving Forward, Loving Back
(1985).
Autobiographical essay:
“Flowering Ivy,”
Bloodroot
(1998), ed. Joyce Dyer, 17–20.

Fred Brown, “Echoes from the Past,”
Knoxville News-Sentinel
(24 January 1999), El, E5. Joyce Dyer, “Sheila Kay Adams,” in
Bloodroot
, 16.

The Easter Frock

Bertha Franklin used to love to sit on her porch and tell me stories about what Sodom was like back when she was a girl. I was always spellbound. Bertha was a great storyteller, and she was the same age as my mother. Her stories formed a window for me, a window I could look through back into the times of my mother as a young girl and young woman.

Evidently, Bertha's mother told her stories about what it was like growing up in Sodom back at the turn of the century. This is a story Bertha told me that her mother, Tootie, told her.

Back then, a peddler drove a horse-drawn wagon around to the different communities, and you could buy just about anything you needed off his wagon. You could get nails, buckets, and dry goods. You could even buy cloth.

Before Easter one year, Tootie managed to save up enough money to buy a pretty piece of filmy material to make herself an Easter frock to wear to church. Now, back then, the dresses had a bustle on them that stuck out over the hind end. If you could afford it you could buy a wire frame to make it stand out, but if you couldn't, well, you just stuffed it with rags.

Tootie spent a lot of time working on her frock and finished it the Saturday night before Easter Sunday. She hung it on the back of the door and went on to bed thinking how pretty she'd look next day at church.

She got up late the next morning and realized she had forgotten to stuff her bustle the night before. She hurriedly reached in the rag bag, pulled out an old flour sack, and commenced to stuffing that bustle.

She got to church and swept right down to the front, holding that dress tail out, nodding and smiling and speaking to everybody.

As soon as folks stood for the first hymn, Tootie heard some snickering behind her. And every hymn thereafter, it seemed like the snickering spread till it was all the way to the very back of the church.

When the last amen was said, Tootie hit the door. She checked to see if her slip was hanging or if all her buttons were buttoned, but she couldn't find a single thing undone. She stiffened her spine and stormed off down the road.

About halfway home, her brothers caught up with her and just set into horse laughing, all doubled over holding their sides. Tootie, who had a temper to match her shining red hair, had suffered enough in silence. She wheeled around on them boys with a vengeance.

“I want to know what's so damn funny?” she said. “Folks has laughed at me all morning in church, and I'm about sick of it!”

But you know how brothers are (and Tootie was blessed with eight of them). They just laughed even harder and ran off down the road with Tootie chucking rocks at them as hard as she could.

By this time I reckon Tootie was livid! She charged down the road, marched up the hill to the house, and slammed through the door, banging it closed behind her hard enough to rattle all the window glasses in the house. She started down the hall to her room and spied the hall chair sitting there—the one with the mirror on the wall above it. She climbed up on the chair, positioned herself so she could look over her shoulder, and there across her bustle you could read, plain as day: “50
LBS. OF THE VERY BEST
.”

(April 11, 1949–)

Born in Greenville, South Carolina, Dorothy Allison began to receive recognition for her work as a poet and short story writer in the 1980s. Her first collection of stories,
Trash
, published by Firebrand Books in 1988, won the Lambda Literary Awards for Best Small Press Book and Best Lesbian Book.

In a 1992 interview with National Public Radio's Terri Gross, Allison explained some of the autobiographical elements of her best-known work,
Bastard Out of Carolina
, a National Book Award finalist in 1992. Allisons birth was traumatic. Her mother, who was barely fifteen, was pregnant when she suffered a concussion during an automobile accident. Thrown through the windshield, Allison's mother was unconscious for three days, during which time Allison was born, and because her grandmother and aunt did not adequately prepare their stories about her young mother's plans to marry, Allison says that she was literally born a “bastard.”

Allison's mother, a hard-working waitress all her life, was married three times before Allison was five years old. Her third husband was the man who became Allison's abuser. The complex relationship between abuser and victim form the crux of the partly autobiographical novel.

Allison's central character, Ruth Anne Boatwright, nicknamed “Bone,” narrates the devastating story, giving readers a vivid and compelling account of her life with her mother, Anney, and her stepfather, Daddy Glen.

Novels:
Cavedweller
(1998),
Bastard Out of Carolina
(1992).
Poetry:
The Women Who Hate Me: Poetry, 1980–1990
(1991).
Short stories:
Trash
(1988).
Essays:
What It Took for Me to Get Here: Young Writers on the Journey through Life (1999),
Two or Three Things I Know for S
ure (1995),
Skin: Talking about Sex, Class & Literature
(1993).

Blanche McCrary Boyd, “Dorothy Allison, Crossover Blues,”
The Nation
(5 July 1992), 20–22.
Contemporary Authors
, Vol. 140, 9–10.
New York Times Book Review
(5 July 1992), 3. E.J. Graff, “Novelist out of Carolina,”
Poets & Writers
(January/ February 1995), 41–49. Michael Rowe, “We're as American as You Can Get,”
Harvard Gay and Lesbian Review
2:1 (winter 1995).

from Chapter 1

I've been called Bone all my life, but my name's Ruth Anne. I was named for and by my oldest aunt—Aunt Ruth. My mama didn't have much to say about it, since strictly speaking, she wasn't there. Mama and a carful of my aunts and uncles had been going out to the airport to meet one of the cousins who was on his way back from playing soldier. Aunt Alma, Aunt Ruth, and her husband, Travis, were squeezed into the front, and Mama was stretched out in back, sound asleep. Mama hadn't adjusted to pregnant life very happily, and by the time she was eight months gone, she had a lot of trouble sleeping. She said that when she lay on her back it felt like I was crushing her, when she lay on her side it felt like I was climbing up her backbone, and there was no rest on her stomach at all. Her only comfort was the backseat of Uncle Travis's Chevy, which was jacked up so high that it easily cradled little kids or pregnant women. Moments after lying back into that seat, Mama had fallen into her first deep sleep in eight months. She slept so hard, even the accident didn't wake her up.

My aunt Alma insists to this day that what happened was in no way Uncle Travis's fault, but I
know
that the first time I ever saw Uncle Travis sober was when I was seventeen and they had just removed half his stomach along with his liver. I cannot imagine that he hadn't been drinking. There's no question in my mind but that they had
all
been drinking, except Mama, who never could drink, and certainly not when she was pregnant.

No, Mama was just asleep and everyone else was drunk. And what they did was plow headlong into a slow-moving car. The front of Uncle Travis's Chevy accordioned; the back flew up; the aunts and Uncle Travis were squeezed so tight they just bounced a little; and Mama, still asleep with her hands curled under her chin, flew right over their heads, through the windshield, and over the car they hit. Going through the glass, she cut the top of her head, and when she hit the ground she bruised her backside, but other than that she wasn't hurt at all. Of course, she didn't wake up for three days, not till after Granny and Aunt Ruth had signed all the papers and picked out my name.

I am Ruth for my aunt Ruth, and Anne for my mama. I got the nickname Bone shortly after Mama brought me home from the hospital and Uncle Earle announced that I was “no bigger than a knucklebone” and Aunt Ruth's youngest girl, Deedee, pulled the blanket back to see “the bone.” It's lucky I'm not Mattie Raylene like Granny wanted. But Mama had always promised to name her first daughter after her oldest sister, and Aunt Ruth thought Mama's child should just naturally carry Mama's name since they had come so close to losing her.

Other than the name, they got just about everything else wrong. Neither Aunt Ruth nor Granny could write very clearly, and they hadn't bothered to discuss how Anne would be spelled, so it wound up spelled three different ways on the form—Ann, Anne, and Anna. As for the name of the father, Granny refused to speak it after she had run him out of town for messing with her daughter, and Aunt Ruth had never been sure of his last name anyway. They tried to get away with just scribbling something down, but if the hospital didn't mind how a baby's middle name was spelled, they were definite about having a father's last name. So Granny gave one and Ruth gave another, the clerk got mad, and there I was—certified a bastard by the state of South Carolina.

Mama always said it would never have happened if she'd been awake. “After all,” she told my aunt Alma, “they don't ask for a marriage license before they put you up on the table.” She was convinced that she could have bluffed her way through it,
said
she was married firmly enough that no one would have questioned her.

“It's only when you bring it to their attention that they write it down.”

Granny said it didn't matter anyhow. Who cared what was written down? Did people read courthouse records? Did they ask to see your birth certificate before they sat themselves on your porch? Everybody who mattered knew, and she didn't give a rat's ass about anybody else. She teased Mama about the damn silly paper with the red stamp on the bottom.

“What was it? You intended to frame that thing? You wanted something on your wall to prove you done it right?” Granny could be mean where her pride was involved. “The child is proof enough. An't no stamp on her nobody can see.”

If Granny didn't care, Mama did. Mama hated to be called trash, hated the memory of every day she'd ever spent bent over other people's peanuts and strawberry plants while they stood tall and looked at her like she was a rock on the ground. The stamp on that birth certificate burned her like the stamp she knew they'd tried to put on her.
No-good, lazy, shifiless.
She'd work her hands to claws, her back to a shovel shape, her mouth to a bent and awkward smile—anything to deny what Greenville County wanted to name her. Now a soft-talking black-eyed man had done it for them—set a mark on her and hers. It was all she could do to pull herself up eight days after I was born and go back to work waiting tables with a tight mouth and swollen eyes.

Mama waited a year. Four days before my first birthday and a month past her sixteenth, she wrapped me in a blanket and took me to the courthouse. The clerk was polite but bored. He had her fill out a form and pay a two-dollar fee. Mama filled it out in a fine schoolgirl's hand. She hadn't been to school in three years, but she wrote letters for everyone in the family and was proud of her graceful, slightly canted script.

“What happened to the other one?” the clerk asked.

Mama didn't look up from my head on her arm. “It got torn across the bottom.”

The clerk looked at her more closely, turned a glance on me. “Is that right?”

He went to the back and was gone a long time. Mama stood, quiet but stubborn, at the counter. When he came back, he passed her the paper and stayed to watch her face.

It was the same, identical to the other one. Across the bottom in oversized red-inked block letters it read, “
ILLEGITIMATE
.”

Mama drew a breath like an old woman with pleurisy, and flushed pink from her neck to her hairline. “I don't want it like this,” she blurted.

“Well, little lady,” he said in a long, slow drawl. Behind him she could see some of the women clerks standing in a doorway, their faces almost as flushed as her own but their eyes bright with an entirely different emotion. “This is how it's got to be. The facts have been established.” He drew the word out even longer and louder so that it hung in the air between them like a neon reflection of my mama's blush—
established.

The women in the doorway shook their heads and pursed their lips. One mouthed to the other, “Some people.”

Mama made her back straighten, bundled me closer to her neck, and turned suddenly for the hall door. “You forgetting your certificate,” the man called after her, but she didn't stop. Her hands on my body clamped so tight I let out a high, thin wail. Mama just held on and let me scream.

She waited another year before going back, that time taking my aunt Ruth with her and leaving me with Granny. “I was there,” Aunt Ruth promised them, “and it was really my fault. In so much excitement I just got confused, what with Anney here looking like she was dead to the world and everybody shouting and running around. You know, there was a three-car accident brought in just minutes after us.” Aunt Ruth gave the clerk a very sincere direct look, awkwardly trying to keep her eyes wide and friendly.

“You know how these things can happen.”

“Oh, I do,” he said, enjoying it all immensely.

The form he brought out was no different from the others. The look he gave my mama and my aunt was pure righteous justification.
“What'd you expect?”
he seemed to be saying. His face was set and almost gentle, but his eyes laughed at them. My aunt came close to swinging her purse at his head, but Mama caught her arm. That time she took the certificate copy with her.

“Might as well have something for my two dollars,” she said. At seventeen, she was a lot older than she had been at sixteen. The next year she went alone, and the year after. That same year she met Lyle Parsons and started thinking more about marrying him than dragging down to the courthouse again. Uncle Earle teased her that if she lived with Lyle for seven years, she could get the same result without paying a courthouse lawyer. “The law never done us no good. Might as well get on without it.”

…

Mama was working grill at the White Horse Cafe the day the radio announced that the fire downtown had gone out of control, burning the courthouse and the hall of records to the ground. It was midway through the noon rush. Mama was holding a pot of coffee in one hand and two cups in the other. She put the cups down and passed the pot to her friend Mab.

“I'm going home.”

“You what?”

“I've got to go home.”

“Where's she going?”

“Trouble at home.”

The cardboard box of wrinkled and stained papers was tucked under the sheets in the bottom of Aunt Alma's chifforobe. Mama pulled out the ones she wanted, took them into the kitchen, and dropped them in the sink without bothering to unfold them. She'd just lit a kitchen match when the phone rang.

“You heard, I suppose.” It was Aunt Ruth. “Mab said you took off like someone set a fire under you.”

“Not me,” Mama replied. “The only fire I got going here is the one burning up all these useless papers.”

Aunt Ruth's laughter spilled out of the phone and all over the kitchen.

“Girl, there an't a woman in town going to believe you didn't set that fire yourself. Half the county's gonna tell the other how you burned down that courthouse.”

“Let them talk,” Mama said, and blew at the sparks flying up. “Talk won't send me to jail. The sheriff and half his deputies know I was at work all morning, 'cause I served them their coffee. I can't get into any trouble just 'cause I'm glad the goddam courthouse burned down.”

She blew at the sparks again, whistling into the phone, and then laughed out loud. Halfway across town, Aunt Ruth balanced the phone against her neck, squeezed Granny's shoulder, and laughed with her. Over at the mill, Aunt Alma looked out a window at the smoke billowing up downtown and had to cover her mouth to keep from giggling like a girl. In the outer yard back of the furnace works, Uncle Earle and Glen Waddell were moving iron and listening to the radio. Both of them grinned and looked up at each other at the same moment, then burst out laughing. It was almost as if everyone could hear each other, all over Greenville, laughing as the courthouse burned to the ground.