Читать книгу Sitting Up With the Dead: A Storied Journey Through the American South - Pamela Petro - Страница 13
ОглавлениеI STOPPED AMID THE BROAD-BACKED HILLS of Northeastern Georgia, not far from Walhalla, to get more peaches and a barbecued pork roll at a roadside shack that looked like it had been abandoned by a mobile flea market. The owner, squinting from beneath a battered Atlanta Braves cap, barked, ‘Girl, you got people in Georgia?’
I told him that close friends lived right over the Tennessee line, and he let it pass. ‘These here’re South Carolina peaches. Just so’s you know. Georgia peaches be runty right now.’ So much for the plump peach on Georgia license plates. I also bought some scuppernong preserves because I liked the name. Vickie said that Daddy Runt had made wine from ‘scuplins’,’ and I thought these might be the same thing (they were, but it took borrowing a dictionary to learn that scuppernongs are wild grapes, and scuplins’ one of Vickie’s family’s innumerable verbal shortcuts).
As the greenery rolled by I had the same curious feeling I’d had for days: that the South badly needed to comb its hair, metaphorically speaking. Mile after mile the tree and shrubscape along the roadsides was hopelessly tangled in kudzu, the plant Time Magazine had voted one of the worst ideas of the twentieth century. It was easy to see why. Kudzu is a leafy vine that was first introduced to the South from Japan in 1876, then promoted with gusto in the Thirties, with the idea that it would prevent soil erosion and provide shade. The problem is, in optimum conditions – for instance, the climate of the American Southeast – kudzu grows up to a foot a day, and eventually smothers every object in its path. In seventy years it has crept everywhere, turning stands of mature trees into wild, giant topiary gardens. Imagine if Christo, the artist who wrapped the Reichstag in cloth, decided to cover the entire state of Georgia in very high pile, green carpeting: it would look exactly like the work of kudzu.
I made up a sport called kudzu-spotting, which is similar to cloud-gazing, though earthbound. The dense green masses take on all kinds of shapes: bears, swooping eagles, several species of dinosaur, all leashed together like shaggy green circus animals. The idea is to spot them while driving at 70 mph without having an accident (I narrowly avoided two crashes that I can recall). Kudzu is so universally despised that it has become a sub-genre of Southern chit-chat to bash it. Everybody hates kudzu … everybody except Nancy Basket. Nancy makes paper out of it. She told me on the phone that she’s also built a kudzu barn in her backyard.
‘The leaves talk to me; they told me to use them.’ Nancy said, sounding like she meant it.
Oh great, I thought, even the kudzu talks.
We were sitting in what I’d call Nancy’s Native American room, though her whole house may have been similarly decorated. I had arrived late, having been stuck on a two-lane highway behind a behemoth thresher, or some other ungodly large piece of farm equipment, and in my rush, hadn’t glanced at the rest of her house. An animal skin was thrown over the sofa on which we both sat, curled up on our respective feet, and her daughter’s Cherokee dancing outfit hung on the back of a door near an American flag, the latter superimposed with the image of a Native American man in full headdress. Antlers, feathers, animal skulls, and beaded necklaces were scattered along the mantlepiece of a large, fieldstone fireplace. It was a comfortable room, earthy, with soft, overstuffed furniture – the very antithesis of Rosehill – and Nancy suited it. She wore her hair in a long black braid; bare feet poked out from under the hem of her denim skirt.
There were baskets everywhere.
‘I’ll explain later why I went to the kudzu for help,’ Nancy said. ‘But the baskets come first.’
Nancy had been born in Washington State, but moved to South Carolina ten years ago after learning how to weave and braid baskets in the early eighties. Shortly after her apprenticeship a great uncle had contacted her out of the blue, sending hitherto unknown information about her third-great grandmother, Margaret Basket, a Cherokee basket weaver who had been born in Virginia. Margaret had been one of thousands of Cherokee forced westward along the Trail of Tears, after white settlers drove them from their homes. (I thought uneasily of Rosehill. Hattie Hicky had told me the day before that one of the branches of the Trail of Tears had passed just in front of the house; it later became the Charleston-to-New Orleans stagecoach route. ‘We ran the Indians out of heah,’ she’d stated, characteristically telescoping past and present with her free use of pronouns.)
‘When a young Native American woman shows promise as a basket-maker,’ Nancy continued, ‘out of respect she takes the name of the ancestor who’s helped her in her art.’ Which is why – encouraged by her uncle’s intervention and a timely divorce – she became Nancy Basket.
The stories grew out of her basketry. After she got to Walhalla, Nancy continued her apprenticeship with Native American artists in Cherokee, North Carolina, just across the state line. ‘They told me stories as we worked. Native people believe that there are stories in the landscape. Stories in mute things, in objects, like baskets.’ Nancy had a rhythmic way of speaking, soothing but with muscular emphasis, as if she were kneading her words the way bakers knead dough. ‘They also believe that stories have medicine. That stories find you when you need them. And if you become a storyteller, it’s a sacred responsibility. You have to give your audience the medicine you think they need.’
I wondered what medicine I would get, as I sipped a Diet Dr Pepper. Now, she continued, she worked as an artist-in-residence in the South Carolina school system, travelling and teaching Native American culture, basketry and paper-making, and telling stories. ‘I tell the children about the drowning of Cherokee towns for reservoirs. There are some of us,’ she was almost whispering now, ‘who can still hear the drums sounding underwater.’
Half-hypnotized by her delivery, this last bit of information jerked me wide awake. In Wales, my touchstone for oppressed nations, Welsh-speaking villages had also been submerged – recently, in the 1960s – by reservoirs dredged so that towns in England could access water more cheaply. Instead of drums, Welsh nationalists claimed to hear chapel bells tolling underwater. I told Nancy this and she nodded solemnly. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I see you understand.’ Then she excused herself and ran out to drive her reluctant teenage daughter to work at McDonald’s.
These missing places, drowned, or decimated like Rosewell, take revenge in ghost stories of phantom drums, and long-dead children crying in the bottoms of wells. Landscapes do hold stories, only sometimes they are so old, or the victims of violence were so powerless, that the tales become dislodged, and the ‘hauntings’ that began as collective conscience, a community remembering, get swept up into the dominant, collective conscious as folktales of ghosts. I heard eerie stories, usually in pubs in North Wales, about church bells ringing under the sea long before I ever learned about the Tryweryn Reservoir. I wondered how many spooky tales contained an ember of subversion at their core – a protest of the vanished, pushed from the margins all the way off the page – that smolders there either to be ignored or bellowed into flames according to the teller. Everything depends not so much on the tale, but on who tells it.
One of the original feminist manifestos, aptly tided Diving Deep and Surfacing, by Carol P. Christ, makes the succinct point that those who tell the stories wield the power. ‘Women,’ she wrote, ‘live in a world where women’s stories rarely have been told from their own perspectives.’ Carol Christ wasn’t the first, of course, to point out the power of storytelling in shaping knowledge, especially in relation to women trapped in men’s narratives:
‘On women … the clergy will not paint,
Except when writing of a woman-saint,
But never good of other women, though.
Who called the lion savage? Do you know?
By God, if women had but written stories
Like those the clergy keep in oratories,
More had been written of man’s wickedness
Than all the sons of Adam could redress.’
This wonderful diatribe was delivered by the Wife of Bath in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Her admonition, and Christ’s – for the characters to seize control of the narrative – applies to all marginal-dominant relationships, as Nancy well understood. It was her particular goal to wrest control of the storyscape from the settlers, so to speak, and return it to the Cherokee. Audiences hear different drums, no matter how deep the water, depending on who is speaking them to life.
She pursues this task with zeal, but with delicacy. ‘Because I work in the school system, I have to be so careful. Remember, this is the South. I can’t say the word “imagination” – I must have looked aghast, because she stopped, nodding her head – ‘really, I’m serious, I can’t say “imagination” to the children because some parents complain it leads to devil worship.’
I was trying not to choke on my Dr Pepper. Nancy raised her eyebrows and rolled in her lips, as if to silently reiterate, It’s true. ‘The South is so controlled. You have to break the rules without making people bleed. Stories do that.’
This was my cue: I asked her if she would tell me a tale that she felt grew out of her environment, her Appalachian corner of South Carolina. Nancy nodded and said that this was her version of a tale she heard years ago from an Abenaki storyteller named Tsnaqua. She cleared her throat, and began.
A long, long time ago, the Creator, the one who made us all, red-yellow-black-white-and-brown, had a huge stone bowl. He reached deep down into it and he picked up the last little bit of clay that he had in there, and he said, ‘There’s not much here, I guess I can throw it away. Hmmmm. But if I do, then the two-leggeds that I made will all know I threw something away. I told them not to do that, and I want them to listen, so I’m going to show them how to take a little bit of something and make it better.’
So the Creator took this little bit of clay and he molded it and he shaped it and he gave the new thin thing eyes and Snake could see. He said, ‘Snake, wait here in the bowl. I need to go down to the river … to get more clay.’
Snake waited and waited. And he waited and waited. And the Creator didn’t come back. So he started looking around, and the Snake looked in the sky and there were stars there, and he was warm, and when he looked down he saw color for the first time. He saw red-yellow-black-white-brown-blue-pink-purple-and-green, and he said, ‘Oooo, what’s this? I want to go into the world and find out about color.’ So he slithered out of the bowl and he went down into the world. When he did that the Creator came back with a big armful of clay, put it in his stone bowl, and said, ‘Snake, where are you? I have enough clay and I can give you arms and legs. Snake! Where are you? I have enough clay and I can make your skin.’
But snake was not to be found. ‘Oh no!,’ cried the Creator. ‘You crawled off into the world and you weren’t ready yet. You’ll never have arms and legs now. You’ll have to slide on your belly forever. How are you going to keep yourself warm? It’s going to be winter and night-time when you get down there and you don’t have any skin! I wish you well, but I wish you would have waited.’ So the Creator just had to wait to see how Snake took care of himself.
Snake crawled off into the world and it was winter and night-time and he had to crawl underneath a rock to keep warm. He was shivering and he was shaking, and he knew he had to get warm or he was going to die. So he looked around and he saw this Cherokee round house, and there was a fire coming up out of the floor, and he said, ‘Maybe the fire is like the stars, and I can crawl over there and get warm.’ So Snake crawled over, got warm, and he was happy and grinning like this [Nancy grins extravagantly]. And there was a girl in this roundhouse, and she took one look at that new and different thing, something she’d never seen before, and she screamed. ‘ACH!’ And it hurt Snake’s ears. Then, in Cherokee, she said, ‘Get out of my house, ugly nasty person!’ And the snake said, ‘Ugly? Nasty? I’m new and different and you’re hurting my ears!’ And the snake crawled out of the roundhouse crying, back underneath the rock.
The snake cried so hard – it was so cold outside – it froze his eyes open, and today snakes cannot close their eyes. It was so cold underneath the rock, all by himself, that the tail of the snake froze and cracked into little pieces, and today rattlesnakes, as you know, have the same kind of tail. And the snake said, ‘I’m cracking up. I’m going to die. And then the Creator will have made me for no reason. I can’t let that happen. I have to take care of myself.’
And so the snake found another roundhouse – because Cherokees never lived in teepees, you know – and he went into that roundhouse, and he was by their fire, and he was getting warm and he was real quiet, but there was a boy in the roundhouse. And the boy took one look at that new and different thing, something he’d never seen before, and he didn’t scream or anything – because guys don’t scream – they just pick up big sticks AND START HITTING. He WHACKED that snake. And then the snake had a horrible limp. Did you ever see a snake limp? It’s real hard to do without legs.
The snake limped on out of the boy’s roundhouse, and he said, ‘I’ve been frozen, my tail’s all cracked up, I’ve got this horrible limp, my ears hurt because the girl screamed at me, I guess I’m going to die in the backyard of that boy and girl. And then after I’m dead I’m going to STINK. They’re going to kill me for no reason.’
So he went to the backyard of the boy and girl and he found that they’d left some beads lying on the ground. Maybe they didn’t want them anymore. And he saw the beautiful colors. So he said, ‘At least I’ll be able to die in the colors that I love so much.’ So Snake went over to the pile of beads, and he wriggled and he rolled, and he wriggled and he rolled, and the beads – because his body was still clay – began to stick. And he said, ‘I know what I’m going to do,’ after he looked down and saw he wasn’t dead yet. ‘I’m going to bead myself my own belt. And I’m going to tell all my other snake relatives when they come down how to bead belts out of different beautiful colors and patterns and designs.’
And that’s why snakes today have their different colors and designs, but they still have to seek out places to keep warm.
‘Haboo? …
… Pam, that means, Are you listening?’
She’d startled me. ‘Haboo!’ I shouted back.
Nancy finished the story by adding, ‘We need to remember that different isn’t ugly or bad or right or wrong. Different is just different.’ I wished she hadn’t beaten the tale with a didactic stick at the end. It was obvious enough already, I thought, preferring to think of it as a creation myth rather than a we-must-learn-to-live-together sermon. I wanted to see the kudzu barn.
The afternoon was warm but the humidity had lifted a little here in the higher elevation. It was actually pleasant to be outside. Nancy told me that when she began storytelling, children would occasionally ask to see pictures. She decided she needed a visual aid that would draw in Cherokee culture in another form. That’s when she turned to the kudzu.
‘I went to it and asked for help,’ said Nancy. ‘It taught me to make paper from its leaves.’ Kudzu should get a teaching certificate: Nancy makes a lovely, deeply textured paper from the stuff, which she stains with natural Cherokee dyes. She presented me with a kudzu collage depicting a bunch of carrots. On the back it told me that in Asia kudzu roots are ground into a powder that’s used as a thickener in cooking, the vines exported as grass-cloth wallpaper, and the purple flowers – which incidentally smell like grape bubble gum – used in jelly-making.
My little gift in no way prepared me for the glory of Nancy’s kudzu barn. Raised up on short stilts and cinder blocks and sagging slightly at the sides so that it arched in the middle, with exterior walls of bundled straw, like a castaway’s palm hut, it was homely and exotic at the same time: a cross between homes I’d seen along the Chaophraya River in Thailand and the covered bridges of New England.
‘See,’ said Nancy, poking the roughage on the exterior walls, ‘it’s made of bales of kudzu. Each wall is one bale wide. It’s great insulation. When I’m finished I plan to stucco over both the outside and inside walls, but I’m going to leave a square inside exposed, that I’ll cover with plexiglass, so you can see how it’s constructed.’
The interior looked like the nest of a big, tidy bird – the dried bales were still exposed behind the wall studs – divided into neat rooms by walls made of antique windows that Nancy had scavenged. ‘It had been a livery stable,’ she said, ‘belonging to the house next door, when it was an old coaching inn. But I’m going to use it as a paper studio.’
We stood in admiring silence. When the wind blew, the dried kudzu rustled in the walls, whispering, I guess, about fecund youth and topiary animals, and the romance of purple bubble-gum flowers.
Walhalla was a thriving little place, with more than its fair share of antique shops, and brochures advertising upcoming events like the annual Oktoberfest. A gas station attendant told me the area had been heavily settled by Germans.
The most surprising thing in town was a Mexican-Salvadorean restaurant, a bit of a dive decorated with big, old-fashioned Christmas lights, where I stopped to pick up some take-out. It was an off hour, around four in the afternoon, and as I pulled open the door a premonition flashed across my mind of a bunch of beery guys hanging out around a pool table. I steeled myself, but as it turned out I couldn’t have been more wrong. It was empty but for three Puerto Rican women – mother, daughter, granddaughter – who were eating at the bar, each pursuing her own version of a seated salsa to the piped backbeat. They told me to order the vegetable quesadilla and join them while I waited, so I climbed into one of the high, twisty swivel chairs at the bar and began to spin it with my foot. We looked like a quartet of exhausted Motown backing singers.
In 1986, they said, the local quilting and textile factory began hiring Hispanic workers; now there is a fledgling community of about five hundred or so Spanish speakers around Walhalla. They were thinking of organizing a Fifteenth of September Party to compete with the Oktoberfest. ‘Not compete, really,’ said the grandmother, ‘just, you know, add to it.’
‘What happened on September 15th?’ I asked.
‘That’s the real Mexican Independence Day. Cinco de Mayo was just independence from the French, you see.’
I commented on her lack of accent in English.
‘Oh, I grew up on Long Island,’ she said. ‘We moved here because the cost of living is so much better for retired people. You can buy a nice house for $30,000.’
I asked if the Hispanic community ever felt vulnerable here, being such a small minority. No, she said, they didn’t really have any problems. A few seconds later she added, as an afterthought, ‘People just see us as different, and that’s OK. As long as different is just different, not bad or threatening in any way.’
At that moment, if Grandfather had tapped me on the shoulder and passed me Snake’s long-overdue feet, I wouldn’t have been surprised. Those were the woman’s words. I asked her if she had ever heard of Nancy Basket, the storyteller. She shook her head ‘No.’ Nancy hadn’t recommended any restaurants in town either, but I no longer doubted her ability to hear the drums sound from the depths. Occasionally a take-out quesadilla helps the medicine go down.
I was fast exchanging the culture of heat for the culture of hills. My route now was due north, destination Asheville, North Carolina, just about an hour and a half’s drive from Walhalla. I was supposed to meet a storyteller named David Holt at his home near Asheville in two days’ time, and had a daring plan for the intervening day.
As I approached North Carolina I felt as if I were leaving one version of the South behind, a process already begun in northern Georgia and Appalachian South Carolina. There were fewer farmsteads, fewer smallholdings, fewer modest, Fifties-style ranch houses and sagging shacks. Instead forests claimed the land almost without exception. I missed what had become my favorite icons of rural living: unpainted barns that sat expectant but stoic in flat fields like aging beasts of burden, their vertical gray boards softened and mottled by weather into velvety, strokeable hides.
The omnipresent greens of the Southern landscape were clustered vertically now rather than spread across the earth in plantings, and were less sun-faded; the rising land grew darker, rearing up before me into the Great Smoky Mountains and the blues of highland distances. The conifers and kelly-green deciduous trees had a Northern look, as if I were on the cusp of a world better known to me (a heart-sinking disappointment), where autumn and its candle-flame leaves make an impact undreamt-of in southern Georgia. My ears crackled in the clean air. Even the sunlight in the hills was different, more matter-of-fact, sharper; gone was the easy-going, late afternoon haze the color of whipped sweet butter, spangled with free-floating dust mites.
But the signs of the South continued. I stopped at a gas station cunningly disguised as a log cabin, and found that I could still buy beer at highway-side convenience stores, even on Sundays (handy, but scandalous to the New England Puritan that occasionally wags her finger in my conscience). Mammoth lumber trucks still ruled the highways, barreling along laden with freshly cut timber in a convincing display that the country was being felled around me. Hot boiled peanuts remained the snack of choice. And everything from live bait to chicken livers to ice cream to twenty-four ounce soft drinks for 50 cents were hawked on portable electric signs that looked like debased offspring of old movie theatre marquees (the above quartet was all advertised on the same sign). These simple things are unknown to me at home in Rhode Island, but for the electric marquees, which only appear in the rural corners of the state, and rarely at that.
Things took an ill turn in Asheville. My devil-may-care approach to lodging – basically, drive until I came to a sign advertising a cheap chain motel – was thwarted by a nest of converging highways. Every time I glimpsed a likely sign, it was on a route that I was either passing over, under, or paralleling, never the route I was actually on. Nearly an hour of this put me in a fierce and rather desperate mood, and I resolved to simply exit and take whatever I found. Unfortunately, I exited on the city’s south side and wound up in the shadow of the Biltmore Estate: the largest private mansion in America, built by one of the Vanderbilt clan in imitation of a chateau from the Loire Valley. For a $30 entrance ticket I could ogle a handful of the two hundred and fifty rooms – names like Ming, Wedgewood, and several Roman numeralled Louis jumped from the furnishings brochure – and all seventy-five acres of formal gardens, if I so chose. I didn’t really want to do either, but lots of other people did, which meant rich tourists, smart hotels, and high prices. I picked one, blanching at the cost, but was so eager to eat my vegetable quesadilla and drink my convenience-store beer in comfort that I stayed.
That night I sent an e-mail to Vickie Vedder, reminding her that we’d talked so much the other day that neither of us noticed she hadn’t told me a story. I proposed that perhaps she could send me one on tape, or even over the Internet: I would check my ethereal mailbox for a reply.
