Judaculla Visits the Valley of the White Lily

When I was a little kid who spent most of his time pursuing the adventures of Superman, Batman and Captain Marvel, my Uncle Albert would sometimes attempt to distract me with tales about the Cherokee giant, Judaculla.

“You think those funny book people are something? Hell, Gar-Nell” (my name when I was growing up in Rhodes Cove), “none of these funny book people are half as impressive as old Judaculla!” Then, he would launch into an incredible yarn (which I now believe he made up as he went along). “Judaculla could stand in Cashiers and see what was going on in Sylva. He bathed in Glenville Lake and combed his hair with the spine of a giant snake that he killed down in Nantahala. One time, a tribe from South Carolina made him mad because they had invaded some Cherokee hunting grounds up in Glenville, and he picked up a rock and throwed it at them. Killed half of them. You know what that rock was? It is now called Whiteside Mountain!”

It has been sixty years since Albert used to make my mouth hang open as he acted out another chapter of the saga of Judaculla, but I find myself thinking about him lately. In fact, each time I venture up #107 from Sylva to Cullowhee, I imagine the great slant-eyed giant bending over the Balsams as he stares at this latest invasion into his domain.

To Judaculla, all of this “progress” looks like some kind of rampart rash or infection. I watch him as he plucks up several big box stores, sniffs them disdainfully and then flips them into South Carolina. I decide to pull out of the gridlocked traffic, park and give my full attention to the Cherokee giant’s “renovations.”

Now, with one massive paw, Judaculla scrapes the earth from Cope Creek to Cullowhee, dragging all of the brightly colored little buildings and the automobiles into one great heap of plastic, metal and concrete. Then, he pulls up all of the utility poles and using the tangled mass of power lines, he tightly bundles the wreckage and flings it into outer space. Noting that the asphalt highways and parking lots remain, he uses his fingers to scale it up, revealing the imprisoned earth beneath. Judaculla scratches the earth and draws a finger down the Tuckaseigee, causing the water to surge through the freshly dredged channels.

Panicked humanity is running into the woods bordering #107, but Judaculla is indifferent to them. He moves his attention to Western Carolina University where he begins
To grind and knead bricks and stone into a fine powder that he casts to the winds. As thousands of students and academics flee, some still clutching their cups of expresso and tea, the Cherokee colossus hesitates as though he is considering exterminating a few academics and administrators. Instead, he merely smooths the wounded earth and surveys the changes he has created. Then, he rises and walks away, finally vanishing in the dim vistas of the Great Smokies.

What will happen now? I sit for a moment, imagining the return of vegetation and a skyline that is unmarred by buildings and power lines. Eventually, there will be pastures and grazing cattle, a river filled with brown trout. Wildlife returns to the woods and….
“Hey!”

I turn to see a Domino’s Pizza car and an angry fellow behind the wheel.

“You are going to have to move, buddy. You are parked in out entrance.”

I crank my engine and search for a gap in the gridlock.
Time to move on.

Charlie K's Funny Books

That cold wind that has been woofing in the eaves the last few weeks reminds me of my childhood in the Sylva Elementary School. SES was a two-story brick building on what is now Mark Watson Field, and it had been officially condemned several times before I graduated (to high school) in the late 40’s. On windy days in March, I would sometimes feel SES literally move. Somewhere in the bowels of that building, great metal girders shifted. I would look across the aisle at Charlie K., a little chubby kid who always wore peppermint-striped tee-shirts, and he would make his eyes get big and round and he would whisper, “It’s coming down!” Then, he would imitate the sound the building made: “EEEEERRRRKKKK! Hear that? You feel the floor moving?” Charlie K. was my best friend. We ended up together because, as our teachers said, we shared “an imaginative proclivity.”

Charlie K. was my best friend. We ended up together because, as our teachers said, we shared “an imaginative proclivity.” Charlie K. and I knew that this was “teacher’s talk” for saying we were weird in the same way. Like me, Charlie K. loved funny books, Saturday Westerns and “Owl Shows,” (which is what we called the scary movies at the Ritz Theatre on Saturday night.) By the time we were in the third grade, Charlie had shown me his secret hideouts. He had two. One was under the Sylva Elementary School and the other was the inside of Sylva’s abandoned movie theatre, the Lyric.

Beneath the flooring of the school, Charlie had found a dark hole where we could sit and listen to the building creak while we ate our bag lunches. Charlie said that the shadowy recesses beneath the school were where Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster stayed between appearances at the Owl Show. Charlie had a talent for making me see the same thing he saw. “Don’t you see him, Gary Neil? Behind that big brick pillar? There! I can see his teeth!” Eventually, I would see Bela’s fangs or the knobs on Boris’ head, and as the dark figures lurched slowly toward us, Charlie and I would flee. Leaving our lunch, we would emerge with thundering hearts into the bright sunlight where we would describe our narrow escape to our classmates, who would look knowingly at each other and smile.

However, in terms of atmosphere, the Lyric Theatre far surpassed SES. Every window was boarded up and every door was locked and wrapped in chains – but Charlie K. knew how to get inside. After crawling through a network of vents and old storage rooms, we would emerge in the murky interior where rotting curtains stirred in the damp air and little shafts of light struggled to reach the rotting stage and moldy seats. I remember that there was always the sound of dripping water and families of squeaking rats would skitter up the dark aisles. Inevitably, Charlie would point to the great sagging balcony that seemed to float in the darkness. “There he goes! See him, Gary Neil? The Wolf Man! He's coming for us!" And he was,
because I saw him, too! Lon Chaney, Jr. dropped from the balcony and growled
and Charlie K and I were gone, back through the tunnels and vents...back into the
sunshine and the safety of the ordinary world

But the biggest treat was yet to come – Charlie K’s funny books. We would climb College Hill, stopping at our favorite foxholes to fight valiantly with the “sons of Nippon” who infested the kudzu thickets along the way. When we finally reached Charlie’s house, we would tiptoe
Through the kitchen into a screened-in porch where a huge chest-of-drawers sat against the wall. Each drawer was labeled with names like CAPTAIN MARVEL, THE HUMAN TORCH, NYOKA,

and THE PHANTOM. Inside, the comics were chronologically arranged in neat stacks. Charlie K. had everything!

Thanks to Charlie’s collection I knew the origin of all of my favorite heroes and could follow their careers from their birth to the present. For example, I knew that “The Heap,” who was a kind of walking brush pile, had once been a famous German fighter pilot before he crashed into a swamp and emerged as some kind of human/plant hybrid that wandered the world destroying evil humans.
Heaven help you if the Heap grabbed you in his twiggy embrace. We knew that Billy Batson (Captain Marvel) had a long-lost twin sister who became her brother’s equal by saying the magic word, “SHAZAM.” She looked a little like a high school cheerleader, but she could fly.

Usually, Charlie K’s mother would put an end to our comic book session by staring at the two of us until I got uncomfortable. “You need to go home, Gary Neil.” It is almost dark and your grandmother will be worried.” In those long, summer evenings with Charlie K’s funny books, I noticed that Charlie K’s mother looked at his wonderful collection with distaste. “Reading those things will rot your brain,” she would say. “Them silly books are going to make idiots of the two of you.” She always ended this little tirade with a threat: “One of these days while you are at school, I’m going to burn them! I’ll make a huge pile in the back yard, pour a quart of coal oil on them and strike a match!”

I remember one afternoon when Charlie K’s mother had made her threat and returned to the kitchen; Charlie K. watched her go and then said, “That’s not my mother, you know.” I laid down Shenna, the Queen of the Jungle and forgot about the terrible revenge that she was about to bring to Ungawa, the witch doctor. “What?” Charlie K. laid down his Captain America, leaned forward and whispered, “Neither one of these people that I live with are related to me!”

Then, he told me a marvelous tale. Charlie K. said that his real parents were wealthy English aristocrats who had devoted their lives to fighting the Nazis. They build an underground lab in Africa where they designed atomic weapons. When the evil “axis powers” learned their location, Hitler sent an assassination squad to Africa. In a hushed whisper, Charlie K. told me that his parents were killed, but that Charlie K. was smuggled to America where his father’s friends arranged for him to be reared in secret. When he reaches the “age of concent,” his father’s atomic squadron would come to Sylva and spirit Charlie K.
Away in a black heliocopter. Charlie K. would then take command of his father’s loyal forces who would launch a coup to avenge the murder of Charlie K’s parents. Wow!

Sixty years have passed since Charlie swore me to secrecy. I guess it is safe to talk about it now. I like to think that Charlie is happy and well in Africa. I wonder if he needs an assistant.

My Hirsute Love

Back in the early 50’s when Western Carolina University was still Western Carolina Teachers College, I got a crush on a feisty little coed named Hedy West during my sophomore year. Hedy played a banjo and sang exhilarating songs about dying miners and terrible injustices visited on people who worked in cotton mills. I followed her about like a devoted puppy and although she never encouraged my attentions, she didn’t reject them either. Sometimes, I would ask her to sing “Cotton Mill Girls” and when she complied, I would quake with mindless joy, and I don’t have the slightest idea why.

I worked in a cotton mill all my life;
I ain’t got nothing but a Barlow knife.
It’s a hard time, cotton mill girls,
It’s a hard time everywhere.

Why did I find this spunky little lady so fascinating? Well, there were several reasons. I noticed that she was totally unimpressed by everyone at WCTC (not just me); she was “different” in some fundamental way, too. In class, she frequently challenged instructors and argued with them while the rest of us sat in astonished silence. Most of us had never heard a teacher’s statements questioned, and we were impressed when Hedy was kicked out of several classes for being “disruptive.”

Hedy usually wore Levis and plaid shirts (which I found provocative in an era of cashmere sweaters and saddle oxfords). But more than the banjo, her rudeness or her Levis was another singular fact that caused me to perspire. On the rare occasions that she wore a skirt, I discovered t that Hedy didn’t shave her legs. From mid-thigh to ankle, she displayed provocative silken swirls that seemed designed to drive me crazy. Why? I have no idea. Admittedly, I was a “quare” fellow.

On rare occasions, her somewhat “notorious” father, Don West, a union organizer, visited Hedy. He had been involved in several north Georgia mill towns strikes
And had the scars to prove it. Hedy finally invited me to meet him at the Townhouse, a student hangout in the ‘50’s; Don gave me a stack of books to read, including
Howard Fast’s “The American,” and a ragged copy of his latest volume of poetry, which contained rousing lines like, “Worker’s arise! The day is coming!” He also told me that a well-dressed gentleman who was drinking coffee at the Townhouse counter was actually an FBI agent who “accompanied” him in his travels. “I’m supposed to be dangerous,” he said. Wow. I was impressed!

From Gilmer to Bartow is a mighty long way,
From Cartoogechaye to Elijay
It’s a hard time cotton mill girls,
It’s a hard time everywhere.

Well, the years have rushed by and Hedy and Don have vanished over the horizon. Hedy became relatively famous and strummed her way through engagements in Greenwich Village and a half-dozen eastern universities, including some high-tone folk music preservation jobs. At one point Don took up with a fellow named Myles Horton and the two of them began the Highlander Center over in
Monteagle, Tennessee – the place where Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Pete Seeger and Ralph Abernathy would meet to plan strategies to fight segregation and poverty.

Eventually Don left the Highlander and established an Appalachian museum up in Pipestem, West Virginia. He continued to support unions, preach and write poetry (No Lonesome Road) until his death 1992. His old friend, Myles Horton went on to become a mentor for some of America’s most noted leaders. He died in 1900. His autobiography is called “The Long Haul.”

Last winter, during a bout of insomnia that lasted for the better part of a month, I became maudlin and sentimental about the past. What became of my hirsute temptress, Hedy? Well, I gritted my teeth and plunged into the internet where I eventually found an email address in somewhere in Pennsylvania. I got an immediate response. Hedy wanted to know who the hell I was, whereon I delivered a modest package of saccharine memories: the banjo, “Cotton Mill Girls,” Don West’s poetry, the FBI agent, plays and recitals in which she participated, etc. (I decided not to mention the unshaven legs.)

In effect, Hedy told me that the majority of what I recalled “had never happened.” She assured me that her memories of WCTC were so unpleasant, she refused to dwell on them, and she wasn’t sure she remembered me at all. Certainly, there was no FBI agent. She was thinking of writing a book and she was performing again – mostly in eastern universities. I believe she holds the copyrights for “Cotton Mill Girls” and “500 Miles.”

Naturally, I wish I hadn’t called, but at least, I’m glad that I didn’t mention those unshorn limbs. That way, they are still true and the memory of them is still inviolate. At this late date, I am beginning to learn how to protect the good memories.

When I die, don’t bury me at all;
Just hang me up on the spinning room wall;
Pickle my bones in alcohol.
It’s a hard time cotton mill girls,
It’s a hard time everywhere.

The Snow Storm at Babbie's House

When winter comes now, and I see those familiar pale shafts of sunlight that briefly touch the tops of the Balsams - just before total darkness settles on Rhodes Cove - I find myself remembering a trip to see my great-grandmother over sixty years ago. As I remember it now, I went with my grandfather to visit his mother, Babbie, in the Cowee section of Macon County. By the time we reached Franklin, we found
ourselves driving through a heavy snowfall that quickly erased the road, forcing my grandfather to halt frequently, get out and prod gingerly at the snow, searching for asphalt and gravel. By the time we got to Leatherman’s Gap in Macon County, all the familiar landmarks had vanished, forcing my grandfather to move with infinite slowness. We seemed suspended in a vast whiteness filled with fat snowflakes that slowly descended like languid feathers.

Finally, somewhere near the old Cowee Church, we abandoned the car and began to flounder through the big drifts that a rising wind had blown into Babbie’s little cove. I had been here before, of course, but now the ramshackle old house, the old barn and the noisy little creek were all transformed – burdened with great, white cloaks. We finally saw the smoke from Babbie’s chimney, and eventually, a collection of relatives spilled out of the house – my grandfather’s sister, Elsie and her daughter, Irene; Uncle Ardell and his boys, Lyndon and Fred followed by Pratt and Zelda and their family – a chorus of Hursts, Cardens and Daltons who watched us trudge toward them.

When we arrived, we were escorted into the house where Babbie sat propped up in her bed, my ancient great-grandmother, clad in a half-dozen sweaters and a huge bonnet. She was surrounded by dozens of framed photographs and faded tintypes, the legacy of her dead husband who had been a photographer. When visitors came to Babbie’s bed, they invariably commented on these images. Who is this? They would say, pointing to a man who stared fiercely back at them. “Oh, that is your great-great-great grandfather who was killed by Kirk’s Raiders in the Civil War.” And this one? “That would be Esther Holland who moved to Sedro Wooley. Do you know where that is?”

In later years, I came to feel that Babbie had been something of a trickster. I think she used all of those old photographs as a means of putting visitors at their ease.
As soon as they asked about the pictures, they were in her spell. She was no longer a frail, ancient woman with cataracts and poor hearing, but a practiced storyteller who knew how to hold her visitors spellbound.

A great fire roared in the fireplace where two-foot lengths of oak popped and crackled. The mantle which stretched above the fire bore the inscription, “God Bless This School” because Babbie’s husband had once taught grammar, arithmetic and John Bunyan in this very room.
We could smell dinner (the noon meal then) and the room was heavy with the odor of gritted cornbread, ham and red-eye gravy, bleached apples and leather britches. The room where we ate canted like the deck of a ship due to the house’s eroding foundation – a condition that made me feel like we were all adrift in a seagoing galleon in a white ocean.

In the adjoining room, a big, iron Home Comfort stove not only baked bread, heated water in a reservoir, and provided a “warming closet” for cat-head biscuits, but it heated the room where we ate. We ate for over an hour, I remember, and then we all returned to the living room/ bedroom where Babbie sat drinking buttermilk and nibbling buttered biscuits.

Over the years, I came to know that in Babby’s house, I was participating in a ritual. Everyone gathered in rockers and cane-bottomed chairs around the bed. It was time for Babbie to talk.

“Last time I seen it snow like this,” she said, Hit were the night that the convicts came.” She waited while those of us who had not heard the story before absorbed that detail. “Yes, that’s right! Convicts! Them poor fellers, they had done turned blue, ‘n one of ‘em couldn’t walk. They knocked on the door which shore give me ‘n Elsie a shock! What in the world. Hit was long atter midnight, when thet pitiful lit’le rap-rap come. Elsie opened the door, ‘n there stood three pitiful wretches. Hah! They just blurted it out when we opened the door. ‘We are convicts, ma’m, and we’re lost.’ Near dead, too. Well, we didn’t even hesitate. Told ‘em to go to the barn, ‘n git settled in, ‘n them come back to the house. We fed ‘em in the kitchen, ‘n Elsie tended the one with frostbite. We packed ‘em a basket of vittles, give ‘em a dozen blankets ‘n quilts ‘n sent them two of ‘em to the barn and put the frostbit ‘en on a pallet by the fire. The snow stopped in the night, ‘n the next day, they was gone by noon. I don’t know what they done to get in the penitentiary, but it didn’t make no difference to me. Nice fellers, they was.
Folded them quilts up, washed the plates in the snow ‘n brought everything back to the house. I often wonder what difference there really is between them and us. Could they just as well be Fred over there or Ardell? I think so. Years later, one of them boys come to see me and brought his family. Stood on the porch with hat in his hand, and thanked me. Had a car, too, ‘n he was so proud of his boy who was plannin’ on goin’ to college. He said I saved his life. Well, I don’t know about that, but he was shore a changed man from the one that came to my door in that snow storm.”

That night, grandpa and I slept in the attic in a feather bed. We were warm as toast, but when I woke there were lines of snow on my quilt. It had drifted through the spaces in the roof singles. At breakfast, we had to break the ice on the wash pan and I noticed that the water ran to the house through hollowed-out pine logs, and we dipped it, cold and ice-laden into the wash pan. Within a few minutes, fires were going in both the fireplace and the Home Comfort, and we sat down to biscuits, gravy, eggs and hominy.

Later that day, grandpa and I hiked into a place that he called “the Cove.” “When I quit work, this is where I am comin’,” he said. He talked about the cabin he would build here, and how he would be “so far back, he would never hear another car horn or stripped gear…just wind and rain.” The cove was filled with evergreens and great oaks, and the silence was only broken the occasional cascade of snow that the wind blew from the limbs of trees; and I remember the sharp report of a frozen tree like a pistol shot which, my grandfather said, was the result of sap freezing and exploding. On the way back to Babbie’s, a flock of grouse burst from a laurel thicket, scaring me badly. “Think about that,” said Grandpa, “having grouse in your front yard.”

Oddly enough, I don’t remember the rest of the day, but over the years, I have retained the vivid images – faded tin-types, Babbie’s face, that table laden with food and Babbie’s enchanted audience. When hard times came for my grandfather, he sold the Cove and I understand that all of that silent beauty is now crowded with retirement homes and condominiums. Babbie’s house burned shortly after her death, and the Hursts, Cardens and Daltons have scattered. Occasionally, we meet at reunions (or funerals) and invariably, we talk about that magic day when we gathered by Babbie’s bed during a snowstorm.

Corn Shellers

I remember a warm afternoon in August, 1949 when the county agent came to our house with an electric corn sheller. It was a demonstration model and had been a big hit at several large farms in the county. When the agent plugged it in, it hummed like a bee hive and smelled of hot oil and scorched corn cobs. The agent made a big thing out of shucking an ear of corn and holding it over the big slot in the top of the sheller. My grandfather stared at the contraption the same way he observed most “marvels of the future” – with distrust and fascination – the same way he looked at snakes and rabid groundhogs.
“Are you ready, Arthur?’ My grandfather grunted and the agent dropped the big ear of yellow corn into the slot.
“Zzzzit!” said the sheller and deposited a double handful of corn in the tin bucket beneath the sheller. The cob shot out of the side and ricocheted off the wall of the corn crib, thereby confirming my grandfather’s opinion that the sheller was probably dangerous. However, I was impressed The agent shucked a dozen ears and dropped them in the slot. “Zzzit, zzzit, zzzit, zzzit!” said the sheller until the bucket brimmed with yellow corn. I picked up the hot cobs like they were the hulls of shotgun shells.
“Now, you can shell in one afternoon what it would take you a week to shell with.... that!” He pointed contemptuously at our hand-cranked sheller in the corner. “How many Corn Zappers do you want?”
] My grand-daddy pulled the plug out of the wall, and the big hummer hushed. “I don’t want one,” he said.
The agent gawked. “Why not ?”
“Cause that was the way my daddy done it,” he said, pointing at the old sheller, “and that’s the way I’ll do it. Either that, or by hand.”

I was not pleased by my grandfather’s decision since I had spent untold afternoons and was now doomed to spend many more with that hand-cranked sheller, my arms aching and my fingertips numb and bloody from shucking. The agent shook his head as he carefully loaded the sheller in his car like it was a prize stud bulldog.
“You are fighting the future, Arthur,” he said. “It just makes good common sense to take advantage of things like this.”
“Maybe so, but there is something unnatural about all these ‘lectric gadgets,” he said, peering at the Zapper with distaste. “I don’t like it.”

As we watched the county agent’s car vanish in a cloud of dust down the Rhodes Cove road, Arthur Carden shook his head and delivered his judgment on time past and time to come: “Things have been bad, and they are gonna get worse.” That is what he would say when our dusty trail became a paved road and his own children insisted on getting a telephone. (He once tore the telephone off the wall and threw it into the cornfield because it rang constantly while we were eating supper.) He reluctantly accepted indoor plumbing but refused to drink city water. (“It ain’t healthy to drink water that has been standing in iron pipes.”) The most marked exception to his rejection was the big Silvertone radio. As soon as it produced Bill Monroe singing “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” it was given a corner of the living room where it squatted like a household god, delivering music (The Grand Ole Opry) and prophecies (Grady Cole’s Farm News).

Oddly enough, I seem to have inherited my grandfather contradictory
attitude about technology. While I nurture a cautious appreciation for television, stereos and computers, I am extremely suspicious of anything that alters my environment or makes radical changes in my accepted mode of living. I especially resent being compelled to change. Living in my grandparents’ old house, I sometimes feel that I am under siege by aspects of progress that are either unwanted or deceptive. Several years ago my grandfather’s spring had to be abandoned when tests indicted that it was contaminated. Now, I have city water that probably stands in plastic pipes, and a telephone that rings incessantly due a host of “marketing specialists” in distant cities who call at inopportune times. My doctor tells me that my persistent cough is largely due to air pollution. (Right here in Rhodes Cove, folks!), and when I look from my porch at the Balsam Mountains, I am distracted by the grid locked traffic on the Cullowhee road. A decade ago, I learned that I now live in the city limits, (if I think of an advantage to this new status, I’ll let you know!) and street lights have spread like malignant fireflies to the top of the ridge. At night, despite my deafness, I hear a constant medley of boom boxes, rap music and stripped gears. Rhodes Cove was once quiet (except for mournful hounds), peaceful and very dark. Now, the new, all-night convenience store over on the highway hovers in the dark like the mother ship in “Encounters of the Third Kind” and ambulances and
highway patrol cars speed up and down the Cullowhee road with flashing lights and wailing sirens. Progress.

When “progress” would get to my grandfather, he used to talk about moving to “the Cove.” He owned an isolated piece of land in Macon county which, he assured me, was so far back, he would never hear another car horn, stripped gear or telephone. “Nothing but wind, night critters and running water,” he used to say. He took me to see it once, and we flushed quail and pheasant, fished and listened to whippoorwills. He didn’t get to go there when he retired, of course, (he didn’t retire) and I’m told that it now has a paved road and a dozen retirement homes, street lights and a security patrol. Progress.

All of this makes me think of a passage in the play, “Inherit the Wind.” Henry Drummond (Clarence Darrow) makes a comment on technology in which he envisions a little man in an office someplace who is in charge of “Progress.” You tell him the marvelous advantage that you want (flight, international communications, entertainment) and he tells you what you will have to sacrifice in order to have it. “You may have world travel in futuristic air ships,” he says, “but the birds will lose their wonder and the clouds will smell of gasoline.” He notes that you may have communication devices that will allow you to talk to foreign countries or distant planets, but “you must sacrifice forever the wonderful world of privacy.”

What is the answer, then, for people like me who grudgingly accept the benefits of technology and bitterly resent aspects of progress that are thrust on me without my consent? I have heard a few learned experts who advised the bewildered public to “readily accept innovation that is beneficial and reject that which is harmful.” Such profound conclusions are meaningless. How do you tell the difference? Sugar substitutes end up poisoning us, computers purvey pornography and some “genetically enhanced” grain are harmful to both cattle and humans. Small wonder that my grandfather was skeptical of electric corn shellers!

A few years ago, a prosperous fellow invited me to dinner in his home – one of those $250,000 “log cabins.” The house was full of furniture and objects form the Appalachian past: pie safes, a cider press, hand-carved furniture, shoe lasts and coffee mills. At one point, he invited me into another room to see “something that his grandfather gave him.” He pointed reverently to it on the wall, mounted like a trophy deer. A corn sheller. “My grandfather actually used it,” he said. I told him that I used one, too. He looked at me skeptically. “You can’t be that old,” he said.

Maybe I am an artifact, too. Maybe I should be preserved in formaldehyde and kept in a room lit by beeswax candles with a tasteful plaque under my embalmed husk that says something like “Extinct life form that once inhabited an undeveloped portion of Rhodes Cove.” Perhaps tasteful music could whisper from hidden speakers – Perhaps, “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” Perhaps I could have my own recorded message that could be activated by pressing a button – a message that says in a pronounced mountain twang, “Things have been bad, and they are going to get worse.”

Mother's Day - 2007

Recently, when I was contemplating my 72ed birthday with a mix of dread and amazement, a good friend of mine asked, “So, what do you want for your birthday?” Without thinking about it, I said that I would like to see my mother. I delivered a rambling monologue about how I had only seen her a few times in my life. Shortly after my father’s death, she left me with my grandparents and “caught the bus to Knoxville” – an act that in my childish imagination was akin to going to Oz or Alpha Centuri. I never saw her again until my senior year in high school when she miraculously appeared just in time to purchase my class ring. My grandmother refused to let her in the house because she had “abandoned a two-year-old young’en on my front porch.” Well, that was my grandmother’s version.

After she returned to Tennessee, she arranged for me to come and see her. It was a mistake since she was married now and had another son. I still remember sitting in a silent living room while the new husband and the sullen son stared at me. I caught the Trailway bus for Sylva the next morning. Many years later, my mother attempted to visit me while I was teaching in Georgia. Another mistake. My marriage was falling apart and when my mother sensed the tension in my home, she quietly departed.

Forty years passed without a letter or a phone call. Then, ten years ago, I made a trip to Tennessee to find her. She was in Columbia,Tennessee, a widow who used “a walker.” Her husband was dead, and she was living alone on a street called “Pleasant.” Diabetic and frail, she was beginning to worry about her ability to take care of herself. We talked for two days and she frequently wept. She insisted that she had not “abandoned” me, as I had always thought, but had simply married a man who refused to raise a child that was not his own – a decision he had made after the wedding. I was confused and skeptical. We often sat silently staring uncomfortably at each other, unable to bridge the chasm of years. When I left, I felt that many questions still remained unanswered and unresolved. The years passed and my mother’s health failed. I received occasional letters that catalogued her losses: her car, her house and furniture which were traded for a wheel chair, medication and “supervised care.” I never thought I would see her again.

Last January, after a six-hour drive, My friend and I found my mother in Lewisburg, Tennessee – not in a nursing home, but in a little boarding house called “Home, Sweet Home.” She is one of six boarders who each have a room and eat at a communal table. The furnishings are sparse: a bed, two chairs, a little TV, a table and a lamp. Home, Sweet Home is near a busy intersection and the sound of speeding trucks, car horns, sirens and the constant chatter of distant voices is something she has learned to live with.

I had written her I was coming and she was eager to talk. “So much to talk about,” she said. “I need to tell you how it was.” And talk she did – about my father’s murder and its bitter aftermath. She talked about her own parents’ casual cruelties, her loneliness in the months after “John Lyndon died,” the resentments expressed by my father’s brothers and sisters and her second loveless marriage.

Then, there was the half-brother, a being so alien to me I could only stare as he discussed the joy of being “born again,” quoted his mentor, Russ Limbaugh and explained a conspiracy theory that left me stunned – Jackie Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, in the throes of a torrid love affair, had plotted the death of President Kennedy! I began to wonder what it would have been like to have grown up with this half-brother and my mother. In the end I came to realize that possibly the greatest privilege that I have enjoyed in life is to have been raised by my grandparents.

On the day that I left my mother at Home, Sweet Home, she was still talking…talking about her attempt to operate my father’s service station after he died, and her long walk home each night (she walked the railroad tracks alone). She gave me a locket, containing two faded pictures of my young, smiling parents) that she had kept for seventy years (“I only loved one man in my life,” she said.) – all of these things she did with a nervous urgency, as though she sensed that this was the last time she would see me. When it was time to go, I bent to look at her worn face one more time, and I kissed her…..finally.

Tiny's Curve

Just up the hill from my house on Cherry Street, there is a sharp turn that the folks in Rhodes Cove used to call “Tiny’s Curve.” In my memory, the name was in use long before the streets in Rhodes Cove had been paved. The name owed its origin to a little woman named Tiny Cagle that lived there. Tiny, her husband Robinson and the little house that they lived in have all receded into the past now, but each year, when spring comes around again, I remember her – a bright spot of color capering in that curve like a gleeful child.



To me, Tiny was always a creature straight out of a fairy tale, a world inhabited by elves and gnomes. She was barely four feet in height and a severe spinal curvature gave her body the shape of a question mark. I once asked Robinson if she had been a victim of polio. He shook his head and gave me one of his usual cryptic responses. “When she was down in Georgia, somebody hit her with a rake,” he said.

I guess the season prompts my memory of Tiny who had a dangerous habit of standing in the road – the best vantage point to see the world around her. Each spring, she would appear, her hand shielding her eyes from the sun as she did her daily survey. I think she was primarily motivated by curiosity, but she reported everything she saw to Robinson who sat on the porch in an ancient rocking chair with a half-dozen sleeping cats for company. He would nod in response to each revelation. Nothing escaped Tiny’s attention. Every car, woman, child and stray dog was noted and appraised.

“I see a red car parked at the Painters. Might be the daughter home from Atlanta.”
“She’s a nurse at Grady Memorial,” says Robinson.
After a lengthy silence, she says, “Willie is workin’ on that tractor again.”
Robinson nods and whittles.
Then, Tiny whispers, “I see a black dog.”
“Belongs to the Parkers,” says Robinson.
“Nooooo, this dog ain’t from around here. Stray. I can see its ribs.” Then, she make an ominous announcement: “I bet it kills cats.” Her bright little eyes turn to look at her sleeping brood and says, “Don’t you’ens worry, kitties.”

Each spring, the local police would visit Tiny, patiently explaining to Robinson that she shouldn’t stand in the middle of the road.
“You could get hit, Mrs. Cagle. Drivers can’t see you in that blind curve.” Tiny would smile shyly and nod, while Robinson shook his head and said, “I can’t do a thing with her.” When the policeman drove away, Tiny would climb the bank into the road and wave at the departing car.

On one occasion, when I was sitting on the porch talking to Robinson while Tiny stood staring down Cherry Street, a speeding van came around the curve. Spotting Tiny, the driver swerved and slid to a stop with a wheel in Tiny’s flowerbed. Then, as the driver and his family gawked in disbelief, Tiny began scooping up handfuls of gravel and sand and throwing it at the van.
“You drivin’ too fast,” she said. The driver rolled his window down and stared at Robinson on the porch.
“Sorry,” said Robinson. “She ain’t got a lick of sense.” The police returned an hour later.

It might appear that Tiny and Robinson lived a precarious existence. Their little house (which, quite fittingly, looked like a house in a Grimm fairy tale) had no insulation and the only source of water ran through a rubber tube from a spring in a neighbor’s yard. (The tube went under the road and into Tiny’s kitchen.) There were visits from social workers, of course, but the old couple had numerous friends in Rhodes Cove. There was always a stack of firewood in the winter, and sacks of corn, beans and tomatoes (the excess of their neighbor’s gardens) in the summer.

One morning as I was leaving for work, Tiny waylaid me. She was standing in my driveway waving a little lace handkerchief and although she was smiling, she looked anxious. When I rolled down the window, she said,
“Honey, I need to talk to you.” She peered at her house and whispered, “Robinson, he ain’t doin’ no good.”

I had heard that Robinson was ailing and that Tiny was having severe health problems – the consequences of her spinal curvature. “It looks like we are gonna go to the county home. I don’t mind a bit, cause the social worker took us out there, ‘n it’s nice.” She went on to tell me about “the big garden ‘n the porch with them rockin’ chairs.” She gave me a big smile, saying “Robinson will like it.” Then, she gave me a dollar. It had been folded many times. “I need you to feed my cats,” she said. “They are gonna wonder where I am.” She began to cry. I gave up refusing the money since it soon became evident that she was determined. “Get ‘em some sardines,” she said.

Then, suddenly, they were gone. Although I made several trips to feed the cats, they had vanished, too. I’m a little vague on the details after that day, but I think Robinson died shortly afterwards. I’d like to think that Tiny spent years, sitting on the big porch in Webster where she could wave at the passing cars. The old county home was surrounded by pastures, gardens and cattle. If Tiny stood in the front yard, she could see everything for miles around.

What This House Remembers

WHAT THIS HOUSE REMEMBERS

I live in an old farmhouse that is literally falling apart. Each spring, clouds of termites rise in the bathroom and the bedroom, coating the windows and covering the kitchen stove and the mirrors in the bathroom with tiny wings – wings that clog my vacuum cleaner for weeks. In the winter, the wind woofs in the eaves, pours through the attic and seeps into my bedroom like an ice-laden river. All of the doors hang off-balance and a tennis ball, dropped in the living room will roll slowly from room to room – like a cue ball looking for a pocket – until, eventually, it find its way to the kitchen, always coming to rest behind the sink.
But, with each passing year, my affection for these canted floors and leaning walls deepens. I came to live here when I was two years old, and now, seventy years later, I still sleep in the same bedroom – the one my Uncle Albert dubbed “the North Pole.” The entire house bears testimony to the lives of my grandparents, and when I walk from room to room, I hear lost voices and sense fading warmth.
Just here, beneath this old flue, my grandmother tended her Home Comfort stove. And over there, on that cracked cement hearthstone, that once fronted a fireplace, I used to lie whimpering on winter nights – my cheek pressed against the warm hearthstone (I was plagued with chronics earaches) while my grandmother poured warm cod liver oil from a tablespoon into my ear. There, where my computer now sets, my grandfather used to tune the old Silvertone radio, listening to “Renfro Valley” on Sunday mornings. It is also where his coffin rested (for I lived in a time in which the dead came home for a final farewell).

The old house seems to be slowly sinking into the earth, dragging with it a roofless canning house and a derelict barn. Yet, there are brief moments – usually in the morning – when this dim space seems filled with a kind of tangible energy. There are mornings when I wake in the chilled air of my bedroom, sensing that I am not alone -that this empty shell has become an echo chamber. In the kitchen, my grandmother’s Home Comfort radiates warmth while she conjures red-eye gravy from a black skillet; cathead biscuits bloom in the oven and a tin coffee pot chuckles on the back burner. I feel my Uncle Albert’s discontent (he suffered from migraines) as he sits leaning back in a cane-bottomed chair at the dining room table, his chair legs gouging little half-moons in the linoleum. My grandfather is milking the cow, and any minute now, he will stomp into the kitchen with a bucket of steaming milk. From the living room comes the strains of Jo Stafford’s “You Belong to Me,” followed by the banter of Reed Wilson, WWNC’s popular early morning d. j.

Fly the ocean in a silver plane,
See the jungle when its wet with rain.

But when my foot touches the floor, it all vanishes … recedes like an ocean tide withdrawing down the corridors of the years; carrying away warmth, biscuits and my grandmother’s hands through the draft of a broken window. Sometimes, I move quickly to the barren kitchen, hoping to capture a belated fragment of what was here a moment ago – perhaps the last vestiges of Albert’s complaint lingers. (“Ahhh, God! I didn’t sleep a wink,” he says, as he massages his head). And here…who is this tow-headed creature in his peppermint striped pajamas? My God, it’s me! I’m on my way to Albert’s bedroom, where I will find a stack of lurid magazines beneath his pillow…Captain Marvel, Plastic Man, Black Hawk and The Blue Beetle.

Is it possible that there are past moments that have taken refuge in these rooms? Are there moments that were fueled by such intense emotion, they hang suspended like banks of summer clouds, waiting for an alignment of hours, months and memory? My mother’s grief for my father’s murder is somewhere in this bedroom; my grandmother’s loss of a “blue baby;” the return of two sons from WW II haunts the front porch; an old, broken fiddle that played “The Waltz You Saved for Me” resonates faintly in the attic – are they all here like eavesdroppers in the next room, waiting for their cue to enter?

Perhaps a night will come when moonlight will penetrate the cobwebs on the attic window, touching the faded portrait of my father’s face; and he will turn to my mother, whispering – and the two of them will laugh. Then, a dozen specters will awake causing this old house to shudder as music, heat and the smell of red-eye gravy
floats in the summer darkness. Then, children’s footsteps will mingle with the slow trudge of the elderly, and blasts of snow, wind and heat will batter these walls as spring and winter collide and this old house finally explodes leaving nothing behind but the buzz of a solitary wasp freed from its prison behind an attic window.

Finally, this old house will mingle with fog and moonlight, drifting through the stand of hemlocks that encircles this dim cove where my homeless spirit will rise to meet the morning sun.

The Front-row Kid

THE FRONT-ROW KID
Riding the range once more
Toting my old 44
Where you sleep out every night


Where the only law is right
I’m back in the saddle again.”
-Gene Autry (and others)


Back in the 1940’s when Saturday westerns were “the big event” at Sylva’s Ritz theatre, I acquired a reputation. I was known as “The Front-Row Kid.” On a typical Saturday, I would arrive with a huge bandana around my neck, my “western shirt” (which was emblazoned with the sacred faces of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans…not to mention a dozen pearl buttons) and my two silver-plated (?) cap pistols. I usually went down to the front row, a location that I had pretty much to myself. Most people don’t like being that close to the action. However, the Front-Row Kid liked to be so close, he could smell the coffee and the gunpowder.

I had taken a time-honored oath (sworn to Mr. Moody, the manager) to not fire my guns indiscriminately, so they nestled quietly in their holsters while Roy, Gene, Johnnie Mack or Hopalong talked, courted the girls and/or sang around the campfire. However, as soon as the Indians attacked the stagecoach or our fearless cowboy rode off in pursuit of the bank robbers, I would cock my pistols and wait. When a barrage of gunfire came, I would rise, take aim and fire.

Of course, the sound of my exploding “Red Devil” caps was lost amid the roar of countless 44’s and Winchesters, but in my time at the Ritz, I stood with the best, including Lash LaRue, Bob Steele and Jimmy Wakeley, the “Singing Cowboy.” When the battle was over, I would retire to my seat, load another roll of caps, journey out to the lobby for a Coke refill and wait for the next attack.

I don’t mind telling you, I miss being the Front-Row Kid. Being an adult is okay, but with a few notable exceptions, grown-up life just doesn’t have a decent substitute for the adrenalin rush that I felt each time that I rose in the thundering darkness of the Ritz to stand shoulder to shoulder with Wild Bill Elliott and Sunset Carson as they blazed their way out of another tight spot.

A few years ago, I blundered on a battered little book by James Horiwitz called They Went Thataway. It turned out that James also called himself “The Front-Row Kid,” and the inside leaf of the dust jacket carried a picture of him decked out in his own gear. In addition, James had decided to track down all of his old heroes and talk to them. By the time that he wrote his book (1976), many of the old cowboys were dead. Some weren’t very talkative (Randolph Scott, Joel McRae and Cisco Kid), some were disappointments (Gene Autry and Roy Rogers), but the majority spent hours with Horiwitz, talking about their careers. After Hollywood lost interest in them, many ended up in road shows and carnivals, while others eked out a living on the “nostalgia circuit” selling tee-shirts and novelties at “old cowboy” festivals.

One of the most moving sections of the book follows Sunset Carson through a festival in North Carolina where he speaks to a platoon of “front-row kids,” and recalls how he was injured by a speeding car that struck him as he attempted to walk across an N. C. interstate. While he was hospitalized, he was visited (and prayed for) by Bob Steele, who was in jail in South Carolina for possession of marijuana. (He got out on an “honor-system parole” to visit Sunset.)

Horiwitz’ book paints a marvelous picture of a lost era – a time of black and white hats and colors when the distinction between good and evil was easy to make. The most painful memories in the book involve many old stars’ expressions of “a sense of abandonment,” and a feeling of Hollywood’s betrayal. When the big studios turned their backs on the western heroes, many were without a means to survive. The interview with the (now deceased) Lone Ranger (Clayton Moore) revealed a man struggling desperately to maintain his dignity in a world where his identity had been taken from him.

After reading the Horiwitz book, I was left with a profound sense of loss. I yearned for a return “to the golden days of yesteryear” when happiness was a double-buttered popcorn, a big Coke and a double-feature matinee. Is there a way to call the old cowboys back? I know they don’t fit in a modern multi-screened mall, but in this world where others yearn for Roy and Dale singing “Blue Shadows on the Trail,” isn’t there a way to bring the good old boys home? Well, maybe.

Last week, I watched two TV programs on the “revival of the drive-in theatre.” According to CBS news and the website, drivein.com, drive-ins are coming back, complete with outside speakers, massive screens and … old movies.
My heart quickened a bit as I read about the popularity of old westerns and the outdoor theatres that intend to feature “a trip down memory lane” complete with the old continued serials (Sheena, Queen of the Jungle!) and Lash LaRue double-features.

Do you see where this is headed? If the drive-ins come back and Johnny Mack Brown returns…if Hoppy rides again and Red Ryder shows up, why not the Front-Row Kid? Can you picture it? Rows and rows of Front-Row Kids in a special seating section, all armed and waiting their cue, as a thirty-foot Lone Ranger and Tonto ride cautiously toward the outlaw camp. Okay, guys, lock and load!

The Bard of Scaly Mountain

THE BARD OF SCALY MOUNTAIN

While I was surfing the internet last week, I stumbled on this: “Jonathan Williams, poet, dead at 79.” For a moment, I sat attempting to absorb the fact that tall, courtly Jonathan, was gone. Then, I immediately recalled my most cherished memory of the Bard of Scaly Mountain.

Over a decade ago when I was bemoaning the approach of my 64th birthday, two of my friends asked me what I wanted to celebrate my “natal day.” At the time, I was reading “The Ear in Bartram’s Tree,” and I quipped, “Jonathan Williams.” My friends laughed and I went back to my book. However, a few days later, when I drove to Mirror Lake Road in Highlands for my “birthday dinner,” I was ushered into a dining room, lit by candles. There were only two chairs at the table. In a few moments, there was a soft knock at the door and Jonathan Williams entered. I remember that he was all rumpled tweed and tousled hair and that he smiled and said, “Happy Birthday, Gary.” I gawked like a fool and my friends said, “Jonathan can only stay for two hours.” Then, they departed, leaving me with a great deal of food, several bottles of wine and Jonathan Williams.

And so we talked … or rather, Jonathan talked and I listened. I asked about Black Mountain College, his friendship with Henry Miller, his awesome folk/outsider art collection (which is now on loan to ASU), his publishing press (the Jargon Society) and his efforts to save Pasaquan, the fantastic “one-man paradise”of Eddie Owens Martin in Bueana Vista, Georgia. He told wonderful anecdotes about his trips down the back roads of America to find the multitudes of untrained artists who paint on cardboard, rusty tin and masonite, people who whittle, carve or make whirly-gigs – all compelled to create a personal vision that Jonathan found as deeply moving as a Degas or a Cezanne. Jonathan also loved baseball and the recipes in ‘White Trash Cooking” (published by Jargon Press). He was a discerning collector of blues recordings and the works of unknown photographers, such as Ralph Meatyard.

During our conversation, I noticed that Jonathan had a small notebook in his vest pocket, and that he occasionally made notes in it. When I asked about it, he said that he collected things other people said, and that he liked my comment about falling in love with the folksinger, Hedy West because “she had hairy legs.” Of course, I knew that he sometimes converted a chance remark that he had heard in a barber shop or a garage (“Your points is blue and your timing is off a week from Thursday.”) Several years after our conversation, I heard Jonathan read his poems in Asheville and was flattered to find a note that I had once written him transformed into a poem. As best as I remember, it went something like this:
“Report from Gary Carden at the Coffee Shop in Sylva.
A friend approached while I sat reading.
“What you reading, Gary?”
“Jonathan Williams,” I responded, holding up the book.
“Oh, that funny feller.”
“No, you’re thinking about Winters.
“Damn straight. It was down to 20 last night.”

After that night on Mirror Lake Road, we maintained an uncertain correspondence. Jonathan seemed resigned to both his own obscurity and the decline of all that was fine and good in America. He despised most modern poetry and felt that theatre had died with Tennessee Williams.
Although he continued to publish his own poetry, me seemed to devote the majority of his efforts to calling attention to the works of others. Occasionally, he would venture out for a reading and he often acted as a commentator for exhibits of his folk art collection. As for the recent popularity of folk art, he noted that the field had been taken over by money-grubbing opportunists and fakes. However, each time he found himself making grim
observations about a world where bad food and deranged politicians held sway (Jesse Helms seemed to epitomize the worst in Southern culture!), Jonathan would
suddenly change the subject, and retreating behind his shield of humor, laugh, quote a bit of doggerel and sing a song. As many of his later works attest, he was fond of addressing his dead friends, saying things like, “If there is a flight out of the Elysium Fields tonight, old friend, I’ll pick you up at the airport.”

Over the years, I have often searched for a fitting icon or symbol for Jonathan Williams. Aside from the undeniable merits of his poetry, his greatest gift was his amazing knack for perceiving talent in others. Whether it was Edgar Tolson, the carver in Compton, Kentucky; Vollis Simpson and his wind machines in Lucama, N. C. or the artist, James Harold Jennings down in Stokes County, Jonathan always saw what the rest of us missed. That includes the art critics who often made belated acknowledgements of Jonathan’s unerring judgment. Finally, I can pick my icon. Jonathan is a magpie!

I have watched a magpie stalking through a landfill and I’m thinking of his discerning eye. In the midst of all that plastic and Styrofoam, he will halt, peer into the debris and extract something … a colored stone, a bauble or an earring. Then, taking flight, he will carry his discovery home to his nest where he will give it a choice setting, a niche that displays its merits. Jonathan did that. He waded through the wreckage of our culture, indifferent to the gaudy fakes. Yet, he sometimes saw it (the real thing!) glinting down there under the debris, and when he saw it he lifted it up and said, “Look what I have found.”

AVE, to the Bard of Scaly Mountain.