ANNIE LEE POTTS BRYSON

When I think of guiding spirits, I see Annie Lee and her sister  Willa Mae in the back seat of the car in which we were riding to  Asheville where we were to lead workshops in corn-shuck doll-making,  lap quilting, and poetry writing, under the auspices  of the WCU Extension Department, now called, or so I believe,  Distance Learning. We'd never laid eyes on each other before,  and I think we were all three a bit amused and amazed that  we were going to be teaching our crafts at the Asheville Mall!   We were not your typical mall-goers, believe me.  Who would  have ever thought that somewhere over the rows and rows of fancy  stores we rarely ever entered, there were classrooms where people  could learn about mountain crafts and poetry writing?  Over the weeks that we journeyed to Asheville from Cullowhee, we shared our stories, stitching them into  a tapestry we took back home with us.  We became friends, but more than that, I like to think we  became soul-sisters, so that no matter how long might go without seeing each other, we never had  to try to re-acquaint ourselves with each other.  We made a connection that lasted through time.   One of my favorite bluegrass songs by Bill Monroe is called, "The Walls of Time."  He sings of being  able to hear his gone sweetheart through those walls.  I can hear Annie Lee and Willa Mae, too,  through those walls that on some days seem as sheer as gauze curtains, especially this time of  year when the leaves are barely hanging on and the light calls to us to look up and beyond our daily tasks. I could say that Annie Lee left us last September 6,  but I don't think of her as gone,  because I know she is not gone from my life nor the lives of her daughters and those who loved her. The greatest honor I can claim to this day is being asked to read at her funeral a poem I'd written  for her 80th birthday.  Her daughter Norma Medford Clayton asked me to helped them celebrate the day with a poem, and so I cast back to my memory of our drives to Asheville.   A BIRTHDAY POEM FOR ANNIE LEE'S 80TH Annie Lee, I still remember you and Willa Mae as being like two birds chirping in the back seat as we drove to Asheville and our classes at the Mall. Your stories  kept me listening through the stops and stalls of traffic.  Christmas oranges and summer dabblings in the creek, the  litany of family names that you recited every trip.  Your talk of cornshuck dolls and quilts  fell on my ears like some endangered speech our daughters' daughters might not ever know, the turn and pull of thread that snaps too easily, if we're not careful.  But your thread's still going strong, it's made a life-- each year a perfect round of stitches, eighty now, a shining wreath of days that we all come to gather round and celebrate:  Happy Birthday, Annie Lee!  This poem became part of the Memory book that Norma and  her sisters Carolyn and Anna compiled, and when Norma  began to think about her remembrances of her mother before  the funeral, she had to confess that" ..."Mama, when I started to write down my favorite memory about you I couldn't narrow it down to just one…I had so many memories of you that I couldn't choose.   So I wrote down all those that were dear to me.  I was so pleased that you liked it and wanted it to be read at your funeral.  I have revised it since you are no longer with us but the memories are still the same." That beautiful litany of memories will cover several posts over the next few days, to give my visitors time to savor and celebrate each portion.

GUIDING SPIRITS

As the year winds down to autumn , I can't think of a better novel to think about than Lee Smith's Fair and Tender Ladies. Ivy Rowe, the young girl who begins this epistolary novel, matures into a woman who lives through love, loss, and many springs that her father taught her how to taste and feel. Ivy inhabits her place with, as one reviewer described it, the avidity of a child. At the end, an old woman facing down the bulldozers, she retains the vitality that has made her life resonate with our own.

This is a short piece I wrote for redroom.com.

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Granny Younger came to visit me last night. Stepped right out of Lee Smith’s Oral History and sat down for a spell, trying make me listen again to her stories out of the hollers and hills of Lee’s mountains and mine. I lay awake with her in the dark, knowing I couldn’t make her leave. Being a granny-woman, she does what she wants. She knows how to birth a baby, tend a wound, tell if a man is cheating on you, or if he needs a woman. The woman he finds, face lit by wood fire, wild as a gypsy from some old mountain ballad, well, that’s the beginning of the story.

Granny Younger also knows how to stand up to the bulldozers turning our mountains into golf courses.

She didn’t know about bulldozers, of course, back when she was wandering the trails in Smith’s novel. She could prophesy, though, and she could have looked into the next century and seen what was going to happen, seen the mountaintop removal destroying the lifeblood of her hills.

What she did see was “blood on the moon,” as she called it, the start of a family tragedy that haunts, literally, the descendants of one Almarine Cantrell, a young man whose story she has followed since he was a boy. When she finds him as a young man sitting by the creek, in the sally grass, for the first time in her life she fails to see what lies ahead.

I stole that sally grass from Granny Younger. Put it into a poem one cold January morning while I was working on the collection that became Wildwood Flower. Maybe that’s why she was messing with my mind last night, but I don’t think so. I don’t think she ever minded that I took a smidgeon of her story to kickass a stuck poem back into life again. Especially one about an old woman singing through the night to her granddaughter who listens and remembers. No, Granny Younger came to haunt me because I’d forgotten how mountain women ought to fight for what they love and need.

Like Ivy Rowe. She’s the character who begins Smith’s Fair and Tender Ladies by writing letters and spends the rest of the novel writing her life onto its pages. After I’d finished my poem, thanks to Granny Younger’s intervention, I sent it to Lee, who was just beginning a new novel.

“We’re writing about the same thing,” she wrote back by return mail, “ only my character doesn’t sing through the night, she writes letters! “

I didn’t get to meet Ivy Rowe till Fair and Tender Ladies was published. There in the front of the novel was my poem “Weep-Willow. “ That’s not the reason why it’s my favorite novel, though. I love the voice of Ivy, love how she writes her way through joy and loss, and into old age where, on her beloved mountain, she stands down the bulldozers coming to force her out of her home.

I love Ivy for loving so hard, despite the long nights, the sad stories, old songs that flit like ghosts through the coves. Granny Younger brought Ivy with her last night, you see. And Ivy curled up on the sally grass in my poem. She rested her eyes on the mountains beyond my house, just as her daddy liked to do in Virginia, the man who eloped with her mother clinging to him on the back of his horse, riding all night through the dark woods with a pine knot flaring. Ivy meant for me to know that I should do the same, to rest and to ride hard. To stand in the road barring entry, if need be, to what threatened what I love.

Two mountain women came together last night to tell me that. Xanax couldn’t make them go away. Finally at three a.m. I got up, walked to the kitchen, found some leftover wine in a bottle. I walked to the door and looked out at the dark. I could hear some drunk frat boy driving his car too fast around the curve below my house. Soon the little frogs down below in the pasture would begin singing. The green shoots would sprout overnight from the naked limbs. I could hear Ivy’s daddy telling me, as he told her in this novel I carry inside me like my own story, to slow down, to taste each season as it comes, to trust the taste it brings, no matter how bitter it might be, as we struggle to live our lives.  Spring does push through the sod again and again.  But now as September begins to its shift to letting go, letting go, we can find the fire in that, as well.


The lasting fire for me contains those guiding spirits who gather around my kitchen counter--Granny Younger, Lee, Willa Mae Pressley, Annie Lee Bryson, and at the table Emma Bell Miles sketching the humming bird hovering just outside the window.   In the days to come I will be letting them speak, watching the leaves on the hardwoods begin loosening bit by bit, spiraling into the earth where a few months from now they will let the first forsythia and wildflowers begin to push through.