KAY BYER —  POET, TEACHER, OLD SOUL

See her three new poems in the current issue.  A full feature will be complete in the coming weeks.

On June 6 the community of writers and readers lost acclaimed poet Kathryn Stripling Byer to leukemia.  A former Poet Laureate of North Carolina, Kay was the author of six books, recipient of many awards and a wife, mother, teacher, friend.  She had taught at several colleges, primarily Western Carolina, and conducted numerous workshops.  She was born in Camilla, Georgia, educated at Wesleyan College and UNCG and spent half a century in Cullowhee, North Carolina among the mountains and people she loved.  Novelist Lee Smith has said, “The fact is that Kathryn Stripling Byer’s poems are absolutely necessary to me.”

Byer’s poetry collections are The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest (1986), Wildwood Flower (1992), Black Shawl (1998), Catching Light (2002), Coming to Rest (2006),Descent (2012), all but the first from LSU Press.  She had also completed a new collection for future release.

Alice Friman’s Appreciation of Byer’s “Pretty,” which appears in this issue of Shenandoah

PRETTY

the world I saw after he pulled me up
onto the saddle so pretty
I whispered into his backbone,
the taste of his sweat through the rough
of his shirt, on my tongue
pretty snatches of lovesong and
doe-si-doe. as the laurels sprayer
down on us sweet creamy
petals and overhead blue china
saucers on which the clouds
floated.  Clotted cream, I would

serve wedding guests such
a fine sweetness they’d never again
doubt my true love.  Never ever again
caution rectitude.  I’d cast my bouquet
so far not a girl in the county
could catch it.  Such a fine day
as higher we climbed
the leaves churning with wind

while into his back I breathe
When.  And he answers soon,
oh soon, as we sink into swirling
shade, pink ladyslippers strewn
over the banks, and fairy wands
trailside when suddenly, witch-hobble
snaring my skirt, he turns to me,
pulling the combs from my hair,
ripping my pearl-buttoned blouse
to my waist, his tongue on my
neck, forcing my mouth open wide,
my stays ripping apart,
soon, of soon I hear him
moaning, even as over my face
I feel dirt falling, hear the trot of his horse
leaving as I try to call out to him
cupping my heartsblood,
Take it,
take it,
this love that lies
bleeding into my hands.

First thing I love about this wonderful poem is the pace, the racing lines under which one can hear the racing horse, the man’s racing thoughts, and the youthful narrator’s racing heart. A galloping, reckless quality created by enjambment—a winding of the lines—and sentences that run headlong on, thus recreating the breathlessness of desire. And like desire, the poem climbs, the way the horse climbs, the man’s need climbs, the narrator’s pulse climbs driven by the repetition of “When” and “Soon, oh soon” until it all comes to a screeching halt when the two seemingly parallel desires run counter to each other, clash, crash in a rape and betrayal.

But this is the narrator’s poem, and we look through her eyes, her young, willful, and romantic eyes to see that this day even nature is on her side. Floating clouds and carpets of pink ladyslippers. What does she want but what she’s been taught to want: wedding bouquets, love songs, and a clotted-cream reception. Not to mention vindication, for how can this great bursting feeling she has in her chest not show everyone who warned her against this man—this man of sweat and rough clothes—the rightness of her love. This pretty, pretty love. And the man? We know him only through her senses. We never see his face, only feel the masculine urge of him through what she smells and feels against her cheek. Nor does it matter. For what she is enamored with is the “other” that is him. The opposite of family, of safe, of all she’s known. But most of all, the opposite of “pretty.” The trouble is, the world of “pretty” is the reality she puts him in, the only world she knows. The world of high romance, chivalry and love. It’s interesting that Byer places the narrative in a long-ago past. Note the “ripping stays,” the “pearl buttoned blouse.” If I didn’t know better I’d think Byer were writing a satire on popular bodice rippers. But no, this piece hits too hard, too close to truth. The turnaround at the end too real, too heartbreaking. Dante in his Comedy put betrayal at the very bottom of hell, the punishment, being encased in ice—payback for coldness, for using people for one’s own ends. And here we have the perfect illustration: when the man gets done, he turns without a word and rides away, his horse kicking dirt in her face, and she calling to him still offering her love, “Take it, / take it, / this love that lies / bleeding into my hands.” Will she stop loving him? I doubt it. She will go on with her dream, her love battered and bloodied, but still there. How do I know that? Well, it takes one to know one.       –-Alice Friman

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Joseph Bathanti’s Appreciation of Kay Byer’s “Tobacco,” which originally appeared in the fall, 1995 issue of Shenandoah

TOBACCO

Grandmama chewed
mouthfuls ripe as
wild plums.  Spat.  Missed
houseflies and hound

dogs that stirred up
the dust.  Her front
porch mottled brown.
Honey, idle

that cuspidor
closer, can’t see
where I’m aiming.
I pushed the can

close with a stick.
Ran.  She don’t miss
a trick, said her
old man who hid

in the shed with
his whiskey.  She
sees better, hears
better, what’s more

she’ll live longer’n
you or me.  Don’t
ever ask her
for anything,

Mama said.  She
won’t say doodley-
squat.  Just let her
sit.  Chew her cud.

Cow.  The devil
take her black tongue

Since determining to write about Kay Byer’s poem, “Tobacco,” I’ve carried it with me a solid month and read it maybe fifty times. It was first published in Shenandoah and then in Kay’s 1998 Black Shawl from LSU. The poem is a modest 99 words: written in tight syllabics – 7 quatrains followed by a couplet. Thirty lines of 4 syllables per line, 120 syllables all told. Eighty-one of those 99 are one syllable. They issue from a small bore – immaculate, economical, lightning-like –yet spray collaterally like buckshot, sometimes rock salt. The poem is tough – a few thorns, not a whit of sentimentality – slant rhymes and assonance, the weave, stitch and trope of a meticulous, elegant hand. Kay’s hand. It forms a backbone and looks like one on the page, albeit tensile, elastic, sonic.

Now I have Kay to thank – as I do for so many other things that have led to the unlikely reality that I myself have become a poet – for an even keener appreciation for why rereading is just as important as rewriting. If you read a poem as textured and clairvoyant as “Tobacco,” it strikes up a chant that won’t leave you. It might even tell you what it’s about.

“Tobacco” starts with that ostensibly scary “Grandmama” (muse) who chews tobacco “ripe as / wild plums” – the only bit of sweetness, the only sensual image in the poem, other than when she addresses the speaker-granddaughter, her heir, as “Honey,” and asks her to “idle that cuspidor” / closer” so she can “see / where she’s aiming.”

I love the verb “idle,” but what I love best about the poem is that the little girl, eye-witness though she is, stands at the edge of the frame, not deigning to touch the “can,” but rather keeps her self-possession and distance by using a “stick” (the talking stick?) to obediently accommodate her grandmother. Then the girl runs off, but not out of earshot. Her grandfather – Grandmama’s “old man “ – “[hides] / in the shed with / his whiskey.” Fearful of his wife, he declares “she don’t miss / a trick” – even though she “[misses] / houseflies and hound / dogs” she’s spitting at.

Yet we find out that Grandmama’s aim is pretty deadly. She “sees better, hears / better” and will “live longer’n” her “old man,” even longer than the little girl speaker. He accords his wife superhuman powers of reckoning and longevity. And, of course, he’s right. “Grandmama” is immortal – in the poem written by her granddaughter who, unlike the others, has been paying keen attention, not missing a trick either. She too sees and hears everything. Their kinship is certain.

The speaker’s mother – we’re invited to see her as Grandmama’s daughter – adjures the speaker never to ask Grandmama “for anything” because she “won’t say doodley- / squat.” Yet Grandmama has been far more eloquent than “doodley- / squat,” and her granddaughter has understood perfectly their private language. In the poem’s surprising concluding couplet, in a sudden departure from that spine of quatrains, a narrowing, she impugns her mother: “Cow. The devil / take her black tongue.” Anathema, perhaps the curse of being a seer, possessed of a “black tongue” that wags with truth. And a tad of irony, a dash of humor, in the bargain; everyone in the poem, other than the girl, is cowed by Grandmama.

 

Grandmama is mythically imposing, archetypal. I like her and she and I both like that cagey little girl who understands everything, and is busy listening while the others hunker and cower and indict. She’s wary, but not afraid, and abundantly curious. She’s hatching her own language, keen eye and ear, apprenticing as the poet she’s destined to be. That “black tongue” is power, and she already knows how to wield it. She’s heard stories she can’t help but tell.                                  — Joseph Bathanti

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Kay’s awards include the AWP Prize in Poetry, The Lamont Prize, The Roanoke Chowan Prize, the Brockman Campbell Award, the Hanes Prize from the Fellowship of Southern Writers, the North Carolina Award in Literature and others.  Of her work, Mary Oliver wrote, “Byer’s poems are certainly gentle, lovely, even delicate; also they tremble, they plunge, they rage, they lash with life.”

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GYPSY

 

“Gypsy,” first collected in Black Shawl (1998), has remained one of my favorite of Kay’s shorter poems.  Just five quatrains, each featuring a pair of rhymed couplets, the poem recounts an old story of the settlement folk trying to protect and control their own but fearing the marginal, outlaw element, whether manifested as snarling bobcat or a whispering, tempting romantic figure complete with stallion, whisky and a breath that “smells like death.”  More than a story, it’s the silhouette of a folk opera the imagination keeps filling in long after the last line.  The dark man is the spirit of wildness, the ticket out, but also the demon lover of so much myth and song.  Here’s the poem.

GYPSY

Tonight by the flare
of a pine knot, his stallion tears
clean through the limb fog that lays
itself down along Beggarman’s Trace.

When he stops at the Jump-Off
to guzzle more whiskey, she coughs
at his back till he turns, and his breath
in her face smells like death

or close to it.  Below, lamps illumine
the houses where she should know women
are already telling how she’s become nothing
but wind they hear mouthing

temptation: Let Go.  (Now she’s
no longer neighbor, they’ll let her be
damned to a shallow grave.)  They try
to listen as far as they can for the cry

of the bobcat their men will be out
tracking all night.  They want it brought
down by its throat or else, goodness knows,
what’s running wild might come too close.

She gives us the topography, with the “gypsy” – not so named within the poem, as the unnamed woman might herself might be(come) a gypsy – “tearing through fog” along “Beggarman’s Trace.”  The abduction or seduction or rescue has already occurred, as “she” is mounted behind the horseman, all lit by torchlight as the rider halts at a place ominously called “Jump-Off,” and the village she has left is “below.”  In the middle of the poem the lens turns away from the torch-lit escape to the lamp-lit houses and their applicants, who are already starting the lapidary work of the tongue that explains and advises and dismisses.  Even though She is now “nothing / but wind” her voice is beckoning them: Let Go.

But they can’t explain or talk it away.  The urge to see a less predictable and less circumscribed  world is rampant.  The village women may want to curse her (even if touched by envy), but they can’t stop listening “as far as they can for the cry. . . .”  But what cry?  We expect stallion or lover or fugitive girl, but we get an actual (or perhaps wished-for) bobcat, indigenous, an unmythic substitute for the more mysterious outsider.– RTS

Kay in her early days as a poet.

 

 

 

Ave Atque Vale

(What follows is less obituary than remembrance and testimony, as I still stammer when I have to refer to Kay in the past tense, but the body of her work does and will survive.)

Kay Byer spent most of her life in western North Carolina, a town called Cullowhee.  Romantics like to say that the word is a Cherokee term for “valley of the lilies,” but it’s more likely derived from Judacullah, a titan of Cherokee myth, a warrior/hunter whose name was associated with “great spirit.”  If anyone ever found a territory appropriately named to nurture them, it was Kay.

I first met Kay I when was in graduate school at Appalachian State, and she had been invited to read, with me as the warm-up act, to an audience gathered to celebrate the work of Robert Penn Warren and the man himself, who was in the audience.  For a week I’d been drinking too much coffee, hiking to Howard’s Knob daily and generally shivering in my shoes.  Warren was, and still is, an inspiration to me, largely because “Audubon: A Vision” has long been my favorite poem.

Kay arrived the day of the reading and was friendly but business-like.  No flash or flair, no performative artiste gestures.  She was not “stylish,” but she had style, presence, an understated authenticity.  I hoped that at least my Dickey-drama method of reading would play well beside what was likely to be an understated and modest rendering from Kay, though I noticed that the occasion itself had not given her the fantods.  Probably, I reasoned, she didn’t realize the enormity of the moment.

When it was all over and she had read some poems from The Girl in the Midst of the Harvest and a few about mountain craftswomen and an adventurous renegade wild gal,” , I was still shivering, but now due to the precision and understated grit of her powerful poems, the traction of the narratives, the hand-hewn feel of her language, the passion about the lives of women who had long lived in near-silence.  It was as if the poems had read themselves, and what comes to mind now is Twain’s quip about how impressive thunder can be (sound and fury and all), while it is the lightning that does the work.  Kay was the lightning.

Three years later we were at a two-week retreat in Critz, VA (which we dubbed Gritloaf), along with Ammons, Applewhite, Deagon and some dozen other poets, most of whose work I knew.  Everyday we’d “workshop” our poems, and again I could see how the drama of my attempts still lacked an architecture of feeling and fearlessness of belief.  Not so with Kay’s work, but what I recall most is another poet telling Kay that she couldn’t make a career out of grandmother poems.

Well, it turns out that you can and you can’t.  Not that Kay’s range was narrow, but she did have a gift for (and a commitment to) matriarchal lines, women’s work and vision, mountain marriages, recognition of the neglected and hushed beauties beyond the pageants and sashay cotillions that continue to riddle the South.  I say you can’t “make a career” of it because, while extending her perspective to landscape, politics, solitaries, historical figures, music, migration, labor and on and on, Kay Byer held the mountains as touchstone and lodestone as she spun a whole unexplored dimension.  She also found family and folk culture fathomless and crucial.  Unfortunately, too many people (readers and professors, too) were reluctant to see Appalachia as the cutting edge and the heart of the country.  She’d taken the Appalachians as her postage stamp of territory and brought the music away from the hearth and onto the stage (though it’s there on the hearth still, magically).  Her first couple of books received national prizes – the AWP Book Award, the Lamont – but after that, she was often pigeonholed as a shawl woman, a porch voice, a kitchen healer.  Well, yes, those too, but she was both in the midst of the harvest and the harvest itself, the collector of wildflowers and the wildness in them, the celebrant of hardscrabble and the melody of grief.  She swerved free of the sentimental and nostalgic and spoke as nurse or earth mother, ambivalent bride, ingénue or scold, as the poem required.

While we were in Critz Kay gave me a copy of North by Heaney, whose poems I was coming to like but whose books I didn’t know.  I remember sitting at a picnic table and listening to her describe and unknot Heaney’s poems as she praised them with precise zeal.  She basically took me by the scruff of the neck and said, “You need these poems, and you need them now.”  I tried to remember every syllable.

Whether she was writing about a ballad heroine, a midwife, Miss Scarlett or Belle Boyd (a sequence she never finished), Kay was lyrical, prone to whisper, inclined to paint with swift strokes, highly conscious of every nuance in her rhetoric, perhaps more luthier rhapsode than scribe.  And she was generous with her subjects, committed to cultural and geographic accuracy.  People who knew her as a workshop leader, teacher and barnstorming poet laureate always speak of her enthusiasm and encouragement,  her accessibility and laughter.

But she was no pushover.  She endured, deflected, rebuffed and shamed the male poets who wanted to treat her like a sidekick, the token po-gal there to lilt and flounce for their entertainment.  They say the in-fighting in the arts world is so fierce because the stakes are so low.  Kay knew otherwise, though real monetary reward is rare.  She saw that the stakes in poetry were at least as high as those in governance, and her talk and poems reflected the continuity among literary politics, sexual politics and Politics, especially those addressing the environment.  I must have heard her read half a dozen times, three at my invitation, and she never failed to bring her A game because the poems deserved no less and because the people she wrote about and on behalf of deserved no less.  She wrote about herself, too, but through the prism of others, grannies or runaway girls, singers or avenging angels, youngsters in the corn rows and teachers in the classroom.

Kay’s work appeared in the first issue of Shenandoah I edited in 1995, as well as many others, including the current (April, 2017) issue.  I am in her debt for this, as well as for her mentoring, her strength and the kindness she showed me when I had cancer 16 years ago.  I could say much more about her personal presence and private words, but I’m going to hit the brakes here and get back to the real (though sorrowful) consolations left to us, the poems.                       RTS// June 20, 2017

 

 

 

     Whenever I hear the commentators on National Public Radio’s “This I Believe” series professing their admirable commitment to honor, family ties, work or poetry or the kindness of strangers, I always think, “This is all very nice and inspiring, but have these people heard of hushpuppies?”  While other splendors and necessities improve, adorn and propel the world, the hushpuppy is the sine qua non, the raison d’etre and probably the prime directive in various other languages whose irregular verbs I have never attempted to conjugate.  From my personal standpoint, the deep-fried hushpuppy ranks right up there with good health, a loving mate, rewarding work and spiritual fulfillment.  Don’t get me wrong: I’m not the kind of zealot who is blind to humanity’s other achievements.  I also believe wholeheartedly in the hand brake, the rifled muzzle, the King James Version, vasectomies, single-barrel aging and hybrid roses.  Those vital developments notwithstanding, the hushpuppy as conceived and consumed in the rural South is crux and hub and core.

     Now I’m not about to define “hushpuppy” in some partisan and proprietary way, though it is kissing cousin to a fritter, neighbor to cornbread and a far cry from a crepe.  I’m not even going to dictate how to concoct the ideal knee-knocking, unforgettable, whiplashing-scrumptious hushpuppy, other than to recommend some basic components and say that you’ve got to tickle the oil right up to about 400 degrees, which is also the temperature the mercury will register if you stick a thermometer under the tongue of most anyone in my family when their ire is aroused.  Our tribe’s tendency to run hot and express our displeasure in unruly and emphatic fashion should right away clarify a couple of things: the oral method is the only fever measurement method worth trying on us, and don’t stand between us and anything we prize or favor, especially our preferred provender.  But don’t get me wrong here; we are neither rabid nor deranged, only enthusiastic.  Fervent, maybe.  Smitten.

     My family at one time, individually and collectively, knew how to make a hushpuppy so delicious it would make you cut a buck and wing and forswear indoor sports and week-night church.  Although we would happily savor them in screen-porch fish camps – from Dowd’s Catfish on the Flint River in Georgia to the piratical Riverview Inn on the Catawba between Charlotte and Gastonia – it was the homemade item directly out of the deep fryer or skillet that hit the godspot.  And of course, being in such proximity to the source, you’d always snatch up the first one out of the inferno and burn your tongue; that’s a requisite step in the rite.  Try as you might to take the fire in and not receive a wound – like Isaiah himself with the smoking ember – you’d blister up and shout to Jesus and fan your mouth faster than a hummingbird’s wings.  Meanwhile, you might be consoled by the fact that there’s a little “bliss” in “blister.”  Then you’d blow on the bitten hushpuppy, shut your eyes in wonder and take another bite.  I used to marvel, given the abundance of local wonders, that no one has ever claimed to discover the face of our Savior in the features of a fresh hushpuppy, because we do not live by bread alone.  But who would delay consumption/consummation to conduct a finicky investigation?  What hushpuppy survives long enough to be thus perused and pondered?  Now you see it, now you don’t.  We may save slices of wedding cake in the freezer or gallstones in a jelly jar of formaldehyde on the mantel, but the hushpuppy enjoys less longevity than your average caddis fly.

     Caution and good medical sense dictate you should always lift the finished hushpuppy from the sizzling oil and set it on yesterday’s news or “Alley Oop” caveman funnies to drain a little grease, the mortal heart being vulnerable to fat and cholesterol and other more subtle perils, but caution and reason can be eclipsed by the sharp and alluring smell of anticipated fare, and my people are inclined to opt for the most immediate full-tilt gratification.  If this means frequently falling for temptation, in the matter of hushpuppies, o felix culpa.  The postlapsarian condition is, after all, the state in which we do our best work, and the blackjack hand of my ancestral genes tends to bless us all with robust hearts.

     With the hushpuppy, you can scarcely blame the strong- or the weak-hearted for impatience, as the delights start potent and just keep coming in a happy sequence, from the lovely cicada-husk color of the puppy to the crisp, gritty texture of the outer shell, which is rough enough to burnish oak planks but breaks open to reveal a spongy trove of yellowy dough in which all the flavors of the exercise are mingled and transformed.  Even the slickness your fingertips retain after the repast and the streaks wiped on your dungarees contribute to the lingering delight.  I should acknowledge here and now that those less discerning than my kith and kin might be tempted to drop by Food Lion or The Pig and pick up a short-cut mix – say Dixie Lilly or Uncle Buck’s – but trust me on this: you will find that experience a tame and diminished thing, if you have ever tasted the “scratch” hushpuppy in its natural habitat.  Which may not be a fund raiser for a local firehouse (which will remain unnamed) along the Maury River.

     Some few civilians don’t know a hushpuppy needs more than a pinch of cane sugar, and others don’t understand about the onions, the snipped-up shoots of young green ones fresh out of the kitchen garden, if you’re lucky enough to have access, but it’s not my business to offer exhaustive instructions on Cracker cuisine, only to testify that we made them and ate them as we quarreled and joked, lied and scuffled and vied to impress one another, and despite the risks inherent in both family gatherings and the unforgiving species of cholesterol, many of us are thriving still.  My father’s father J. J. W. Smith was in fact the best hushpuppy chef in unrecorded history, and he so clearly understood how crucial to this delicacy is a side of fried fish that he excavated his own pond and stocked it.  Not with bass of the large or small mouth varieties and more shades of gray than a unit of Sandlapper cavalry, not even with those bream we called “sunfish” and which are dazzling as a buccaneer’s casket of jeweled swag.  The bottom-feeding sly and conniving whiskery catfish is your only true ally in this gustatory matter, and you must litter the floor of your pond with trees and junk – old bikes and tires and plows, now and then the carcass of a whitetail deer.  Deeply secret items, too, no doubt.  You cannot safely practice the modified American crawl in such waters, but you can lure your quarry with rubber worm or blood liver or cheese or maybe even just the right low-country hoodoo spell.  Most likely you should go ahead and allow one of his javelin barbels to gaff you when you unhook your prey, as the bubbling grease appreciates a drop or two of human blood, if you want to stay in mythic territory, which I obviously do.  But no matter how slick he skins out when spiked on a plank nor how sweet and moist he cooks up, no matter how gold-gowned he is in his own batter and how crisp and peppery his tail, he remains, as I have mentioned, always an auxiliary item.

     Furthermore, dear hearts, as Brother Dave Gardner used to say, don’t neglect the supporting cast of coleslaw and sliced red Better Boys and maybe mustard potato salad, cob corn (Silver Queen!), perhaps a crock of molasses-baked beans, all nearly necessary, all Friday-night special.  Still, the cornmeal hushpuppy amplified with just a hint of cayenne and a dusting of salt and black pepper, is the redneck nexus.  Ice tea, Dr Pepper or bottle beer, it goes without saying (and Jax it was, back in my salad days), maybe a dill pickle and pimiento cheese sandwich while you’re waiting, but you all know what you’ve really congregated to partake of and celebrate, and you refuse to be distracted by supplemental minor pleasures.  At least, my tribe always did.

     Of course, there was some smidgen of pretext.  Both wings of my family hail from just outside Spalding County, Georgia’s county seat, Griffin, where according to homegrown lore Doc J. Henry Holliday first practiced dentistry, sarcasm and deadeye marksmanship.  The downtown noise-ordinance zone was once an hour from Atlanta but is now virtually swarming with polyglot wireless Hotlanta commuters whose sir names I wouldn’t recognize.  When I was a boy, though, and summering on the farm to teach me labor and discipline, stalk hunting, Bible verses and the mysteries of animal husbandry, there wasn’t much call for a full-dress formal clan reunion (though I must spell that carefully, as some shadow branches of my clan were rumored to do dark and shameful things by moonlight under the guise of a supposed fraternal bond the family never did, in quorum, endorse).  We saw each other at the feed store, the sanctuary, hooch haven, the ball field, the gin, the barber and farmers market and so on, but we’d still convene by consensus just because we could, and because maybe we had grave plots to dispute, headstones to tidy or bushels of peas to hull, a fresh will to decipher or just a new in-law to welcome and interrogate and appraise, meaning fellowship and good stories, petty dueling and flirting and merciless mutual scrutiny, but for my money the hushpuppies remained the cardinal attraction.  It didn’t hurt that Uncle Rufus ran a grist mill on Greedy Faith Creek, and since everybody had some acres in corn (and some not destined for gallon jugs), any branch of the family could supply the meal ground to ideal fineness guaranteed to retain a little stimulating grit in the final product.  Buttermilk was similarly acquired, home-harvested, though you don’t exactly have to shuck a cow.  And lately I’ve come to believe that moths martyred in the grease and accompanying mockingbird chivaree were essential ingredients, as well, and neither item was ever in short supply.  Or so I have evidently chosen to remember it.

     Who was there, lounging on the lawn, slouching by the horseshoe pits or leaning back to see the clouds and then the summer stars – sparks of the Swan and the Harp –  from the tire swing’s black zero, strutting and declaiming, hide-and-seeking, bantering or confiding?  Not too many, though Uncle Coit, who married my daddy’s sister Doreen, was raised Jehovah’s Witness, so to keep the Kingdom Hall brethren appeased she had produced a full brood, from Hannah to Ruby-Dean, Ruth and Thaddeus and five or six more.  The older girls were not spare nor spindly and neither cut their hair nor painted their faces.  They obeyed adults with an annoying dispatch and thoroughness, but to my mind they were wholly redeemed by their blue-bright eyes and skill with the button accordion.  Under the right fingers, even “Hey Diddle-diddle” has its charm, and even a spirited hymn has often been able to set me to dancing, orthodox dogma notwithstanding, if I have a plate of proper hushpuppies at my disposal.  And my mother’s sister, Doreen Two, had married a pipeline worker named Theodore but always addressed as T-Henry.  He told randy jokes, sang “Yes, Elvis Loves Me” and smoked Carter Hall in his pipe, adding to the atmosphere and general sophistication.  My middle name comes from him, and it is reputed to mean “beloved of God,” though I long ago learned in a dream that it truly means “Hushpuppy Enthusiast.”  I do love an edifying dream.

     My daddy Smitty learned the black arts of outdoor frying from his sire and was himself a master of the tongs and pepper shaker.  He has always known how much egg to work into the batter, and no matter how many puppies you aim for, it’s never a whole number of eggs.  Two and a third, or three goos/four suns.  Or most likely something like nineteen and a half, as you don’t ever want to run short.  Smitty is a man who likes to instruct and organize and direct, and under other circumstances, I have always imagined, might have been a symphony conductor, instead of a cop.

     My mother was a delicate and discrete eater, a house cat and whisperer, so I have little memory of her at these pseudo-Eucharistic feasts, and my sister was too young through the highest times to be more than a swaddled squall and a blue-eyed puzzlement.  My father’s mother wore chunky boots about the yard – under the waspy scuppernong arbor and by the blacksnake’s fig tree, beside the appleshade anvil, into the vegetable rows and over at the simmering trash barrel with its firefly-winking scraps rising with the acrid smoke at dusk like fragmented bats.  She was the primary catcher of fishes, a surreptitious Tube Rose dipper and rustler-up of ancillary items from the kitchen, but she had little hand in the conjuring of the “host,” if I can push my reverence for hushpuppies that far without inviting lightning.

     You always want a seasoned white oak spoon to beat the batter, and you need to add your ingredients with some rhythm and whip it around with disciplined fury.  Elbow grease at that stage is crucial to the desired effect and never hard to find, because every leaf on the family tree wants some of the credit when the chorus of compliments begins to resound.  As it happens, there’s always at least a relative or two with fond recollection of a Ford model-A crank who would rather turn the ice cream freezer for old time’s sake, so laggards won’t be underfoot.  What’s in that cylinder encased in the rock salt inside the cedar bucket exists to provide a kind of palate-cleansing afterglow, and likely Uncle T-Henry Theodore or his adopted daughter Janeanne (former spouse of Alton Banjo) has picked the peaches at Pomona out McIntosh Road that very afternoon.  Some males are born for crank competition and will supervise and warm up to the slow rotation of that sweat-dyed handle, flexing muscles and growling till the confection is firm.

     The vocal majority milling about and inhaling the pine-scented air (I called them the Salivation Army) passionately prefers to beat the puppy batter, to work it toward the shaping stage, the paste consistency ready to dollop the size of a crabapple, and not everybody can: the “too many cooks” danger and so on.  The me-next competition will cause more scuffles and bruises than a misplaced kiss behind the abelia, and before it’s over there’s going to be sharp words and sneers, and somebody’s likely going to seize up a hoe handle or a tomato stake, while the dogs Kicky and Spot and Trixie dart and circle and snap, and then Grandaddy will have to flip aside his Herbert Tareyton cigarette and pull from his coverall pocket an old Smith & Wesson 32.20, once nickeled like a mirror but losing plate in flakes, and discharge it into the air.  The conspicuous report and attendant whiff of cordite are part of the ritual (he called the gun Us & Wesson), and his lead target load might whistle through the willow crown or pecan canopy or just rise and rise until it became a star, but the message was unmistakable.  Even the dogs shut up and slunk off.  Even the accordion wheezed to a silence.

     This brings me to the story, legend maybe, that hushpuppies were devised for throwing to dogs to occupy their jaws and stifle their howls and yowls and mendicant whimpers.  You can easily see the etymological temptation in that apocryphal notion, but if you have ever eaten the 24 caret hushpuppy, you will affirm that nobody would donate a fresh one to a dog unless that animal was two hundred pounds of frothing, snarling cur with his eyes fixed on your carotid artery.  Or if somehow all the bipeds were already filled to the gills, which seldom happens.  So where did the word come from, if not meant (in an isotope of the Irish eist) to HUSH the feisty pets?  A popular story goes that Ursuline nuns in New Orleans before the Purchase conjured up a treat called croquettes de maise, which could mark the hushpuppy’s genesis, and those who do not declare that hunters (or slaves or croppers or Confederate camp cooks) hurled them to the hounds like sops to Cerberus . . . well, those folks will tell you that salamanders were once named “water dogs” in the hand-thrown language called the vernacular, and that cooked hushpuppies were somewhat cylindrical, like a finger or a lizard.  The name came from the resemblance – size and shape – that story goes.  But just take a hard gander at a salamander and a hushpuppy – not one from Captain D’s or Cracker Barrel or some Southern Culture Ethnology Workshop or Oxford John expert article, but a backyard, iron-pot, family-caucus, Friday-night, wait-your-by-God-turn hushpuppy, and then run your eyes over a lizard.  No match, Butch.  There just has to be another explanation.

     Our family was somewhat more extensive and metaphorical than I’ve let on, and there were biddies and bulls and boars and cygnets in human form, as well as a patriarch, though not my daddy’s daddy’s daddy, who had gone on to what’s rumored to be a sweeter realm.  The sovereign and wizened presiding grand geezer was a House, who had once lived briefly for some unfathomable reason in Michigan cherry country and had in a rare fit of appropriate ardor sired my daddy’s mama.  I’m likely getting in big trouble here with the ghosts, because I was allowed to call her only “Grandmother,” as if we were fugitives from a Henry James novel, and to name her otherwise was to court a switching – that abelia bush again, red wand stripped of leaflets, whish and whish against bare skin.  Even when people said on my birthday, “Make a wish,” I couldn’t banish that whipping sound and memory of the sting, the welts across my calves.  But her daddy in his eighties was earthy as a red wiggler, and he loved to laugh and spiel yarns rife with non sequiturs and misdirections, Minos-mazes with a shaggy dog, snoring bear or besmirched preacher at the finish.  His daughter, assisted by her daughter-in-law, was forever trying to shush him, forever failing.  I expect they were a little embarrassed by his jovial and transgressive yarning, his irreverent loose-cannon wit.  Once he told me, whispering so she wouldn’t know, that he was himself traveling cheek-by-jowl with the shepherd boy Jack when he climbed the Bible beanstalk to stone the mighty Goliath.  You can see how that brand of  mischief might offend a pious daughter, who was in her own advanced age sterner than Cotton Mather, but who I believed to be, in her secret hours, something of a misery witch.  And when he’d peeve her so much she fumed and gave off steam (remember that congenital temperature business), she’d fall back on the makeshift and functional, even quietly affectionate language of her past.  She’d say, though nearly hissing it, “Hush, Pappy.”  In fact, she’d offer him a glass or plate of anything to pinch his story off.  Any morsel or potation to fill his mouth and chew or swallow, with the one exception of that unmentionable contraband smelling of rotten eggs in a jar hidden in an old ammo box in the garage or behind a loose board in the coop.  It seems a viable etymology to me: “Pappy” to “puppy” just a vowel slip on a warm cricket night, perhaps two centuries back.  He or any other raconteur would surely have abbreviated his usual narrative peregrination at the offer of a hushpuppy.  And by the way, his name was Rory, and he was dedicated to the notion that bacon grease had to be involved in the recipe and that the curly snags on the surface of the puppy that result from drips and dribbles must be scorched deep, deep brown before the glory was full.  If they came out just sort of panther amber, he’d call them fool’s gold and scowl.  Of course, he’d devour them, just the same.

     It seems important to testify that no disproportion of ingredient (not even the necessary near-nothing of baking soda administered to excess), no mis-distribution of the puppies in the batch nor absence of cane sugar in the final product ever pushed anyone in my family to words and actions so absolute that a rush to the hospital would have to follow.  We skirmished and fenced, jeered and snickered and regrouped and pretended to tolerate one another.  My cousin Larry Grady Giles was, however, accidentally splashed with grease from a skillet in 1959 and to this day carries a scar shaped like Denmark on his shoulder.  Rubydean’s Paolo Soprani squeeze box was once stomped beyond repair amid a sparring match over two dresses cut from the same bolt.  My own first frog-goggley spectacles broke against a flagstone because the other Giles boy, Jerry, slapped me with malice aforethought.  I kicked him back in the knee and counted it even.  And though I got a switching later, his knee joint swelled up and took on the color of a spoiled Talmadge ham, as I got in a good lick and was wearing steel toe barn brogans, not some lightweight suede shoe named and patented as “Hushpuppy” by some wistful footwear entrepreneur.

     Perhaps inevitably, this brings me to manna, as that’s after all what I ultimately believe in: a culinary gift beyond explanation and sure to inspire and help you survive, rejoice and misbehave.  You don’t have to search for it or earn it, for divine agency is real, and the Mighty Mystery, being indefatigable, hardly sleeps a weary wink.  When I was a boy, I already knew our visit to this realm is brief – that swallow passing briefly through the mead hall’s light, then out again into unforgiving winter –  and I wanted some reward for enduring the tribulations that would surpass licorice twists or deep dish pie or promises of adult independence, and on many a summer night there it was.  Behold: hushpuppy, sacrament, manna.  Not sage-tamed possum and sweet potato, not blackberry cobbler with today’s cream just whipped up.  Not even Tabasco oysters on a saltine, but hushpuppy, born of sugar and corn, Dominecker egg and buttermilk, the fires of Hell and grease that might be Crisco or Wesson but might even be from rendered lard.  Lord, yes.  It takes me back, and then we’d have sparklers and rockets and rainbow-splash starshells, yawns and covert kisses and “Goodnight Ladies” on the accordion, back-cracking hugs all around and “look after yourself, you hear,” as the engines sputtered and caught and revved, a klaxon  horn squawked a few bars of “Dixie,” followed by headlights ghosting past the abelia and willows, hydrangea, myrtle.

     When the dust from parting trucks and cars would settle on us and the honeysuckle and the shorn lawn alike, when grandmother had concluded her prayers and other conjurations, glassed her teeth and switched off her bedside light as the dogs curled on their pallets, my grandfather and I would traipse back up the terraces of the grazing meadow to the pond he’d gouged with an Allis-Chalmers tractor over three years to fill with rainwater and catfish so we could revel in just such serendipities.  He’d always say, “Don’t you step on a copperhead, son; don’t wake the skunks,” and I’d promise not to.  We’d tote the catfish bones on amber Depression glass platters and, standing on the bank, fling them out in a high arc, give them back to the water, then turn together and piss eastward with sighs of content and relief.

     And so to sleep, now as then, as rehearsing this clement and soporific scene closes off memories of my favorite delicacy and gentles down all the commotion, including the how and why of frying hushpuppies and devouring them like nomadic starvelings on any available occasion.  The exercise leaves me feeling almost shriven.

     Our time on this planet is short, and it might seem somewhat mean-spirited, despite my aversion to dictating taste, to conclude this treatise without revealing more than a scatter of details about the Smith-Griffin Weekend Hushpuppy Wonder.  A recipe is not a treasure map, and even the proper ingredients and proportions can go awry without a vigilance intense enough to pass for reverence.  Maybe it’s worth asserting here that, no matter how the place attracted its name, a Griffin is a mythical and mongrel beast somehow half eagle and half panther, with a diamondback for a tail, as I’ve heard tell from that eloquent House patriarch, so it wouldn’t be surprising if this recipe didn’t require that each cook add or change or subtract a portion of some surprising creature according to the demands of the moment and idiosyncratic taste.

     Some of the peculiars might include creamed corn, slivered tomatoes, even a splash of beer, but the obligatories are a deep kettle or skillet (or a skettle!) of grease (lard or Crisco preferred) at just shy of 400 degrees (the boil beads winking the size of an adult gray squirrel’s eye).  You can test it by slipping in a smidgen of batter to see if it floats.  I’m scaling down quantities for practicality, but you need at least four cups of the oil, and you blend together in a clay bowl two cups of yellow cornmeal, a cup of all-purpose flour, one and a third eggs, a cup of buttermilk, a cup of spring water, ¾ teaspoon of salt topped by ¼ teaspoon of baking soda.  Whip that about con brio till all the lumps give up the ghost.  Then see if the batter is cohering to appropriate collops.  If it seems too dry, dash in more milk; if too feeble, add meal.  This is when you dose the magma with a dash of Tabasco, pinch of cayenne, cane sugar, pepper, onions diced fine, bell pepper bits.  Proportion depends upon your personal knot of nature and nurture, wind velocity, humidity, last year’s wooly worm coloration and what key the squeezebox is playing in.  I do not recommend adding snuff, cigarette ash or mosquitoes, but if they manage to finagle their way in, silence is advisable, and they will do no more harm than the sweat that is destined to trickle from the chef.  Your actual puppy dollops should be smaller than a hen egg, and they’ll be done in about 300 seconds.  I do advise cutting back the oil heat just as you spoon the puppies in.  They’ll float, and as you rescue each gold-brown treat from the boil, you can (if you must) preserve their freshness in an oven at about 200 degrees, but after half an hour they’ll start to rebel and lose their magic.

     This small caliber recipe should make enough hushpuppies to offer each of the original dozen disciples a pair, which would be adequate to convert them to this cult but not to satisfy them.  But then, how many would qualify as “a gracious plenty,” enough to sate a real aficionado?  You can never speak for the incurable gluttons, but a simple optimist will be able to settle for six or eight at one sitting, assured that other evenings, other feasts will bring additional servings, and I do believe that possibility alone is enough reason to enlist among the dedicated Pollyannas and keep your eye on the road, your ear to the ground, your shoulder to the wheel, your eye on the sparrow.  At least for me, one question is settled: if I’m ever in a situation to be offered the option, I know what I’ll request for my last meal.  Honi soit qui mal y pense, puppy.

Published in Zoetrope, 2006 (and later in Redux)
[I had previously written a short story based on one of our Georgia family’s antic reunions, but the narrative was unsatisfactory because my kin came across as fugitives from central casting, their outbursts too much like Faux Faulkner 101, their attitudes toward the food more endearing than their feelings toward one another.  It was probably an attempt to get at the riddles at the root of the family tree, a fool’s errand.  Once I realized how the menu, especially the hushpuppies, constituted the heart of the piece, I understood that I preferred to write a personal essay about Southern food as a symptom of Southern cult and culture.  Like everyone who endeavors to recall and recount, I telescoped, embellished, fabricated and marinated where necessary, kneaded and conjured to provide sketchy memory with coherence and continuity, but as Huck says of Mark Twain, I “told the truth, mainly.”]

R. T. Smith has edited Shenandoah since 1995.

EVERY DAY.

A Coke bottle
with a sprinkle head
sat at one end of the board.
She’d swap iron for bottle,
splash the cloth,
then go at it with the iron.
The crooked was made straight,
the wrinkled smooth
and she’d lecture from that altar
where rumpled sheets went crisp.
“If Old Scratch gets his claws
in your thigh or neck,
you burn a thousand years
and that is the first day.”
Our clothes got rigid,
seam matched seam.
Our bodies would ruin her work.

from Gospel  Road Going (Tryon Publishing, 2002)
published by permission of the author

At first “Heat” may seem a simple poem about ironing and the importance of being neat, but the religious references, from crooked being “made straight,” an altar, the Devil and fiery eternity make it clear he has bigger game in mind.  Through labor, moisture and heat, flaws are corrected, but the correction can’t withstand use by our corporeal, moral bodies.  Life has that way of refusing the neat, but we’re invited to imagine that “she” (mother figure or helper) will work against Old Scratch and the crooked again and again.  The poem depends upon that parallel between “our clothes” and “our bodies,” the bare, forked, naked (and sinning) selves and the vestments which have been baptized and disciplined by fire.  One of the poem’s beauties is the naturalness with which Chitwood makes the comparisons, the vernacular deployed authentically and not over-done.  “She” has earned the right to lecture, and we owe it to ourselves to listen, even heed (close enough to heat, not so far from heart).  “. . . and that is the first day.”  Another of the poem’s virtues is thrift – enough said.

Michael Chitwood was born in Rocky Mount, Virginia and took degrees at Emory and Henry and UVA.  His collections of poetry include Salt Works, Whet, Poor Mouth Jubilee, Whence, Spill and The Weave Room.  He has also published several collections of essays and works as a freelance writer, as well as a lecturer at UNC.

The Brown Recluse, also known as the Hermit Fiddler, a spider whose bite produces a gangrenous sore, is apparently spreading northward. From its original home in the Southwest it has now migrated as far a North Carolina.

Not it.  She.  The one with eggs.
Demographer with the future in her belly,
moving up in the world.  Texas rots
dry, Louisiana wet.  Twenty
years in Alabama: closets, drawers,
silver chests, the backs of portraits
cottoned with eggs and everywhere the sweet
festering scent.  In Tennessee
she homed into the woodpile, roughed it,
budded the board with eggs.  Now here
holed up in my ornamental block
she babysits a quiet contagion.

Lady,
I know your bite.  I am myself
something of a recluse and given
to wearing brown.  My Odyssey –
no, my Penelopeid up the dry
shins of girlhood to the wetter parts
was not unlike your own.  We are heading
both of us north.  The cold, I hear,
is shriveling, the cold bites back.
Even in this lush midway state I feel
a touch of gangrene on my hither leg,
some deadlier hermit fiddling in my brain.

from There Is No Balm in Birmingham (Godine, 1978).

Luck plays a powerful role in the formation of a writer’s perspective and identity.  I was just beginning to write poem-like things when I ran across Ann Deagon’s first books, and she was an excellent practitioner of the kind of poetry I wanted to write, stanzas which vibrantly and evocatively introduced the reader to one subject only to reveal that subject as a metaphor (but no less literally meaningful for that) – vehicle first with cunning suggestions of things to come, a thin but alluring narrative, then the tenor, all tightly knit and headed for a cinching knot at the end, as “fiddling” works here – insignia of the spider, a word for tinkering, the playing of a violin.

It’s not my intention to explicate, but I want to point out that migration becomes evolution, spider becomes woman, weather becomes emotional as well as meteorological, all in service of survival.  Contagion/ gangrene.  Eggs as fecundity, treasure, danger.  Run through this a suggestion of Homer’s story regendered and sexual/marital relationships are suggested.  “Midway” as a carnival can’t feature can’t be ignored.  She is bold, she knows a lot, and though she may taunt and fence, she does not tease.

To a greater degree, what impressed me was the assertive, challenging tone which is never quite belligerent, not quite threatening, but by the end, the narrator has become something neither quite victim nor spider.  I was startled by the seizing of power at the beginning and watched the poem justify the feminist gambit, and the visceral quality of the language, along with the deft identification of the South’s hidden corners said to me, “You need to learn to do this with equal thrift and muted drama.”  I never did, nor did I learn to seize the authority in Deagon’s stern but good-humored way; however, I still have her work to savor (in Poetics South, Carbon 14 and others) and always wish for more.

A native of Birmingham, Ann Deagon lives in Greensboro, North Carolina and for many years taught classics at Guilford College.  Her other books include poetry, a novel and a collection of stories.  86 now, she is a storyteller, a singer and a songwriter. 

R. T. Smith