The Apple Tree Adventure

Granny’s not lookin’! Good.” Five-year-old legs and feet flew across the yard to the picket fence. Nomie pulled up on the bottom rail then looked over her shoulder at the house. “Granny’s still not looking.” Nomie pulled herself from the bottom rail to the top of the fence post. She didn’t remember the ground being so far away. She closed her eyes and jumped from the top of the post to the ground three feet below. Tumbling to her knees on the gravelly path, Nomie wanted to cry from the scrapes but if she cried, Granny would hear her…. And then she would be in trouble. “I’m not gonna’ cry. Only babies cry and I’m no baby.” She picked herself up and started across the alfalfa field. Ole Jim, Uncle Tom’s black collie, limped after her on his three good legs. She spotted a four leaf clover and stopped to investigate. A bumblebee buzzed nearby. Nomie did not like bumblebees.

She looked up the hill at her Daddy’s house. Daddy of course was not home. He was at work driving his big yellow Kentucky Power Company truck. Nomie knew that if Daddy didn’t work, lots of people would have no ‘lectricity and they would be calling 117 and asking for Harry. She didn’t like it when Daddy had to go back out to work at night just ‘cause people didn’t have ‘lectricity. Up ahead here was a nice place to sit under the walnut tree and if she sat there, Granny couldn’t see her and make her come back to the house. Nomie didn’t want to have to come back to the house…not yet. Ole Jim laid down in the alfalfa next to her and she put her chubby arms around his neck and hugged him. “Good Jim…you’re my favoritest playmate…. except for Nancy and Sue…and Paul…but I can’t go to Daughtry Hollow by myself. Anyway…I’m scared to walk by the graveyard…even with you. Some ghost might jump out the grave and get me!”

Nomie wondered if her stepmother was home. Having a stepmother meant that Daddy had a new wife but she guessed that was okay…after all her momma was in heaven…had been gone to heaven a long time. Granny had explained all that and after all…Granny was her Momma’s momma. Still Nomie didn’t feel right about the stepmother. She didn’t know why…she just didn’t …but she didn’t have to worry…she had Granny and Uncle Tom, and Uncle Carter, and of course, Grampa.
Her eyes wandered to the field by the creek where the well house stood. Then she looked up the hill toward the Daddy house and saw the apple tree. Daddy had sawed a limb off the apple tree but he didn’t quite cut it all off. Sticking out was a piece of limb with a sharp point . It sure looked like a good limb to turn a flip-flop on. Could she do it? Maybe if she held on to the pointy limb and the one next to it…that would work? Nomie headed toward the tree. Ole Jim stayed where he was, his tongue sticking out as he panted for breath. He laid his head on his paws and continued to watch the little girl.

Nomie looked up at the tree. It wasn’t very high so she started to climb up so she could reach the pointy limb. Now how could she turn this flip-flop? She turned around facing the tree trunk and thought of a way she could try. As her body turned, the sharp point of the limb caught the waistband of her shorts and tore a hole in the seat! There Nomie swung …stuck on an apple limb …bobbing from her shorts. She yelled for help. There was no answer. Finally her stepmother came out of the basement door with a dishpan full of water that she threw in the garden. Her father’s new wife did not look Nomie’s way and then she turned and went back in the house. What could Nomie do now? She yelled for help again and again and nobody came. The bees kept buzzing from blossom to blossom in the tree and….still, nobody came. Nomie waited. . Granny couldn’t see the back of Daddy’s house…. and besides, Granny didn’t know where she was. Nomie hung in the tree bobbing like a big apple. She didn’t like this…. Not a bit.

What could she do? Nomie reached out and grabbed the trunk of the tree and pulled herself closer. She heard the rip in her shorts. Granny was going to be mad…real mad. Nomie wiggled and her shorts ripped further She kept on wiggling and finally fell half way to the ground. How could she get out? Maybe…..if she pushed backwards? Nomie pushed away from the tree and fell backwards toward the ground….her feet caught in what was left of her shorts legs! She kicked harder and …one foot came out….she kicked again and….at last…she was free!

Her legs hurt…..Granny would be mad…..Maybe she ought to get her torn shorts from the tree…Nomie wanted Granny. She grabbed the torn shorts and ran through the alfalfa field toward the fence gate and her Granny. Nearly there…she started crying and screaming at the top of her lungs ”Gran…nee……..Gra…nee…Gra..neeeee!” Tears rolled from her eyes as she screamed and ran across the field…through the hay grass…toward the house…toward her Momma’s Momma screamin’ and …cryin’. Ole Jim limped along behind her his lame hind leg tucked up.Climbed down the wet creek bank, slid under the woven wire fence at the back of the garden, ran through the peanut patch all the way to the back door, Nomie screamed every step of the way. Gran…….nee, Gran….eee, GRANNEE!

Turkey Calling

You jive-time turkey. Why are you knocking on my door? I could care less if you are a Republicrat or a Demican…neither party means much to me. Beneath the skin you are all the same..standing on my doorstep in my neighborhood in which you do not live and which you would not enter after dark or in three out of four years…yet you cram my mailbox with all this unsolicited propaganda trying to twist my thoughts to your biased, narrow view of the world…and now you ring my doorbell with that fake two-faced smile pasted on your face…who do you think buys your line of rhetoric anyway…involuntary lobotomies went out of style with the civil rights era….you know during the Sixties…when your predecessors passed all those treating your neighbor fair laws which you say discriminate against you…yes, I guess those laws did discriminate against you because you were definitely unborn at that time and let us face this fact.. since the unborn can not talk…they have no voice.

Ah….you say you’re born now…and you want to help me? I guess you do want to help me…probably into the poor house which you closed last year because after all government would be better served fighting a war and killing off the young people..who bought your plan to force a lifestyle down the throats of a different culture, a different religion because after all GOD spoke to you personally last night or night before and told you that the only people who would be permitted through the Pearly Gates were clones of you and yours…….who spoke the same language in the same way with the same flat intonation at the same minute in the infinite universe…oh I forgot…there is no universe…the stars are only painted lights on the ceiling of that dark room you call a mind….where logical thought and compassion are criminals to be arrested as threats to your home….land ……security.

T-I-O-N

Somewhere. way back when in the beginning of our NATION
We forgot the logic of the original EXPLANATION.
Forgot when the ancestral elders left on their EXPLORATION
Across the sea, long and lonely far from the REVOCATION
Of their right to freely kneel and practice the ADORATION.

Today, distantly removed stands the new GENERATION
Of politically correct refugees from ultimate SALVATION
Isolated, angry and devoid of desire to begin RENOVATION
Of a cultural, spiritually, morally bankrupt CIVILIZATION
Locked in an unheard, unheeded, unnoted VOCALIZATION.

Out of the mouths of concerned babes comes this ORATION
Demanding, requiring, desperately needing a new DEDICATION
A new definition, a new focus of prayerful CONSIDERATION
Toward reclaiming the original GOD-centered INSPIRATION
Of the essential founding truths of our elders’ EXPECTATION.

In the names of Father, Son, and Spirit we pour the LIBATION
To insure for eternity the healing, nurturing CONSECRATION
Of the sanctity stated hallowed liberty driven DECLARATION
That we as a people stand before the world’s OBSERVATION
Under God, under liberty, without any further JUSTIFICATION!

Sunday, Someday Remembered by an Absent-minded Penitent

Bright Sunday morning sunshine pouring through the stained class windows of our church. The image of the Christ is backlit in all its glory…HE with HIS hands extended to one and all who come through the door and down the center aisle to pause and kneel before the altar. They are the faithful who come each Sunday, each holy day and some other days besides ..to salute the altar and then to sit in meditation on the meaning of FAITH, to communicate with our GOD on the meaning and responsibilities of life…to beg forgiveness for transgressions from the straight and narrow….to achieve a semblance of peace within each individual soul….

Sunday morning , the most divided day in all our world because each of us seems to believe that his or her house of worship is the only viable entrance to the Afterlife. I personally do not believe that there is a specifically allocated section of the afterlife sat apart for each denomination but I would also admit that I am probably in the minority because of the innate wish of many people to play a childhood game of “one up.” This is the game that leads one person to think that he is “better” than other people. As a child growing up in a tiny mountain community, I would listen on Sunday morning for the bell pealing from either the Methodist church or the Baptist church as the bells called their individual members to service. I have attended services in both churches. Then some new people moved in and built a Holiness church and I have attended services in that church also. As a matter of fact, my aunt, Sister Belle, preached in that same church one week.

My father didn’t go to that particular service because as he would say, “I’m of a different persuasion.” I never did know exactly what “persuasion” that was but attending the service didn‘t matter because the Holiness church had a loudspeaker and the whole hollow had no choice but to hear the service in its entirety unless someone got in a vehicle and went across the river to Vinsontown. My stepmother, who was a Baptist, would rather sneak a drink than go to either one of the churches in our town. Her excuse was that she was a member of the church in Rivertown some 40 miles away by the highway, Matter of act my brother had her buried from that church . I was caught in an icestorm and even though I was on the way didn’t get there until after she was buried but I heard from another source that nobody came to the funeral because none of the members of that Rivertown church remembered her at all – not so surprising since she had moved from Rivertown some thirty years before Daddy’s service, on the other hand, had been quite different. An 84-year-old retired Free Will Baptist preacher from Vinsontown who had fought in the Big War with Daddy spoke over him and most residents of Yatestown, our town, and Vinsontown came.

Mountain people never seemed to much care what church a person went to. If there was a church in town and you felt like going..then you went and that was that. Sometimes people would fall out with either the preacher or somebody else in the church and change churches . Maybe other folks knew why the change took place and maybe they didn’t…neither the change nor the reason was earth shattering and life moved on. Life in those days was so much simpler than it is now. People had an innocence then that cable television and mass media have since damaged. Only occasionally do I hear a person speak with that distinctive manner of speech and the distinct choice of words that identifies them to another hill born person. Speech patterns may have changed but values and social actions are too inherent in our Appalachian culture. My adult children show their mountain heritage in the way they act, in how they choose their friends and in their personal values.

And on Sunday morning, on Holy Day morning, they scatter to whichever church draws their interest. My gospel music playing offspring will happily travel to whichever church calls him and his group to come and play. The group will join hands, Brother Rod will pray for Divine approval of their efforts and a joyful noise will be raised to the heavens. Sister Belle (my aunt) used a loudspeaker to spread the word but in these modern times the brothers of music have replaced the loudspeaker with an amplifier connected to both the electric guitar and the electric piano to make sure all the audience hears. The years have passed and methods have changed but the purpose is still the same. By sunlight, moonlight or starlight. touch the faith, let it shine through, let it be heard from the mountains to the hollows and beyond. Remind all of us of the values taught in our childhood and help us keep to the pathways that bring us into whatever building is dedicated for the personal communication with God that develops and strengthens our Faith, our so that within each soul we find peace and love for all His creatures.

The bells are tolling and we are being called to show our own belief in the right pathway to the whereafter. Please don’t ask me for specific directions because I can not give you a definitive answer. After all, I am the person who stood up and walked out the door of the church where a minister preached that everyone who went to another church across town was going to Hell because they did not come to his church. That particular preacher has slid on into the afterlife but I have not set foot in a building of his particular denomination in nearly forty years and I don’t think I am going back. The memory is a bit too prejudicial to me. In my current home town, I walked out of the church (which I claim) because I got really tired of folk looking at my black skin like I had leprosy or AIDS or some such incurable disease. Nor am I going to drive nearly twenty miles to the black church of the same denomination…where my children used to go to school. In that church I was sniped at and made fun of because of my Appalachian ways. No one there communicated with me until they wanted $5000 to build the new church…then they found my phone number. I , on the other hand, had lost my checkbook that day and couldn’t remember the way to the bank.

What I do find myself remembering is the Irish Catholic priest who came flying down a curvy twisty mountain road seemingly on two wheels of his raggedy station wagon because our house had burned and my oldest son had died…remembering the parish that reached out and took in a relatively new family in the community. That same priest who stopped in mid homily because I was carrying my baby son out of the sanctuary because he was screaming at the top of his lungs Father Rooney said quite forcefully, “Don’t you dare carry that boy out of this church..no matter how loud he gets…. He can cry here anytime he wants…” and Father waited until I sat down again before he continued . and continue he did …with HIS sermon!

The Unanswerable Question

This is a message I really can’t ever deliver. It is very personal.
Yes, you over there in your lonely suburban house.
Saw your grandson yesterday, the one you don’t know.
Nice kid –somehow he knows I’m related – same birthmark.
He keeps trying to figure it out – so he comes by my classroom.
Looks in – wondering – looks at me with questions in his eyes.
I’ve got no answers – just more questions, simple questions,
His name, his birthday, his daddy’s name, where he lives.
Questions I can’t ask.


Years ago I saw his daddy and I…..almost passed out.
Same height, same hair, same face just like his dead brother.
I sat there stunned and watched him move – a living ghost.
Hush! I told my child, close your mouth and shut up!
Went home, demanded answers from our aunt – who knew.
Got only a question in response – where’d you see him?
Then she said, “His momma wants nothing to do with us!”
Who’s he look like, how’d you know he was ours?



I still don’t know his name, our aunt wouldn’t talk
Any more on that subject, though she talked on many more.
Now, I understand why she wouldn’t speak and séances do no good.
My classroom is empty now, I don’t teach there anymore.
Your grandson will stop, look in, and find no answers,

Don't Tell Me Who I'm NOT!

Brother in blood , don’t dare try to tell me who I’m not!
Such a sad, sorry, misguided and boring argument .
Your face’s reflection in the mirror
Seems much like mine,…but you can not,
Will not recognize my Appalachian Soul.


Sick and tired I am of people telling me
I don’t exist and who I’m not.
I am BLACK and I am MOUNTAIN BORN!
Seven generations of my people have
Walked these meandering mountain hollers.


My dark eyes and ears see and hear your games and
Read them sadly for your blind ignorance
Which sees only my obvious African face.
While your mouth spews contempt and hatred
For my Appalachian heritage.


You played games of disrespect with your elders.
Would not recognize mine as they walk by.
Those long gone folk who climbed the mountain
To build and light the schoolhouse fire.. for children yet unkmown.


I have walked my mother’s steps and the footsteps of her elders,
Always remembering the lessons of my grandmother’s
Peach tree switch which taught respect for all living beings.
Listen well and don’t try telling me who I’m not!
I am proud, black, and Appalachian, and most of all, I am ME!

Farmer's Market on a Long Ago Saturday

Bumping shoulders, dodging small running children, tripping over curbs, grabbing Dorothy Susanne’s hand, tugging the wagon carrying Jay-Jay and Brad a.k.a. the twins.
Hot baked bread from Wisniewski”s Bakery smelling of butter, sesame, garlic, onions; smell of fresh Indiana melons (cantaloupe) sliced for sampling…melon which came in the back of a pick-up truck…not in a semi-trailer….melon picked in the dark…just this morning.

Huge stuffed Raggedy Anne and Andy like dolls with brown faces and tightly kinked hair and dressed in colorful kinte clothes. The little old lady who got even with me because I told her that her dolls didn’t look like my kids. Now the dolls do look like my kids. She laughs…she knows I’ll buy.

Vendors and customers in constant communication…hearing bits of conversation…how many…how much…fresh fruit for sale….will you negotiate?……idling diesel engines of the watermelon trucks from south Georgia….Can the twins have some candy?….Will they ever just be Brad and Jay-Jay instead of the twins?…Think I’ll scream if one more person tells me my identical sons are cute…I think I’ll scream.

Artists market….sculptures for sale…..African masks….busts of small children…flat framed carvings…..woven mats of many colors….Running into Marvin Vines...my artist friend…..he sketches the kids and me…talking about how I should get LeMaxie Glover to sculpt the children’s heads…wishing later that I had because too soon LeMaxie is dead and we have lost another important black voice…

The quilt lady asking about Herma Mack Henry….who used to be my landlady but stayed around to become my elder friend. She’s off to Columbus to visit her little sister and will be home next week. I’ll be back to Market with her…and she’ll leave with bargains…she always does.

Seeing my used to be landlady for the garden site in Spencer Sharples Will I be needing the site in the spring…if so her husband will plow it and fertilize it for me….and oh yes, next summer the rent will be $30.00…Dorothy Susanne tugging my arm…Mommy, will that bad old goose be gone….the one that flogged my baby’s legs….before our Dobie jumped out the van window and chased him off?!..No, the farm lady tells her the goose is gone..he’s in the freezer now waiting for his starring role at Christmas dinner!
Through with the market…putting the kids in my orange Volkswagen van…struggling to put the wooden Radial Flyer through the sliding door…its nearly 8 a.m…..can I get the kids to go back to sleep? Don’t know..turning north on Monroe headed toward Collingwood and the Old West End. See you next Saturday!