NEVER SHARED MEMORIES

ThomasWolfe's final novel  (title) is one of the most misquoted phrases in American English..."You can't go home again!"  Physically..... the words are probably a profound truth but emotionally...that single phrase is the biggest lie perpetrated on generations of  readers.  How so?

Home, for me, is the holler (hollow to you non Appalachian language purists) in a small western  West Virginia town, the same town my great-grandparents settled in  nearly 150 years ago , the head  of the  holler once exclusively owned by family members...a place where many family now sleep in eternal rest.  I grew up in that holler...running the surrounding hills accompanied by the beagles  that my father raised and the black collie that my uncle brought home one day. For almost the first two decades of my life, I waded the creeks to catch crawdads, picked buckets of wild strawberries, blackberries and dewberries to carry  home to my grandmother, cut and picked flowers to lay on my mother's grave, watched  the turn in the road for visiting relatives, and daydreamed about the world outside...a world I knew only from books and my father's collection of National Geographic magazine. 

By the time I finally went to school  (at 11 after the Brown vs. Topeka  Supreme Court decision), the mile and a half hike out of the holler was a respite from the  drunken shaving strap wielding rampages of my stepmother because by then I was old enough to take charge of my own well being. The day I emancipated myself was the day she swung the shaving strap at me and I caught it in mid strike with the admonition that she would never in life hit me again...I was taller than she was, weighed more than she did and could outrun her. I walked out of the house and went the 75 yards down the hill to my octogenarian grandparents house......HOME.   I thank GOD every day for that home...a place of peace  and safety..and a place where I could find answers or a path to answers for the questions of my heart.

With the support of my mother's family, the next five and a half years were survivable.  My grandfather "schooled" me on family history  and mountain "smarts". I learned to make a flute from a branch of a pawpaw tree. how to scout out the root of a sassafras tree (to dry for tea in winter) and how to make a "hotbed" for growing tomato plants for planting in May  and how to straw late growing tomato plants (the runts of his hotbed) so we had fresh tomatoes on Thanksgiving day. Through his eyes I learned to watch my  environment for weather changes and what to do for "swimming in the head."   Had my grandmother not been blind...there was much more I could have learned from her. Her important lessons focused on the value of "FAMILY"  and traditions  and maintaining the "ties that bind" families (and communities) together. 

My senior year in high school was challenging in personal ways. My father had a massive heart attack and nearly died,  his best friend (my mother's younger brother) died suddenly of pancreatic cancer and my mother's older brother was diagnosed with prostate cancer.  The family tried to shelter me from the storms that were gathering on the horizon because they wanted my focus on graduation and getting into college. No distractions would be permitted.   For nearly two months I struggled trying to complete my college application. Each version was rejected by my stepmother (my father..who was now retired and at home...trusted her judgement). Finally I voiced my frustration to my grandfather and my uncle because my stepmother refused to mail my application because it "wasn't right.)  Grampa had the solution...get another copy of the application...fill it out and mail it!  His pronouncement finished with "Do it now!"   I  did exactly that and Grampa handed me the application fee. A month later I was headed out of the holler  into town and met my father. he had one question...had I finished the application to my stepmother's satisfaction?  To my NO answer came the question..what was I going to do ?  I looked at him and said..."Nothing" and pulled the acceptance letter from my pocket and handed it to him.  In essence I told him that I had gotten tired of being told that what I wrote was not good enough...so I did it on my own. He folded the letter, put it in his pocket and told me he would give Grampa back his money. He walked home and I went on to town.

Three weeks after my 18th birthday....I left HOME. Unforeseen (to me) many changes  were in the wind.  Home was fast moving from a physical  place to a place I could only visit in my memories.

HISTORY - LOST, IGNORED, or JUST PLAIN HIDDEN

 I came across a message from Henry Louis Gates Jr. regarding his newest PBS project, "The African Americans..Many Rivers to Cross," recently. In the message was a request for input from African American families regarding their interest in our history.  Those  that know me know that many years ago I started researching my personal family history, an interest that was created by my mother's father as he sat in his rocking chair in  front of the fireplace..in our West Virginia home. To me , the child that sat with closed mouth and open ears - the stories he told were simply that .."Grampa's stories." Only later  as an adult, as a parent, as a newly minted  grandparent, would I recognize that these "stories" were the ripe kernel of history as it directly impacts a family and its development over the years.  Those stories were the connecting point which joined the history of these United  States with the individuals who made up my FAMILY. Only in this realization did HISTORY become alive for me...it was no longer the dry facts chronicled (truthfully or untruthfully) in a textbook.

As a writer, I am NOT primarily a historian The facts of what I write are handed down by my elders and they are not colored by the brush of "propriety."  My brother (the historian) would often omit and or ignore certain occurrences because of :propriety...his or some one else's. Historians are prone to that error...if the fact is not socially or politically correct...ignore it or probably edit  it.  Thus what textbooks tend to say about some of the darker moments in our country's times has been "cleaned up" or sanitized for the sake of "appropriateness."  Journalists (reporters)  retell  what they see or experience, editorialists react to events and most  people don't know the difference.  Historians tend to blend the roles without clearly defining the viewpoint.   As a writer (storyteller)I mix the method of telling the story with the facts because my goal is to provide a hook for my  listener to remember the reality of the occurrence. As I tell my story...the facts are as I heard and or experienced them...the characters may be blended.

The "rivers" are symbolic of many things....rivers, mountains, oceans, time spans, social attitudes and prejudices, religious beliefs and convictions.  The first documented ancestor in my knowledge of family arrived on these shores in the 1700's. He was a Quaker anxious to leave the old World (England) for the freedom to worship as he chose.  Another ancestor (a Catholic)  headed westward to the Greater Ohio Valley again for the freedom to worship as he chose.  Another set of ancestors fled across the mountains for the freedom to marry and raise a family with the person they chose. Over the next 200 years..the lifeblood of all three sets of ancestors merged into one bloodline..a portion of the DNA mix  of .one family.   Am I interested in connecting the ancestral lines further back...to the African motherland. Absolutely! The probabilities/possibilities  are mind boggling and this inquiring mind wants to know!