Writers may have heard that Belle Point Press is one of the more enterprising small independent publishers out there, that they're specifically dedicated to publishing the best literature of and from the Southern-Midwest States but they publish books from the Southern States and occasionally from other places too. In order to bring out the best work from new writers of real, if raw, talent, they sponsor an occasional writing workshop, like this one:
It costs money. It involves being online on Saturday. It involves Zoom.
But I will dash off a true story from my memories...this one was provoked by another Southern-interest publisher promoting a song that reverses the traditional carry-me-back motif into "You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive." For what it's worth, although the songwriter presumably meant that per education and work experience in Harlan County, Kentucky, weren't going to qualify person for a better-paid job somewhere else, I've driven through Harlan County many times and encountered no difficulty leaving it, whatsoever. An anti-nostalgia song may be as refreshing as an anti-romance novel, but that in no way implies that people, generally, no longer want to be in small towns in the Appalachian Mountains.
The writing exercise, in which any number can play, works like this: Each participant writes a short true story of "a family memory." Then each person writes a fictionalized version of someone else's story from the perspective of a different character.
So, true story:
The last Saturday morning in September, at breakfast, Dad broke the news. "You kids are going to have to vote. All three of you, mind! The question is, do you want to go back to Virginia..."
"Of course we do!" my brother and I shrieked in chorus.
"Don't interrupt. Do you want to go back to Virginia with your old Dad, or stay here and go to your new school that you like so well...without him."
"Is there a catch in that?" I said. "That's like asking if we want both candy and a dollar, or neither."
"Of course we want to go home with our Dad," my brother said. "Tribe must have Chief."
"Think about it," Dad said. "We have to think about what's good for the Baby, too."
Our new school that we liked so well was operated by the Seventh-Day Adventist church. We went there after breakfast. I had a red paisley maxi-dress, the latest fashion, to wear when the middle grades went up front and sang "Faith of Our Fathers." I had a quarter to put in the collection box in what Adventists call "Sabbath School" and a dollar to put in the plate in the main church service. It wasn't potluck dinner week, so we went home for the afternoon. In the evening we'd go back to be taken to sing at a nursing home.
Meanwhile, as we changed into shorts and took the Baby out to play, we had a quick try at thinking like the Baby. My natural sister didn't say or understand a lot of words yet. She was just learning to climb up stairs and wanted to climb up and down all the stairs in the project. Each building was a "four-plex" with two staircases. Nobody minded our climbing the stairs but, when we came to an open door where people were moving out, the Baby darted right inside and had to be hauled out. After that we thought it might be a good idea to play in the shade, under the little tree in its enclosure of bare sandy dirt in the back parking lot.
The year before, we'd rented half of a duplex that was pretty nice, with a big back yard where we each had a rose bush, a camellia bush, and a tomato plant to look after and a swing set to play on. We'd moved to our new apartment in the project in order to be near the church school. It was a mission school, and church, deliberately placed in what everyone called a bad neighborhood. The neighbors did seem pretty bad to us. The project did boast a swimming pool; we'd enjoyed swimming in the motel pool before we'd found the duplex house, but when Dad saw the older kids hanging out at the pool at the project, it became very clear that we were never going to swim there.
What the project offered as a place for us to play was maybe ten square feet of bare dirt around a moribund little tree. I sat on the ground and read my new big fat book (it was Louis Untermeyer's Treasury of Laughter). My brother sat on the ground and made a row of pebbles. The Baby sat on the ground and sifted sand over herself like a bird.
"Mother doesn't like you doing that," my brother reminded her.
"Don't care," said the Baby.
"You know," I observed casually, "it would be different back home on the farm. The dirt there has potatoes in it. This is the time of year when the potatoes get ripe. Kids get to put on old clothes and dig through acres of potatoes."
"And have bonfires to roast the potatoes in," my brother recalled. "Roast hot dogs and marshmallows over the fire, and potatoes in the ashes"
"And we'd go around the cousins' houses and help dig their potatoes, and they'd come around our house and help dig ours..."
"And instead of being scolded for getting dirty when you didn't have to, because you can't dig potatoes without getting dirty, you'd get money for your share of the potatoes you dug..."
We went indoors. "Enough dirt to clog the drains," Mother said. "There ought to be a way to distract her from doing that."
"We're ready to vote," my brother said. "Baby, do you want to stay here or go back to Virginia?"
"Wanna go Virginia," the Baby said.
"That's three votes to go home," I said. "Majority!"
The parents sighed, but on the whole they seemed pleased.
We had rented houses in our extended family's neighborhood for a few years before. We'd planted vegetables, and the only vegetable we'd ever had enough of to sell were potatoes. The land had been poisoned for so long, Dad said, it hardly even produced a bean. We'd eaten green beans off our own plants but had seen no real proof that our green bean could ripen; there weren't many beans and the beetles ate them if they weren't picked thin and young, like French beans. So Dad had written to people about wanting another job in town. For one year he'd taught a trade school course in agriculture. He might have been happier, and the school might have been happier, if it had been a university course in math. Anyway he wasn't offered another contract. He'd taken a desperation job in a factory that involved working with corrosive chemicals; blistered, he'd said he was going to have to quit, forfeit even the unemployment insurance, and go home. If he deserted Mother, everyone would feel sorry for her and give her enough money to keep us in the church school. But none of this was explained to us children until the Baby was in college.
I put on my maxi-dress and went to the nursing home. They didn't have a piano; we sang "Amazing Grace" and other hymns accompanied by a guitar. I listened to the middle grades' little-kid voices singing in unison and thought how much I loved singing.
Back at the apartment there was a confirmation vote. There were discussions of logistics. Almost everything we had, including family heirlooms from England, had been left behind or lost when we'd moved back to the West Coast. A large part of Dad's salary had been spent on guilty efforts to restock our closets and shelves. In the apartment all of our new cherished books and toys were still in boxes jammed into a closet. Now they'd all have to be sold, or if not sold donated to a charity store, so we could make the trip back by Trailways bus. My Barbies could go, because Mother didn't want to hurt Aunt Dotty's feelings, but the paper dolls I was just learning to dress couldn't go. The suitcase of books for reading on the bus was pathetically small. We'd only just bought encyclopedias and we could take only two volumes of one encyclopedia. We would sing in nursing homes again, but it'd be years before we went to another church meeting. Within two weeks my brother and I would have formed the habit of basically hating school.
It was worth it, I thought, to get back home.
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