The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek

A lot of people were leery of our looks. Though with Pa working the coal, his mostly pale-blue skin didn’t bother folks as much when all miners came out of the hole looking the same.

But I didn’t have coal to disguise me in black or white Kentucky. Didn’t have myself an escape until I’d gotten the precious book route. In those old dark-treed pockets, my young patrons would glimpse me riding my packhorse, toting a pannier full of books, and they’d light a smile and call out “Younder comes Book Woman…Book Woman’s here!” And I’d forget all about my peculiarity, and why I had it, and what it meant for me.

The brisk morning nipped at my face, and I buried my chin deeper into Pa’s oilskin coat and nudged the mule ahead to the home of our first library patron. We crossed over into the fog-soaked creek before sunrise, the dark waters biting at the beast’s ankles, a willingness to hurry pricking Junia’s long ears forward. Late April winds tangled into the sharp, leafy teeth of sourwoods, teasing, combing her short gray mane. Beyond the creek, hills unfolded, and tender green buds of heart-shaped beetleweed and running ivy pushed up from rotted forest graves and ancient knobby roots, climbed through the cider-brown patches of winter leaves, spilling forth from fertile earth.

“Sorry Bluet. It got busted some when Willie had hisself a fit and threw it outside. I’m glad you’re back ’cause he lit at me good for not being able to read him his own loan. Said a colored shouldn’t be able to read better than me. Real sorry…” She latched on to my hand and laid the apology with a firm grip. I looked down at us bound together like that, tried to draw back, but Angeline squeezed tighter and whispered, “Hain’t no harm. Our hands don’t care they’re different colors. Feels nice jus’ the same, huh?”

It did. But Mr. Moffit didn’t like folks who weren’t his color. He used to demand that I stay put in the yard.

Weren’t no such spirit, just a man sly-eyeing me. He didn’t fool me none with his pasty-white face. Darkly he was, filled to the brim with the blackness inside…

It was preacher man Vester Frazier, my dead husband’s cousin … He’d been coming for me a good while, and more boldly since I’d been left widowed.

He’d done the same to others like me: Michael McKinney, the three-nippled midget who rode his goat cart bare-chested across the hills, a boy with pink eyes and hair the color of a white lamb, the seven-year-old Melungeon girl who had fit that tonic and herbs couldn’t quiet…And there were the godless, those who’d never found a church, and a few ungodly others Vester Frazier and his followers thought the devil had given those peculiarities to. The odd markings with no names.

Lovett’s Ridge was a spectacle, and soon I relaxed a little and soaked it up. Layers of dark-blue mountains stacked in the distance, at every turn their cuts rolling, deepening, then lightening to shades of blue-greens from the day’s passing clouds. The air blew fresh and breezy. Scents of apple blossoms lifted from a nearby tree, and honeysuckle clung to a crumbling split-rail fence as swallowtails and fat-legged bees flitted above the old timbers and dipped for nectar.

Mountainfolk looked forward to this section filled with the latest home remedies from magazine and to the health pamphlets the government sent in. It made me happy that a lot of folks, especially the elders, insisted on sharing their own too.

Someone had written instructions for using a lodestone, advised readers to wear the mineral round their necks to attract money, love, and luck. Beneath that was a note from the old midwife Emma McCain, instructing women to find the small stone from the knee of an old cock and hold it during birth to protect the babe … Underneath the amulet’s instructions, Emma had penned a special reminder written to husbands: Wear a cock stone to excite and make your wife more agreeable.

I looked down, knowing my place, knowing I was the one they were really afraid of, detested the most.

It was difficult enough being colored, much less being my odd, ugly color and the last of my kind. Somehow, folks like Harriett and Eula made it worse, made sure their color, any color was better than mine. I was an affliction on their kind and mankind. And I was to stay put, and exactly where they wanted to keep me put. Beneath them. Always and alone.

“You know the rules. Blues and Coloreds outside,” Eula said, shaking her head, darting her nervous eyes between Queenie and me. “We can’t have you using the indoor facilities. We wouldn’t want to chance passing on a … Well, we just can’t have it!”

The Companion was a popular request. Mountain women were snatching up new cures and remedies from the magazine, abandoning their old ways of healing.

[…]

“Be obliged to git one. Nester Rylie’s been reading it and she told me in passing last year, she ain’t rubbed groundhog brains on her babies’ sore teeth or needed to use the hen innards on the gums of her teething ones since. And after she’d read about a good paste recipe that cured thrush, Nester said, none of her nine youn’uns ain’t ever had to drink water from a stranger’s shoe again to get the healing.”

I held the library book a moment and then said, “Miss Loretta, this is a Doctor Dolittle book, and I think you might like it some—”

Loretta held up a shushing hand and shook her head.

“Nonsense, child. And what I done told you before: I ain’t letting you read me them government books.”

“But—”

“Them’s books about rubbish and devilish deeds. Foolishness. Take it on back.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, wishing she’d let me read her one from the library once in a while instead of her Bible.

Every time I brought one I thought she might take a liking to, she’d sour and rile on. “Them city books ain’t fitting for my kind—ain’t got a lick of sense in them pages for us hillfolk. Nothing but foolish babble an’ prattle.”

Pa believed the mattress advertisement that promised to soothe hurt bones and give better rest would help me heal faster. Pa had credit to spend at the Company store that he used for the purchase, saying he’d had a little extra that month.

But Pa didn’t have as much as two nickels to rub together […] The Company didn’t like for the Kentucky man to feel a dollar in his pocket, and they’d pay the miners mostly in Company scrip—credit that could be used only at the Company store—to make sure of just that. The Company […] [kept] the families good ’n’ indebted to them, insisting to any that might raise a brow, it serves to smarten the miners, give the coal man a vicissitude from improper business standards, and educates them on sound business practices, on acquiring sound credit.

Pa and I had seen our share of hunger. We only had the berries, morels, squirrels, rabbits, and other life we’d pinched from the forest. Sometimes Pa’d trade the miners his kills for other foods we couldn’t get, like eggs, corn, and fruit. Rarely could we afford the expensive staples at the Company store. The Company scrip and my paycheck helped us to stay afloat a little, despite Pa using most of it to buy up the store medicines rather than a doctor’s stronger ones to fight his lung illness. Still, he stayed in debt purchasing newfangled medicines, the next sure-fix potion that the store would bring in. Like a small bandage, the store-bought medicine would hide his sickness for a little bit, so that he could go back down into the mine and make more money for newer cures the Company kept stocking and pushing on the miners.

I’d seen motorcars and coal trucks around town, read about them in books and magazines, but I never imagined I’d come this close to one, let alone ride in one. I stared at the shiny steel-winged lady perched on the nose of it.

Doc must’ve seen my bewilderment because he grinned and said it weren’t nothing more than a radiator ornament called “the flying lady.”

[…]

Then he opened the heavy door. “Time is wasting, Bluet. It’s just a horse with wheels,” he insisted. “A 1932 Plymouth automobile, is all. Get in. You’ll find it’s a comfortable sedan.”

I know’d what it was, but the leap from knowing to actually touching one seemed overwhelming. I looked at Doc and then back to the machine, and pulled out one of Pa’s handkerchiefs from my pocket to dab my brow.

It was a life I’d only read about in my books, and my hungry hands touched the glass, trying to touch the stories I’d read.

[…]

I fumbled with the crank, then finally opened the pane and breathed in smells of oil, gas, concrete, and other scents I couldn’t name, tasted the peculiar spirit of the place, listened to the unusual buzz, the city’s open hymnal.

The soot of the city, its oils and smoke and grit, filled my nose, burning, watering my eyes.

A motorcar hurried past us and honked, startling me. Another answered back, and still another and several more. Shouts, the pound of hammers, and music and loud greetings swirled from every direction. “There’s so many voices. How do folks stand it?” I pressed my palms to my ears, swiveling my head to follow it all.

“I’m sorry the nurses were rough with you, Bluet,” he said, “but it was important—very—and we’ll learn soon about your family’s blood and how we can fix it—fix you, my dear.”

I felt a spark of anger slip behind my eyes, prompting a headache. What I wanted most was to be okay as a Blue. I never understood why other people thought my color, any color, needed fixing.

[…]

Fix. Again, the chilling word caught in my throat, and I suddenly wished Mama had fixed my birth with some of her bitter herbs. Then I would’ve never had to suffer this horrid curse of the blueness. Still Doc said it would be wonderful, and I couldn’t help but wonder what my and Pa’s life would be like if we were fixed.

Winnie clasped her hands. “If only we could get more outreach programs up here. If only they could send a block of cheese with every book, a loaf of bread.” She tilted her head to the sky as if telling it to God.

I wished it too. Their hunger for books could teach them of a better life free of the hunger, but without food they’d never live long enough to have the strength to find it.

“Just one damn block of cheese,” Winnie scratched out in a whisper.

I thought of the cheese Doc promised. If I could bargain with him for more food, I could give it to the schoolchildren.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Smith,” I said, secretly touched they loved the books so dearly. Without the loans, his young’uns couldn’t learn because the moonshiner refused to send them to school. No man, no Kentucky law, could make a hillman do that. Most folks hadn’t even heard it was law. The land had its own decrees, held tight its hard ways of handling harder things. Folks would pack their little ones off to school only if it suited them, and not because of something written somewhere far away by city folks they’d never seen, or would ever see.

I had also seen the feminine hygiene advertisements in magazines and newspapers. The pictures of the weeping lady with a dainty hankie to her eyes showed she’d been a good mother, good housekeeper, good hostess, good cook, all those things, until 6:00pm.

The feminine wash advertisement scolded the sad lady, insisted the perfect homemaker did one disgraceful thing her husband couldn’t forgive by forgetting her smelly lady parts. It warned womenfolk about the dangers of neglecting intimate personal hygiene and reminded them to use the feminine wash to keep from wrecking a marriage. A powerful germicide, the product promised, and one that removes all kind of powerful things and even stranger things I’d never heard of like “organic matter” […] It will keep your man happy and is a surety for a happy marriage.

For a minute I envied her, wanted to send Junia home, unlace my heavy, tight shoes, and run free with her to escape Frazier, the doc and his medical tests, and everything damning to me—to hunt and fish in the woods like I’d done as a child. To be wilded. Have a wilded heart in this black-treed land full of wilded creatures. There were notches in these hills where a stranger wouldn’t tread, dared not venture—the needle-eyed coves and skinny blinds behind rocks, the strangling parts of the blackened-green hills—but Angeline and hillfolk here were wilded and not afraid. And I longed to lift bare feet onto ancient paths and be wilded once again.

In front of the mirror, I pulled out a section of my hair, carefully wrapping the ends around a strip of fabric a couple of times, rolling it all to my scalp before tying the rags into tight knots.

When I finished I stared at myself. An old ballad spilled from my lips, and I stretched out an arm and pretended to accept a dance with a find man who’d won my pie. I twirled around the room once, twice, and again and again until I stubbed my toes on Pa’s bedpost and yelped. I winced and limped back over to the looking glass. Feeling foolish and looking it, I yanked out all the rag curls and turned my darkening face away from the mirror, untangling my damp hair, scratching at my head.

“Hold your tongue! The men picked me, and I have to speak for my fellow miners to get better pay and safer work conditions! It’s thievery down in the shafts, the lung sickness waiting to snatch your last breath. The miserable long hours. And the Company bosses who’d murder anyone who wants better than that—they scalp our land, leave behind the dirt an’ ash, their broken coal trucks and ghost camps. They’ve left their filthy, fancy boot prints everywhere on everything, the poor ’tucky man’s back. Why, even the fish are dying from the poisons running into our streams.”

“I feel the same as before, Doc.” But I turned back to the mirror and know’d I wasn’t, nor would ever be. I brushed my hand slowly over my face, poked my lips that had colored a pretty pink, my cheeks a soft rose. Normal. I peered again at the stranger looking back at me, then looked at Doc, questioning.

“Modern medicine,” he exclaimed.

“I’m a stranger.” I stared at my reflection.

“A right pretty stranger at that,” Doc commented. I gazed back to the glass and inspected closer.

Pretty. Could it be? My neck looked white, like linen that matched my hands. I raised a palm and lightly braced it at the base of my neck. A tear rolled off my cheek, then another and several more, splashing onto my white hand. I was white, and that pretty white stranger was me. Me.

But Pa weren’t listening to me or the doc, and a few minutes later, I flew out the door to relieve my stomach same as last night.

Finished, I crept back inside. Pa gawked at me, alarmed. “Daughter, are you hurt?”

Doc shook his head. “No. It’s temporary, Elijah. Like the drug.”

“Temporary? Then it’s a vanity, not a cure,” Pa snapped.

I winced.

“She should feel better directly. It’s just a little discomfort that’ll right itself, Bluet,” the doc said with sympathy in his voice.

“Prideful,” Pa grumbled. “Dangerous.”

“It’s a safe cure,” Doc insisted. “And Bluet’s strong.”

Pa scowled. “Belladonna cures ails too, and it’ll turn mean an’ slay the strongest.”

“Oh my,” she said. “So pretty, and the prettiest li’l daisy I’ve ever seen. Isn’t that right, Samuel?” She jiggled him up and down on her hip. The baby squealed with delight, poked a finger into his drooling mouth, and grinned at me. “Yessir, our Bluet’s a looker, and one the boys are gonna want to hook,” she told him teasingly. “And look at you, Samuel, already a’flirtin.’”

Harriett walked out of the ladies’ room.

“Uh-huh. One pretty lady,” Birdie said.

Harriett’s heel landed beside me. She leaned her head dangerously close to min. “A pig in lipstick is still a stinking pig,” she spat, her wet hiss spinning in the air as she swept past me to her desk.

I turned. Her red eyes bored into mine. And I held them, locked, and lifted my chin two-man tall, snatching back some of the humankind that had been stolen.

I’d been foolish. Reached the worse. The drug had not redeemed me. I didn’t belong at this bright, happy gathering with these lively folks and bubbly chatter. I belonged in darker places where darker thoughts kept me put, where sunlight, a cheerful voice, or a warm touch never reached me. Weren’t no pill ever going to change that.

I threw the cake into a bush and mounted Junia, glancing once more at the crowd. Across the street, Jackson talked to a group of smiling men and women. He lifted his head my way, raised a hand, and called out, “Cussy Mary…”

I couldn’t bear for him to see my disgrace, see me for who I really was—who I’d become in their eyes. “Ghee!” I kneed the mule hard, and she raced off toward our dark, dead holler.

“Where’s my manners? I hope you get to feeling pert soon, ma’am. I miss seeing my bonny Picasso.” He grinned.

I stared at him blankly, and he added, “Picasso’s painting of the pretty blue lady, the Woman with a Helmet of Hair that I’d seen in one of the magazines you brought us? You remind me of her. Your fine color. My woman always said God saved that best color for His home.” He pointed a finger up to a patch of blue sky parting the gray clouds. “Guess He must’ve had Himself a little bit left over.”

Astonished, I could feel my face warm. No one, not a soul, ever said that my old color was fine. The best.

I touched the baby’s hand, my own eyes filling, my mind grappling with losses, the unbearable pain of loneliness. Nary a townsfolk, not one God-fearing soul, had welcomed me or mine into town, their churches, or homes in all my nineteen years on this earth. Instead, every hard Kentucky second they’d filled us with an emptiness from their hate and scorn. It was as if the Blues weren’t allowed to breathe the very same air their loving God had given them, not worthy of the tiniest spoonful He’d given to the smallest forest critter. I was nothing in their world. A nothingness to them. And I looked into Angeline’s dying eyes and saw my truths, and the truths that would be her daughter’s. Know’d that without love, in the end, her babe would have no one, nothing, and would be fated to die alone in her own aching embrace.

“Let me tell you, Cussy, a miner’s life is a short one.”

“Oh, Pa,” I fanned his words away.

“Daughter, they buried eight of ’em last January after the collapse. Sealed that pit with them eight poor souls trapped inside it.”

I had heard the horror of it all. How the men and young boys were trapped so far down in the midnight dust and crumbling rock, no one could reach them. Then a leak of poisonous gas put them to sleep. There weren’t anything left to do, no way to rescue them except to cover the tomb and have a preacher hold a burial service at the face of the mine.

I gasped. It had never happened here, but I’d read about the laws in the city newsprints and know’d they were being enforced in other places. Folks were charged and thrown in jail for courting someone not like themselves, for taking another color to their marriage beds. It was an ugly law that let mere folk lord over different-type folks, decide who a person could or couldn’t love.

[…]

Sheriff shifted and squared his shoulders. “The law clearly states that marrying a colored person destroys the very moral supremacy of our Godly people and is damning and destructive to our social peace.”

“I’m taking my wife and daughter home,” Jackson told the sheriff.

“You listen to me, Lovett. You think you can jus’ waltz back in to Kaintuck with your highfalutin ways and soil the good people. No, sir, this ain’t the west!” Sheriff’s face heated with a fury.