Listen Here (25 page)

On the opposite side of the French Broad watershed, where bold Allen's Creek rushes down out of the Balsams, anyone you talk with up or down that creek and many adjoining ones can tell you who Granny Sarah McNabb is and where she lives. In a weathered little house yon side of the creek. There are still pockets of snow high up in the mountains around the narrow valley, but the buds on the cherry trees in Granny's yard are swelling toward spring. There are shocks of fodder and stacks of green wood in the yard too, for a son and his family live in part of Granny's house. Nevertheless, she does all her own cooking and keeping in the two front rooms she set aside for herself after she'd finished her life work as a midwife and divided up the farm among her children. Her face is round and webbed with fine lines and full of light. Its strength of character matches her lean body's strength of muscle.

“Law, child, I've had to be strong. I'm eighty-four years old now and I've catched babies ever since I was twenty. The last one was when I was eighty. I slipped out in the night, none of the family knew about it, and I got back before morning. None of them know about it to this day.

“I waited on two or three doctors at different times while I was growing up—everybody always said I had the turn to be a nurse—and after a while women started sending for me if they couldn't get the doctor, and pretty soon some of them wanted just me, wouldn't hear to a doctor looking after them. I couldn't count all the babies—five, six, seven hundred?—there was over a hundred I guess, that I never turned in at Raleigh. It was before I ever had those forms to fill. But out of all that number, over all those years, I never lost a baby or a mother. Oh, it wasn't none of my doing. It was the work of the Lord. I was just an instrument for Him to use.

“During those years I got married and had children myself. There was ten of them, five boys and five girls, all still living today but one, and I've got forty grandchildren and fifty-two great-grandchildren and four great-great-grandchildren. And my husband was only fifty-two years old when he died. My baby was under five and there was four of the younguns just tots. It was hard going for me, sometimes we went short, but I never begged for anything. We always made a crop. I never stopped under a thousand cans of food, not counting pickles and jellies, and we had apples in the cellar.

“And for thirty years I made wreaths for the Farmer's Federation over at Asheville. They'd ship them up North and all around. I'd go up on the Balsams and get my green stuff. I'd hitch up my wagon and team and put the children in and go up into the mountains and gather greens all day long. The Federation furnished me all the wire and materials I needed. I'd get a dollar a wreath.

“But many's the time I've put it aside to go on a call. One of my boys asked me once, ‘Mama, what if you had a contract for a hundred wreaths and they was due the next morning and you were running short, but someone came asking you to go to a woman whose time had come, what would you do?' ‘Why, I'd lay them wreaths down,' I told him. ‘Wreaths can wait. A woman can't.'

“There's no time in the world like the hour a woman's bringing a baby. There's nothing like somebody coming into the world, a new life. And nobody ever come and knocked on my door and asked me to look after their wife that I didn't go. Snow or rain or cold, it never hurt me to go out in weather when I went on a case. I remember one electric storm, the man led the way up over a high ridge, the thunder was crashing and the lightning was so close the horse would just squat and tremble every time it come. But we made it through all right.

“One of the hardest and pitifulest places I ever went was to a lumber camp way back there in the Balsams. The man come after me and we rode just about all night before we got to the house, one of those poor little throwed-together lumber shacks and it already full of babies. The woman was having a hard time. I straightened up the house and took care of the children and gave the mother a little quinine in two ounces of castor oil—that's all the medicine I ever gave, and the best doctor I ever waited on showed me about using that if the baby was lingering. But I stayed a week there. I always saw my woman through, no matter how long it took, and there wasn't a scrap to cover the baby's nakedness whenever it did come. So while I waited I had to make it a belly band and some little shirts and gowns. I'd always take flannel in my bag and if they didn't have any fixings, I'd make what they needed. Sometimes I'd take food too, if I knew it to be a place where the folks were in need. There was seven babies I caught in that lumber camp before I was through there.

“Pay? Once in a while they'd pay me. That wasn't what I went for. At first I charged ten dollars. Later on I asked twenty. But mostly it was just whatever they could give, and I never dunned anybody in my life. They never paid in produce, though, ‘cause usually I had more than they did. I'd be carrying them food.

“One of the doctors let me read up in his books and after a while I signed up in Raleigh to be a midwife. They sent out somebody to teach us and give us a test. From that time on, I always got my Permit, and with a Grade A on it too. I carried all my necessaries in a denim bag with a drawstring top: washbasin and handbrush, nail file, soap, Lysol, cotton cord tape and dressing, boric acid and eyedrops, two pad covers, four towels, a white coverall apron and cap and the birth certificate and report cards on the mother and baby. It had to all be boiled in disinfectant water and wrapped in clean rags. And I always kept my special dress and slip and shoes and stockings cleaned and ready at hand for me to step right into night or day whenever a call came.”

Granny McNabb leaves for a moment and goes into the next room. She walks slowly because in the past year she's broken both hips. When she comes back her bright blue eyes are shining above the faded blue denim of the bag she's clutching. On her lap she sorts through the remnant of necessaries left in the little bag that has gone with her over so many lonely trails during so many strange hours, helping deliver life in the French Broad country. The white cap that folded to cover her head, crowned by a bit of yellowed lace sewed with tiny stitches. As she handles the flannels and cottons and bottles, a smile creeps across her face.

“Some folks think the moon changing has something to do with the time a baby's born. It don't have anything to do with it. When the apple's ripe, it'll fall. The baby wasn't got in the moon, it'll not be had there, neither.” Remembering something else, her face sobers. “A few times I had to tend a girl as young as fourteen. That's not right. A man ought to stay off that marriage till the girl's of age to have a baby. No matter what age, a man can't ever be too good to a woman has had his children. I've seen them come to their time and I know. I remember once a father came after me to help his daughter. She wasn't married, but her folks were looking after her all right. They don't always, when it's like that. I went and stayed with her and when her baby come, it was black. What'd I do? Just what I did for every one of my babies. Spanked the breath of life in it and put drops in its eyes, give it a bath and dressed it and put it to the breast. It was another soul, and its mother was another mother. I'd never lower her name none either. But I watched that baby grow up, and sometimes it pretty near broke my heart seeing him neither black nor white and neither side claiming him. He went away from North Carolina finally. I don't know where he is now but I hope he's found his Lord, wherever he is.

“My babies are scattered all over. Whenever I go to our church up here I can sit and count folks I helped bring in the world. That was my talent. I never had an education but the Lord give me my talent. And I never heard a knock come on that door at night that I didn't start talking to the Lord. He can do anything. He made the leaves of the herbs for the healing of the nations, and He can carry a body through any trial. I'd ask Him to help me. I'd tell Him it was a mother I was going to help and He'd have to show me what to do. All the way going, on horseback or walking, riding behind mules or maybe even oxen, I'd call on the Lord. This was my mission in life and I did it with His help the best I could. Because there's nothing on this earth like seeing a new life come into the world.”

(November 29, 1848–August 30, 1928)

Sarah Barnwell Elliott was the daughter of Charlotte Bull Barnwell Elliott and Bishop Stephen Elliott, one of the founders of the University of the South at Sewanee, Tennessee. Born in Georgia, Elliott spent most of her life at Sewanee, with the exception of a year at Johns Hopkins University (1886), and seven years in New York City (1895–1902).

Elliott was part of the nineteenth-century local color movement, a genre which flourished after the Civil War and was based on the ideal that the local fiction writer could interpret her own area better than someone from the outside. One of the genre's trademarks is the heavy use of dialect. Most critics find Elliott's handling of dialect inferior to that of fellow local color writer, Mary Noailles Murfree.

Known primarily as a novelist, Elliott also published a collection of short stories,
An Incident and Other Happenings
, and a biography,
Sam Houston.
She is credited with introducing feminist views into the local color genre, most notably in her novel
The Durket Sperret.
Her most critically acclaimed work was the novel
Jerry
, which opens in the Tennessee mountains but is primarily set in a western mining town; it was originally published as a serial in
Scribner's Magazine
(1890).

Elliott returned to Sewanee in 1902 and, in later life, was known as much for her suffragist activities as for her writing. She was president of the Tennessee State Equal Suffrage Association and vice-president of the Southern States Woman Suffrage Conference.

The main character of
The Durket Sperret
is Hannah Warren, a poor but proud mountain girl who defies her grandmother's demands that she marry “well.” A reviewer for
The Nation
noted that Hannah “is made to pass through an improbable experience, but she herself is never improbable.”

In this scene from
The Durket Sperret
, Hannah has ventured into Sewanee to peddle produce and encounters the townsfolks' underlying prejudice towards the mountaineers.

Novels:
The Making of Jane
(1901),
The Durket Sperret
(1898),
John Paget
(1893),
Jerry
(1891),
A Simple Heart
(1887),
The Felmeres
(1879).
Short stories:
Some Data and Other Stories of Southern Life
(1981), ed. Clara Childs Mackenzie.
An Incident and Other Happenings
(1899).
Biography:
Sam Houston
(1900).

Clara Childs Mackenzie,
Sarah Barnwell Elliott
(1980). Review of
The Durket Sperret, The Nation
, 19 May 1898, 389. “Sarah Barnwell Elliott,”
American Authors
, ed. Stanley Kunitz and Howard Haycroft (1938), 251. Robert M. Willingham Jr. “Sarah Barnwell Elliott,”
Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary
(1979), 143–44.

from Chapter II

At the time this story opens, the railway station, known as Sewanee, consisted of a few shops, the post-office, and one or two small houses, built about a barren square. From this a broad road led to the “University,” and the other end of Sewanee. Up this road the butcher and shoemaker had planted some locust trees in front of their shops, and beyond them the confectioner had laid a stone pavement for the length of his lot, and planted some maple trees, that, in the autumn, burned like flames of fire. Beyond the confectioner's the road was in the woods for a short space, then more houses. About a half mile from the station this road ended in another road that crossed it at right angles, and up and down this the University town was built.

Between the houses, between the public buildings, wherever any space was left free from carpenters and stone masons, the forest marched up and claimed its own, while the houses looked as if they had been convinced of their obtrusiveness, and had crept as far back as possible, leaving their fences as protection to the forest, and not as the sign of a clearing.

Very still and bare the little place looked on the gray March morning, when, under Mrs. Wilson's guidance, Hannah made her entrance as a peddler. Down the road, beaten hard by the rain, and dotted here and there with clear little pools of water, Hannah led old Bess, bearing the long bags, in the ends of which were bestowed the apples and potatoes, the bucket of butter being fastened to the saddle.

They had not stopped at the station, for Mrs. Wilson said the people in the town paid better prices.

“They don't know no better than to tuck frostbit ‘taters,” she explained, “an they'll give most anything fur butter jest now. All the ‘versity boys is come back, an' butter's awful sca'ce. To tell the truth,” pushing her long bonnet back, “thar ain't much o'
anything
to eat right now. What with layin' an' scratchin' through the winter fur a livin', the hens is wore out, an' chickens ain't in yit, an' these ‘versity women is jest pestered to git sumpen fur the boys.”

Hannah listened in silence. She had her own ideas about trading, and besides had very scant respect for Mrs. Wilson, either mentally or morally. She knew that her things were good, but she was determined to ask only a fair price for them. It was bad to cheat people because they were simple or “in a push.” She was in a push herself, and felt sorry for them.

“An' ax a leetle moren you ‘llows to git,” Mrs. Wilson went on, “kase they'll allers tuck some off. Thar
air
a few that jest pays what you says, or don't tuck none, an' I axes them a fa'r price.” They stopped at a gate as she finished, and she directed Hannah to “hitch the nag an' stiffen up.”

“I ain't feared,” Hannah answered, while she made old Bess fast, “but I ain't usen to peddlin', an' I don't like hit, nuther.”

Mrs. Wilson laughed. “Youuns Granny keeps on a-settin' you up till nothin' ain't good enough,” she said. “Lots o' folks as good as ary Warren hes been a peddlin' a many a year.”

“Thet don't make hit no better fur me, Lizer Wilson, an' nothin' ain't agoin' to make hit better; any moren a dog ever likes a hog-waller,” and she took down the bucket of butter with a swing that brought her face to face with her companion. One glance at Hannah's eyes, that now looked like her grandmother's, and Mrs. Wilson changed the subject.

“Leave the sacks,” she said roughly; “hit'll be time to pack ‘em in when they're sold.” She led the way in along a graveled walk, Hannah looking about her curiously, and trying to conquer her rather unreasonable anger against Mrs. Wilson, before she should meet the people about whom she had heard such varying reports.

At the front piazza Hannah paused, and Mrs. Wilson laughed exasperatingly.

“Lor, gal!” she said, “these fine folks don't ax folks like weuns in the front do'; weuns ain't nothin' but ‘Covites come to peddle'; come to the kitchen.”

That people lived who thought themselves better than the Warrens or Durkets was a new sensation to Hannah, and she wondered if her grandmother knew it. Her astonishment stilled her wrath until the thought overwhelmed her, that perhaps these people would look on her and Lizer Wilson as the same! She had followed mechanically, and before she had reached any conclusion they were at the back door.

A negro woman stood wiping a pan, while a lady, holding an open bucket of butter, was talking scoldingly to a woman who, as Hannah saw instantly, looked very different from the lady, and very much like Lizer and herself. There was a moment's silence as the newcomers appeared; then the negress spoke.

“Mornin', Mrs. Wilson,” she said familiarly.

“Mornin', Mary,” Mrs. Wilson answered, in an oily tone; then to the lady she said: “Mornin, Mrs. Skinner.”

“Good-morning, Mrs. Wilson,” the lady answered, while the woman she had been scolding turned, and Hannah recognized a person who lived near the Durkets, and who was looked down on by them just as Lizer Wilson was by the Warrens. They did not greet each other, but Hannah felt the woman's stare of wonder, that “John Warren's gal” should peddle with Lizer Wilson! She seemed to hear the story being told to the Durkets, and repeated to her grandmother by Si. Things seemed misty for a moment, then, through the confusion, she heard Lizer's voice. “No, I ain't got nothin' left but a few aigs; but this gal has a few things she'd like to get shed of ‘fore we starts home.”

Hannah listened, wondering, and remembered a saying of her grandmother's, that Lizer could “lie the kick outern a mule.”

“What has she?” questioned Mrs. Skinner.

“Taters, an' apples, an' butter,” Lizer answered; “nothin much to pack back if the price ain't a-comin'.”

“What is the price of the butter?”

“Thirty cents; I've done sold mine at thet; the taters is a dollar an' a heff a bushel, an' the apples a dollar.”

“I have just paid twenty cents for butter; why are your things so high?” was questioned sharply.

Ourn is extry good,” Lizer answered. The negro woman smiled. Hannah's indignation was gathering, but she did not speak. Mrs. Wilson must know the ways of the place—she would wait.

“I'll take the apples,” the lady began compromisingly, “but I will
not
take the butter nor the potatoes. How many apples have you?” to Hannah.

“A bushel,” Hannah answered quickly, afraid that Lizer would say a cartload.

Mrs. Skinner looked at her keenly. “I have never seen you before,” she said.

“She ain't never peddled befo', an' ain't got no need to come now,” Lizer struck in, looking straight at the woman from the other valley. “She jest come along fur comp'ny, an' brung a few things fur balance—she ain't pertickler 'bout sellin'.”

The first part of this speech soothed Hannah's feelings somewhat, but the final clause, representing her as coming for the love of Lizer Wilson, was worse than the peddling.