It
was in the 1980s that a colleague at work who loved Southern writing introduced
me to writer and poet Fred Chappell (born in 1936). She recommended, and I
read, one of his novels, I Am One of You Forever. I went on to
read two of his other novels, Brighten the Corner Where You Are and Look Back All the Green Valley, and one of his
collections of short stories, Farewell I’m Bound to Leave You.
What
I had not read was his poetry, and Chappell first established his literary
reputation as a poet. He was an English professor at the University of North
Carolina – Greensboro for 40 years, retiring in 2004. In 1997, he was appointed
North Carolina’s first poet laureate.
I
love Chappell’s stories. They are Southern, yes, but they are about family and
history and all the things that used to define Southern culture. When I read
his stories, I read my own family history – the characters and places seem real
because they are real.
I
stumbled over a copy of one of his poetry collections, River: A Poem, first published in 1975. My
copy is a reprint by LSU Press in 2000; I bought it used and it’s certainly
been read many times.
It’s
subtitled “A Poem,” and it should be – River is actually one poem with 11
divisions. It is about family, and specifically his grandparents. It was first
published when Chappell was 39, so it is something of a middle-aged memory from
the 1940s and early 1950s.
To
write these memories down is important; it helps your own children and
grandchildren understand where you and they came from, and how those who came
before were as much a part of that river as you and they are now.
The
individual poems that form River are too long to cite in full here, but here is
an excerpt of one, entitled “My Grandmother Washes Her Feet,” recounting a
conversation between Chappell and his grandmother as she was doing exactly
that:
I
see her still, unsteadily riding the edge
Of
the clawfoot tub, mumbling to her feet,
Musing
bloodrust water about her ankles.
Cotton
skirt pulled up, displaying bony
Bruised
patchy calves that would make you weep.
Rinds
of her soles had darkened, crust-colored—
Not
yellow now—like the tough outer belly
Of
an adder/ In fourteen hours the most refreshment
She’d
given herself was dabbling her feet in the water.
“You
mightn’t’ve liked John-Giles. Everybody knew
He
was a mean one, galloping whiskey and bad women
All
night. Tried to testify dead drunk
In
church one time. That was a ruckus. Later
Came
back a War Hero, and all the young men
Took
to doing the things he did. And failed.
Finally
one of his women’s men shot him.”
“What
for?”
“Stealing milk through fences…That part
Of
Family nobody wants to speak of.
They’d
rather talk about fine men, brick houses,
Money.
Maybe you ought to know, teach you
Something.”
“What do they talk about?”
“Generals,
And
the damn Civil War, and marriages.
Things
you brag about in the front of Bibles…”
 |
| Fred Chapell |
Should
I say that I have the family Bible from the 19th century. And there’s
this family stuff in the font of it, the “kind of stuff you like to brag about,”
and I have a photograph of my great-grandparents, which has a Civil War story
behind it?
The
other scenes from River include the poet as a child being lowered down the well
by his grandfather, to give it its periodic scrubbing; what it’s like for that
young boy to discover one day he’s a grandfather himself; and his grandfather’s
river baptism (a Methodist getting baptized like a Baptist, for goodness sakes), among others.
Reading
River is wading and then swimming in that river of family and memory that each
of us flows from, becoming and being that river ourselves.
Photograph of the French Broad River in western
North Carolina courtesy of the Visit
North Carolina.
