Sitting Up With the Dead: A Storied Journey Through the American South. Pamela Petro
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lion jumped up and felt Jack on its back. It tried to bite him and tried t’claw him. And tried to run through the bushes ta knock him out. But Jack was scared t’death. He was hangin’ on that lion’s back fer dear life.
The lion took ough a-runnin’. Right into town that lion went. And the king was settin’ on the porch. He looked, and seen that lion a-comin’ with Jack on its back, and he run in the house and grabbed his rifle. They come round the king’s house, the king shot and missed and shot Jack’s hat ough. Boy, Jack was getting scared on that lion’s back, and the king shootin’ his hat ough.
The lion come around the king’s house again, the king took better aim, and Bang! Shot the lion right between the eyes and killed it. The lion fell over in the street and Jack did too. Well, the king walked over thar where Jack was gettin’ up, dusting hisself off, and the king got up to Jack, and Jack said, ‘Looky here, king, I’m mad, I’m good and mad.’
The king said, ‘What you mad about? I shot that lion.’
Jack said, ‘That’s what I’m mad about.’ Said, ‘I caught that lion up on the mountain, and I was trainin’ it for your ridy horse. I’ve been a-trainin’ that thang for nearly two hours, and you up and shoot it like that. King, that makes me mad.’
The king felt sorry for Jack, give him an extra thousand dollars, and old Jack went on haum with three thousand dollars in his pocket. The last time I’s down by thar to see Jack, that lazy rascal still ain’t done n’work.
Orville chuckled so hard he almost drowned out the clapping. I was freezing – fog had settled again, bringing with it a chill better suited to a November afternoon – but I was too absorbed to care. Orville’s voice fascinated me. Akbar, Colonel Rod and Vickie all had Southern accents, but when they began their stories they slipped out of standard grammar into dialect, as well as thicker, curlier versions of their own voices, which they either borrowed from their own past selves – as, I think, was the case with Colonel Rod – or from friends or relatives. The change was a marker that conversation had stopped and storytelling had begun. But with Orville it was different. His voice never altered. As an educated, African-American professional, Akbar would never say, ‘Ah hears what you’re saying,’ the way Brer Bear does. But to Orville sody pop was always sody pop.
‘I like to tell ma kids now, ’cause they live like lit’le rich kids, with a TV set’n all, what it was like when I growed up,’ continued Orville, after he spat some more jet streams of tobacco juice. ‘I didn’t like school much. I was always a-lookin’ out the winder, day-dreamin’ and such. So I used ta hide in th’ woods and not go ta school. I’d swing on grapevines and set rabbit traps. Maybe I’d go two, three times a munth. My parents never found out ‘till we got the ’lectric’ty, ’cause then a phone come in, around 1965. Th’ princ’pal called and said I hadn’t been in school. You know I got a whippin’.
Before I went ta school, if I went’ – Orville chuckled and his beard shook up and down –’ I had to get up at five in the mornin’ and run th’ milk cow down from the mount’n, cause whar we lived at was in th’ holler. That’us just one a ma chores. Another was raisin’ pumpkins. In the fall o’th’ year, people would drive up thar t’get these pumpkins, specially round Hal-oween time er Thanks-givin’. We raised some great big pumpkins. One Saturd’y, daddy left me down at the barn sellin’ them pumpkins. It was long ’bout one or two o’clock, I hear’d a car come up, a great big old Cadillac. A feller got out with a big old coat on and a necktie. And he looked like a rich city feller.’
The déjà vu switch tripped in my brain. I waited expectantly, then sure enough, Orville sold the rich city feller a mule egg. My mind raced: if I’d had trouble disentangling the undergrowth of Colonel Rod’s conversation from his tales, it was impossible to tramp through the audible kudzu thicket of Orville’s monologues and separate memories from performance. And perhaps that was the point: his memories were his performance. The storyteller was the story. In real life Colonel Rod is a composite figure, half mule-egg seller, half city slicker; perhaps because of this dichotomy he’s more comfortable presenting the tale in the third person. He doesn’t quite have the credentials to sell mule eggs himself. But Orville does. If I hadn’t heard the story previously, I might have believed him. The parts about the sugar tit, the whippings, and playing hooky were all true, so why not passing off pumpkins as mule eggs?
Despite his isolated upbringing, Orville’s storytelling betrays a very modern self-awareness. He is conscious of his own exoticism, of how the ‘mountain man’ image is perceived and valued – and ridiculed – in the world at large, just as Vickie is conscious of Granny’s uniqueness. Because it is presented in the first person, however, Orville’s double-vision is even more unsettling. As I discovered later, listening to his storytelling tape and thumbing through a written profile of him (when the group broke up, Orville offered to sell me his latest tape and CD, which he kept in the passenger seat of his truck), Orville codifies his childhood experiences, remembering them as stories – almost as if they had happened to Jack, and not to him personally. His telling of the Mountain Dew incident on tape, and in print, was word-for-word the way he’d told it to me.
It is clear that Orville is on the cusp, one foot in the contemporary world, one foot in the otherworld of his parents, Gold and Sarah Hicks. But what made my drive to David Holt’s house, outside of Asheville, shot through with twined veins of relief and regret, was that the old world of his daddy’s day is past. If it weren’t, Orville’s stories would not have petrified into legend in his middle age (he’s forty-eight); the flotsam of daily life would polish their edges, as silt burnishes gemstones in a tumbler machine, and his tales would change shape and luster day by day. But daily experience is so different now in these Southern mountains, with the arrival of condos and tourists and wider roads and better jobs and cheeseburgers from paradise, that it doesn’t bear any more on Orville’s childhood memories than it does on Jack’s fifteenth-century escapades. And in some private place beneath his chuckles, that makes Orville sad. In the book he sold me, he is quoted as saying:
‘With my children and the new generation coming along, I can’t live the old ways. Can’t even buy a wash pot. We’ve got a car and a VCR and television, and our children are growing up fine. But if it was up to me I’d take all the electricity out of the house and have oil lamps. Live the old way.’
Before I left the Blowing Rock Recycling Center I asked Orville two crucial questions. One was how to get to his cousin Ray’s house, to which he replied with a tangled web of directions. I’d have liked nothing better than to turn around and march back up into the mountains, but I was due back at the Atlanta airport the following day, and so set them aside for a future trip. The other was what on earth I had been perching my feet on as he had talked.
Orville laughed, chest heaving, spat hard and said, ‘That thar’s a gut bucket. It’s a subst’ute fer a bass. See.’ And Orville began strumming a cat-gut string that was threaded through a tiny hole in the bottom of an overturned metal washtub, attached at the other end to a makeshift handle held aloft by a four-foot stick. Dum dum dum it went, recycling the sound of Orville’s childhood from the percussive thrum of his memory, up through his fingers, and out into the chill mountain air.
A DIFFERENT MAN, a different mountain.
Like Orville, David Holt is a ‘mountain man’, but only in the sense that he lives on a mountaintop. In Butler Mountain Estates. To reach his house I more or less pointed the car straight up, jammed it into second gear, and ground past increasingly big homes until I reached the crest, where David’s was perched. The first floor clung to a ridge that looked across a scalloped valleyscape so far-flung and full of beauty it made me gasp; the lower level sprawled down the mountainside. Wet suits and scuba gear hung drying in one of the garages.
After two hours of contemplating Orville’s beard, David himself appeared almost obscenely clean-shaven. He was handsome, with smooth, regular features; I imagined he would be extremely photogenic. He greeted me in a black baseball cap, Hawaiian-style shirt with carp