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Writings1 Julie Norvell Taking It Back
On the dusk of June 19th, 1983, my mother gave birth to me, a slightly underweight but healthy baby girl. She thoughtfully named me Jodi Rena Miller, after her own mother, who died just five days prior to my birth. Every year on my birthday since, my mom tells me how hot it was in Lexington when she and my father sped down South Limestone to Good Samaritan Hospital, all the windows rolled down and Waylon Jennings wailin’ on the radio. She also tells me every year that as grandma lay on her death bed in the exact same hospital just days before my entrance into the world, she said, “Mae, the girl you’re holdin’ in your belly right there isn’t ever gonna take no for an answer.” And my mom replied, “If she’s anything like you, Mama…” “She will be, Mae, she will be.” Growing up, I wondered why grandma had said that about me and why mom always felt the need to pass it down every year, especially since Mom didn’t talk about her life before Dad too often. All I knew growing up was that my mother did everything in her power to get out of Eastern Kentucky, and she never looked back, if she could help it. When Grandma started getting sick, Mom and Dad drove east to Clayhole, Kentucky, a little town just southeast of Jackson, and forced Grandma to travel back to Lexington with them so they could get “real” help for her in the city. She was staying with my Great Aunt Bulah at the time, preparing to die where her home was, but Mom felt she needed “educated” doctors to assist her. One day just months ago, I figured out why Grandma said what she did about me. I watched my favorite tree get chopped like a vegetable to the ground for parking lot space at my school, the University of Kentucky, and I realized why grandma’s soul was connected with my own. We both had the land in our bones. I can still see the image vividly; a large big-leaf magnolia tree stood about thirty feet directly in front of the window where my medieval literature class was held. I stared at it unconsciously. I was drawn to it like mothers are drawn to their children. Its massive leaves hung like the floppy ears of a hound dog. It looked nothing like the other trees around campus. It had an exotic feel, but it was native to Kentucky, my home. When I began college in the fall of 2002, I immediately noticed this tree and found myself sitting underneath its canopy every chance I had: in the morning with my cup of coffee, between classes while I studied, and during lunch as I ate my dreadfully repetitive peanut butter sandwich, a ripe banana, and Wheat Thins. I felt protected beneath this tree. I can’t explain what exactly drew me to it, but I befriended her and never looked back. It was April of my last semester at the university, just one month from graduation. There was talk amongst faculty and students about campus renovation that would soon be taking place. The university’s ambition for Top 20 status was being put into motion. One Monday, following the first warm day of the season when all the trees began gathering their green coats, Dr. Hill passed out a pamphlet which was created to inform the students, faculty, staff, and surrounding population of the new changes to come at the university. The first facet of the agenda was to pave a new parking lot, especially for students who commute to class everyday. The parking lot would be constructed right outside the Whitehall Classroom Building. The building initiative was estimated to last five to six years. With Lexington’s growing population and its ever growing passion for Starbucks and Super Wal-Mart, university administrators felt it was time to modernize and expand facilities. In doing so, they stole the only place I felt at peace. I was sitting in class listening to Dr. Hill recite the beginning of Beowulf in Old English when I began my clockwork shift of the eyes towards my tree, except this particular turn of my head brought me tumbling to the cold, hard floor of Room 108. My tree was being demolished. I’ll never forget the look on my classmates’ faces as I picked myself off of the floor, brushed the dust away from my faded blue jeans, and took my seat again with a giant tear that ran from my eye duct to the corner of my mouth, where it seeped onto my tongue, and I swallowed it with a hard gulp to keep more tears from coming. “Jodi, what happened?” Dr. Hill asked. He was clearly trying to remain calm, but I think he secretly wanted to take me outside into the hallway and paddle my behind like I was in elementary school. I had interrupted his infamous Old English monologue. “I don’t know. I guess it’s just been a long day. Sorry.” And as the words came out of my mouth, I cringed because I knew Grandma was shaking her curly, red hair at me for not expressing the truth. I was taking no for an answer. It was strange that day when I brushed off my utter shock and disregarded the fact that thirty feet away from my seat, the tree of my daydreaming was being cut, limb by limb, to the ground. Chainsaws roaring like lions in the pleasant midday air. All of its guts and skin were flailing through the air helplessly, and I just sat there while, for the first time of my twenty-two years of life, my connection to the grandmother I never knew became the only real thing I had. When the clock hands landed on 1:50 p.m., I jumped to my feet in a hurry and bolted towards the red, double doors that squeaked as they opened and closed. I walked down the single set of steps leading to the sidewalk that lay just to the left of my fallen tree. I toddled slowly past, hesitating to look at her remains, but knowing I had to say a proper goodbye. I sat down on the stump that was left of her body and ran my hand across the rings that established her old age and her enchantment over me. I rose to my feet for lack of control over my emotions and bid her farewell under my breath. I headed quickly towards my little, blue Chevy S10 pickup truck that once got my older brother across the continent and back but which now sat covered with magnolia bark and large magnolia seedpods. As I drove home, the image of my tree falling played over and over in my head. I felt like I had lost a friend to death. I wondered if other people got this involved with trees. I pulled into my driveway and headed straight to my room on the second floor of the house I had lived in for eighteen years. I sat on my quilted bed cover, and finally, the tears I had stopped from spreading onto my face earlier fell like the limbs of the tree. I took out the only picture of my grandmother that I owned. My mom gave it to me when I turned ten years old. She told me my grandmother loved me, and had she survived the lung cancer that so suddenly brought her to death, we would have been best friends. I rubbed her pale, white face surrounded with fiery ringlets, with my right thumb and saw my eyes in hers. Why would she say that I would never take no for an answer? I knew exactly where they were planning to pave for that parking lot. I knew the big-leaf magnolia that stood with no ill intention would have to be cut, but I never thought to write a letter to the school president or stage a protest. I could have tried to stop that tree from falling, but I didn’t. The word “no” never formed in the shape of an oval on my lips.
5 I decided right then and there that I had to know my grandmother’s story. I had to know why she thought she could speak for me when I was merely a baby in my mother’s womb and if that had anything to do with my profound desire to save that tree. …………………………………………………………………………………………….... I walked across the stage in front of thousands of people at Rupp Arena for my college graduation. The Chair of the English Department handed me my diploma just twenty-eight days after the big-leaf magnolia was cut down before my eyes. As I grabbed the rolled piece of cardstock from him, a symbol of four years of hard work, I shook the dean’s crusty hand, focused my eyes on his multi-colored tie and walked back to my seat, where I imagined for the rest of the ceremony what my life would be like now. As it turned out, my first stop as a college graduate was Eastern Kentucky. My friends had a hay day ridiculing me for this choice. A couple weeks before I left for my adventure, y friend Lydia asked me, “Jodi, why the hell would you go to Eastern Kentucky when your father offered you an all expense paid trip to Paris for a graduation present?” I simply replied, “I’m going back to my roots.” No one could wrap their minds around my decision, even my family at first, but I knew I had to go back to where my grandmother and my mother were born and find where my roots were buried. My mom struggled with my decision at the beginning. She kept asking me why I thought this was necessary. “What good is it going to do to explore where I came from, Jodi? That place isn’t a part of me anymore.” “That place isn’t a part of me anymore”- those words rattled through my head until the day I packed up my truck and left. Maybe I wasn’t a part of my mother’s life in the mountains, but she certainly was. I was setting out to find that part of her. I was headed to Breathitt County, Kentucky, where my Great Aunt Bulah Mae still lived on the land where my mother grew up and her mother grew up and her parents before them. She was the last surviving sister of three in the second generation of Millers in Breathitt County. I had never met her before. The last time my mother saw her was at Grandma’s funeral, before I was born. I asked Mom for Bulah’s number, after days of explaining why I had to make this trip. She finally caved in and searched the back of her faded, flowery address book. Fortunately, Bulah Mae slid aside all her hard feelings towards my mother for not keeping in touch and graciously invited me to spend the month of June with her. She told me on the phone, “Jodi, if you’re gonna come stay with me for a whole month, you can’t just be layin’ around like these lazy teenagers I see these days. I’m puttin’ you to work in my garden and in my kitchen!” Bulah Mae sounded very young on the phone. At 77 years old, she was still working outside all day and cooking for her neighbors as often as she could. I’d never done much cooking, let alone tended to a garden. When I began asking my mom questions about her life growing up, she was hesitant talking about it, but she warmed up after she realized I was not going to back down. The night before I left, my mom and I sat on the back porch of our house where huge willow trees form a canopy over our backyard. We drank hot black tea, and as she wandered down memory lane, I held her hand all the way. She mainly told me about her own mother. How she was always causing uproar in the town. How she fought for the simplest of causes then came home every afternoon and cooked and cleaned and made certain my grandpa was well fed. She told me that my grandmother was a legend in her time. Before the uprising about women’s rights issues in the seventies, my grandmother was already fighting, in her own way. My favorite story she told was about the time my grandmother, Rena, got her little town of Clayhole all in a stir over a piece of land that the town council voted to log to build a new town hall. Her ammunition for causing the stir was a short poem she sent to the local paper. It read: Streams of shadows chase each other through wet leaves on the forest floor, As my feet ramble on crackling sticks and make the sound of colliding rocks migrating down the creek bed. At the top of the ridge, looking down into waves of broccoli heads, Where some are red, yellow, orange- Good enough to eat with my eyes and fill up until dinnertime, When I can sit on my cabin porch and contemplate where I’ve been and where I’ll go tomorrow. If I didn’t have these trees to rest my weary head beneath, I’d never find solace, and the sounds that bind their divinity would vanish with my view.
My mother had kept this poem all these years to remind herself that life is fleeting, she told me. Grandma Rena wrote it on a piece of white stationary paper for her, with the letters “RM” embossed in the left hand corner. That poem was one of the only keepsakes my mom had from her life in Eastern Kentucky. “Jodi, people from the mountains have hard lives. There’s a stereotype about those folks that just hangs over their heads. That is why I left. I wanted to start over. Not to mention the fact that it was hard living with the mom that was always causing chaos. As much as I love her still, I’ll never forget the torment I went through because she thought everyone else was wrong and she was right.” She went on to tell me of the effects mountaintop removal and strip mining had on the families in the hollers of the Appalachian Mountains. She explained how my grandma was always trying to fight the coal companies. She said, “Families living at the bottom of the mountains don’t get a lot of say about their very own land around there. People are always dying from mining accidents, whether it’s actually up on the mine or down below when an overloaded coal truck whips around a curve and collides with another vehicle. And the environment is always being toyed with. Pretty soon, there won’t be any native plants or animals down there.” She specifically remembered a time when a dam broke down the road from her house and sent massive amounts of sludge through the stream that ran through their town. She lost a friend to that flood. Until that night, I had never given a thought to where my electricity actually came from. “Do you know why our electricity is so cheap, Jodi?” My mom asked me and my jaw dropped. I had never thought about it like that before. After our talk on the back porch that night, I felt ready to leave home. As cautious as my mom was about reliving stories from her past, she eased them out of her mouth like a natural storyteller. Once the last drop of tea hit her lips though, she stopped immediately and became my mother again. ……………………………………………………………………………………………… I woke up the next morning, bright eyed and feeling inspired for the road ahead. I packed the bed of my pickup truck with the essentials: tent (just in case), sleeping bag, pillows (2 to be exact), a duffel bag with shorts, t-shirts, under garments (all the things a girl needs), and my camera, and in the passenger seat, I laid my journal down (my partner on the road). I drove down my street, past all the familiar yards of my childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, and a shiver ran from my head to my toes in an anxious whirl. Next stop: Breathitt County, Kentucky. As I pulled onto Highway 15 from the Mountain Parkway, the mountains I would soon grow to love like family became visible. I was overtaken with sentiment as I drove down the two, sometimes three-lane road. I had never thought about Kentucky as a mountain state, having grown up just miles from the rolling fields of the horse farms it is most famous for. About five miles in, the joy I was experiencing came to an abrupt halt when I saw, for the first time, a mountain without its top. This is what mom was talking about. I thought. As I progressed further into the mountains, I noticed more and more flat land where mountains once stood like Egyptian pyramids. Large machines roamed across their surfaces pouring colossal amounts of freshly dug coal into trucks that passed me on the highway. It took five hours to make a two and a half hour trip to Aunt Bulah Mae’s. It is easy to get lost in these mazes of gravel roads that lay at the bottom of the mountains. I pulled onto the rickety bridge that lies over a babbling creek and drove through a winding gravel road towards her house. Surrounding me were gigantic, ancient trees. Pressing their leaves towards me and leading me down a road I felt I already knew. Big-leaf magnolias were everywhere. As I pulled closer to where I would be living for the next few weeks, I could see Aunt Bulah pull her massive arm out of the pocket of her gingham apron and wave it in the air, as if she knew me, like I was truly her family. It felt like I was driving towards home. “Now Jodi ,honey, did you get lost or somethin’?” She yelled with a loud squeal after she saw that my window was rolled down. “Yeah, all these roads look the same, but the scenery sure is nice. I didn’t mind the inconvenience. I hope I didn’t put you out!” I exclaimed, sticking my head out the truck window. “Nope, I’ve just been bakin’ some goodies for that little tummy of yours. I had a feelin’ I might need to fatten you up,” she said, as I stepped out of my truck, brushed the wrinkles out of my long, purple skirt and breathed in the mountain air. Aunt Bulah wrapped her body around mine, engulfing me in her giant breasts. She smelled like homemade bread baking in the oven. I melted in her arms. “Come on in, dear. We’ve got almost 23 years of catchin’ up to do. And some beans to pick!” 11 I felt instantly at home with Aunt Bulah. There was never a moment of an official introduction between us. We laid eyes on each other and knew that our blood was connected. It didn’t take long to learn about her garden. At 7 a.m. the next morning, she had me outside in the yard, picking beans, shucking corn for the neighbors, and doing what eventually became my favorite part of tending to her garden, eating the blackberries that grew wild around it. Each morning, I was up and outside getting familiar in many different ways with the land. When I wasn’t helping with the garden, I was weeding the shrubs around the front porch or hiking the trail behind the house. I kept wondering when I was going to get tired of doing the same activities everyday, but it never happened. There was always a new tree to see, a new flower to smell, a different part of the creek to dip my feet in. One morning, a few days after my arrival, Aunt Bulah and I walked down the gravel road towards her neighbor Anne’s house to offer some fresh baked bread, which I made, and freshly picked blackberries. “Bulah Mae, I swear, you spoil me!” She yelled, as she opened her yellow door and saw her holding a picnic basket. “Well if I didn’t give you some of my food, I wouldn’t a been able to keep this girlish figure I got!” Aunt Bulah cried with a big, bellowing laugh, knowing she was an easy comparison to our favorite syrup bottle. As we stepped onto Anne’s front porch, dripping with sweat, she offered us glasses of sweet iced tea and welcomed us into her home. We sat around her oak kitchen table, popping blackberries into our mouths, drinking tea, and talking about the past. I learned that my grandma was known as “Rowdy Rena.” My mom wasn’t kidding when she said my grandma was always causing upheaval in the town. Anne’s family had lived down the holler from my family since she was just a little girl, playing with my grandma, then her daughter playing with my mother. I was falling in love with the innate sense of community here. I asked Anne and Bulah about the poem Grandma had written that my mother told me about the night before I left. “Why Jodi, you’re in for a real treat now,” Anne giggled and walked towards an old roll top desk. She opened the bottom drawer and pulled out a notebook, overflowing with paper that smelled like my attic at home. “Here ya go, sweetie.” She handed me the very paper my grandma’s poem was published in. I raised it to my nose and breathed deep the smell of aged paper, imagining the satisfaction on Grandma Rena’s face when she opened this paper up almost fifty years ago and found her very own poem printed for the whole town to read. Bulah and I spent the rest of the morning with Anne. They told me stories and I sat back, devouring all their words. ……………………………………………………………………………………………… It was a sultry Saturday evening. We had just finished eating a meal of fried pork chops, fresh green beans, baked potatoes, and cooked cabbage with a little vinegar added for taste. She was certainly fattening me up. I had already gained four pounds, in nine days. This night was a peculiar one. The sky was swirled with oranges and pinks and purples, like God was painting through the blue that had been out all day. The sun was squash yellow as it moved slowly behind the ridgeline. Aunt Bulah stirred up a pitcher of sweet iced tea with blackberries floating at the top, her special touch. We sat down together on the front porch and sat in silence for nearly ten minutes, both of us staring into the locks of leaves that extended around us. “Aunt Bulah, I chose to come here because I want to know where I came from. Mom is always telling me how much Grandma Rena loved me, but she didn’t even know me. I figured there would be no other way to find her than to come to the land that she loved so dearly,” I said, feeling every word. Aunt Bulah stood up, walked to the front steps and wrapped her wide arm span around one of the dark, wooden poles of the porch and said, “Jodi, when your grandma got sick, she moved in here with me, so I could take real good care of her. She kept sayin’, ‘Bulah Mae, I gotta live to see my Jodi enter in the world ‘cause who’s gonna tend to this land, if it ain’t her?’ Your mama left here after she and Michael got engaged and she didn’t do much lookin’ back after that. She wanted to live in the big city, where the people weren’t judged for bein’ poor and backwards, I guess. Rena hated to see her leave behind all the memories that made her who she was, but she knew she couldn’t stop her either. Your grandma loved your brother Justin, too, but she felt this land should go to the next woman in the family, since your mama wasn’t gonna have it.” “Is my mom aware of this? Does she know that grandma wanted to leave me all this?” I asked, stunned and disheartened. I felt I had been lied to all this time. “Yeah, yeah, she knows, but I’m sure she didn’t wanna force it on ya. It’s a big responsibility. I think Mae knew you’d come around to findin’ your way around here one day. Your mom wrote me a letter about fifteen years ago, that was the last time I’d heard from her. She said you was a special kind of child, Jodi, the kind of little girl that knew her own way from the very beginning.” “She said that? Hmm, maybe I was, I don’t know, but am I so special that I deserve this land? I mean, my home is Lexington, not Breathitt County.” “Oh honey, this is your home,” Aunt Bulah whispered, as she placed her calloused hand on mine and squeezed tight. I went to bed that night wondering where to go from here? I had come to Aunt Bulah’s to find something, I still don’t know what exactly, maybe my grandmother, maybe something new, maybe myself. ……………………………………………………………………………………………… “Jodi, rise and shine and give God the glory, glory,” Aunt Bulah sang as she opened the rosy pink curtains in my bedroom. “Get up sweetie. We’re goin’ on a little trip today.” I stood in the bathroom, remembering the smell of the paper that my grandma’s poem was written on and smiled into the mirror. The sun had streaked my dark hair red, like Grandma Rena’s ringlets. I washed my face and I stepped out into the hallway to find Aunt Bulah standing there with a cup of coffee and a blueberry muffin. “You’re so good to me, Aunt Bulah. Can I just stay with you forever?” I asked, as I reached for my coffee and muffin and kissed her wrinkled cheek. “Git your shoes so we can get a move on.” I didn’t ask any questions. I just followed her orders. We hopped into my truck and started down the road. We didn’t speak for the first few minutes. I finished up my warm blueberry muffin and sipped on my coffee. It was too early for conversation. “Turn left here.” I turned left and found myself on another winding road just like the one that led up to Aunt Bulah’s. I learned to drive slowly on these roads over the course of my stay. The coal trucks didn’t seem to give much consideration to the other cars on the road. “Okay, now a right just past this curve.” As I took the turn onto a gravel road, leading uphill, I saw a sign that read: “Flint Ridge Mining Site.” Where was Aunt Bulah taking me? I thought and then remembered suddenly, my mom telling me that all of her relatives that had passed away were buried at Flint Hill Cemetery. The vague memory of that name stuck out intensely in my mind. “So, can I ask where we are going?” “Nope, just keep on drivin’.” Aunt Bulah said, without a smile, as a heavily loaded coal truck whisked by us, launching coal and gravel dust in the air and onto the trees that outlined the road. “Okay, last turn up here on your right. See that little, white chapel on the hill? Head towards there.” I took a slow turn up another gravel road. My heart was beating fast. My intuition was bursting with a forceful cry. I was right. Aunt Bulah was taking me to my grandmother’s grave. ……………………………………………………………………………………………… I stepped out of my truck in no hurry. Without shutting the door, I walked towards a large white sign with black letters that said “Flint Hill Cemetery.” Slowly, I unlocked the latch of the metal fenced gate and found myself at the bottom of a flight of wooden stairs. I wandered in a dream-like state up the stairs, looking straight ahead towards a hill of graves, big and small, old and new, fresh flowers, rotted flowers, and plastic flowers. At the top, I turned around and saw Aunt Bulah walking towards the porch of the chapel, staring into the distance. The grass was high and stiff. It rubbed against my unshaven legs causing them to itch. I bent towards the ground to scratch my right leg and discovered a tiny ladybug crawling on my toe. I left it alone. I began walking through the maze of graves, noticing the name “Miller” on more than half of them. I was hesitating at every glance, knowing at any moment, “Rena” would be carved into a grave and I wasn’t sure how I would react yet. So I stopped my footsteps and took a seat on a gray, marble bench. Before that moment, I hadn’t taken the time to look around me. I was not only in the cemetery where my grandma was buried; I was sitting in the middle of a coal mine. I rolled my eyes to the left of me and felt my heart jump as if it had been struck with a knife. I can still feel that pain. Surrounding Flint Hill Cemetery was mountain top removal in the works. A giant, blue machine sat like a king in the middle of dirty, flat land. Its gigantic arm poured tons of coal in the bed of a truck; then the truck drove hurriedly down the road, spraying the trees that were left with a coat of filth. Workers in hard hats stood around smoking cigarettes, watching the machine do the work, while trucks zoomed by them in a monotonous rotation. I began to sob like a child. But still I hadn’t seen my grandmother’s grave. I stood up from the hot bench and meandered through the cemetery, pausing here and there at dates that read, “1944-1949” and “1870- 1902.” Such young deaths were all around me. Finally, I came to one of the largest graves on the hill. The MillerSisters- daughters of John D. Jannett 1931-1933 Rena 1923-1983 Bulah Mae 1929- Yes, no one knows God or sees him as plain as those who have met him on “The Pathway of pain.”
A great burden was lifted off of me, as I read the word “Rena” on the grave. I felt closer to my grandma than ever before. She was surrounded by her family, buried directly next to her youngest sister, and one day, there Bulah Mae will be directly next to Grandma. As I stared at her name, all the memories Mom shared with me flooded my mind. If there was one thing I knew about my Grandma Rena, it was that she fought for her land. And the place she would now forever remain was being destroyed for coal. The land she worked so hard to save was crumbling around her dead body. I felt like I was being mocked as I stood there. I approached Aunt Bulah with timidity, as she sat quietly on the porch of the chapel, looking out into the sea of topless mountains. I sat next to her and laid my head on her shoulder. We didn’t talk. She wrapped her arm around me and we sat there until the sun shone so bright, we knew it was well into afternoon. Finally we stood up and went home. ……………………………………………………………………………………………… When we arrived back home, Aunt Bulah got out a photo album full of pictures from the past. As she opened the dusty, black book, the smell of a secondhand store wafted through the air. The pictures were fading, even as I sat there looking at them. One picture was of Grandma holding Mom when she was just a little girl, probably five or six. Behind them is the forest that still stands intact on my family’s land.—the forest I will someday inherit. And most importantly, the forest I will fight for until I am buried at Flint Hill Cemetery with Aunt Bulah Mae and Grandma Rena.
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