My City Mother Has Risen From the Dead - by H. Byron Ballard

I have thirsty roots in this place. Almost every day some fresh-faced newcomer whose grandma was born outland approaches me to learn where I’m from. Here, I say. When did you move here? I have always been here, like Pisgah and the Rat. Like the ghost woman who jumps for love of a dead man. I go away for a time and I always come back, for my gnarly roots seek refreshment from dark springs of mountain water. McKinney Cove. Enka High School. West End. You mean Chicken Hill? Hell, no. I mean West End. Bootleggers, murderers, so lawless that people from outside--people from Biltmore Forest, say--would threaten their wayward children with abandonment after nightfall in West End. In Peck Town. Mill workers and the concubines of rich men. Little children falling to an almost-death through the rusty railings at Queen Carson School, only to be made to walk home, where they could die later. My grandfather coughing his way through TB on Jefferson, dying rough, the way “Sweet Stuff” had lived since he left the Navy, returning from the gassed fields of France. Rich in story and history, no doubt. A place of mythic stature. Steinbeck or Joyce or Williams got nothing to compare to it. Filth and squalor and soul-killing poverty. Ah, West End. Some flatland real estate developer from off can try to sell the Chicken Hill label, but it’s an insult to the leveling of the real Chicken Hill, razed to story by the coming of the Expressway.

We don’t have Southern Living-kind of Southerners in this family. We are more the “hell, no, we’ll never forget” NASCAR kind of Southerners. We live in a landscape haunted by our personal demons and the familial boogers of our extended families. I always begin my life at Number Ten Roberts Street--the store and house where my great-grandmother raised ten children to maturity, or what counts as maturity in this family. A host of girls and three boys, all dead now. The oldest and the youngest, being for several years the only ones left, are both gone as I write this. If family can ever be gone. As if they cannot rise from Green Hill Cemetery and pace Park Square again, watching the clouds for winged angels.

I never saw Number Ten Roberts Street except in my mind’s eye because my family left West End in the last years of the Great Depression. Number Ten holds the essence of Grandma and Grandpa who came here from Haywood County, to escape in-laws or bastard children or debt, who knows? I have photographs of the wooden store, one with Grandma in a filthy apron, standing with three boys in the doorway, an advertisement near her shoulders. But there is no photograph of upstairs at Number Ten and no photograph of the couch where the ghost of the dead man lay, on evenings when the streetlight shone through the curtains. My mother saw him, as did my grandmother as a young girl. He lay there with his knees drawn up and his hand under his cheek, sweet and peaceful and long dead. No one knew him--he was not one of ours. But he inhabited the upstairs at Number Ten on those nights, a temporary permanent visitor. He was there since before the flood of 1916 and may have been there when they tore the structure down during the halcyon days of Urban Renewal. Plans are drawn to put an artist's studio on the square of land and I wonder sometimes if the sleeping man will appear on some paint-spattered sofa in the loft, relieved to find a napping place.

People genuinely from here can blink their eyes and see Pack Square in its reincarnations, have a heart for the old Wall Street, bought feed and seed in T.S. Morrison’s. We can remember heavy traffic on Tunnel Road as lines of reeking cars popped through the old tunnel, before the Cut was cut. In West End, you can blink your eyes and the street cars are running again, a bulky school building dominates the hilltop, the river rises into Miss Olive’s basement and Ida Crawley floats below the captain’s walk on her turret, frightening the children.

But I digress, wandering again through the stories and places that made me and made my family, denizens at Number Ten who climbed out of West End and the mill. My grandmother’s stories became my stories, my mother’s stories became mine, my cousins-elders bequeathed me variations on a theme of this peopled empty space. A great-aunt put a board out the upstairs window onto another balcony and escaped the baleful eye of her father, eloping with the boy she loved who would become a tyrant and a pervert. She would stay with him until he died, a relief (it was said) to anyone who had to submit to his constant lust.

Tyranny is a kind of theme to this place: the tyranny of the mill, the church, the parent, the spouse, the city government who forgot this oldest of neighborhoods and only remembered when it was time to excise something from it. Some land or some taxes or some drink during the years of Prohibition when a drink of liquor could always be found in West End. Batwing bottles of corn from Tennessee, hidden under rotting floor boards and in baby’s basinets. Satisfying ways for lazy men to make a buck while their women took in laundry or sewing or warmed eggs in their aprons to facilitate the birthing of chicks. Sometimes the men took mean and hit their women-wives-sisters or slammed the door on the tails of their cats. The men could be mean drunks, it is told, and so could the women. Once, a man so mean or sad or eviscerated with life shot his wife through the chest, the bullet going in here and coming out there. She appeared later in the clouds and my mother was whipped when she mentioned her, because looking up to heaven and seeing a neighbor there was somehow more shameful than shooting your wife.

Around the corner from Number Ten and slightly up the hill is Mary’s House, one residence upstairs and an apartment in the basement, a not uncommon sight in West End. I never knew Mary’s last name and can’t remember who told me her first because I never spoke to her, not once. I sometimes sat with Mr. Guthrie and his white dogs but Mary never came out to her yard. She peeked out the window or stood at the door waiting. I saw her months after she died, still waving from the window, still waiting. Mr. Guthrie has gone from his old home place, visiting with my elders in the steeps of Green Hill. Sometimes I spot a whisk of white from the oldest ghost dog, trotting to the back of the restored and soulless old house.

My mother was born here, in a house that her mother did not own. Upstairs, across the street but still on the mythful Roberts Street. She left when her mother did but all my life she carried the joy of growing up poor in West End, where she and her friends smoked cigarettes at twelve and pretended they lived on a ranch in Texas. She met my father hereabouts and told of her grandmothers here, one for her mother and one for her father. I carry those tales now, Jacob Marley-style, never sure what is real and what is not. Not that truth matters in myth. After the war, she was moved to the western part of the county to a place she always hated, hated til the day she died, alone in the night with no one to hear her last confession if she spoke it.

When my mother died in a pre-9/11 world, we had worked nothing out between us. We had come to a Middle Eastern peace that was as unworkable as it was uneasy. We lived in this state of ungrace--too much unsaid, too much misunderstood, a wall of pain and anger towered between us--and so she died. My life is quieter for her absence from it, my parenting loving and conscious as it can be (given what it is), a legacy of her laissez-faire approach to affection, her bitter honed edge of rebuke and complaint always present. I count myself lucky to no longer receive the late-night drunken calls that invite me to shatter the portable phone against the front of the piano in my fury. She did not haunt me until now, preferring to give me a false sense of security, to think I had at last escaped. She has risen, I must tell you, from the dead. I saw her only a few days ago in my sister’s house, inhabiting my sister’s body, looking at me through my sister’s eyes.

What to do now? She can not be vanquished, a lesson I learned in my adulthood. No matter how I plot, she can turn my good intent to malice, my best work as dust before her glance. She will join those others who walk the narrow ruts of West End streets, waiting for another turn at a life hard in its living. Only Mrs. Crawley is above this fray of spirits, pacing her porch roof, shaking her sad head.

Byron Ballard

Asheville's Village Witch

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