Appalachia Project: Missing May, 1992

Missing May, by Cynthia Rylant

This is the dingy discouraging cover
of the edition of Missing May that
I got from my library.

This is the dingy discouraging cover
of the edition of Missing May that
I got from my library.

"She understood people and she let them be whatever they needed to be. She had faith in every single person she ever met, and this never failed her, for nobody ever disappointed May. Seems people knew she saw the very best of them, and they'd turn that side to her to give her a better look." This was May, who adopted a sad little girl named Summer and gave her a home and then died six years later. Missing May. That's what this book is about.

It's a little gem of a book, only 89 pages, small in geography, large in spirit. The book is set in Deep Water, West Virginia, a poor mountain town. We meet Summer in the midst of her grief and it is her voice that tells the story in first-person narration. Her mother died when she was a baby and her life was a harrowing move from relative to relative until May and her husband Ob took her home for good. According to May, they recognized need in each other and also the filling of the need. In the one chapter that May narrates, she says,

"I used to wonder why God gave you to us so late in life....My guess is that the Lord wanted us all to be just full of need. If Ob and me had been young and strong, why, maybe you wouldn't've felt so necessary to us. Maybe you'd've thought we could do just fine without you. So the Lord let us get old so we'd have plenty cause to need you and you'd feel free to need us right back...And we just grabbed onto each other and made us [a family]."

This book gives a pretty clear description of a poor Appalachian home: a rusty, rickety trailer with weeds growing all around it; an old vehicle or two resting on blocks; a warm home with a fantasyland of sugary food; and strong family ties. Rylant dignifies these surroundings by describing the love of the people for each other, the love that is the glue.

Rylant's use of dialect is subtle--she uses few phonetically respelled colloquialisms, but still provides an authentic voice for Summer. It's in the syntax and in the plainness and in the marvel of describing amazing things with plain language. Describing a teacher who had the town's only facelift, "She just had this look on her, like she was going to spring loose all of a sudden and snap clear across to the other side of town." She gets it just right. She uses "set" for "sit," and other antique phrases with a light touch, keeping it readable, unlike Twain, whose use of phonetics in his dialect almost requires special training to interpret.

Ob and Summer are lost without May. The balance of need is gone and they both worry about being enough for each other. Ob believes that May is trying to communicate with them and experiences a visitation. This freaks out Summer. Fortuitously, a schoolmate of Summer's, named Cletus, comes into their lives and they latch on to him and he onto them and healing begins. It's Cletus's idea to visit a spiritualist preacher three hours away in Charleston. Maybe the preacher can help them contact May. Cletus's other agenda is to see something of the world--to see the magnificent, gold-domed state capitol.

The book turns into a quest, with references to The Wizard of Oz and heading to Emerald City to see if the wizard/preacher can give each of them what they lack. On the way, they pass the state capitol building.

"Then...there it was, and I know it was better than all three of us figured it would be. The capitol building sprawled gray concrete like a regal queen spreading out her petticoats, and its giant dome glittered pure gold in the morning sun. I felt in me an embarrassing sense of pride that she was ours. That we weren't just shut-down old coal mines and people on welfare like the rest of the country wanted us to believe. We were this majestic, elegant thing sitting solid, sparkling in the light."

The old man, geeky boy, and angry girl find out what Dorothy and her companions find--that you can search the world over, but the answers are at home. The quest itself fails, but in the going away and returning home, they get the sign they needed. May is free to go to her heavenly home. Summer says:

"I began to cry. I had not ever really cried for May. I had tried so hard to bear her loss and had swallowed back the tears that had been building up inside me...But nothing could keep them back once the owl disappeared from my eyes and I knew as I had never known before that I would never, ever, see May on this earth again. When I finally felt I could speak, I whispered to [Ob], 'It's been so hard missing May.' And Ob said, 'She's still here, honey. People don't ever leave us for good.'"

I highly recommend this book. It is beautiful, meaningful, and authentic. It deserves its Newbury Medal (1993) as much as any book that's ever received it--and more than many of those.