Appalachia Project: A Parchment of Leaves, 2002

A Parchment of Leaves, by Silas House, 2002

"Then I noticed the new leaves on the redbud tree. The purple buds were being pushed away to make way for the leaves. I walked out to the tree and put my finger to a leaf, smooth like it was coated with wax. I could feel its veins, wet and round. I had always found comfort in the leaves, in their silence. They were like a parchment that holds the words of wisdom. Simply holding them in my hand gave me some of the peace that a tree possesses. To be like that--to just be--that's the most noble thing of all." (page 218)


The redbud tree is a key symbol in A Parchment of Leaves, by Silas House. The book tells the story of Vine, a Cherokee, as she negotiates divergent worlds and worldviews. Her family had settled in Kentucky after eluding the Trail of Tears (during which Cherokee people were removed from North Carolina to the reservations in the west), so she was always a displaced person of a kind. Her marriage to the white man Saul was equally a displacement, into yet another set of values and aesthetics. Vine experiences yet another disruption when her birth family is forcibly removed from their home when a white person purchases the land they lived on for generations. The family returns to North Carolina, where a Cherokee settlement has survived, but Vine is left on her own to hold onto her sense of identity as a woman, wife, mother, Cherokee, friend, and child of god.

Vine's father tried to be as "normal" (non-Cherokee) as possible in raising Vine. After the return to North Carolina, we learn that he has restored himself to his native identity. I was hoping for a depiction of this, and for Vine to take part in it, but the author wisely stopped the story when he should. I want a next book that tells this story.

Place and Time

The book is set in the mountains of eastern Kentucky and the land is beautifully described. Vine cannot see herself as separate from the land, the streams, the soil, the rock. She grew up among and in them. The book takes place between about 1913 and 1920 and encompasses World War I. The war plays a role in the plot, as Vine's husband must live away from home to work in a job that keeps him from going overseas.


Like Christy, A Parchment of Leaves depicts a spiritual journey. But Vine's god is not up in heaven or in a book. Vine's god is in the wind and in the trees and all of the other living things. Vine's god is in the yearning she has to comfort her children, make love with her husband. The paragraph I quoted at the beginning of this post, in addition to explicating the title of the book, is one of the clearest statements of Vine's relationship to the most sacred--the earth and the life upon it. She brings the redbud tree from her birth home when she gets married and its fragility, peril, and growth and beauty parallel her own. The tree recurs as a source of strength for Vine. (And makes me want to plant one in my yard next fall.)

Please see below for a poem I wrote called "Strong Like a Tree," that expresses a sentiment similar to the one stated by Vine at the beginning of this post.

Parchment starts and stays slow until about two-thirds of the way through. It's almost like the author doesn't have enough confidence in our understanding of Vine and so he goes out of his way to establish her goodness and credibility. Several times I felt like the other shoe was going to drop, my heart beat faster as I turned the page, and then nothing big happened. Honestly, if I hadn't committed to reading the book for this project, I don't know if I would have stuck with it. Now, I'm so glad I did. I guess the author's strategy worked, because I feel absolutely committed to Vine now and shed tears for her and felt pain for her.

Matriarchy

The book starts out as a story of a courtship and marriage but evolves into the story of a group of women. These are Saul's mother, Esme; Saul's brother's wife, Aidia; and the divorced (gasp!) midwife, Serena; as well as Vine. As is still common in Appalachia, good men go away to work wherever they can find a job and bad men drink too much, get in trouble, and wander off. This leaves a family group of women, a matriarchy. Esme is the matriarch. Vine is sort of matriarch-in-training. Each woman has one child.

The story of the friendship and mothership that evolves among these women is beautiful. They support each other through so much. And over and over again, they put aside opinions and judgments to reach out to each other. The children are part of their mothers, always referenced, always on the hip, under the kitchen table, wrapped in a quilt. It was striking and yet subtle, as it is in real life, that once a child is there, it is always there, a constant. The relationship of the women to each other and to their children, in addition to a spouse, makes them rich.

I did think that the author left the women an inordinate amount of time for pursuit of their own interests, for roaming around, and resting. A huge unspoken absence was laundry. When you have a family and have to carry and heat water, you work on laundry all the time. Even "modern" women with kids do wash almost every day. Cooking also seemed to be a snap. These women would have been bone tired most of the time, although their informal cooperative did allow for shared labor. There was a golden glow where housework and farm work was concerned.

Striking Images

• Vine returns to the village of her birth to find all of the houses destroyed. She locates her family's homesite by the orientation of the trees and finds the slab of rock that was the front stoop. She sits there remembering until she is run off by the owner of the mountain, who thinks a piece of paper lets you possess something.
• Vine setting out on a horse to cross the mountains to find her people in North Carolina, carrying with her the lock of hair of her great-grandmother who first left North Carolina to live in Kentucky.
• Marvelous depiction of a pentacostal church service, where Vine is amused and terrified. She was raised as a Quaker, very quietly worshipful. The singing, speaking in tongues, flailing on the floor, and general chaos were outside of her realm of experience and unlike anything she had ever considered to be worshipful.
• The combing of hair, Vine's by her mother; daughter Birdie's by Vine.
• The washing of the bodies of the dead--a woman's duty. All four women perform this task.

Cherokee People

Author Silas House, who is part
Cherokee

When I decided to read novels of Appalachia, I did not think about native Americans. One of the reasons I chose to read this book second was that I was curious about the role the Cherokee played in the region. They are one of the few native groups that still reside in the land of their ancestors, even if they had to reclaim it after the Trail of Tears. In Ohio, the native Americans were moved out before large-scale settlement occurred; they have not been part of my personal experience of Appalachia. Because of earlier studies, I at least am aware that a strange void existed where there should have been people. We whites were able to envision the land in our own way, impose our values without interference from people who had actually lived there and knew the place.


Strong Like a Tree, by Joy Dickerson

I want to be strong like a tree

With a sturdy wooden trunk,

A crown of dancing green.

I want to feel sap rise,

Hear leaves shake,

Grow back broken branches.

I want to sway in the wind,

Capture the light of the sun,

Taste rain.

I want to be strong like a tree,

Roots making love to the soil,

Holding fast,

Bounty of earth

In my grasp.

I want to be strong like a tree,

To know in my heartwood

That spring will come

And, with it, bring

A warm time.

Conclusion

A Parchment of Leaves is excellent, as a depiction of Appalachia, but more so as a story of one woman's struggle to hold onto meaning and love. If you've read this book, I'd love to hear from you about your response to it.