Appalachia Project: Icy Sparks, 1998

Icy Sparks, by Gwyn Hyman Rubio

I have lots of critiques of this book, but generally I like it very much. I especially appreciated the main character's reference points in the flora and fauna of Appalachia. Her wanderings in the woodlands of northeastern Kentucky were similar to my own rovings in Vinton County, Ohio.

Icy Sparks was an Oprah Book Club book, meaning that it fits into a particular style: Excruciating suffering followed by unrealistic triumph. The endings dignify the suffering and make it meaningful. These books match Oprah's own life story of abuse and poverty, which she, through drive and talent, turned into an outstanding triumph. But Oprah doesn't credit herself with being extraordinary. Her story is not the norm. It seems like a comforting myth, that strong women will always prevail for the common good and suffering turns into benevolence. Hideous abuse survivor turns into crusader for justice. Schizophrenic woman makes inspirational bookmarks and is fulfilled. Call me a cynic, but a cloying rose-scented mist floats over this group of books. Suffering is the key. Suffering is only meaningful if it ends up doing good.

In Icy Sparks, the heroine and first-person narrator (named Icy Sparks) has Tourette's syndrome, a neurological disorder that causes physical and verbal tics. A Tourette's patient may have an urgent need to stick out her arm, distort her face, or say a curse word. The syndrome is related to obsessive-compulsive disorder; and symptoms may be worsened by stress.

Rubio's book is set in Kentucky at the between about 1955 and 1962 (Kennedy is elected as part of the plot, but the book ends before his assassination.) Rural Kentucky has more in common with the previous century than the one it's in. The area seems more prosperous than the region Johnson sought to fix up in the 1960s, but jobs were hard to come by, the coal industry was up and down, and coal dust coated the towns.

I imagine Icy's eyes to be this color.

Icy's mother died in childbirth, so she is raised by her grandparents, who she calls Matanni and Patanni, terms which are completely undefined. I have looked them up and they refer to places in Thailand and Pakistan, but have no use as grandparent names. I quickly got used to them and they sounded normal. They don't seem to indicate any non-western ancestry for Icy. She is pale and blond and has golden eyes...nothing that would indicate India or Thailand.


As she nears puberty, Icy starts to have compulsions to twitch, curse, twist, and pop out her eyes like a frog. She controls these as best she can, saving up all of the urges until she can be private and alone. Then she lets fly the pent up impulses, twirling and twitching and cussing until she has used them all up. She sees herself as having an entirely evil self to go along with her nice self and has a terror that the people she loves wouldn't love her if they knew.

Icy uses the image of the pokeweed plant to describe herself to herself. You can eat the stems and leaves of pokeweed--they are perfectly fine. But the berries and roots are deadly poison. She seems to be like the pokeweed, part poison, part good.

Rubio does a great job of portraying Icy's process of developing an understanding of what is wrong with her...she does not have a name for it and sees it as a flaw in her character rather than as a medical condition. Icy struggles to stay in touch with her good self, to make sure that both selves have expression.

In the hospital, Icy puts puzzles together, like she
tries to put herself together.

Of course, Tourette's doesn't easily stay hidden. Icy becomes more and more of an outcast and is seen as a major behavior problem at school. Her principal, in compassion, sends Icy to a mental hospital. The mental hospital is grim and gray. Icy's description of the food made me want to gag. And the other patients are a hodge-podge--cerebral palsy, OCD, brain damage of various kinds. Although the other patients are described with gruesome detail, their suffering is somewhat glossed over; they are presented sort of as other oddities that populate the world of abnormal children as opportunities for good-deed-doing. It's all Icy's story.

Icy's experiences in the hospital are weird. Although she has very little actual treatment, she gets miraculously better and is released. This seems like a complete denial of what happened in those sorts of settings. Icy's rebellions and actings-out are tolerated rather than brutally suppressed. She is on no regular medicines. Everyone is wonderful and the Nurse Ratchet character is satisfyingly banished.

More stuff happens. Icy deals with loss and with a peculiar religious conversion that seems like a lengthy non sequitur in the context of the book. The religious material is certainly interesting and vividly presented. It seems that the extremes of religious expression give Icy an outlet for her urges and compulsions. She begins singing with several different choirs, and singing helps. When she sings, the urges go away. The roots and berries are no longer poisonous; she is all good.

There is a Harry-Potteresque epilogue that cheapens this book. "See, I became a useful person who helps others in a wonderful way, so that means all my suffering was OK." Again, my inner cynic was triggered. And, in terms of literature, we already knew that with the last sentence of the last chapter. It's like the author didn't trust her readers and didn't trust her own writing. Please razor blade out the epilogue before you begin reading.

Here's the ending of the last chapter, when Icy is singing at big concert--the real best place for the book to end.

"At that moment, a handwritten sign shot up like a crown above the heads of the crowd. Dressed in red, white, and blue, Miss Emily was tilting on top of the bench like an unfurled, massive flag, propped up by the sturdy shoulders of Darrel Lute. WELCOME TO THE WORLD, the sign read. Right then and there, I believed in my future. In front of the whole of Ginseng, beneath the mountain of cloth, my heart was finally beating bright red and strong for all to see."

What doubts can you have after that?

Trying Twitching

I have been experimenting with twitching. I have some familiarity with it from have restless leg syndrome. When I'm trying to sleep, my legs need to twitch. They probably do during the day, too, but I'm moving around enough to ease the need. I take medication for it. What if twitching gives me a tiny measure of the relief that Icy felt?

So far, I feel that an occasional twitch is useful and releases tension. However, I hope that my practice with twitching doesn't turn habitual. I'm already unusual enough without adding that.

Singing

Like Icy, I am never more relaxed and at ease than when I am singing. I soothe myself with singing all the time, or with whistling. Music is in me. And, I stick with music. I find that I will listen to the same band for months, the same set of songs. I'm processing that music over and over. I don't know why. I like all types of music. I'm on a Rolling Stones jag(ger) right now...have been listening to them for more than a year and can't get...no satisfaction, of course.

I feel most spiritually right when I am singing. I feel aligned. It's not a matter of good self/bad self, like it is with Icy. But when I'm singing, other stuff drops away. It's cool.

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.