SOME KENTUCKIANS AND
OTHER PEOPLE
 Mary Willis Shuey
 

To
OUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN
WITHOUT WHOM THIS BOOK WOULD HAVE BEEN FINISHED
SOONER OR NOT AT ALL
And
MY HUSBAND
WHO NEVER CRITICIZES MY VERSE

QUILTS

They gave me the quilt that Great-Aunt Elizabeth made --
A quilt of pink roses and careful stitches
It goes into my chest, for in October I marry.

Pink roses, with stems of green on a background of white,
And Great-Aunt Elizabeth pieced it for her own chest.
She pieced it with trembling hands, for her lover had gone
To fight with the South.
Elizabeth filled in the long days with quick, nervous fingers
Roses of pink, for love and a bride.
But here is a spot of red among the pink roses.
I wonder what is stitched into the quilting.
She finished it long afterwards, when war
Had taken all she had but memories.
She pieced her life into a pink-rose quilt
When war was making patchwork of her soul.
They gave me the quilt that Great-Aunt Elizabeth made --
A quilt of pink roses with stems of green, for a bride.
But I see all the time the splotch of blood in the roses.
October is so far when war is near.
 

FOR MISS MAUDE IN HEAVEN

Her long thin back, Scotch-Presbyterian straight,
Will never rest on flowery beds of ease.
She will not dawdle inside Heaven's gate,
So give her work at once, St. Peter, please.
You'll find her helpful with the Heavenly rolls --
She taught a small town school for fifty years --
She knows the ways of West Kentucky souls,
The sins of Richards, Wallers, Ames, Brashears.
She saw three generations live and die,
Knew Flournoys, Youngs and Sparks as pupils, friends,
Knows which are honest, which will sometimes lie,
Which hold their grudges, which make quick amends.
Miss Maude can judge folks by the family name:
She found three generations just the same.
 

NOTE TO ST. PETER
INTRODUCING MISS MARY ALLEN

Quite probably she'll call you "Colonel Peter,"
But please don't think her choice of titles quaint,
For in the Bluegrass that has been her Heaven
A Colonel always has outranked a Saint.
You'll find her most proficient in her praises:
She was a maiden aunt, a constant guest,
Who spent her time recounting family glories,
She'll know her place in mansions of the blest.

She'll soon find out the social scheme you follow
And join the Heavenly chorus in joyful hymn
When she discovers kinship with archangels,
Or finds she's cousin to the seraphim.
 

CANFIELD

Her years are just a deck of pasteboard cards
That she keeps playing over, solitaire.
Just fifty two small lifeless paper weeks,
Now somewhat worn and frayed by constant wear.
She has played them out so many, many times!
She shuffles them with hands blue-veined and thin.
Stacks seasons four in even, tidy heaps:
The old, lone game that women never win.
 

CALLERS

Kate was wearing a white shantung
And Lenna a rose organdy,
But black fingerprints marked my plain wash dress
When they came to call on me.

Now babies are much more joy that work --
As they'd know, if they had any -
But I could see as they looked at me
They thought my three too many.

I wouldn't trade places with anyone,
Though I'm mother and nurse, part-time cook.
But I long to wear clothes that will not wash
And I HATE the way I look!
 

ON RECEIVING A WEDDING ANNOUNCEMENT

It isn't that I'm sorry.
I don't really care,
But you took me to my first prom,
You're my first real love affair.

Ours was the glorious springtime
When grown-up days begin
And that near-enchanted summer
I wore your Beta pin.

My husband is MUCH nicer!
But there's still a little thrill
In thinking of old sweethearts
As I check the grocery bill.

You are just a pleasant memory
Of a happy, care-free past.
Still I rather liked to fancy
That your broken heart would last.
 

PROFESSIONAL KENTUCKIAN

She smugly mouthed the pilloried platitudes;
Columns, racing horses, her transplanted heart,
The proper people, proper attitudes.
Self-satisfied Philistine from the start.
 

AUNT EULA

She never once did anything halfway:
Hemmed napkins on four sides, picked seeds from currants.
Hands busy every hour of each day --
Never the need of idleness deterrents!

"Give her a desert isle and grain of wheat
And modicum of sun to make it grow,
And when we finally save her she will meet
Us with hot bread to compensate our row!"
My father said.

She only wasted Time
And that her own.  Perhaps in mansions blest
She's found there's sometimes in that Heavenly clime
A space where people simply sit and rest.
 

A WARNING

Her mind had wings
And seven league boots.
He could do daring things
And not care two hoots
What rewards they carried --
Until he married.

She darned the frail wings,
Brushed the boots to gleams,
Scrubbed and dusted his thoughts,
Sewed buttons on dreams.

And so daring died,
Starved on waffles and honey.
Dreams are suicide
When men need money.
 

ANNIE FELLOWES JOHNSTON

The Little Colonel was Kentucky, our state,
And Chivalry lived in Two Knights of Kentucky,
Old Mammy's Torment was our key to race relations,
And the Wide World opened at The Gate of the Giant Scissors.
Our philosophy grew on The Legend of Camelback Mountain
For we believed every word you wrote.
You were magic, and so were all the tales you told us -- those
Lucky ones of us who listened with your niece Albion.
These many years after I still remember your sister's definition of
poverty:
"It never is the pinch and pang that hurts the spirit so,
Nor wanting what some others have:
It's knowing that they know."
Only one thing I want to forget,
We stopped to see you in Peewee Valley not long before you died,
Remembering you as a lovely, gracious, vital woman who was always
giving.
You who had always seemed ageless were unbelievably old and broken.
Only Proust should try to recapture the past.
 

LAST YEARS

The world now dwindles, draws in its confines
As she grows older.  She must dominate
Or find new friends.  The present is the past.
Concentric self must never hesitate.
 

TALENTS

My talents seem to lie in little things --
In babies, jams, and dinners seldom late.
I much prefer my poems to my puddings;
But those who serve must mostly wait.
 

MARTHA

She loved and served us for two generations,
And we loved her.  Grandchildren may forget
Dim, distant kinfolks, but they still remember Martha.
I taught her how to read and write.  Brought schoolbooks home
And we went to the Fifth Grade.  One of us
Lost interest then.  She gave advice on cooking
When I was grown.  "You can't cook out of books.
Don't measure.  Take just what you need.
Salt-rising bread
Needs three beans in your scalded meal to rise."
She hated gossip.  "Dogs
that carry bones one way
Will carry them the other."

When we take flu shots how I wish I knew
Just how old Martha made hot vinegar stew!
 

MADISON CAWEIN

Because you wrote "Happy Go Lucky"
They would not believe your
bathroom fall an accident.
Insurance men, lawyers, even friends quoted:
"This is the truth as I see it, my Dear,
Out in the wind and the rain,
Those who have nothing have nothing to fear,
Nothing to lose or gain."
And they reveled in those lines:
"Come let us sleep, Love, sleep like the dead,
Out in the wind and the rain."

It isn't safe even to write poetry.
Strange that a poem should almost go to court.
 

PRAYER FOR A LOUISIANA PLANTER

If you've a galleried house where land abounds
Please let him live there.  His last years of life
Were spent in Frank-Lloyd-Wright with Lambert grounds:
The signs of wealth that pleased his Dallas wife.

He rode a bay horse through a red clay lane.
He'll never be impressed by streets of gold.
Wood fires, old books and bird dogs, warm spring rain
He loved.  Heaven's palaces sound damp and cold.

His wife, like your Saint John, judged worth by money.
Oil derricks crowded out his Kaffir corn.
Give him wide acres flowing milk and honey:
Heaven's merely home to those plantation-born.
 

ROBERT PENN WARREN

"None shall look back.:
But always there is looking back --
Hopkinsville and Dawson Springs and Alex Maury and Penhallow
And All the King's Men.
Louisiana State University air conditioned
Mike the Tiger's Cage
and The Southern Review died.
That portrait by Caroline Durieux, and Cleanth Brooks,
And again and again the War Between the States.
John Sterling and Willie --
Pieces from the same cloth,
Where men move inevitably,
The bird seeks the bullet, man his doom
And always the deformity
By which man knows himself
and becomes a Brother to Dragons.
 

VILLANELLE SAILOR IN A GROCERY

Beyond the shelves of corn and peas,
The shining tins with labels new,
He looks out on the rolling seas.

Plain women buy his coffee, teas,
He gazes on a South Isle view
Beyond the shelves of corn and peas.

He hears the housewives' litanies:
Sugar and butter, eggs.  In lieu
He looks out on the rolling seas.

His fingers press the counter keys
For nickels, dimes.  His thoughts pursue
Beyond the shelves of corn and peas.

Perhaps few men do what they please.
Fathers must give to sons their due.
Beyond the shelves of corn and peas
He looks out on the rolling seas.
 

AUNT SOPHRONIE TELLS HER STORY

She was a little girl the night stars fell.
Comets came down in fields, a piece of sky
Struck by the sugar-house and dug a well.
Slave children huddled close, too scared to cry.

Straight-haired descendants whom she scarcely knows
Teach school.  'Rene's bright-skinned girl went North to dance.
Bob's boy is preaching. Sheriff Lea killed Mose.
She had three great-grandsons who fought in France.
But this the story she likes best to tell:
She was a little girl the night stars fell.
 

1962

"In honor of anonymous obscenities
Offered to other princesses
You ordered all their obelisks inscribed
"To Cleopatra!"

Legend and more legend and Liz Taylor
And unbelievable millions thrown into the filming
Of primitive passion and stale sophistication.

Cleopatra hair, asps and jokes work thin, pearls --
But what destroyed "the legend on your consequence?"

IN-LAWS

They lived quite close to home.  The family believes
They caught the drippings from the parents' eaves.
 

ALICE HEGAN RICE

"Asia, put another cup of water in the soup --
Chris is staying for supper."
With us, in South Louisiana, miles from a real grocery,
It has been hard-boiled eggs and canned peas and celery
and more milk added to the chicken pie,
or cornbread stuffing two slices of ham.
But always added to Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch
Has been Annie Fellowes Johnston's The Ancestral Latchstring,
Decreeing hospitality to Kentuckians and others
At any price.
 

PLANS FOR A HOUSE

Dear rambling house was the added-to look,
Queer straggly house, not built from a book,
Your wild growth was made to hold childish laughter,
And old home of mine, these many years after,
No plans for our house the best architect drew
Seem half as complete and as homelike as you!
 

HENRY CAMPS

You were sent to get wood for the fire
But we ate before your return,
Bright-eyed, your boots caked with mire --
And nothing at all to burn.

Wild azaleas were all that you brought.
Son, after all you've been taught,
Are you MY child?
 

LETTER TO OUR CHILDREN AND GRANDCHILDREN
ABOUT OUR HOUSE AND US --
ALL GROWING OLDER

Our woodwork could stand painting -- that we know.
The house had its last coat five years ago.
Scissors repaired the fringes of our rugs.
We still use spray-guns in our war on bugs.
You feel we strive too little, have grown lax,
But children and grandchildren, face the facts:
We are not following some distant star,
We love you, house, and things, just as they are!
And after sixty, know the mold is cast:
We do not want slipcovers on the past.
 

KENTUCKY WIFE

To all his spoken wishes she deferred --
A loving wife in thought, in deed, in word.
Gracious even to his rural kin.
Who sometimes wore their welcomes rather thin.
Proud of his honors and his public life,
She truly was the very perfect wife.
Yet underneath she never quite forgot
HER family outranked his in Camelot.
 

KENTUCKY LAWYER

Always he could his literate elbows rub
(How he enjoyed the Jabberwocky Club!)
And deal with Lewis Carroll, treated lightly
Even when Dodgson's light was shining brightly,
With people who in life filled many strata.
He did not agonize with Filson data;
Things fell in place.  But there was always Law,
A serious thing, handled almost with awe.
So when he spoke of "the judicial mind,"
He spoke unconsciously of his own kind.
 

WINDOW ON ROYAL STREET

All day she sits alone and watching there
Back in her window on the busy street.
Time seems so much to all those walking feet,
So little to her, helpless in her chair.
It seems just yesterday that she was fair,
Young, golden-voiced, but oh, the years are fleet!
Now only memories can make life sweet,
For no one's left of all those who used to care.
No one goes by in all that hurrying throng
Who ever knew her golden gift of song,
No one who sees the flame in fires burned low.
For life would never seem so sadly wrong
If he remained, who in her spirit's glow
Still saw the girl of seventy years ago.
 

MUSIC TEACHER IN HEAVEN

She once loved music.  She has had no chance
To listen for some years.  She's had to play,
Beat out on uprights rhythms of the dance
For Lions, Rotary and P.T.A.

"Now 'Jingle Bells!"
Tap with knife on your glass.
Let's all join in for "Sleigh-bells in the Snow!"
Now 'Tip-toe through the Tulips.'  Some one pass
The books.  There may be songs you do not know."

She'll love to hear Your Choir.  Lord, You are wise,
Here ear is deaf for naturals or sharp.
She has no wish to lead, help organize.
It's doubtful if she even wants a harp.
 

PATCH-WORK

She never had a pattern of her own,
And yet from little scraps she pieced a whole,
From remnants that were left from other lives
She made a patch-work that she called her soul.
Scrap 1.

Lucy's life was free and gay --
Lucy was the family beauty.
Roses, lovers, every day
Lucy's life was free and gay.
Bess got what she threw away --
Old maid sisters live for duty!
Lucy's life was free and gay.
 Lucy was the family beauty.

Scrap 2.

Tom cut his life in squares of engineering,
Each block laid out exactly by the rule.
Harvard and Tech, of course; he never questioned
The money from his sister, teaching school.

More scraps

Catherine married early.  Perhaps that explains
The turmoil she continually caused
With babies and measles and chickenpox
And broken arms and tonsillectomies
And servants who stole
And a husband who lost his job.

But Bess straightened everything out --
Scarlet fever and buttons and bills.
After Jack's uncle left him the money
They rather forgot Bess.

Isn't it queer?
The rest are so gay,
Lucy's a dear,
Isn't it queer?
I think they all fear
Bess is coming to stay.
Isn't it queer?
The rest are so gay.

She never had a pattern of her own.
The scraps of roses, blocs of work she built
Against a background of eternal drab
Made all such scraps can make:  a crazy quilt.
 

HANDS

Only her hands betray her
As she fingers platinum chain
Her ageless face is mask-like
"Lifted" of joy and pain.

But her hands -- how her hands betray her,
Restive under their diamond rings;
They are hands that have worked, have been gentle,
Hands that have done useful things.
 

HERESY

She loved the and of which the legends tell:
Gallantry, glamour, roses, columns, swords,
Not this strange South of Faulkner, E. Caldwell,
Tom Wolfe, George Milburn and their illiterate hordes.
She loved vast acres flowing sugar cane,
And fields of cotton, Negroes, plows and mules.
Sharecroppers, incest in a moss-hung lane,
Poverty, crime, break all her cherished rules.
Is it not that this great, glorious South
Was surely once the chosen land of God?
"Problem" and "shoes" in Madame Perkins' mouth
Are blasphemy.  Who calls this common sod?
But here is heresy:  That now at last
This Deep South lady doubts the jasmined past.
 

MISS SUSIE -- IN RETROSPECT

She made herself remember only pleasant things,
So that her reconstructed stories of the past
Confused newcomers, but to her were real.
She ruled her matriarchal kingdom with firm hand
And no one questioned her authority
From church to cakes.
Saturday morning the cake maker came
And baked eight different kinds of cake for Fluker children.
(Use only half for dinner; save the rest," he said.)
On Sunday night the kissing kin for miles around
Drove in, ate half of eight cakes plus fresh peach ice-cream
Down on the tennis court.  (There was tennis too.)
Church service never started till Miss Susie came,
Perhaps quite late, or maybe just on time.
Even the preacher waited when he could.
Sometimes most people went to cockfights after church,
But church was most important.
One Sunday the Club Forest orchestra came out to play,
Half of them Catholics, but they read their hymn books well.
"I invited them last night; said we'd have chicken afterward."
"Why did they drive 180 miles?"  Miss Susie's matriarchal voice
Reached even to those far New Orleans night clubs.

Her house ran in her own way, rather differently.
The eggs were hidden under cushions in her bedroom,
Oranges behind the books in cases; sugar high up in the armoire.
"Servants are careless now; we mustn't tempt them,"
She said, explaining everything.

Old field hand Pappy serving, feet bare, jeans rolled high
But spotless coat of white, also made fires, swept floors,
And startled Northern visitors.
Miss Susie saw that he was always useful.

She visited New Orleans.  Bells unheard in dining room
Brought soft-soled, noiseless maids.
"But then I thought:  this really isn't Christian.
Jesus never lived like this!"
And that was her true thought: how Jesus lived.

The youngest great-grandchild is in the manger
At Christmas, Martin Luther's cradle song is played.
The other children shepherds, angels, what Miss Susie plans.
But Earth must end her talismanic rule.  One doubts that up in Heaven
There is a matriarchy purely Protestant.
 

PLANTATION PIECE

Lilly stroll the levee in a big red hat,
Walkin' high-rumpted an' actin' loose,
But she come right back with a fish (big cat)
An' a can of the government grapefruit juice.

Mary min' the children an' she cook the meals,
Se chop the cotton an' she bring the wood,
But her man's gone with Lilly to the lower fiel's
What's the use of bein' good?
 

FACTORIES, MOVE SOUTH

The factory whistle blows at half-past five,
This starts the day.  The whole town comes alive
And all the countryside climbs out of bed,
For work begins at six.  The day ahead
Brings money, and all people have to live.

Sometimes it seems there's nothing left to give
Past weary, unwashed bodies, but for loaves and fishes.
For food a single man still roves.
And thus day follows day in endless tread
As long as men have pride to seek their bread.
 

ROOM 21, SOUTH HALL, CENTENARY COLLEGE

Reality must lie in this bare room
Or else lie nowhere.  Here the fixed conceit
That study weaves the web on learning's loom
Holds sway.  Frm Music Hall across the street
Come strains of Strauss and Brahms.  The tired ear strays
The while the mind steps back on Englsh themes,
And grave young veterans find their hearts still phrase,
Note against note, the counterpoint of dreams.
 

ANNE

Lullabies and legends, these were what she gave them,
Knowing from the threats of life nothing else could save them,
So they climbed the tallest trees, swam happily in rivers
(God too loves the seeming fearless givers!)
No one knew how often she held her breath,
Few knew she ever even thought of death,
And the children grew joyously, knowing all life's bounty.
Her name was Anne:  she came from Union County.
 

IN A SCRYING STONE

I see it in a scrying stone -- some day I'll be a witch.
Cross with seven green willow twigs the first clear ditch,
Do the homage needed to the Lord of Sin
And join the coven dancing where the Devil's rites begin.

Then I'll shoot nine silver bullets at the great ruling Moon --
Faster, sisters, dance me in, old age is coming soon!
I'll throw a knotted cat's tail straight in lying Dawn's face.
Does any woman growing old believe in God's grace?

My daughter will find me sleeping, sleeping soundly in bed,
Nor know the Devil's touched me on the feet and on the head.
I'll pour my grandson's coffee, white-haired, serene and sane.
They'll never know I ride a mare with a long, wind-matted mane.
Never know I cut tongues with a ragged coin of gold.
Never know I've turned witch in quest of joy when old.
 

LAWS

She was so graceful, beautiful,
Tall, lithe, with pink-tipped pointed breasts,
A Redbone -- Negro, Indian, French and what?
Her great-grandfather said to be a count
Who slept with quadroons, never thought of marriage.
He was a migrant worker, tried to marry her
In Louisiana, but the law said NO.
He tried again in Tennessee, Kentucky,
But laws and more laws stopped him.  Logging in Colorado
He thought he had it made, but when they saw
Her Indian blood, that brought out other laws.
In Kansas he got a license, proudly married her.
By then she had grown bored, and other men
Besides a laborer, slow-witted, gone all day,
Looked on her beauty, offered her other things,
One day he came home, found another man
And killed his wife. (The other man escaped.)
He told the court the truth, and neighbor women
Had seen it going on.  He thought he would be hanged
But was acquitted.  Strange enough out there
They have unwritten laws.
 

TULIPS

A tall, gaunt woman in dusty black
Waters her tulips of crimson and gold.
Her face is as colorless as the parched earth
And her hands are strong and gnarled and old.

She loves the tulips' brilliant hues --
The arrogant lift of their haughty heads --
She has brought them up from their plain, dry bulbs,
She has lifted them from their lowly beds.

And they'll never know that she caused it all,
So gorgeous and gay and conceited are they.
But the tall, gray woman in rusty black
Keeps giving them water every day.
 

MARGARET

Hers in most ways had been a happy life --
Beauty and charm and marriage, a good wife
And mother.  She had been a Charleston belle,
Keeping her figure through some years of hell
And diet, holding fighting at bay,
Not yielding to her age in any way.
She should have died at forty, in her prime.
Too bad she lived so long beyond her time.
One day she found herself with wrinkles, old:
Death for a woman, after al is told.
 

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Grandmother Davis made a red and white coverlet,
Letty Reed a sampler, cross-stitched 1795,
Mary Miller's linen sheets were skillfully handwoven,
And six chairs of needlepoint keep Sally Hughes alive.

But as for their great-granddaughter, Mary Willis Shuey,
She pieced no quilts, made no hooked rugs, her breads and jams don't
matter,
The things they saved so carefully she used seven days a week,
She broke a Wedgewood bowl, cracked a yellow Lowestoft platter.
Count the hall-marked silver teaspoons, sort the Spode and pewter,
Sandwich glass and Sheffield servers, treasures of the past.

The last granddaughter added nothing to their heirlooms:
She made and saved some poems -- not a single thing to last.
 

NOTE TO THE NORTH ABOUT MARY
NOW GOING YOUR WAY

I never let her broil a rib-eye steak.
I always put the canned goods on the shelf.
She couldn't make hot rolls or angel cake.
I really did so many things myself!

We kept our liquor under lock and key
And even then she watered our best gin.
She never dusted where I couldn't see.
The kitchen overflowed with Spring Ridge kin.

And seven was the latest she would stay.
She's fat and slow, a somewhat ashy black.
If she should ever come around your way
Will you please tell her that I want her back?
 

THE SECOND WIFE

I went into the closet were still hung
The dresses patched.
With trembling hands shook my own silk gowns.
They scarcely matched.

She worked and saved on that wide-acred farm
All of her life --
And left it prosperous and paid for now for me,
The second wife.
 

FISHERMAN'S WIFE

"They are striking now on black and red,"
He showed me all the flies he'd bought.
"We'll leave at 4:15," he said.
He kissed me as an afterthought.
 

HOUSEKEEPER IN HEAVEN

The golden street before her house will shine
Much brighter than the sidewalks of her neighbors.
She'll sweep and clean her mansion every day --
No slipshod methods in her household labors.

And if some idle women think that Heaven's
A place that's free from moths, corruption, rust,
She'll never trail her white robes up their steps
Until her fingers test the tops for dust.
 

PART KENTUCKIAN
ELIZABETH MERIWETHER GILMER
(DOROTHY DIX)

A lady -- word misunderstood, misused today --
But tat is what you were in every way.
You knew the peace Kentucky summer brings --
How often you went back to Diamond Springs!
You never let some outside false emotion
Lessen your loyal family devotion.
You genuinely loved the human race
(Yet many would be bitter in your place.)
Though common sense and sage advice you'd mix,
Please always let me write, "Dear Dorothy Dix."