Introduction to When Green the Grass Did Grow Around the Fumbles of Desire

Introduction

I am a West Virginian.  My father’s people came from France by way of Scotland to the area around Pinch up the Elk River to settle on a 900 acre tract of land, less than an hours drive from where I now live, bequeathed to them by the King of England in 1625.  My mother’s father was from the Nash family with links to the Melungeon clan who claim to be descendants of the Portuguese who chose to stay behind from the original explorers of the Appalachian Mountains in the 1500s and intermarried with the Cherokee to form their own tribe.  Others emigrated from Wales during the 19^th Century influx of “Scotch/Irish” who came to work the mines.  My father’s grandfather was a minister in the Church of Christ who ran for and won a seat in the state legislature only to be cheated out of it by the mine owners who held up the election results in court until he finally served a single day and made a single speech.  


In 1928 my real grandfather changed his name, stole a car and chiseled off the serial number and fled West Virginia.  He was arrested in Roswell, New Mexico and ended up in a federal prison in Washington state.  I like to think he was heading for the Mother Ship with two whores and a trunkfull of 'shine. The only grandfather I ever knew, my grandmother’s second husband, fought with the miners at Blair Mountain and died of black lung when I was still a boy.

            My father was a minister in the Church of Christ.  He was a good and honest man, much better one on one over the inevitable chicken dinner on Sunday afternoon or at the bedside of the sick and dying than he was in the pulpit.  He preached to the churches in West Virginia that really couldn’t afford a minister.  He prided himself for not taking any money directly choosing to live on the small stipend his parishioners could afford.  He never made more than nine thousand dollars in any year of his long career  He died from injuries sustained in a car wreck while on his way to preach.

            My mother was a raven haired beauty scarred by a father who abandoned her and a truncated childhood made endurable only by a vibrant imagination and an unschooled talent for language and life. She took her training and became a Licensed Practical Nurse back in the Fifties and worked till she broke her back in a fall in the late Seventies.  She moved from a holler in Boone County to subsidized housing in Kanawha City after my father’s death where she currently resides.

            I have one brother who chose to cont-
inue the family business of preaching and now serves a church in Naples, Florida.  He’s the white sheep of the family.

            To say I’m proud of my heritage is a cliché I can’t bring myself to use.  I have no reason to be proud of what others did before me.  I hope, when or if I am remembered at all, that I will be part of a long line of ancestors they will be proud to call their own.  

            I say all this to establish my credentials as a bona fide, born and bred West Virginian.  I left for Nashville, Tennessee in 1968 and, after living in Tennessee, Ohio, Wisconsin and Virginia, I returned to the hills in 1989.  Those years in the flatlands don’t negate my hillbilly status, but rather confirm it.  The best of us go away and, those of us who can’t cut it in the real world, find our way back to the only home we know. 

These poems are about West Virginia.  The West Virginia I grew up in then spent years running from.  The West Virginia I returned  to when I found myself looking up over the flat roof of a Virginia shopping mall and seeing nothing but blue sky and no comforting green hills to bracket my horizon and realized what I once thought of as a prison’s walls were really the balustrade of a fortress strong and secure. 

This is my West Virginia.  These poems  talk about the streets and alleys of Charleston and the degrading poverty of Chesapeake and the tangible darkness of a Boone County night and the loneliness of those who have lifted the rock and looked under and can’t forget what they’ve seen.  When I write about the hills they don’t have “...summits bathed in glory like the Prince Emanuel’s land.”  I don’t write bits of folksy wisdom and nostalgia about growing up in the holler with a tight knit family clan filled with god-fearin’, Bible-believing gun-toting men and women who could whip up supper for a mess of kinfolk from commodity cans of beef and home grown vegetables then come out on the porch to play a tune on the dulcimer as the sun dips behind the hills and the kids catch fireflies in the twilight. 

Don’t get me wrong, I caught my share of fireflies growing up.  I’m not saying that image wasn’t partially true.  I’m just saying it never was the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  I’m saying that Edenic time is as gone as going will get you gone.  All that’s left is a bunch of craft show sellers who moved here from New York in the Sixties and wannabee rednecks who take their lifestyle cues and politics from the boardrooms in the skyscrapers of Nashville.

We can’t afford to let nostalgia numb us to the needs and problems of real people struggling to overcome the inherited evils of poverty and joblessness, of alcohol and drugs, of pandemic child abuse and domestic violence and of the scathing bigotry and ignorance this pastoral image serves to mask.  We need to face our past with honesty and our present with a firm determination to end these evils in our generation and not pass them down to the next.

Philip Jarrett

Dunbar, WV
6/30/2012

hey, cowboy, let me see your face

hey, cowboy, let me see your face

the scar where pain still lingers from a broken-necked beer bottle brawl

the teeth gone bad and yellowed like old paper

from the chew you cannot swallow

the whiskers like a patch of stiff,

dew frozen weed from too many early mornings

the ravenous etching of an ugly time drip down below your eyes

your eyes, hey cowboy, let me see your eyes

or are they set too deeply ‘neath the harrowing ridge

of your high wrinkled dusty forehead?

let me look into your eyes

and see the passage of dim whiskey settle down to aching joints

or the light that drained through your thick thighs

into the heavy, hairy well of a sweaty, wet-back chicano whore

you’re old, cowboy, old and dying near the grave

your broken fingernailed and cold split hands have dug

you’re old and what you were you never were

and what you never will be

you soon will never have the chance to be again

you’re old, cowboy, you’re old and you won’t open up your eyes

to let this imitation of an imitation

booted and jeaned young fool of a bastard

look back

and feel his father’s flesh

or hear his mother’s cry

the choice

if i could catch you like a dark firefly

and hold you in my hand

prick my thumb with your mosquito’s tongue

till your eyes glowed bright again

then i would think my life completed

that i had finally done my part

and as my soul depleted

give my blood, not just my heart

but you are not an insect

to spare or slay with a swatter

and i am not so perfect

yet i claim you as my daughter

and life is not so gentle

and fate is never kind

and the price of love parental

is to give up love that’s blind

so i sit in stony silence

as befits a man who’s died

watch you suffer another’s violence

bear the bruises of false pride

i scream behind lips tightly stitched

burning bile has stole my voice

knowing you, alone, must come un-bewitched

and the best i have to offer you is


the choice