My Friend Sally - The Beginning by � moon_grace Half Cherokee and half white, she was round and in her sixties by the time I caught up with her. She was trying to sell me a distant home place back up in the mountains of Virginia.  I parked in the yard of the tiny home she lived in. In the back was a falling in chicken house surrounded by a rude stick fence. It didn't keep the chickens in and rarely kept the dogs out, but it was there and it was hers and there always managed to be an egg or two. A stranger to money, she didn't see it as odd to pick up pop bottles on the side of the road for tobacco money.  She did not wear shoes inside. I didn't either after the first visit. And I was not allowed to go to the front door after that day either. It was bad luck...only strangers came to the front door, not family and friends. She made no sound as she padded her way across the bare floor to greet me. She moved with the mystifying silence that heavy women often have. For the first visit, there was virtually no talk of the land or of pricing. She shared her stories. She filled me in on the goodness and the ugliness of her life. Nothing was too intimate. Greedily, I grasped the threads she spun and wound them in my heart. There, I hoarded them against the day when my own life might pale and seek a glimmer of light, or the day when I would be so captive to my own illusion that I might forget persons more blessed than me were out on the roadside looking for pop bottles.  The unrinsed salted ham she offered, I ate without a making a face. At the next visit, I left tenderly clutching a jar of greens clumsily wrapped in a gaudy pink dime-store doilie. She beamed as she relayed the good fortune of finding greens just for me in a vacant lot in town. I ate the bitter greens. I placed the doilie in my living room for all to see. It was my tribute to the woman- the one who had given proudly and wholly from the fathomless wealth of her heart. My friend Sally- The Land On a quiet Saturday afternoon, the six of us went to look at the land. We were three couples, including Sally's daughter and all three husbands. Sally and her husband rode with us in our small station wagon. Normally jovial company, her husband became quiet on the ride, hardly speaking unless spoken too. I didn't quite understand it, so I let it be. Sally and I sat in the back and talked, barely acknowledging anything outside our own conversation until we found ourselves at the foot of a set of steep mountains. It was not long until the road narrowed into a beautifully paved one lane road. "This is not so bad" I thought to myself. We came to a large house with a garden that was fenced to keep deer out. It was a homestead one might feature on a postcard-- large white two-story house with a wrap-around porch all nestled by trees in spectacular autumn yellows and reds. We were abruptly stopped by a heavy logging chain across the road and I came to the realization that the road was a private drive. We got out to stretch our legs amidst barking dogs. A man appeared from behind the house. He seemed vaguely familiar with who Sally and her husband were and nodded us consent to finish crossing his land. We drove until the road ended. From there, we walked. At first concerned for my elder friend, I soon saw there was no reason. She was pulled by an invisible life-line to the land. The trail rose ever higher and I wondered how anyone had lived here. We stopped here and there so Sally could inspect trees. She was looking for a spring that edged its way from the bottom of a tree. She told me it was a sulfer spring and every other time she had been with child, she had made the journey up to drink from it. It gave her boys. The two times she wasn't able to climb to drink from it, she had had girls. She wasn't able to find it that day. Sadly, she remarked, you will have to have all girls now when you start your family. From a family of six, five of whom were girls, I told her amusingly that maybe my mother had been the one who needed the spring more than I. Along the way, she pointed here and there, "That is a gum tree. This is a raspberry cane, you can tell by the color of the branches." The trail came to a crest and as steeply as it had gone up, it dropped dramatically and fell into a small valley. This was it. Her husband stopped. I tried to be polite and wait, but he blurted out, "No, you go on up ahead, this is as far as I go, I don't want no part of him. It gives me the creeps just being this close." I was stunned. I had no understanding of who "him" was. Sally took me by the arm, "Come on, he won't go any further. This trail used to be a road and he drove right up to the door and I would get in and we would go right back on down this mountain. He won't come here on foot." Still confused, I followed her down the trail. Down to the most beautiful place I had ever seen. We crossed an open tall meadow. There, tucked in the corner of it was a small fallen in cabin. Logs were askew and the chinking was gone. "That's where I was born" came her soft voice. It was small, smaller still than her present home. Having taken drafting in school, I calculated the whole of it to be about 10 by 16, which meant the living quarters were even smaller. I marvelled at how any one person could have lived there, let alone a family. She had told me once that she had 9 brothers and sisters. The rest of our party was wandering away, looking for stone marker boundaries. We were left alone outside the cabin. I patted down a place in the grass and plopped down on the ground. She sat on a fallen log from the cabin. She began to weave a tale, the journey of her childhood. With each twist and turn in the story, I became more fascinated and horrified, like one does when there is a bloody wreck on the highway. You try not to look, but are compelled to see. My friend Sally- The Story Ends I sat on the ground and looked around at the remains of the cabin and the small meadow of tall grass. We were completely surrounded on all sides by tall mountains. On one side, to my right, I could see the sun moving across one set of ridges. All was silent except for the eerie sound of the wind rushing through the trees. You could hear it coming, rising up-hill before it crashed back down the other side and could be felt. "You know, the sun doesn't ever shine here" she said. "It's what they call a dark hollar. He grew corn here, my daddy did, but it never got very big, so he bought a lot of it. He made whiskey over the hill there." She pointed off in the direction the others had gone. I was still mesmerized by the sound of the wind long before I felt it, but I tried to stay in the conversation. "What was there to do up here growing up, Sally?" She looked at me amazed and I felt incredibly stupid for having asked it. "We did a lot of things. We played and I had a few pets. I had a whistle pig. It was wild, but I threw out cornbread to it from the porch. It would come up and whistle when it was hungry." "A whistle pig?" I asked, I had no clue, I had had a lot of pets, but had never heard of this one. "Yes, it wasn't really a pig. My daddy called it a groundhog. I thought it wasn't big enough to be a hog and it whistled so we called it whistle pig." I laughed. The only groundhogs I had ever seen were on the side of the road and I didn't know they made any noise. She went on, "I had a snake too, one time. It lived in the chinkin here in the wall on the outside. I used to give him milk when we had it. But one day, my daddy saw it and he killed it." I shook my head, not knowing what to say to that one. "Sally, tell me, how in the world did you all in live that tiny building?" "Well we never did live in it at one time. My daddy ran off all the boys once they got up to workin' size, about six or seven. All my brothers ended up living with other families up and down the mountain that took them in. My daddy was a mean man." I would have been content to leave it at that, but she went on. "You know, he wasn't an Indian, he was white. My mamma was Indian. She was a Cherokee. She was a pretty thing. She was nice, my mamma was. Mostly, she stayed right here and never went anywhere." I asked her how they came to meet or get married, but she said she never knew any of that. "He made whiskey up here. He had to buy corn for it some years cause the corn here didn't make. I remember one time, she went to town with him. All of us children stayed here at home. He didn't ever take us anywhere." I was curious, "You mean you never went to school or anywhere?" She looked at me for a minute as if she were trying to decide what to say. "Yes, I did go to school one time. But I didn't go for long. He wouldn't let us go. They said at the school we weren't white so they put us all in the colored school. When daddy found it out, we never went back no more." I was uncomfortable with that subject, having come through the first level of integration myself. So, I turned back to her family. "You said your mamma only went to town with him one time. Why didn't she go with him all the time?" My parents had always done everything together and this was a foreign concept to me. "Well, it was a long walk. He took her one time that time cause he needed help with getting corn and sugar. But, while they were there, he thought she was smilin' at another man and he left the corn and sugar. We could hear her screaming a long way before they ever got back. He had left that corn and sugar and pulled her by her hair all the way home." I sat in silence. I heard the wind heading up the mountain again and I wondered if that was the way her screams had been. I had never seen violence before like that except maybe on tv. Certainly not in real life. I felt like changing the subject again, but I couldn't. "What happened then, Sally? Was she all right?" "Yes, he didn't pull her hair out, only pulled her by it all the way home. After that, he never let her go to town again. He was real jealous. He used to think after that that some other man might be comin' around when he was gone. After that, when he left to go to town, we had to all of us stay in the cabin. We couldn't go outside til he got back. He would close the door and take a bag of corn meal and pour it in a circle around the house. He put it on the porch and under the windows and all the way around the house. That way, he could see foot prints if anyone came up while he was gone." I gritted my teeth and shuddered. The wind was up to us again and I could see the sun a long way off but there was no warmth from it where we sat. I saw her for a moment, not as an old woman, but as a young child seeing all that she had seen and I wondered at how she had survived. She spoke softly, so casually- as if she were telling about a movie instead of her life. She had no emotion about her. I had to know more. Part of me inwardly chiding myself for not changing the subject and part of me wanting to know what had happened. "What happened to her Sally? Did she always stay with him?" "Some of her people came and took her away from here. I don't know where she was buried. I didn't know them. He killed her you know. ""Sally! surely he didn't kill her!" "Yes he killed her. It was cold. Really cold. There wasn't snow on the ground, but it was cold. I was still pretty little then. My mamma had just had a baby. She was laying on the bed and the baby was crying a lot. It always cried. One night, he come home and said he was tired of that cryin' and he grabbed the baby up and threw it into the fireplace in the fire and left. I got it out. It wasn't burned or nothin' 'cause it had a bunch of blankets wrapped around it. I took it and I tried to take care of it, but it died a couple of days later anyway. Me and my sister buried it." I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach. The world was starting to spin. Maybe it didn't show on the outside how I felt inside. I was used to hiding emotions back then. She went on. "He came back a few days after we buried the baby. Mamma was still sick in the bed. He brought another woman with him. He said mamma was dying anyway. He let the fire go out. Then him and that woman went down to the spring and got buckets of cold water and poured them on her. She was asleep and she didn't wake up when she got wet. He made me and sister stay in the other room, on the other side of the curtain." I could hear the others coming back, crashing foot sounds came through the hollar. Sally stood up. I followed her lead. She looked at my husband and the others and asked him, "Well what do you think? It is a good place to hunt deer here." I was numb. That was it. She had switched gears and was jovial again. I was still in shock. I didn't care about any mountain retreat now. I didn't want to be there now. I was afraid. I looked behind me here and there on the way back and stayed with the group, afraid to be away from them for a second. I understood now why her husband had not come down the path. Had I known, I would not have either. What had an hour before looked like a place of hidden magic now looked and felt like danger. The other's were still revved up, chatting here and there but I couldn't concentrate on the conversation enough to join in. We made our way back to the cars. My husband had been elated with seeing deer scrapes and fresh trails. He had always loved a wilderness kind of area. He was on the main road before I knew it and started to sing, "I'd rather be in some dark hollar.." Suddenly Sally broke into song with him, "Where the sun don't ever shine." They sang and she said, "My daddy used to drink and sit on the porch and make music, the whole place would ring with music. You could hear it up and down the mountain." I was still in another frame of mind and I marvelled at how resilient she had been. How strong she still was. I had always had visions of mystery and power associated with Native American cultures, this was a side no one should have had to live. These were memories no person should have ever harbored. It was a dark hollar. The sun did not shine there. Later, when there turned out not to be a clear deed and the land was all tied up, I was not sorry. I had tried with my husband to go back once to look at the place again, just the two of us alone. Again, I would hear the wind long before I felt it and this time, I steered us far from the cabin. It was sheer will that kept my feet moving, that and the fear that suddenly, he would be out of my sight and I would be alone. I feared being alone with the ghosts of the hollar. Sally I had to sit on the ending here for a while before I could share all of my dear friend. She has long since died but she forever remains a turning point in my life. I loved her. I had started out with the intent to share only the beauty of her and hide the rest. That would be wrong. All of it was her. All of it melded her into one of the gentlest souls I have ever met anywhere on earth. Her story has sustained me through a lot of hardship. There have been periods of time I harbored a lot of bitterness in my life. Slowly, I have always come back to her. Sometimes, it has taken a few years, but she always circles back to me. And then I remember the way she was still able to crinkle up her face and smile as she spoke of how her father made music ring in the mountains. Meer survival was not her triumph. Her triumph will always be that despite all, she was able to still smile at one small memory. This was her real gift to me. After greiving and feeling hard feelings about things, I remember Sally and I remember-- she could still smile. An entire legacy in one smile. If I have offended anyone in anyway by the telling of her story. I am truely sorry. It was my heart's wish to share only her life as she gave it to me. moon_grace.

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