Who Barbee Heilman Was to Me

      When I was pregnant with my son, Ela, his dad and I joined our friends Hap and Barbee to live in a small cabin on the Cherokee Indian Reservation in the Smoky Mountains. (See the April 11 post for more tales about life on the Cherokee Reservation.)

Barbee

The cabin sat in lush greenery on the side of Noble Mountain, miles from any neighbors and without electricity or a telephone. The cabin's owners, who, like all the other Indians on the reservation, had long ago moved to the valley, were glad to see the family cabin lived in again. It was an especially nice arrangement for the four of us because Barbee was pregnant, too, and due about the same time I was.

         While Dan and Hap worked on the cabin and talked about the state of the world, Barbee and I did our Lamaze exercises on the cabin floor together, learning to breathe with the expected labor pains, fluttering our fingers in effleurage over our rounded bellies. We shared our pregnancy experiences, whispered secrets of the womb, talked about babies, diets, breast feeding. We would both have natural childbirth, but whereas Hap and Barbee opted to have their baby in the hospital in Knoxville, Dan and I would have ours there in the cabin. Dan would deliver.

        When the time came for Hap and Barbee to leave, I stood at the cabin door watching him help her across the yard to their car. Barbee turned around to wave to me, smiling over her pregnant belly. I waved back, smiling over mine. The world would be different when we met again.

        Dan and I stayed at the cabin and waited. I worked in the garden. I hiked up Noble Mountain. Dan made a baby bed. We weren't afraid to have a baby so far away from help. I was strong and healthy. We had read a lot of books.

       Ela was born on the morning of April 20, spurting into the world with wide-open, excited eyes. As soon as Dan felt he could leave, he drove into the valley to call Hap and Barbee, and when he reached Hap, Hap told him that Barbee was in labor. Their baby was born later that same day.

      A few weeks after the babies were born, Hap, Barbee, and their daughter, Apple, came home to the cabin. When I heard their car pulling into the driveway, I ran to the door of the cabin with my baby in my arms. Barbee was walking towards me with her baby in her arms. We met on the doorstep, and in our hug was the world of difference we had anticipated when we last parted.

      We lived together in that cabin for another couple of months, nursing our babies, learning to be mothers, strengthening the already close bond between us. That bond never weakened in the years since our life together in the cabin, even though Barbee and Hap remained in Tennessee, while Dan and I moved to Oregon.

At the cabin, about 20 years later. Barbee and Hap on the extreme left; Apple and Ela on the right. I am in the center.

 Barbee Heilman was one of the most beautiful spirits in my life. She died this past Easter Sunday, the day after the birthday of our "twin" children. She didn't die after "a long battle with cancer" but after a short, intense battle with cancer, during which she was the same smiling, gracious, beautiful person she always had been. She was Buddhist and more than anyone I know, exhibited the principles of Buddhism, as much in her dying as in her living. She was a sister of my soul. I am going to miss her more than I can say. 

Hap and Barbee, about a week before she died. 

A Talented Docent Can Change the World

        You go on a tour of Oregon Caves, you visit the Heceta Head lighthouse, you go to a museum or historical house or battlefield, and a docent will tell you the story behind it all. And then you go to Montpelier, James Madison's home in Virginia,

and you find a storyteller so talented you not only feel the spell of history but leave a little wiser than when you came.

        Jeb Gray has a rare ability to feel the thrill of history. "In these very chairs, around this very table, sat the great men: Madison, Jefferson, Adams." To us the life-size cardboard silhouettes gave a simulacrum of a dinner at Montpelier,

but I had the impression that Jeb was seeing the actual people, hearing their conversations and debates about the country they were founding. As he told us about the important role Dolley Madison played in our history – arguably as important as that of her husband, James – he brought her powerful presence into our presence. I had been aware of how important Dolley was, but I never knew it, the way Jeb Gray knows.

        One reason his storytelling was so captivating was that he obviously loved his subject – history, yes, but James Madison, as subject, even more. He loved the man. When he told us of James's childhood – growing up on a wealthy plantation in Virginia, learning Greek and Latin and several modern languages before he was eleven – his admiration was palpable.

        But Jeb Gray did not let admiration prevent him from seeing truth, and the truth was that James Madison, that great man whose ideas about government by the people were powerful enough to build a nation, owned slaves. Jeb also did not let his esteem for Dolley Madison whitewash the fact that she sold her well-loved slaves, who had served her for decades, to pay the debts of her gambling-crazy son. Nor did he let "the consciousness of the day" excuse such acts. Nor did he stint on making it clear what owning slaves meant, even when the owners were kind, as the Madisons were, because in the end, a slave was property, and property could be sold, whatever the consequences to such "property," the human cost to love and family. In their life-times neither James nor Dolley ever freed a single slave. Without voicing his condemnation, Jeb Gray let hang in the air how reprehensible, unethical, and immoral such behavior is. Even from people he also revered.

        It was more than what Jeb Gray was telling us, though, and more than the implications he left for us to understand that made him a docent who could, in his own small-step way, change the world. It was his storytelling talent. In the room in which Madison died, next to the bed in which he died, Jeb told us about that death, spinning images that stuck vividly in our minds. He told us about Paul Jennings, the slave who was Madison's valet, picking him up in his arms and laying him in the bed as he was dying. Then Jeb read Jennings's written description of that death, letting us feel not just the impact of it on the devoted attendant, but the impact of such good writing on us. The account was movingly, beautifully written. Jennings had absorbed his education by being around Madison and could write like that! And was a slave. The impact of slavery sank onto us without Jeb Gray having to say a word about it.

        I've heard a lot of docents, but Jeb Gray is the only one who could not only bring the story alive in the imagination of the listener but let the moral significance of that story leave its effect on the listener's conscience. Being a docent seems like a small-impact job, but every one of us in the group tour at Montpelier that day left with a slightly stronger sense of the evils of slavery in addition to the image of a man who did great deeds while still perpetuating that evil. Can a docent change the world? One small step at a time.

Basket-making with a Cherokee Indian Who Knows Her Craft

        In 1972 I lived in a cabin on the Cherokee Indian Reservation near Cherokee, North Carolina, as guests of Emmaline and Russell McCoy, who lived down the mountain, in the valley.  Emmaline was full-blooded Cherokee; Russell was part Cherokee. My partner, Dan, and I were living in the cabin with another couple, Hap and Barbee. Barbee and I were both pregnant when Dan and I joined them in the cabin. On April 20 the four of us in the cabin suddenly became six. 

      There was no electricity there on the mountain, and no telephone. There was a road to town, but we didn't take it very often. Mostly we were living the sort of cræfty life I talked about in my last blog: doing things the way they were done before motors and electricity. One day, for instance, Russell took all of us – the two couples and their two babies – way back in the woods to a bee tree he remembered from years ago, enough years ago that small trees had grown in the wide path we were using for a road. Russell kept having to get out of the car to cut them out of the way. But when we stopped, somewhere deep in the woods, his memory had served him well. There was indeed a bee tree there. Russell must have known that the bees were swarming then because it wasn't honey we were after but bees themselves. (Swarming bees don't sting.) Russell scraped an armload of bees into the hive he had brought, making sure he included the queen. Bees buzzed angrily all around us, but I don't remember that anyone got stung. We took the bees home in the back of Russell's pick-up and set up beekeeping.

        Another day Emmaline took Barbee and me into the woods to find suitable white oaks for the baskets we had asked her to teach us to make. She showed us how to select good trees for making the splits. I don't remember what her criteria were or whether, after we selected a tree, we cut it down. Possibly Russell did, with a chain saw. When we got back to Emmaline's house, she showed us how to split the tree, dividing the pieces more and more finely, with a knife, until they parted easily into thin, pliant strips we could just pull apart. Emmaline used skillful, swift motions with her knife, starting at the top of the length of wood, then pulling it apart into two long, flexible slats. The pieces that would be the warp of the basket were about an inch wide, the horizontal weft pieces about a quarter inch. 

        After the strips were made, we boiled English walnut husks for a dye and dyed the pieces a dark brown. Some pieces stayed in longer than others and some absorbed the dye more than others, causing slight variations of color that, later, lent the baskets interesting rhythms of color. 

        When the wood was dyed and the dye had set, we put the long white-oak splits in water to keep them flexible and started weaving the baskets themselves. We were making rectangular baskets with a stiff rim and a stiff curved thick piece of white oak for a handle. It didn't take long to do the shaping and weaving. The finished baskets were sturdy and beautiful, and I loved having made my basket at Emmaline's tutelage, from gathering materials to tucking in the end of the last strip of oak.

      I used that basket for many years. I do still use it, for storing canning supplies, but my lack of skill in the craft showed where the oak splits broke at one side. Or maybe I was careless with the basket during one of my moves to a different location – from Cherokee to the Rogue Valley or from my first home there to my first house on this land, then, ten years ago, to the one I live in now. Always the basket went with me. It is a prized possession, not because it is a perfect basket but because I made it: from tree to materials to product. 

Learning from the Past

        "Against a rising tide of automation and increasing digital complexity, we are becoming further divorced from the very thing that defines us: we are makers, crafters of things."

        So says Alexander Langlands in his excellent book Cræft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts. To reconnect with ourselves as makers, Langlands, who is an archeologist, walks back into time. He swings a mattock to break new ground for a garden. He learns to thatch a roof. He grows hedges to replace wire fences. He makes and uses limestone as a building material instead of concrete. Everywhere, he extols the ancient craft over its more modern replacement: baskets over plastic bags, thatched roofs over tin, horse-drawn plows over tractors. Even the bicycle, in Langlands's eyes, "removes us from a natural state." To walk, he says, is more "crafty" (craft being the Old English word for craft but connoting, along with the skill of making, which is what we mean by the word today, power, knowledge, wisdom, and resourcefulness).

        Alexander Langlands would have understood my forty years of life on the mountain without electricity. Just as he felt that his learning to use a scythe for making hay was a valuable contribution to the general psyche of modern living, so did I feel that my life on the mountain, so intimately connected with nature, was psychically important to our world. Someone has to understand what we lost with modernization.

        When I first moved onto the mountain, I was doing everything by cræft. I built my house with a hammer and bow saw, cutting from my own woods the poles for walls. I spent hours with a drawknife, peeling bark from logs. But I was making concessions from the beginning: it was a chain saw, run by a friend, not my bow saw that cut down the larger poles for the framing.

       Langlands would have approved of my living without a car, though I think he would have preferred me to have a horse and buggy instead of hitchhiking, as I did after walking the half mile to the road when I needed to go to town. When my wheelbarrow broke, I hitchhiked to town to buy a new one. Langlands certainly would have approved of the time I borrowed a burro from a neighbor to haul garden soil up the hill. I loved the burro, but it wasn't really a very suitable way to carry burdens to my house, after all.

        For a very short while I was walking a half mile down the road to do my laundry in the creek. I may have been learning the cræft of beating dirty clothes against a rock, but mainly what I learned was that it was well worth the time, trouble, and lack of cræft to take my clothes to the laundromat.

       One thing I learned from all those years is that life is easier with electricity. But I also learned what Langlands learned by pursuing so many ancient crafts: that with every advance, something is always lost.

        When we accepted electricity, for instance, we lost silence. We hardly know how much noise is in our lives because we shut so much of it out of our hearing. With all the noise of electrical equipment and appliances eliminated in my little house on the mountain, I flowed into a more peaceful life. I lived always with the sounds of nature, especially in my poorly insulated house with its single-pane windows. When I moved into my new house nine years ago (on the same land, still on the mountain), I gained a warmer, easier-to-heat, easier-to-keep-cool house, but my double-pane windows muffle, without entirely shutting out, the whir of crickets, songs of birds, calls of owls, barks of foxes, the wind roaring down the ridge, and the thump of snow falling from trees. Mostly my well insulated house has put me at one remove from the huge and beautiful silence of snowfall in the night.

        At my old house I also knew the darkness of that night. Kerosene lamplight is a soft light that seeps gently into the dark, letting dark curl into corners of the house and letting the stars keep their power. The electric lights in my new house are a hundred times better than the kerosene – cleaner, easier, healthier, brighter – but they jut viciously into the dark, thrusting it outside. It is dark in the house; then suddenly all there is is light. Everything that is is indoors. The outdoors is alien, blacked out. If I want to see outside, I have to turn the light off, let my eyes adjust, gentle my vision, and be one with the night. 

        In the same sort of way, Langlands prefers a scythe, while acknowledging the tractor's superiority in certain ways. He still thinks we should use a scythe, but I don't advocate going back to kerosene light, which is dirty, smelly, and troublesome. I wouldn't want to. But I do know what we lost when we took up electricity instead. And I think it's a good thing to recognize what we lose when we take up something different.

        Langlands would agree.