Double Creek Girl

Abstract

Double Creek Girl Silas House (bio) for Sylvia Woods They don't expect much out of girlsraised on Double Creek.Up where the pines hang lowover the road like a tunneland the sun doesn't riseuntil the rest of the worldhas had its coffee and forgottenthe magic of morning already, up where evening mist breathesover the clean graveyardand gardens with their straight rows.They don't think girls from a placelike Double Creek will amount to anything at all.Especially when you were littleand they had pictures of girlslike you in all the magazines.Life and Look and Time. Oncea man from National Geographic came and took pictures up there.Girls in dresses their mothers madethem and stringy hair, hollow-eyed,hungry-eyed, sad-eyed.But you defied them, Double Creek Girl.You showed them. Every timeyou opened a book and drank it uplike spring water. Each time you read [End Page 72] a poem and closed your eyes at the end,savoring it like a good hunkof cornbread, seeing itlike an azure sky, tastingthe words like the wet in a bloom of honeysuckle. You showed themwhen you listened to every wordthe teacher said and walkedthat commencement line and tookyour degree from the handof the professor who wassecretly one of them. He neverthought you could do it. But you did. See here, our Appalachia, ourbone and blood. Listen, ourDouble Creek girl: you arewhat happens when we knowthat God lives in betweenthe pages of books and at the tipsof pencils and on the sharpedges of notebook paper. That's something they'll never know. [End Page 73] Silas House Silas House is the author of four novels, two plays, and a book of nonfiction, as well as the editor of several books. House currently serves as writer-in-residence at Lincoln Memorial University and will become the NEH Chair in Appalachian Studies at Berea College in Fall 2010. Copyright © 2010 Berea College