Interview with Linda Tate, Author of Power in the Blood: A Family Narrative
Carol Samson

Linda Tate, faculty member in the DU Writing Program, has recently published a family narrative, Power in the Blood, which traces the lives of her great-great-great-grandparents, her great-great-grandparents, her great-grandparents, and her grandparents and parents. Many of her family members lived in the land between the rivers (now the Land Between the Lakes) on the border between Kentucky and Tennessee. In the memoir, which is part fact and part imaginative recreation, Tate allows her ancestors to create their own oral histories with distinct voices that show storytelling itself is a birthright. I interviewed Linda at the University of Denver on March 9.

Carol Samson: First let me say I finished this book over the weekend, and I know that it was published on Friday, March 6, 2009. I want to tell you that I find it to be a powerful and tough-minded piece of writing. I know it took you ten years to write it.
Linda Tate: Fourteeen, actually.

I stand corrected. (Laughs.) Fourteen years to write. . . . It is a fine work, and I have a few questions about it. In the Authors Note, you explain that the book is based on years of painstaking research aided by artistic acts of the imagination. The first sentence in Power in the Blood states: Grandma Fannie died when I was five, but now I get word that she is still alive. Clearly, that sentence has the factual conjoined with the imaginative. It is a haunting sentence. It says that the dead make appointments with us. Could you explain how this worked, how you were called to write this book by certain hauntings?
Well, hauntings is a great word for this. That opening scene was based on a recurring dream that I had for many years. It was a progressive dream. I would dream that she, my grandmother, was alive. I would dream that I had heard something about where she was. And I would get a little closer to her. And finally I got to the house. And finally I got inside the house. And finally I got into the kitchen where she was. The last time I had that version of the dream it was as I wrote it: she looked at me and did not know who I was. I do still dream that shes alive and that she hasnt told me that she is. But shes living in some different houses now. But I do still dream about her now. I have had that dream for twenty years, I imagine.

Do you recognize the houses that shes in now? Or are they completely foreign houses?
No. Completely foreign houses that are of the imagination.

Does she still call you Dancing Bear?
No. She doesnt recognize me. No.

The word hardscrabble appears again and again as an adjective for the lives of the people who lived in the land between the rivers. From your research, the artifacts you collected and documents, could you define the lifestyle of your great-great-grandparents and grandparents in terms of your historic research? What is their hardscrabble existence?
Yes, so it would be my great-great-great-grandparents, my great-great-grandparents, and my great-grandparents. My great-great-great-grandparents, as far as I can tell, were sharecroppers or tenant farmers, meaning that they did not own their own land and they farmed for someone else. That, in itself, is a hardscrabble way to live because that system was designed so that you would not come out ahead, and you would stay beholden to the farmer who owned the land. In addition, I did find out that my great-great-grandmother, Louisiana, who tells part of the tale, was a domestic worker, and I found that out on a census document because it lists your occupations. She was the only woman listed as white in the entire land between the rivers who was also listed as having domestic servant as an occupation. Anyone else who had that designation was black. And from all the research I did on what that area was like at the end of the 19th century, that fact, being white and doing domestic service reserved for blacks, was considered an extraordinarily, one might say humble, but they might see it as humiliating, line of work. It was considered lower than low. So for her to work outside her home as a domestic servant as a white woman was . . . that was the lowest place that she could possibly be. That suggests to me that their lives were hardscrabble. I believe they were involved in subsistence living. I dont know if their cabins had . . . well, I imagine that they had puncheon floors made out of logs, but they may have been dirt floors. They were very humble circumstances.

Often in the book, the women teach the women how to keep the humble spaces quite pristine. I remember the one little girl who was five who had to sweep and keep the room clean and in order.
Right.

And the artifacts, you actually held some.
I was going to say women passing down tradition. Probably my most prized artifact is the family cornbread recipe which is in the book. My grandmother Fannie wrote the recipe down because, I guess, my father was frustrated that my mother wasnt making the cornbread just exactly as he experienced it growing up and asked his mother to write it down for my mother. And thats the only thing I have in Fannies handwriting that recipe. And its conjecture on my part, but cornbread was certainly a major staple of Cherokee and other American Indian nations. I imagine that that recipe was passed down to Fannie through other women in the family. So thats a very tangible artifact. Another artifact that I did see was the bonnet that had presumably, as far as we know, belonged to Nancy who was my great-great-great-grandmother, so three greats back. She would have been born about 1825, and her bonnet still exists. And what also still exists is the story that has been passed down of someone who is deceased now, but who, as a little girl, remembered seeing Nancy tie her hair up at night and tuck it in her bonnet to go to sleep. And then for me to actually hold that bonnet was amazing. Talk about linkings across time!

I wanted to ask you about the cornbread because I read the recipe, but I didnt know what it was you put on the griddle first. Steriten?
(Laughs) Lard? No, shortenen. Shortnen.

Oh, shortening.
She had her own spellings for things: shorten. She spelled it some way.

Then you get the griddle really hot. Then the cornbread goes in . . .
Yes, in the sklit. The skillet. The sklit with the shortnen. (Laughs) It is a good recipe.

(Laughs) I might have to try it. . . . Now, Henry James said, The truth must be invented. In the book you allow two narrators: Louisiana Armstrong, 1902, and Fannie Tate, 1963, to tell extended tales of their personal histories. Louisiana says that she was a woman of the old ways with a birthright in stories and that she will tell her tale in a slant way. I found her to have a poets sensibility. She is the one who spoke of landscape of mountain people having clouds at [their] feet. She watched her dark-skinned mother comb her hair and tuck it in a bonnet. She described her river journey in a canoe, related her own aging and dementia. Could you describe how you came to invent the truth of Louisianas voice? How did you hear her? Find her dialect? Let her talk to you?
Thats a great question, and it can be answered on so many levels. Let me talk first about the language, how I let her voice sort of come into being. My field as a scholar is Appalachian literature, so Ive read vast amounts of literature from the 20th century but also some documents from the 19th century, and I have spent a lot of time in that area. So partly it is my scholars ear, knowing what many of the speech patterns were. I also grew up in a family that, and in a church that, had a connection to those areas; and so I grew up with many elders in my family who had speech patterns that I just absorbed growing up. I wouldnt have known I was doing research, of course, but I was listening with a keen ear. My sister also is an incredible mimic, and so she and I have just mimicked for each others amusement various speech patterns. And I listened a lot, when I went and spent time in that area with family, I listened to how they phrased things. And there is a wonderful writer, she just died, her name was Verna Mae Slone. And she lived in Eastern Kentucky. I had the privilege of meeting her. I think she was about 95 when she died. She was an untrained, self-taught writer. She wrote an autobiographical book, called Rennies Way, but she also wrote a book, How We Talked. Its a compendium in dictionary form of slang and idiom. And she split it up: words related to food, words related to play, words related to work. And its a treasure trove of how language was spoken. And the final thing -- this was a real find -- I spent a lot of time in the Kentucky State Archives. They do not have the county records on microfilm. They have the actual court documents that were written by hand, and they wrote down verbatim the testimony that people gave. I was there looking for documents related to my family, but you couldnt tell what the documents were at a glance. You had to open each thing up and skim it to see what the names were. And it was all in 19th-century script. It was laborious. It took me probably three weeks to make my way through the boxes. But in doing that I would come across these cases where people were talking about difficult lives. Of course, they were in court. They were talking about crime. They were talking about difficult domestic situations; and I looked at the language they used to describe that. The most amazing thing I found was a woman who had lived just a few miles from where my great-great-grandparents would have lived. She was an elderly woman. She was experiencing what seemed to be pretty severe abuse at the hands of her son. It was a case of elder abuse. And she was testifying in court. The main thing that the lawyers entered as a piece of evidence was a diary that she kept. She had no paper, but you know the banks would give you a calendar or something like that, and she would write on the back or in the margins. I found 200 pages of this womans diary. I read how she described the weather, how she described her daily chores. And that collection was immensely helpful in imagining how someone would tell a story.

It was 1902?
It was probably 1890s but close to that time.

And was the woman poetic?
A little. I think I gave Louisiana a flavor of her. So that answers the question of language.

For me, the portrait of Fannie was the most complex and, again, haunting of the portraits. Somehow she told her tale and expected me to see the holes in it. She willingly explained her wildness and her conversions and her moral choices; and yet all the while she was doing that, I found her to be unreliable or, at least, a teller of half-truths. Its rather like Nelly in Emily Brontes Wuthering Heights, who narrates a story larger than what she herself can understand. I found Fannies section to be that kind of a remarkable creation. How did you come to hear this grandmother who you loved and lost at age five and who you had to discover in the process of writing the book? Did you just let her be, let her go? Her section reads like she took command of your pen and wrote it.
Thank you for that question. As you can imagine, coming to terms with Fannie was huge. She was my hero as a little girl, and she was a safe adult for me in a frightening childhood. And I obviously grieved her passing enough that, thirty years later, I decided that I would embark on this journey to find out more about her. I had no idea what I would find out. People ask me how to do family history; and Im happy to share some of the trade secrets about how to do it, but I must tell them to be careful because you may find out things you dont want to know. Fannie turned out to be a cruel person, and I didnt know that about her. When I was writing her story, she was just larger than life. I knew about the carnival, and I knew she had run off from her family. But in my growing up years, I only knew she had been abused, and I romanticized it. I just understood that she was liberated and that she became free. I didnt know what she had done to her children. I did not know a lot of her extreme behavior. So when I found it out, I didnt write her story for a long time. I was coming to terms with it personally. But when I did write it, I tried to think of how she would see her story. She would not condemn herself. She would feel justified in what she had done. At the same time, I wanted the reader to know that I do not condone what she did, and I tried to put her out there as she is, as she was. And it also helped me understand, in my trying to understand my own father, that none of us is wholly good and none of us is wholly evil. I understand that we are complex creatures, and we all in whatever way are making choices that we must assume at the time are appropriate choices for us.

I agree. I did feel as I read her that she would tell things that, had she thought about them or had she assimilated why Harv, for example, comes and takes the girls back, well, she might have understood herself. But there were just moments when you showed us that the people in the context around her were reading her in a different way than she was reading herself. Then, there was that marvelous character Herschel, her husband, who keeps bringing her up to understanding in a quiet way as best he could. When I finished the Fannie section, I thought Linda Tate has done some amazing things here because it is hard here to write a character who, as I say, does not understand all she is saying and wont stop telling you about it.
(Laughing) Well, she is larger than life in how she tells the story, too. She was . . .

Mythic.
Yes, mythic in her own way. And I imagined that she would just go on and on.

And I do think that, as you say in the end of the book, you can stop carrying her bones. You have put the bones down. But I do think the reader picks the bones up. You gave us so much to consider. Since I finished it yesterday, I have had to come to terms with her in my life. . . . Then towards the end when you regroup and you recount your process in writing and your research methodology, when you show that some of her tales are challenged and some are corroborated, we get another reading of Fannie.

At one point in the narrative, your Uncle Henry warns you to be careful what you ask for, Linda. In many ways, you, like Louisiana and Fannie, come to understand that you look out one day and youre living with meanness. You show that school work and reading and writing was a way to deal with pain and meanness, that in the end writing/researching/inventing voices was what led you to a kind of peace. It was a way to go to a hiding place and let the world go. Louisiana hides under her daughters house. Fannie goes to the kitchen in the basement. You went to dark corners and to journals. Did the writing of this book bring peace of mind? Have you stopped carrying the bones, as you call it?
Yes, it certainly brought me peace in many ways. I dont think the journey will ever be over. I dont think Ill ever be fully able to put them to rest. Its just that, right now, theres yet another stage, another moment in the books life as people are beginning to read it. I have a very sweet and lovely life. I would not have that life if I had not gone on the journey of writing the book. It was a really, really difficult journey, and I like to think that if I had known when I started how things would come out, particularly, how things would come out in my life, I like to think I would have done it over again, but (laughing) it was really rough along the way.

But the reward is yours and, then, mine. Well, it is stunning. I would imagine that having articulated it, you have a different perspective. You can hold it at a distance outside yourself, if not find peace.
A friend of mine was recently reminding me of a line from Faulkner, which I will probably get wrong: The past is not dead. It is not even past. So the past is always there. The things that happened will always have happened, and, you know, there is no final peace.

But you know what I thought? In the last chapter when you all go up to straighten up the graveyard and to put the fence around it and your relatives are all there and you mark your territory, I thought to myself, If Linda had not had a researchers mind and a poets soul, these people would not have been there all together with the table and the big dinner.
Oh, and we would not have had Lucy. Oh, she was such a marvelous person. She passed away a few years after I met her. But I would go and visit her, and she would make me these wonderful meals. And she was a quilter. And I would sleep under piles of quilts she had made. And she was just the sweetest, most loving aunt, and to think that I wouldnt have found Lucy. And Henry, my uncle, would not have found Lucy.

Yes, and the reader sees what the project brought to so many people. The honoring of that idea, that the past is not even past.

Now, a final question, I would imagine that the end of a ten-year project . . .
(Laughs) Fourteen . . .

(Laughs) Yes, lets, get that right: the end of a fourteen-year project . . . well, the end is a relief and a sadness: so much energy, so much planning, over. What will you take on next? What is your next project?
I dont envision myself writing another book any time soon. I am totally exhausted and drained. This book went through five full and different drafts. And it was intense in so many ways. With the publisher two drafts. To get it ready for the publisher I did three. There were two people who helped me a lot with it. One was Lee Smith . . . I think she is one of the most important novelists writing in Appalachia today. Lee read the first attempts I wrote of Louisianas tale and the second full draft [of the book]. She also helped me when it was time to think about a publisher, and a blurb from her is on the back of the book. And the other person who has read everything along the way is my best friend Jennifer Soule, who is a poet. The press had a marvelous copy editor who really absorbed the vision of the book and helped me bring it to fruition. He helped me with some conceptual things, the craft and the voices, the fine tuning. But I dont imagine another such project (laughs). I may do some book writing again, many years down the road.

And youre about to go on a trip to Ohio to celebrate the publication of Power in the Blood.
Im going to the Appalachian Studies Association Conference. The Appalachian Studies field in general, both the conference and the Center where I was a Rockefeller Fellow (the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Gender in Appalachia), those organizations and, more importantly, the people in those organizations were hugely instrumental in supporting me and encouraging me and just, well, you know, it is an appropriate place to launch the book. Im going to the conference in Portsmouth, Ohio, on the river. Im flying to St. Louis. Im meeting my mother and sister, and theyre going with me. Ill give a reading of the book on Saturday morning, March 28, and then that afternoon there will be a book-signing.

And the title, Power in the Blood . . . which is from a hymn?
Well, you know, I grew up with all of these hymns. These hymns rattle around in my mind. I kept thinking of Power in the Blood, which, you know, is a really rousing hymn, and I cant even read that section in my book, the conversion scene, out loud without starting to sing that hymn because its so catchy, as Fannie would say, and lively. Truth to tell, as Fannie would say, its a lively piece. Itll draw you in.

As we finish, I want to thank you, Linda. Your book, too, is a lively piece thatll draw people in, and I think it attests to what Fannie, as a young girl, says about learning, about overwhelming tasks, about wonder. At one point, with a simple wisdom, she says: Its a whole heap of things to be knowing in the world, aint it?

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