Change and Modernization Theme Analysis

Weren’t no such spirit, just a man sly-eyeing me. He didn’t fool me none with his pasty-white face. Darkly he was, filled to the brim with the blackness inside…

It was preacher man Vester Frazier, my dead husband’s cousin … He’d been coming for me a good while, and more boldly since I’d been left widowed.

He’d done the same to others like me: Michael McKinney, the three-nippled midget who rode his goat cart bare-chested across the hills, a boy with pink eyes and hair the color of a white lamb, the seven-year-old Melungeon girl who had fit that tonic and herbs couldn’t quiet…And there were the godless, those who’d never found a church, and a few ungodly others Vester Frazier and his followers thought the devil had given those peculiarities to. The odd markings with no names.

Mountainfolk looked forward to this section filled with the latest home remedies from magazine and to the health pamphlets the government sent in. It made me happy that a lot of folks, especially the elders, insisted on sharing their own too.

Someone had written instructions for using a lodestone, advised readers to wear the mineral round their necks to attract money, love, and luck. Beneath that was a note from the old midwife Emma McCain, instructing women to find the small stone from the knee of an old cock and hold it during birth to protect the babe … Underneath the amulet’s instructions, Emma had penned a special reminder written to husbands: Wear a cock stone to excite and make your wife more agreeable.

The Companion was a popular request. Mountain women were snatching up new cures and remedies from the magazine, abandoning their old ways of healing.

[…]

“Be obliged to git one. Nester Rylie’s been reading it and she told me in passing last year, she ain’t rubbed groundhog brains on her babies’ sore teeth or needed to use the hen innards on the gums of her teething ones since. And after she’d read about a good paste recipe that cured thrush, Nester said, none of her nine youn’uns ain’t ever had to drink water from a stranger’s shoe again to get the healing.”

I held the library book a moment and then said, “Miss Loretta, this is a Doctor Dolittle book, and I think you might like it some—”

Loretta held up a shushing hand and shook her head.

“Nonsense, child. And what I done told you before: I ain’t letting you read me them government books.”

“But—”

“Them’s books about rubbish and devilish deeds. Foolishness. Take it on back.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, wishing she’d let me read her one from the library once in a while instead of her Bible.

Every time I brought one I thought she might take a liking to, she’d sour and rile on. “Them city books ain’t fitting for my kind—ain’t got a lick of sense in them pages for us hillfolk. Nothing but foolish babble an’ prattle.”

I’d seen motorcars and coal trucks around town, read about them in books and magazines, but I never imagined I’d come this close to one, let alone ride in one. I stared at the shiny steel-winged lady perched on the nose of it.

Doc must’ve seen my bewilderment because he grinned and said it weren’t nothing more than a radiator ornament called “the flying lady.”

[…]

Then he opened the heavy door. “Time is wasting, Bluet. It’s just a horse with wheels,” he insisted. “A 1932 Plymouth automobile, is all. Get in. You’ll find it’s a comfortable sedan.”

I know’d what it was, but the leap from knowing to actually touching one seemed overwhelming. I looked at Doc and then back to the machine, and pulled out one of Pa’s handkerchiefs from my pocket to dab my brow.

It was a life I’d only read about in my books, and my hungry hands touched the glass, trying to touch the stories I’d read.

[…]

I fumbled with the crank, then finally opened the pane and breathed in smells of oil, gas, concrete, and other scents I couldn’t name, tasted the peculiar spirit of the place, listened to the unusual buzz, the city’s open hymnal.

The soot of the city, its oils and smoke and grit, filled my nose, burning, watering my eyes.

A motorcar hurried past us and honked, startling me. Another answered back, and still another and several more. Shouts, the pound of hammers, and music and loud greetings swirled from every direction. “There’s so many voices. How do folks stand it?” I pressed my palms to my ears, swiveling my head to follow it all.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Smith,” I said, secretly touched they loved the books so dearly. Without the loans, his young’uns couldn’t learn because the moonshiner refused to send them to school. No man, no Kentucky law, could make a hillman do that. Most folks hadn’t even heard it was law. The land had its own decrees, held tight its hard ways of handling harder things. Folks would pack their little ones off to school only if it suited them, and not because of something written somewhere far away by city folks they’d never seen, or would ever see.

I had also seen the feminine hygiene advertisements in magazines and newspapers. The pictures of the weeping lady with a dainty hankie to her eyes showed she’d been a good mother, good housekeeper, good hostess, good cook, all those things, until 6:00pm.

The feminine wash advertisement scolded the sad lady, insisted the perfect homemaker did one disgraceful thing her husband couldn’t forgive by forgetting her smelly lady parts. It warned womenfolk about the dangers of neglecting intimate personal hygiene and reminded them to use the feminine wash to keep from wrecking a marriage. A powerful germicide, the product promised, and one that removes all kind of powerful things and even stranger things I’d never heard of like “organic matter” […] It will keep your man happy and is a surety for a happy marriage.

“Hold your tongue! The men picked me, and I have to speak for my fellow miners to get better pay and safer work conditions! It’s thievery down in the shafts, the lung sickness waiting to snatch your last breath. The miserable long hours. And the Company bosses who’d murder anyone who wants better than that—they scalp our land, leave behind the dirt an’ ash, their broken coal trucks and ghost camps. They’ve left their filthy, fancy boot prints everywhere on everything, the poor ’tucky man’s back. Why, even the fish are dying from the poisons running into our streams.”

“I feel the same as before, Doc.” But I turned back to the mirror and know’d I wasn’t, nor would ever be. I brushed my hand slowly over my face, poked my lips that had colored a pretty pink, my cheeks a soft rose. Normal. I peered again at the stranger looking back at me, then looked at Doc, questioning.

“Modern medicine,” he exclaimed.

“I’m a stranger.” I stared at my reflection.

“A right pretty stranger at that,” Doc commented. I gazed back to the glass and inspected closer.

Pretty. Could it be? My neck looked white, like linen that matched my hands. I raised a palm and lightly braced it at the base of my neck. A tear rolled off my cheek, then another and several more, splashing onto my white hand. I was white, and that pretty white stranger was me. Me.

But Pa weren’t listening to me or the doc, and a few minutes later, I flew out the door to relieve my stomach same as last night.

Finished, I crept back inside. Pa gawked at me, alarmed. “Daughter, are you hurt?”

Doc shook his head. “No. It’s temporary, Elijah. Like the drug.”

“Temporary? Then it’s a vanity, not a cure,” Pa snapped.

I winced.

“She should feel better directly. It’s just a little discomfort that’ll right itself, Bluet,” the doc said with sympathy in his voice.

“Prideful,” Pa grumbled. “Dangerous.”

“It’s a safe cure,” Doc insisted. “And Bluet’s strong.”

Pa scowled. “Belladonna cures ails too, and it’ll turn mean an’ slay the strongest.”

I gasped. It had never happened here, but I’d read about the laws in the city newsprints and know’d they were being enforced in other places. Folks were charged and thrown in jail for courting someone not like themselves, for taking another color to their marriage beds. It was an ugly law that let mere folk lord over different-type folks, decide who a person could or couldn’t love.

[…]

Sheriff shifted and squared his shoulders. “The law clearly states that marrying a colored person destroys the very moral supremacy of our Godly people and is damning and destructive to our social peace.”

“I’m taking my wife and daughter home,” Jackson told the sheriff.

“You listen to me, Lovett. You think you can jus’ waltz back in to Kaintuck with your highfalutin ways and soil the good people. No, sir, this ain’t the west!” Sheriff’s face heated with a fury.