Elm for Overwhelm – County Highway

Essay

Effie Lou

Five Years Old When the Titanic Sank

Memories of an Elder

“I’ll meet you in the morning by the bright river-side”

By Brandon Meeks

She was old all my life; 76 when I was born, 87 when I first met her. When she spoke, it sounded like a swarm of bees hovering over a thick patch of clover. She was blind and feeble and had to be led around by the arm. But there was rarely a Sunday that went by for a hundred years that didn’t find Miss Effie Lou standing in the choir loft carrying the altos on her bony shoulders. She’d lost a husband, a daughter, and two sons, but she never lost her song. I have always been fascinated with old people. All the things they’ve seen and heard and done. When I was a kid, I would go over to Ludbar, the small assisted living apartments where she lived, and sit for hours listening to her tell stories. “I was 5 years old when the Titanic sank,” she said. “Daddy was a preacher. We prayed for the families of those that sank frozen into eternity as he told us to make sure we were always ready to meet the Lord.” She told me about life before electricity and bathrooms and televisions. She called …

Review

Everybody's Appalachian Protest Novel

Demon Copperfield is a phony

“I don’t know nothin’ ‘bout birthin’ babies,” says Barbara Kingsolver

NPR listeners are suckers for this crap

By Jonah Raskin

As Oscar Wilde and T. S. Eliot both wrote, “Talent borrows, genius steals.” To write her most recent novel, Demon Copperhead, her tenth in the past 35 years, Barbara Kingsolver didn’t exactly steal, but she turned for inspiration to Charles Dickens, whom she calls her “genius friend.” She turned specifically to his 1850 autobiographical fiction, David Copperfield, a Victorian rags-to-riches tale that exposed the plight of children who toiled in factories and women who labored in what's now called “the sex industry.” In doing so, she set herself up for a comparison in which she was bound to come out on the shitty end of the stick. Dickens’ novel features a notorious villain named Uriah Heep. For ages, high school readers have learned to despise this antagonist who epitomizes malice. In the acknowledgements to her new novel, Kingsolver writes, “I’m grateful to Charles Dickens for writing David Copperfield, his impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on …