Chapter One

    The blame lays mostly with me. In our efforts, my efforts to protect our ideals of what was best I neglected my only true responsibilty. She's angry, embittered by experiences she only thinks she understands and on who elses shoulders can that be placed. Regretfully she does'nt see things this way, she blames you. Which I suppose is my doing as well. If she had found out what she needed to know from me rather than fumbling blindly for the truth she sensed under the veil of my well intentioned deceptions then her understanding of the life that was thrust upon her might not be marred with feelings injustice. I robbed her of the wisdom that should have came with our history and the experiances and knowledge of our ancestors.
    I thought I was sparing her. That by keeping from her our heritage I could save her from the responsibility and confusion and at times horror of who we truely are. I thought with her I could end it all and she could just flow naturally into a normal common happy life. I look back now and realize how blindly niave I was.
    Perhaps if I had let her share in this knowledge in its entirety instead of the watered down half assed version she now believes to be the full truth these burdens I wanted to shield her from would haved wieghed down her feelings of oppression and intitlement. She sees the legend but knows nothing of the suffering and trials and also beauty of our history. How could you or I either one expect her to feel any other way with the mangled truth she thinks she has uncovered.
    My hope in writing this book is to kill two birds with one stone. To lay out for her once and for all an honest no feelings spared account of all that I know and just maybe she will understand and be soothed by what I have to tell her and if that isn't the case then my words here can be used to possibly temper your reception of my baby girl. Maybe if for once you are trusted with our full story you may atleast understand her and us wether you are willing to accept us or not in these desperate moments I see this as my best and only weapon in forstalling a violent misunderstanding.
    Understand too, that in this telling I'm going against everything that I've ever been told was right. I'm going against every instinct that pumps through my blood but that I honestly and truely believe this to be my best choice of action even though it is completely undesirable its the best in my opinion. Hopefully I'm not as wrong in this as I have been in other decisions.
    I don't know of any other way to go about this other then just starting at the begining and leading you and her through what I know as I myself learned it.  My life began in the green hills of western North Carolina. I was born there in 1949 and I guess you could say I was my daddy's girl right from the start. From the begining he and I shared a love for the land surrounding our home. The land was a living thing, its moods ranging widely not just with the seasons, offering winters of silver, glittering beauty as easily as ones of bleak lifeless grey, falls with air as warm as the reds, oranges and yellows spreading over the landscape.  So vibrant the season is unrecongnizable as the death it really is, and others of frigid winds and cold rains cutting the life out of the land swiftly without mercy.  But spring, in spring no matter what the mood be it raging thounderstorms or gentle warm showers the heavens can be trusted to pour out life over the land agian,  It would start small, but within a very short amount of time the land would literally burst out of its winter shell.  You could watch as the brown and grey winter mountians tranformed into green giants seeming to roll endlessly on every horizon.  The once dreary at times meloncholy and on the worst days menacing gaurdians seem to overnight become throbbing jungles of dense green, every speck of land not covered by green trees is covered with green under brush or grass, or crawling with kudzu and wisteria vines. Even the sir tasted green.  The valleys and hollers hidden away in the backwood hills of north carolina during spring rival untamed paradises we only associate with far away lands.
    My father cleared our land and built our home here in 1943 with his own hands. Him and his brother Aaron along with my mother purchased the land and spent three years scratching out our home from the overgrown patch of earth that was all thier own. They built a modest structure only four rooms in the begining. A large kitchen to left was closest to the edge of our clearing so that most of the day it stayed cooled by the shade of tall pines that gaurded our little nest. The two back rooms being bedrooms for Mama and Daddy and the other for uncle Aaron and later me and my sister Isabelle. And of course the front room being mainly for Mama though we lived so far from our nearest nieghbors that the likelihood of visitors dropping by was almost nil Mama said you didnt have a real home unless you had a front room to recieve people in. If for no other reason you'd need it to lay out the dead.
    From far off you would'nt even know the house was there the lumber it had been built with had once stood where the house now did so the colors blended back into the woods they came from, all but Mama's white trim. Another one of her insistences it would'nt be a home with out white trim around the windows and doors. Daddy built it strong but Mama softened it into a home.
Mama softened everything. Where Daddy was all muscle, broad shoulders and square jaws with his floppy wide brim hat always pulled down covering the deep blue of his eyes, Mama was light, thats the only way to discribe her. Her hair was always so pale it looked silver at times and always so long it would whiip around her waist whenever the wind would catch it. With eyes that challenged the deep blue of Daddys with the brightest sapphire I've ever seen.
    Sadly Mamas front room was needed after all though not for the reception of the living guest I'm sure she would have preferred but to provide a proper send off for my Daddys brother. No one came to see him laid out in the box my Daddy had built for him with his hat covering the hole he'd shot through the top of his own head, but Mama laid him out nice and proper anyway. She said just because no one was there didn't mean he wasn't due all the bells and whistles of a man with a houseful of mourners, that hers and my fathers grief for him was no less with or without anyone else..
    The year following my uncle Aarons suicide my sister Clara was born. My father called her honeydew he said when she was born she looked like a little drop of honey with her fair skin and mop of curls the same honey gold color of his own. All our lives even though she was the eldest between us she was always the more subdued. Where I tended draw attention even in times when I didn't need it she had a natural ability to blend into the background of whatever situation she was in, which I suppose was just as uncontrollable as my tendacy to fall into the spotlight. Don't get me wrong my sister was quite a beauty. Her hair worn long like our mothers her limbs limber and graceful but is was as if every thing about her whispered which caused her to be even more striking whenever she was brought into full focus. I on the other hand could'nt seem to help but pull everyone into even my most private moments. Part of it was my apperance. My coloring alone was enought to draw attention. I read the word alabaster in a book when I was a young girl and I've always preferred it over ivory or porcelien or fair when it came to the discription of pale skin thats the word I'd use to discribe my tone. But it's my hair that does the real work it was my mothers silverlit hair tenfold, I'm sorry to say that in age the silver has run rampant. All my life has been a fight to keep it down played or under wraps or ponytailed or whatever I thought would keep it from painting me into the center of attention. During my youth I wore it no longer then my mid back which was as short as my father would allow me to go, but in my later years I realized I actaully had a secret vain urge to have my glowing mane even if it was for my own personal enjoyment of knowing that should I want to I could loosen it from its binding and draw the attention of whomever I chose although I only actaully indulged in this shameless act twice in my life.
    The first time was not in adulthood but when I was seven years old. My father had been walking from the barn behind our house which I still have no clue why we had other then a glorifired tool shed and home for the few pigs and chickens we kept on the property. I always loved the way he walked always as if he was on some important errand, with great purpose you could say. On this journey though he fell victem to an unexpected and fatal deterant. The timber rattler was as common to our mountian as the grass they hid in, for the most part they avoided us as much as we did them. I suppose he startled it, maddening it with fright because it showed him no mercy striking him twice before he could recoil from its reach. By the time he reached our home it was too late but mother sent Clara running down the mountian for help anyway. Then she turned to him and gathered all of him that she could into her lap and she began to sing to him the lullaby that always soothed us girls best. When they arrived thats the way the doctor from town and his boy found them my mother rocking gently my dead father singing softly of twinkling stars and me removed but intent on on all that I had witnessed.
　
    My mother laid my father out just as if there were a hundred of us coming to wail beside him as well and the mournful sounds that came from her did equal that. At the graveside as the town men she hired the dig the grave and lower the box purchased with the last of what little money we did have she whispered softly under her breath.
" We're a race of women now. "
    I'll never forget those word because of the chill it sent through my blood. Even then without a clue as too what they meant I knew those words to be the most ominous I would ever hear. On the walk home from the funeral, walking with my mother and sister toward a future none of us were willing to imagine yet, for some insane reason I reached up and unbound my long hair and let it be swept out, whipped by the breeze blowing through the air. And I could,nt help but imagine it a bright , waving banner that my father should he be looking down would'nt be able to miss