Stories

Cast Iron Skillet

“Prompt: Choose an artifact or physical object from your past and write what it evokes in you.”

Elizabeth Gentry (Writing Class at John Campbell Folk Art School)

It's easy to time travel here in these ancient mountains. They hold stories you can feel in the very land. Mournful stories of Cherokee, rounded up and forced to march. Stories of mountain boys, poor as dirt, snatched from the folds of this green quilt, and sent to fight in wars not their own. Sad stories, sad songs set to Irish fiddle music.

When asked to choose an artifact or physical object to write about, it was easy to latch onto the cast iron skillet, an instrument that once defined poverty. Well seasoned, black as night, wiped not washed. Here is my fifteen minute piece:

“I see my grandmother, Mama, standing before her white enamel stove, in a little college town in Tennessee. An alien environment for her, coming as she did from the North Alabama cotton fields. Mama, who cooked endlessly for her nine younger siblings, and her own ever-pregnant mama, learned as a girl how to fry cornbread in bacon grease on the top of the stove; how to flip it in the air like a coarse-milled flapjack. Pone after pone to feed hungry field hands, dirty from gathering prickly cotton bowls into long cloth sacks. Skin burned and scratched raw. Field peas, side meat in gravy, cornbread, turnip greens (if we're lucky) and pie—always. Cobblers full of hot sweet apples, or blackberries gathered that morning from a dusty roadside. Cast iron skillet, with a side of cinnamon.”

If you chose one object that evokes childhood for you, what would it be? What stories would it tell? Can you feel their soul connection?

                                                        In the Spirit,

                                                              Jane