 ou Crabtree’s porch is sacred. To the uninitiated, it merely looks like a simple wood construction with white paint peeling from exposure to the elements. An old rocking chair, rubber car mat, decorative iron grillwork, boxes and a coat rack, are scattered across the porch like discarded props left out in the cold. But those who come here in the summertime, when Crabtree holds court, know that her porch is actually a stage, classroom, sanctuary and confessional. Crabtree’s daughter, Bonnie Seitz (’68) of Blacksburg, says that her mother sits on her porch most of the summer “and everyone knows it’s an invitation to come up and talk. It’s quite fun and entertaining. It can go on all day. My mother can really talk. The knowledge she has is quite amazing.”Crabtree’s porch is where one elderly man came repeatedly to practice a sermon he would never deliver. Someone else would have to deliver the sermon, because he was practicing the message for his own funeral. He practiced and practiced because he wanted to find just the right words -- and Crabtree, a renowned writer, is an expert at finding just the right words. Her porch is where the downtrodden come to spill their guts. It’s where high falutin’ folks all the way from NBC in New York City come to sit beside her and converse because they know she will always listen. And she will always have something to say. “I reckon it’s because it’s such a fast world we’re living in,” says Crabtree, class of ‘32. “I travel all over the world without leaving my porch. They know they can find someone to talk to.” Visitors have included a man who climbed Mount Everest and one who had just returned from the Arctic, dying to talk. One woman who visits Crabtree curses all the time, “which my mother doesn’t approve of,” says Seitz, the third of Crabtree’s five children. “So my mother is trying to help her find other words.” Crabtree calls her “my old cussin’ woman.” So far, the woman has decided not to take the name of the Lord in vain, but everything else is still fair game. Not that Crabtree is adverse to colorful language. Her writing is sometimes explicit and she contends that “no word is dirty if used by the right person in the right time and right place.” Crabtree loves words. She loves to read them, study them and let them come to her in the middle of the night, when she believes that the voices of ancestors can permeate our consciousness. Crabtree keeps a notepad next to her bed so that she can capture the “most unusual things” that surface in those motionless moments when even the air seems to hum. “I think all of our ancestors are in our genes,” she says, “and sometimes, at night, you can hear what they have to say. The love of the land, the love of the church, it’s all part of me from those who have gone before.” Crabtree’s storytelling and poetry skills have earned the Abingdon resident considerable notoriety. She has won the Edgar Allen Poe Award for Poetry and been named Virginia’s Laureate in Literature. She was once interviewed on NBC’s “Today Show.” But she doesn’t have a list of awards or credentials. She describes herself simply as a lifelong “scribbler.” And if you ask for a résumé, she’ll give you a poem instead. Her stories are often inspired by real people and experiences. There’s a clarity to her writing that’s rare, like a pure-toned bell cutting through static. Her first book Sweet Hollow was published by LSU Press in 1984, when she was 72 years old. The book paints a picture of old Appalachia, a time and place when even an outhouse was considered a technological advancement. It’s a world where people can recognize the smell of snakes and know that buzzards begin their fleshly feast at the eyeballs. Superstition abounds and death’s shadow falls long. But it’s also a world of wild freedom, sage grass, orange honeysuckle and peppermint, where stars mix with sunbeams. It’s a place that has stayed with her, like the pond Crabtree describes in her story “The Jake Pond.” “Even in his dreams and nightmares, the boy was never far removed from the pond. Down to the pond, in the black night where the waters were black and white and the center of the pond swirled and gurgled black silver, and where the holly tree had grown into a giant tree, casting long shadows in the waters, the boy was of the pond and the pond was one with the boy . . . The dreams, the nightmares, the premonitions, the mysteries, intermingled with illusions and reality, were all in the vicissitudes of the pond.” Colorful characters include a hellfire and brimstone preacher who suffers from oppressive guilt and the persecuted boy named “little Jesus” because his mother claimed that he “Got no daddy. Come like Jesus.” During the winter, Crabtree mostly stays near a heater in one room of her rambling house in Abingdon, where she receives visitors. She takes a visitor’s coat and hangs it on a clothesline above the heater. “That’ll be nice and warm for you when you leave,” she says. When she settles in to talk, it’s easy to see why the 86-year-old Radford graduate is an in-demand conversationalist and confidante. Her conversation runs from space and time to love, death, art and science, with profound seriousness balanced by a playful sense of humor. “That’s my boyfriend,” she says, pointing to a sepia-toned print of a ruggedly handsome Native American, black hair flowing beneath a hat that looks almost identical to one Crabtree has been known to wear. “It’s the only boyfriend I’ll ever get,” she says, laughing in a way that almost makes her sound girlish. “I’ve always loved Indians,” she says, describing how she was ceremonially adopted by Cherokees who gave her the Indian name “Grandmother Wolf Woman.” “God has been good to me,” she says. “I’ve lived an adventuresome life.” Some people say the writer Lee Smith “discovered” Crabtree in a Virginia Highlands Festival creative writing class. Smith has certainly helped spread awareness of Crabtree’s work, which is a good thing because Crabtree never made an effort to publish. Instead, her writings were strewn and scattered about her house, stuffed in drawers, suitcases, whatever she could find. Smith writes about their first encounter in the introduction to Crabtree’s newest book of poems, The River Hills & Beyond, by Sow’s Ear Press. “We had already gone around the table and introduced ourselves when here came this old woman in a man’s hat and bedroom shoes, grey head shaking a little with palsy, huffing and puffing, dropping notebooks and pencils all over the place, greeting everybody with a smile and a joke. She was a real commotion all by herself. ‘Hello there, young lady,’ she said to me. ‘My name is Lou Crabtree, and I just love to write!’ My heart sank like a stone. This is every creative writing teacher’s nightmare: the nutty old lady who will invariably write sentimental drivel and monopolize the class as well.” Smith asked each person in the class to read the first line of their story. “So we began. Nice lines, nice people. A bee hummed at the open window; a square of golden sunlight fell on the old oak table; somebody somewhere was mowing grass. We got to Lou, who cleared her throat and read this line: ‘Old Rellar had thirteen miscarriages and she named all of them.’ The hair on my arms stood straight up ... I had never heard anything like it. Crabtree was one of 10 children born to the Price family on the north fork of the Holston River. Even wagon traffic deserted the nearest town when the main road was re-routed, so it was a solitary existence, punctuated by interludes with nature and the need to escape stray bullets from the few feuding families that remained. One of her first writing attempts was “Hawaiian Love Story,” which Crabtree says is “just hilarious ... You know I didn’t know a thing about love or a thing about Hawaii.” She says she always knew how to read, but “until I was 16 I didn’t have any friends. But I had a wonderful time and learned to love nature and animals. Witches lived there, too. One put a spell on our cow so the milk wouldn’t churn. To break the spell I had to boil milk in a skillet and stab it with a knife and I swear, it worked!” At the age of 17 she went to the state teacher’s college then known as Radford Normal School, a name that amuses her. “Can you believe that?” she asks. “Why do you think they called it a ‘normal’ school?” “It was a wonderful time,” says Crabtree. “I never came home the whole time I was there.” Crabtree says she had delightful roommates, had a poem printed in The Grapurchat student newspaper and had a drama teacher praise her for her singular understanding of drama. She remembers that it “gave her a glorious feeling” when a Christmas play she wrote was produced at Radford. “I thought I would never feel as good again,” she said. She also remembers a painting she did of sheep in a snowstorm. While at Radford, she worked in the kitchen, dining room and library. “Thank God for that,” she says. “Now I can go into a library and find any book I want.” She fondly remembers President John Preston McConnell -- “I reckon Dr. McConnell never refused a girl entrance” -- and dean of women M’Ledge Moffett, “who really took care of us.” She remembers Moffett preparing students for an impending panty raid by telling them to hide all their good undergarments and leave out old, ready-to-discard underwear. As expected, the would-be raiders showed up, and Moffett politely invited them inside. “They may have gotten a old dirty bra or two, but mostly, they were as scared to death as we were,” she says. Another teacher, Mr. Fitzpatrick, was undeniably memorable. Each day, says Crabtree, he would stand by the door of the classroom and punch every student who entered in the stomach. Then he’d ask, “What’s your aim and puh-pus (purpose) in life?” He’d do that every day, says Crabtree. Finally, one day, Crabtree’s friend punched him back. They were terrified of the consequences of that retaliatory action, but none ever came. “Those kinds of things stick with you,” says Crabtree. “And when you think about it, we are supposed to have an aim and ‘puh-pus’ in life.” Reflecting back on those years, she says, “I love Radford. If I had not been a teacher, I don’t know what I would have done. I owe my life to the three years I spent there.” After graduating, she taught school and studied drama during the summers in New York. Initially, she was terrified of the hustle and bustle and especially the skyscrapers, which she had never seen before. But ultimately, those were times of social and cultural stimulation. She studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and the Fagan School, “got kissed at Grant’s tomb and got a boyfriend.” In 1942 she married Homer Crabtree and quit teaching to work on the family farm in the remote area of Smith Creek. Those were tough years. Five children were born in seven years, making relentless demands on her time, but all of them too young to entertain her mind. As Crabtree wrote later in one of her poems, “I wanted to be the crocheted edges on the pillow case of life.” But instead, in “Smith Creek No. 1,” she tells how she loathed “those years of borning five young ones by myself with no doctor and washing for five on a board until four o’clock, until the sun dropped behind Gumm’s Hill.” “I didn’t realize it at the time, but I think those were very hard, lonely years for my mother,” says Seitz, who surmises that there’s always been a dual quality to her mother’s life. There was the dutiful wife and mother, but there was also the expressive artist who had given up her dream of acting in New York. It was the frustrated artist who would stay up late at night, expressing her yearnings and frustrations in writing, each word somehow breaking through her isolation. Crabtree’s children were oblivious to this internal conflict. “When I was growing up, I didn’t even know that my mother was writing,” says Seitz. “With me, it was always, ‘are you saving your money, are you going to church?’ It’s like there was another side to her life, a person I didn’t even know.” After 20 years of marriage, Homer Crabtree died of cancer and, in 1960, his widow moved to Abingdon with five teenage children. The family rode down Main Street “just like the ‘Beverly Hillbillies’ coming into town,” says Seitz. Crabtree taught for 36 years before retiring in 1975, but even after retiring she continued to teach adult education, writing for the gifted and English as a Second Language, where she got to know people from around the world. Before being “discovered” as a writer, Crabtree was mostly known as a teacher. “She was an absolutely marvelous drama teacher,” says Seitz. “She had a wonderful rapport with students.” One young man was so inspired by Crabtree’s drama class that he even set up a stage in a barn to perform Shakespeare. As you might expect, former students still come back and sit on her porch. “One student came back and told me I was the best teacher he ever had, even though I didn’t have a textbook,” says Crabtree. Even as a teacher, she employed the therapeutic power of words, encouraging children to write in journals. “I had one retarded student who couldn’t read, but I found out she loved to sing,” remembers Crabtree. “So I told her to write down the songs she loved to sing and she could do that.” Textbooks may have been rare, but Crabtree has always been an avid reader who voraciously acquired knowledge. Recently, she took a college astronomy class and has written more than 50 “space poems.” “I wanted to find out about space because I wanted to know where paradise was,” says Crabtree. “It’s faster than light. Scientists say that if you can go faster than the speed of light you’ll get younger, so science and Scripture agree.” Like her porch, Crabtree is showing the effects of time. But beneath the thin skin and brittle bones, something is shining. As she wrote in the poem Salvation, “Jesus Jesus this old body ain’t so important I got holiness flirtin’ with death.” And for Crabtree, there surely must be poems and porches in paradise. TO  |