Mrs. Romans was our eighth-grade English teacher, and she knew all the tricks. She was a little thing, just slightly shorter than most of us, and as old as the hills that surrounded our small, east Tennessee, Appalachian town. Her face looked like a sun-dried apple. Her hair was frizzy and gray, and her arms and legs were as skinny as sticks. But as old as she was (she could have been our grandmother, or maybe our great grandmother), she had the energy of the much younger teachers of Rogersville Elementary School, if not more.
There was a large desk in the front of the room, but she rarely used it, preferring to sit on a tall stool behind a pinewood lectern. From there, she taught. She perched herself on the stool, held the edges of the lectern and got busy asking each of us questions to make sure we read the assignment for the day. She kept the class in check with her wry wit. I remember when Kevin McCaugh missed two days of class. He had a tendency to play hooky. Instead of scolding him outright, she quipped, “Well now Kevin, I reckon you’ve been down by Big Creek with Huck for the past few days!” (we were reading the book at the time). Kevin smiled gingerly, confused, not sure what to do with such a reprimand. He said he’d had a touch of the flu. Mrs. Romans said, “Getting a little behind, son, you ought not be catching so many colds. I’ll call your mama and give her my poultice recipe for the croup.” And that settled that. Kevin missed fewer days.
Mrs. Romans wielded power, like all teachers do. But it was the way she used that power that has stayed with me all these years. She taught us English literature and grammar, but there was more to it. She would sometimes tell us a story from her younger days, such as when she fell in love in fifth grade with Randy Marshall, who, a decade later, ended up marrying her sister.
Ours was an old, brick school with two floors, and had been built in the late eighteen-hundreds. Mrs. Romans pointed out the area of the room where she herself had sat God knows how many decades before us. I pictured her as a twelve-year-old, wrinkled-up student, sitting amongst us. Then, after so much storytelling, she’d reel us in, “All right, let’s get back to Huck and Jim. Where’d we leave off?” as though she didn’t remember. Mary Anne Geiger said the river scene, when the two characters were first on the raft together. “Oh that’s right, thank you, Mary Anne.” Mary Anne beamed.
Thank you. It was a simple thing, but it was part of her pedagogy: to show deference to her students (as well as teach us good manners). And she showed ignorance as well. A week later we reached the latter part of the novel, when Tom Sawyer enters the picture. The runaway slave, Jim—who, up until that point, was Huck’s good friend—has been caught and is in jail. Tom and Huck talk to him through the bars. It’s not commiseration; Tom ridicules Jim, and Huck joins in. It’s a hurtful scene. Mrs. Romans asked, “So, what do you all think about young Tom?” A girl named Joy Bloomer answered, “I don’t care for Tom at all. Huck and Jim were friends, but when Tom’s around, Huck just acts like a brat.” To which Mrs. Romans said, “That’s a good point, Joy. I hadn’t thought about that before.”
I’m sure she had. She’d been teaching the novel for over forty years. But that moment has stayed with me as much as the thank you. I had wished (and perhaps still wish) that it had been I who had made that observation about Huck. It would take decades to recognize what Mrs. Romans was doing, feigning ignorance before a crowd of eighth-graders. Or, perhaps she hadn’t faked it; maybe she truly had never considered that character change in Huck when Tom entered the picture. She could have merely said, “Good point, Joy,” as though Joy had hit on the correct answer, one that Mrs. Romans already knew. But no. I hadn’t thought about that before. Now, in recollection, it seems like a radical statement. A way of relinquishing power, to let the student shine.
She tricked us into loving the written word. Not just the stories, but the words themselves. In those days, diagramming sentences was the norm. Today, I can’t diagram a sentence to save my life, and don’t recollect the differences between a past participle and a diphthong. But back then, I was pretty good at it. As was Danny Peterson. For many of the students, I reckon the exercise was a drudge, having to take apart a sentence and write the words on vertical and diagonal lines, breaking down the phrase into its individual components. But Mrs. Romans made a game of it. She’d have us compete with one another at the blackboard. Once, she handed chalk to Danny and me. We had our papers in one hand, with the long sentence written on each of them, and the chalk in the other. The goal was to get the sentence diagrammed within two minutes’ time. It was long, something, in recollection, like this: When I go to the store with my mother, I ask her to buy me a comic book, but she says that they make your mind rot, and she doesn’t have enough money to waste on such trash. Whoever got most of it done won a Three Musketeers bar. Mrs. Romans stared at her watch, waiting for the second hand to reach twelve. “Ready, set, go!” And boy, did we go! At first all you heard was the click and slide of chalk on blackboard, but once Mrs. Romans started the countdown from fifteen seconds, the students would cheer each of us on. Danny won the chocolate bar; he got the whole sentence diagrammed. I got as far as “enough money.”
She had us read aloud. This was hard on some, easier on others. Whenever Bill Weaver got picked, I cringed; he was a shy student, and trembled when he read. As he stumbled along, Mrs. Romans sat quietly, patiently, on her stool, sometimes helping him with a word or two. “Very good, Bill,” she’d say, and ask another student to pick up where Bill had left off. Joy could read better than any of us, but she received the same, equal compliment, “Very good, Joy.” There was a certain equanimity to Mrs. Romans’s methods; there were no teacher’s pets in that class. She cared for us all.
After calling on a few more of us to read, she’d say, “All right, it’s my turn.” That mellifluous, soft, Appalachian tone of her voice, I can still hear it, can hear her love of well-crafted sentences. We had to read Faulkner’s “The Bear.” It was one of his easier stories to follow, but it still was Faulkner. Those long sentences of his could have covered three chalkboards’ worth of diagramming. But in Mrs. Romans’ mouth, the story not only made sense; she brought out the thrill of the hunt for the old, monstrous bear named Ben. One of the hunters, Boon Hogganbeck, slits Ben’s throat. I remember the sorrow that I felt when Ben died. I feel it now.
My elementary school years were overall calm, predictable, and lacking in violence, unlike at home, where my father kept us on edge. He had suffered from depression and alcoholism all his life. We never knew if he would come home sober or drunk. He was a binger, sometimes going a couple of weeks without a drink, then suddenly hitting two bottles of cheap liquor for three days straight. Sometimes he’d pass out in the front yard. I remember trying to drag him into the house by his armpits before any neighbors saw him. I was ten.
We were a mixed-race family. My father was Appalachian, my mother from El Salvador. They met in San Francisco in 1947, when my father was discharged from the Navy after having served in the South Pacific during World War II. My mother and her family had immigrated to the U.S. during the war. One of mamá’s first jobs was at a sewing factory, where she stitched closed bullet holes in life jackets for the Navy.
After the war, Dad got a job as a mechanic at a Shell gas station. They met in a coffee shop in the Mission District. Dad couldn’t speak Spanish, and though mamá had studied some English in the old country, she couldn’t understand Dad’s drawn-out, elongated sentences that were pure Appalachian. That didn’t stop them. Within the year, they married.
Dad put her on the back of his Harley Davidson motorcycle and drove her all the way from California to Tennessee, to meet her new in-laws. It did not go over well. In San Francisco, their marriage was tolerated, but not in Tennessee. My McPeek grandparents couldn’t make heads or tails of who (or what) my mother was. She wasn’t Black, but she sure as hell wasn’t white either. They worried about what people would think, and fretted over miscegenation—that their son and his new wife would bring mongrel children into the world. Sometimes the pressure was too much for mamá. She would insist on making trips back to California, where she felt more at home. They would spend a few years in one place then the other, never really settling down until I came along. I was born in California. After my first four years of life in San Francisco—a Latino life, when I was a bilingual kid—we moved to Tennessee, where I would spend the rest of my childhood. Where I would lose my Spanish.
I believe that Dad’s “white treason” played into our life at home in Tennessee. Maybe we would have been better off in San Francisco, where I was seen as the gringo-guanaco (the latter being a nickname for Salvadorans), a child who had the best of both worlds. But in Tennessee, the race laws of the American South still dictated our lives. Dad, born into sharecropper poverty, was already seen as a low-life alcoholic. Once he married outside his race, he dropped into the definitive hole of “white trash,” someone who has wasted their white heritage by marrying brown.
I was different from the rest of the school body. I wasn’t as dark as my mother; but everyone knew about our mixed-race family, and sometimes questioned me about it. They could get mean; I remember being called a mongrel a couple of times. Still, life at home was precarious; school was orderly. You knew what was coming around the corner. There were bullies, of course, but I don’t remember being bothered by them much. Perhaps the tumult at home cast a shadow on whatever a bully could get away with. I’m not sure. All I know is, school, for me, was a sanctuary.
Quietude. Calmness. A sense of order. These are what I remember most from my elementary school years. They’re enough to blot out the “ordinary bad” that comes along with education—the bullies, the teasers, the classism of cliques, from the popular, more well-to-do students to the poor, struggling outcasts. I was somewhere in the middle, maybe a wee bit on the lower end, perhaps due to my “mixed blood.”
Due to the chaos at home, the ordinary bad of school was no match. But as much as I remember the overall tranquility of my education, I also recall other students who cringed whenever stepping into the school. Timmy Jacobs, for instance. He was as shy as a rabbit, kept to himself, and never spoke up in class. He was a slight, pale fellow, bean-pole thin, and one of the smartest students in our grade. It seemed he never moved, or tried to keep his movements as limited as possible, as though afraid that his slightly lilting hand or his walk or any other gesture that wasn’t “manly” enough would give something away. Some boys would crowd around him, push him from one to another, knock him to the ground. They yelled epithets across the playground as he sat under the shade of a maple tree, an open book on his lap, a sandwich that he held with both hands. Faggot, queer, homo—the boys knew them all, and made sure everyone on the playground heard the words. Kids laughed. Timmy sat there, slowly chewing on his sandwich, his head down towards the book, his cheeks red-hot with shame.
Then came the day when we learned that Timmy was more than what we defined him to be. The school had set up a special assembly, in which all the students attended, from first grade to eighth. They held these from time to time, bringing in special guests, such as the high school science teacher, Mr. Jameson, who amazed us by sticking a hotdog into a small vat of liquid nitrogen, which froze it instantly. He popped the hotdog against the side of the table. It shattered. I can still hear the awe that rose from the student body.
For this assembly they had wheeled an upright piano onto the auditorium’s stage. We all gathered, with the eighth graders in the back and the younger kids toward the front. It was loud, most of the talk and rambunctiousness coming from the upper-class students, but it didn’t take long for the principal, Mr. Cunningham, to quiet us down. He wielded power like no other, though he didn’t look like a powerful man, not with his average height, his wire-framed glasses and slightly balding hair. A man of little words, all he had to do was stand before us and raise his hand, showing us his palm, like a cop stopping a car at a crossway. It silenced us all. I’m sure his control over us had to do with his “walk softly but carry a big stick” way of dealing with the more unwieldly students. These were the days when corporeal punishment was still legal. A number of boys had walked out of his office after a hardwood spanking, rubbing their buttocks and trying their best to hold in the tears.
Mr. Cunningham lowered his hand and told us that we had a special guest today, one of our own, and that we should give him the same respect that we gave any other visiting presenter. Then he gave us all a long, hard look, as though knowing that the special guest had suffered the malevolence of the bullies.
Mrs. Goins, our music teacher, walked onto the stage, sat at the piano and put her hands on her lap. A few seconds later, Timmy Jacobs stepped out from behind a mauve stage curtain. His entire body shook as though someone had touched him with a live wire. He walked to near the edge of the stage, still vibrating with fear, standing before an audience that had, for years, brutalized him. He turned slightly to Mrs. Goins, who nodded and put her fingers to the keys.
I had never heard such music. It was classical, though I didn’t know that word at the time. Maybe it was Chopin, or Bach, or Mozart. I have no idea. Timmy trembled. I wonder what we looked like, the entire school body staring at him—sharks, maybe. But no one spoke. It was confusing. Here was the most ridiculed student of the school, standing on a stage before us all.
The music seemed to have a magical effect on him. He stopped shaking. His hands were to his sides, and his shoes pressed against each other. He raised his head and looked over us. Something had changed, as though he were slipping into a world that was from somewhere beyond the confines of our small town.
He began to sing.
Later in life I would learn the word Aria. But in that moment, all I saw and heard was a fellow classmate standing straight as a pin, his diminutive shoulders back, his slight chest expanding to take in a deep breath. Then the song came out in long, suspended notes. How did he hold those notes for so long? And that voice, one that we rarely heard in the classroom or the hallways, rose into the alto-soprano heavens. He didn’t have a microphone, but his song reached the back wall, a song that seemed larger than his body.
Afterwards we all headed back to our classrooms. I remember mean words in the hallways, again, mostly from the bullies who made fun of his “girlie voice.” But I also remember my thoughts and emotions from that day. I was confused; I had no words to articulate what I was feeling. Now, I see that Timmy Jacob’s voice was one of the first lessons of my life regarding the notion of Beauty.
All the town’s children attended Rogersville Elementary. But there was also a small group of students who came down from the mountains, the “hillbillies,” which we never called them to their faces. There might have been four of them in our class. They were a rough bunch. They didn’t mix much with whom they called “the Townies,” unless to harass us. Their shenanigans went beyond whatever a local, “citified” bully would do. One of their favorite tricks was to pull your pants down. They’d sneak up on a kid, grab the back of his pants and jerk them off the poor boy, underwear and all. They chewed tobacco, which their family had themselves grown in the hollers that surrounded Rogersville. They were deep-mountain folk, poor, living in shacks throughout the mountains. They walked to school on stony, dirt roads. They wore old clothes that had faded from so many scrubbings on wash boards. The hillbillies were, in our minds, the lowest of the low, but no one made fun of them. We didn’t dare to.
Sammy White was their ringleader. He was slim, with ropey muscles that ran down his arms from working crops and chopping wood. It was strange, to see such muscle on a kid. We feared him the most. On the playground, he would pick fights with the older, bigger boys. He could beat the pulp out of most of them but he didn’t always come out ahead. One day a fellow named Rick hit him hard enough to split open his upper lip. That should have stopped the fight, but Sammy kept wailing away, trying to punch Rick in the stomach, face, groin. But Rick was bigger, and blocked most of the blows. After a while, Rick had had enough of it, and walked away. Sammy stood there, his teeth caked with blood, and grinned at all of us, as though he had won.
Sammy came from Clinch Mountain, the same mountain where my father was born. Though only three miles away from town, Clinch was another world. There was an invisible border between Rogersville and the surrounding hills. To drive out of town was like crossing into another nation, one that was all rural and, in many areas, without electricity.
My father and Sammy shared similar childhoods. Dad was born in a shack in the middle of a field of tobacco that was tucked deep into a holler. He, as did all children of sharecroppers, worked the tobacco alongside his father. Sharecroppers got paid only once a year, in December, after the harvest. My papaw—my grandfather—worked the crop from March to November. He had to buy his own tools on credit, along with food and home supplies. After harvest, he took the wad of money down the street of Rogersville and paid off all his creditors. Then he handed over more than half the rest to the landowner, slipped the remaining slim bills into his wallet and talked about game, that the deer, hopefully, would be thick, and get them through the winter. Dad started using tobacco at age three, out of necessity. My grandmother would stick green tobacco leaves into her son’s mouth to calm his stomach pains. He chewed the leaf like a sandwich. It kept the hunger at bay.
The sharecropping system ended sometime in the mid twentieth century, but the poverty hadn’t. Mountain people like Sammy White still hunted game to get them through harsh winters. They planted their own tobacco crops, and sold it at market, but it was a pittance. They lived in old, dilapidated shacks. It was a third world all its own. And though a few families sent their kids to Rogersville Elementary, many children didn’t make it beyond seventh grade—the same age Dad had to give up on school in order to tend the tobacco with his father. Sammy made it to eighth grade. After that, he was gone, as were most of the mountain kids, all of them returning to their homes to work the crops.
Sammy would leave us, but not before making his mark on the school. He wasn’t just swagger and trouble. Whenever he wasn’t picking a fight with an older kid or pulling someone’s pants down, he would tell tall tales that had been passed from one generation to another. That’s when we lost some of our fear of him, and would approach him like scared puppies to hear his stories.
One day, Sammy, sitting in the back row of Mrs. Romans’s class, was telling one of his tales to the other students around him. At one point, they laughed. Mrs. Romans sighed, put her fists on her skinny hips and stared at Sammy. “What are you all talking about back there that’s so funny, Mr. White? Why don’t you come up to the front of the room and share it with the rest of us?” And she meant it, because she smiled at him. He didn’t hesitate. He made his way up the aisle, walked by Mrs. Romans and hopped onto her desk. She didn’t say anything, just crossed her arms over her chest and shook her head slightly. “All right now,” she said, “Tell us all.”
“Well now Mrs. Romans I’d be glad to.” He turned to us and grinned, then looked down at the floor and lost the smile, as though an old memory had come to him. “I was telling the fellows back there about my dog Blue. Real mongrel, a mix of, I dunno, terrier and German Shepherd and a bunch of other breeds. All that mix made his fur strange. It was just a bit on the blue side. Best fox-huntin’ dog you’d ever meet. Until the day of the accident, of course.”
Blue was, Sammy said, faster than lightning. He could run down any fox in the woods, except for the one that got away. “I had my double barrel twelve-gauge shotgun with me, and Blue by my side. We stopped in a field just spittin’ distance from our house. I sat down on a rock, Blue sat beside me. I had a little smoked pork on hand, and gave him a piece. He was chewin’ away at it until he heard a russlin’ in the bushes. He raised his head, perked his ears up and studied the sound a few seconds, then, just like that (Sammy snapped his fingers) he was gone. Ran so fast, he could’ve kept up with a bullet.”
Blue disappeared into the bushes. A fox jumped out and took off into the woods. Blue burst out of the shrubs and took off after him. “I tell you, all you could see was the red streak of the fox with the blue streak following right behind. The fox zig-zagged as best he could to lose Blue, but that dog of mine kept up with him. That’s when it happened.”
The fox ran into a forest of what Sammy called “razor pine,” which was a short tree that was so thin, you could wrap your fingers around its trunk. But it was a stout tree, “Can’t bend them for nothin, they’s as solid as an oak.” The fox darted between the trees, and Blue stayed right behind. At one point the fox ran straight at a razor pine then veered to the left. Blue was right behind him, but couldn’t make the turn. He slammed straight into the tree. Blood burst from his body. Sammy ran to him. The fox was long gone, but Sammy didn’t care. He leaned his shotgun on another tree and fell to his knees next to his dog. Or dogs. Because Blue had hit the razor pine so hard, the thin trunk had cut him in half, from his head to his butt. “Even his tail split in two,” Sammy said, in a woeful tone.
But Blue wasn’t dead, no sir. Sammy leaned over both pieces of the dog. Each nostril was breathing on its own, and the halved-tongue was still flapping on both sides. Sammy slapped the two pieces together, carried the dog home, wrapped Blue in an old quilt then lay him in the shed. He hoped and prayed that the two pieces would mend. “But, I wasn’t payin’ that much attention. I’ll be honest with you folk—I cried. Wept like a baby. I was in such a vexation, that I didn’t see my mistake.”
It took a few weeks, but Blue started to get better. Sammy fed him cream and honey at first, putting the small bowl in the folds of the quilt so Blue could lap at it. Then he tried solid foods, pushing a piece of smoked ham under the blanket. He could hear the dog chewing. He took hope in that.
One morning Sammy walked in with a tiny plate of scrambled eggs. The quilt was moving. Blue was trying to stand up, but had a hard go of it. The moment he seemed to get on his feet, he keeled over. But he kept trying. The blanket slipped off him and Sammy saw his error. He had been so fraught from his dog’s possible death, that he had slapped the two pieces together backwards. That made one piece upside-down. Blue finally got his balance on his two left legs, while his two right ones pointed up at the ceiling. Oh, Sammy said, but it was a terrible sight, with one eye looking east and the other looking west. But that dog got stronger and stronger, and before long was running down foxes again. He could still keep up. After so much running, his two legs on the ground would tire, so Blue would just jump and flip over and land on the other two legs and keep going.
I don’t know about my classmates, but I believed the story all the way to the point where Sammy took the halved dog home. Maybe a little beyond that. I could imagine—no, not imagine, but see—the dog flipping over and running on the other pair of legs. Sammy ended the story simply, “Yep, best huntin’ dog I ever had, that Blue.” We laughed. Mrs. Romans clapped and we applauded along with her. Sammy hopped off the desk and headed to the back of the class. Mrs. Romans thanked him for his tall tale. “Tall tale?” he said, “why ma’am, that’s as true as the four Gospels put together!”
Memory is a slippery thing. Sometimes it makes clean distinctions between the bad and the good, like Jesus’s farmer who threshes the wheat from the chaff. I suppose looking back on halcyon days helps us to endure the brittle moments of the past. My family life was broken; school was a haven. But there’s more to it. I now see how my father suffered. His depression was sometimes crippling. I remember him, sober, sitting in a rocking chair on our front porch, staring at the world as though he couldn’t see it. He slept a lot, escaping that harsh world in dreams. I know what this is like; for I too have been diagnosed. I struggled with alcohol for years, though I didn’t follow Dad’s pattern of binges. My choice of drink—scotch—was my nightly medication, until I started taking the pharmaceuticals that now keep me in a certain equilibrium. How I wish those pills had existed back then. They could have made all the difference, for him and our family life.
When my father was sober, and wasn’t struggling with the depression that drove him to alcohol, he would take me fishing and hunting. He was patient, teaching me how to bait a hook when I was no more than five years old. He put a rifle in my hands when I was nine. We hunted small game. I wasn’t such a great shot. He, on the other hand, could take down a rabbit in mid-jump.
He knew all the best fishing holes, and the fields where the rabbits were thick. By the time I was twelve, I knew his old stomping grounds pretty well. My favorite place was a small clearing on top of a hill, right in the middle of the woods, where the locals had built a small Methodist church and a one-room schoolhouse a hundred years before. People in the area still used the church, though the school had fallen into disrepair. We would stop there to eat the bologna sandwiches that my mother had packed for us. We’d lean our shotguns against a jut of limestone and sit on a fallen tree that was on the edge of the property. Dad would tell me stories about his childhood, such as when he and his buddies climbed up into the church rafters and smoked rolled cigarettes during services. Back when he was a child, in the mid 1920’s, the hillock was a busy place, with kids from the nearby mountains attending school during the week and the parishioners gathering for the weekend services and afternoon picnics. Now, the area was as quiet as a monastery. He and I sat alone, eating the sandwiches and drinking sweet coffee from a small Thermos that he hung from his belt (that was a thrill for me, drinking coffee at such an early age).
I always knew that Dad had attended the one-room schoolhouse up until he was twelve, before he had to join his father in the tobacco fields. The white walls had faded and chipped through the years. The shingles curled from decades of neglect. There was no electricity out here. The school had four fairly large windows that let the sunlight in, enough for the students to read from their primers. A pot-bellied wood-burning stove stood in the middle of the room. Dad told me how, during the winters, when he was just a little boy, the teacher paid him two cents a day for lighting the stove before school began. He rose before dawn, made his way to the school, set the kindling and stuffed the stove with firewood. By the time the students arrived, shivering, the room was toasty. Two cents a day. “That was good money back then,” he said.
Many years later, when I was in my thirties, I visited my parents for Thanksgiving. By that time Dad, near eighty, had stopped drinking. After so many years of soaking his liver in rotgut alcohol, half a beer would make him sick.
While my mother prepared the turkey at home, Dad and I took one final walk into the woods with shotguns in hand. We didn’t get any game that day, and ended up at the Methodist church and schoolhouse earlier than usual, so he could rest while we ate our sandwiches.
He studied the school. He repeated stories he had told me in my childhood, about stoking the pot-bellied stove, a girl whom he had fallen in love with when he was no more than six, and his teacher, Mrs. Baldwin, who was from these same woods but who had gotten all the way through high school, which gave her the credentials to be a schoolmarm. He spoke about her with a certain reverence. “She taught us the three R’s really good. Didn’t put up with shenanigans. Us boys didn’t give her nary any trouble.”
Then he stood up slowly, carefully, from the tree trunk, and made his way to the schoolhouse. His aged body shifted slightly with each step. I followed him. The school had been locked up for as long as I could remember. The lock on the front door was rusty, it looked like it would break apart in your hands.
We circled the school. He showed me a small place on a lower corner of the back wall, where he had scratched his name seventy years before. Again, he repeated the stories, about the stove, Mrs. Baldwin, the girl he’d fallen in love with. He didn’t talk about the poverty he had been raised in, the shoes that had to last through three winters, the work in the tobacco fields when he was just a child. He didn’t refer to his own mother’s alcoholism, or her bouts with erratic mood changes, and how she put the house on edge whenever she drank. He had his own academic, halcyon days to consider.
We stopped at one window and peered in. He pointed out which desk he had sat in, in the middle of the room, near the stove. He rested his fingers on the bottom of the windowpane, and studied the inside for a long while. I kept quiet; for it seemed an important moment, that he was looking back into his own past. Perhaps he was separating his own chaff from the wheat. For he said, quietly, succinctly, in the Appalachian voice that I had heard all my life, “I liked school. It was good.”
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Marcos Villatoro is the author of six novels, two collections of poetry and a memoir. His Romilia Chacón crime fiction series has been translated into Japanese, German, Portuguese and Russian. He has written and performed essays on PBS and NPR. His latest work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. A recent essay won the Dogwood Literary Award in Nonfiction. After living several years in Central America (his other home territory), Marcos moved to Los Angeles, where he holds the Fletcher Jones Endowed Chair of Writing at Mount St. Mary’s University.