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through hearts, and I had not known.

4
    Emma Lovella Witherspoon. That’s what I had named my baby before she died. Emma Andrews Witherspoon is on the birth and death certificates because at the time of my labor and her passing, I could not muster up the strength or the words to tell them a middle name. They simply used my maiden one. O.T. remembered the Emma part because I had told him in the eighteenth week my decision about what she would be called. He had forgotten about Lovella.
    Emma was the name of my sister, who died when I was seven. She was younger than me by almost three years. So what I recall of her is mostly baby and toddler stuff. Crying, resting at my mother’s breast, pulling onthings—the table or sofa, my legs—as she learned to walk. I know that she was weak, prone to coughs and colds, a thready breath, Grandma Whitebead called it as she held the baby over a pot of steaming herbs, worry spread across her face.
    Emma was lethargic, not very playful; she mostly stayed in the house, near my mother’s lap. But I do remember one time not long before she died when I carried her to the creek and helped her climb a tree. It was the happiest I ever saw her. I lifted her while she grabbed for the sturdiest limb, and she pulled herself up until she was standing six or seven feet above me.
    Of course I got in trouble for taking her outside without dressing her in hat and coat, for letting her get so high; but even my mother’s anger quickly subsided when she saw the glee and excitement on her younger daughter’s face and listened as she talked about what she saw from so lofty a perch.
    That’s the way I think of her even now, a little girl standing in a saucer magnolia tree, tiny cups of purple and white all around her, the sounds of her laughter, a thin voice calling out to the birds and butterflies that floated so near. I like the thought of her that way, happy and playful, surrounded by the sights and smells of spring.
    After the death of my baby, however, I wondered if I had cursed her in some way, naming her after another child, a little girl, who had died unnecessarily. I considered the possibility that my sister Emma had returned and claimed her for herself since she had been disallowed most of the pleasures of living. I even thought it was fair. But that only lasted a few days. Grief doesn’t let anything stay true for long.
    Lovella was the name of my elementary school teacher. Dr. Lovella Hughes. She was black as coal, wiry, and not the least bit interested in excuses as to why you couldn’t be or do the thing she knew you could.
    It was, of course, in the 1930s, so the minority children were not permitted to attend the white school or be taught by white personnel. Dr. Lovella Hughes was the only teacher willing to travel up into the caverns of the Great Smoky Mountains and find and educate the children that no one else even acknowledged were living up there. She was hired by the state to teach the black children and the Cherokees.
    The white teacher and the white school were in Bryson City, twelve miles away; and being half white and shaded more like my father’s side of the family, I could have passed. But since my daddy was blind, literally and figuratively, he saw no reason for me to travel so faraway just to go to a white school when I could walk down my driveway and across the field to the little cabin on the reservation where Dr. Hughes taught all nine grades. That’s as high as you went in that school if you were even able to get that far. Most of the students were finished with the education system and Dr. Hughes’s enormous amount of homework by the time they were ten.
    She was hard, like wood, steady eyes and unyielding; and she would say to me, “Jean Andrews, there isn’t a reason written down or spoken why you can’t leave this mountain, go to college, and be anything you want to be. You have a gift, young lady, and God knows all