Sherry Chandler

Over at a blog called Disability Studies, Temple U, Penny L. Richards has this to say about women who are Really Old, Disabled…and Tough?

I like finding examples, biographical or fictional, of very old women with disabilities who don’t fit the stereotypes–they’re not miserable, they’re not idle, they’re not cute or sweet–they’re thinking, they’re active, they’re… tough, like Marjory Stoneman Douglas.

Mary Stoneman Douglas was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Bill Clinton for her work in saving the Everglades. She was 103 at the time.

I have found my examples closer to home. The women I knew didn’t do anything world-changing, really, unless you count the example they set for me and other women of my generation to hew our own paths in the world. Their lives acted as a counterbalance to the June Cleaver image we were getting on tv.

Two of them died this week. Anna Catherine Toole was widowed at 36 with eight children. She raised them all on her own and, as my mother pointed out, in those days there was no welfare. She died on Easter Sunday at 91. Lillian Glass never married. She ran her family’s farm in Owen County, and could do her share of the work along with the men and keep a clean house. She died on Monday at 90.

Before that, there were my grandfather’s stepmother, Suzie Glore, who outlived three husbands and could still play a mean “Cotton-Eyed Joe” on the mouth harp. And Aunt Ad O’Banion, a widow who lived a quarter mile further along our dirt road. She worked hard and she wasn’t sweet and polite, as I was often admonished to be. I remember looking at her one day and thinking, “I want to grow up to be a mean old woman.”

I still do. I wrote a poem about it. It’s called “Manifesto, Age 59″ and it’s in the current issue of Kudzu, premiering tonight at Hazard Community and Technical College.

Link from Carnival of Feminists XIII at I See Invisible People.

Reminder: I am reading tonight at this event:

ECTC’s Morrison Gallery Poetry Series presents a National Poetry Month Celebration April 20th form 7-8.30pm. Featured will be Lisa Williams, this year’s judge and the winners of the 2006 Joy Bale Boone Poetry Prize Sherry Chandler, Woods Nash, and Christian Lund. There will be a short open mic and refreshments; this event is free and Open to the public.

Dirge in Woods

A wind sways the pines,
                  And below
Not a breath of wild air;
Still as the mosses that glow
On the flooring and over the lines
Of the roots here and there.
The pine tree drops its dead;
They are quiet, as under the sea.
Overhead, overhead
Rushes life in a race,
As the clouds the clouds chase;
                 And we go,
And we drop like the fruits of the tree,
                 Even we,
                 Even so.

— George Meredith (1870)

Text from The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 1962 edition

Amelia Ball Coppuck Welby was born in Baltimore on February 3, 1819. She published her first poem in the Cambridge Chronicle when she was 12. She moved to Louisville with her family when she was 15, and began to contribute poems to The Louisville Journal, which according to William Ward in A Literary History of Kentucky:

…had been the medium for the original appearance of much of the best poetry of the west. For several years, [George D.] Prentice’s home was the center of literary life in Louisville. A man of unusual intellectual brilliance, he was for forty years (1830-1870) the stalwart editor of the Journal (merged with the Courier in 1868), where he lashed out at his adversaries with wit and cleverness in his editorials and was one of the forces that kept Kentucky in the Union during the Civil War. But Prentice also wrote sentimental, moralistic verse…and had a knack for attracting ladies with poetic aspirations, women whom he and his gracious and talented wife encouraged and whose verses he published in his Journal. Welby was one of his favorite “discoveries”…

Welby’s work was picked up by other editors and widely published throughout the south, and even some northern periodicals. She was noticed by Edgar Allen Poe (criticism reproduced at the link).and Rufus W. Griswold included her in his Female Poets of America in 1856. In 1838, she married Louisville businessman George Welby. In 1845, she published a collection Poems by Amelia. She died at 33 (1852) after the birth of her only child. (And that bald statement must hold a great drama but the story is untold in the sources I’ve consulted.)

Twilight at Sea

THE twilight hours, like birds, flew by
As lightly and as free,
Ten thousand stars were in the sky,
Ten thousand on the sea;
For every wave, with dimpled face,
That leaped upon the air,
Had caught a star in its embrace,
And held it trembling there.

Text from Poet’s Corner.

Other Welby quotations found here.

[Note: I find it odd that most of Ward's paragraph devoted to Welby is actually about Prentice and his gracious and talented but nameless wife. On the other hand, Prentice apparently does not merit his own entry in A Literary History.]