L. Renée: “I am a collector of my family’s stories. Sometimes, we gather for oral history interviews and I am prepared with an audio recorder and a listening ear. Other times, we’re just having conversations around the dinner table or on the phone and somebody says, ‘Well don’t you remember when …’ and my hand reaches for a pen. On this occasion, my aunt was telling me and Mom about the time she tried to burn her school shoes on an old coal stove in West Virginia, where my granddaddy labored as a coal miner for 43 years before ultimately dying of black lung disease. After she shared this story, I kept hearing a little girl’s voice. She was a witness to my aunt’s attempted destruction of those shoes and I wrote down what she told me exactly the way I heard her tell it—dialect, diction, and all. This was a challenge—to honor this character’s authentic voice and allow her to tell her version of the narrative, but to take care that her voice was not misunderstood as caricature by readers. I spelled some words the way I heard them to celebrate the embedded music in her speech. Here, again, I tried to emphasize the multiple meanings of the tongue: the shoe’s tongue, the sister reaching toward an ‘expensive’ word like ‘redeemed’ (which comes with an implied cost), and the speaker’s own tongue in sharing this story. I am a believer in the power of storytelling and the ways in which Black folk have passed down knowledge, experience, and wisdom through the spoken word. When I write, I know I am not writing alone. I know all my ancestors, Black Appalachians who called dirt and mountains home, are with me.” (web)
