Meet Adriana
The first time I saw Adriana was late one night in a Comfort Inn in 2003. I was looking over my research notes on Ozark folkways, focusing on the recipes for Spring tonics. As I drifted off to sleep, I dreamed I was in the woods walking toward a swamp. I recognized these woods, I grew up in the Ozarks. I saw someone else in the woods. She wore long skirts which she gathered and tucked between her knees. She was several inches deep in murky water. The air was humid and smelled like rain. She bent down and plunged her hands into the water near the roots of a stand of Calimus plants. She pulled up several bulbs. I realized that must be the part of the plant that people used for tonics. A few nights later, I dreamed about her again. It was dusk and she was peeling the bark of a slippery elm tree. The inside bark forms a mucous-like substance which she quickly stripped off and collected into a small crock. I knew from my research that slippery elm bark was applied topically to ease aches and pains. The third time I saw her, I was at home, preparing for a presentation about my research. I was writing about food superstitions. I was typing the abstract for the presentation when she appeared. I thought I was awake, but there she was! And in more detail. She was barefoot; her hair was long and dark, almost to her waist. She had dark brown eyes which complemented her bronze skin. She was running, so I followed. Smoke drifted through the trees. The smoke was so sweet I could taste it. She ran to the source of the smoke, a small clearing in the woods. It was thick and a young man emerged through the haze. She recognized him. He'd lit honeycomb on fire, it smoldered on a stump, and hundreds of honey bees swarmed the area. I'd heard of this before, old men in rural parts of the Ozarks, still do this to find a wild hive. The bees are attracted to the sweet smoke and lead the honey robber to their hive. I've always had vivid dreams, but not while I was awake! This girl kept coming back. How did she slip from my subconscious to my consciousness? It was time to tell somebody about her, so I described the girl to my husband. He suggested I give her a name. Our friends had a beautiful little daughter named Isabella. So I named the girl “Bella” after the toddler because they had the same color eyes. The woods in my dream looked like part of Devil’s Den State Park near West Fork, Arkansas. So, in 2003, right before I started teaching Anthropology and Native American Studies in Oklahoma, a curer named Bella from West Fork stepped into my world. But I was too busy to write and tried to put her out of my mind. Eventually, Bella from West Fork came back. I saw her one night running alongside a creek. She was different though; she was older and more defined. She carried a basket with poultices in it. Something or someone was in the woods running toward her. She was scared, but brave. She was strong, capable, and clever. She had purpose. I wrote the scene as soon as I could shake myself awake. It was very late at night. I knew she couldn’t stay Bella from West Fork because the Twilight Saga had been released and the main character was Bella from Forks. She became Adriana and she knew the woods well. For her, curing was part innate and part learned. Her life was complicated, and she introduced me to some of the people that complicated this more adult life.
As Adriana crept through the cellar and up the tiny stairway into her bedroom closet, she thought she heard something or someone moving above her head. When she emerged from her closet, a hand clasped tightly over her mouth and an arm reached completely around her body trapping both of her arms. She tried to kick but a leg behind her and one in front of her kept her from moving…..Then she heard the whispered voice of a man she couldn’t quite recognize. His face was up against hers and his mouth spoke right in her ear. His words left moisture clinging to her cheek and hair. Chills ran up and down her spine. “…Consider this a neighborly warnin’ because I’m gonna be watchin’ you…we never did need your kind round here anyways.” His soured breath reeked its way into her lungs. I wrote until dawn. Why had it taken so long for me to acknowledge her existence? To allow her to exist? Adriana showed me her world, the world that I'd caught glimpses of during intense hours of research and academic writing, but this kind of writing was liberating! The more time I spent tellling her story, the more often she visited. But she never showed me everything; there were many things that I had to figure out. Sometimes when I saw an image of her, it raised more questions. For example, what was chasing her while she ran along the creek? Was it human or animal? What did she hear? Where was she going?
Whatever was stalking her was no longer doing it stealthily. It was not concerned with quietly sneaking up; it was rapidly and noisily crashing through the underbrush and headed straight for Adriana. She ran without looking back, wanting nothing to slow her down, trying to outrun the unseen predator, hoping that she could make it to the safety of the camp. Suddenly, the thing rushed at her from just a few feet away! It was too late. Adriana was too far away for anyone to hear her cries for help. Still running, blood pounding in her ears, Adriana sensed its presence; it was going to attack from the right. She tried dodging to the side just as she felt it clench down on her upper arm, pulling her. I puzzled over the honeycomb smoke scene. Why was the young man robbing honey? Maybe he wasn’t; maybe he was after something else. But what? I had to work it out; I eventually decided he was after the honeycomb itself. This was an opportunity to flesh out the young man and give him a fitting name, so I wrote a scene that would come later in the story: “What is that? Are you cooking something?” Adriana asked curiously. “Not exactly. Watch this, I think you'll like it,” Marko said. He was assembling a small machine. The base was round with an arm across the top. On one end of the arm Marko attached what he said was a mold. The opposite end had a small metal bowl for holding molten silver. “This is my jewelry casting equipment,” Marko said. Marko wound the arm of the machine around and around until it refused to wind further. Then he blocked it into place…Marko took a small crucible of molten silver and poured the liquid into the bowl of the casting machine. Next, he released the arm which rotated so fast it was just a blur. All of the molten silver traveled down the channel and into the mold. Marko explained that it was centrifugal force that caused the liquid to be expelled into the mold, which had been fashioned into a piece of jewelry. “You see,” Marko explained to Adriana, “the negative space of the mold becomes the positive piece of jewelry. It’s rather poetic, if you think about it.” “But how do you create an empty space?” Marko smiled, “In order to create a negative image of the jewelry, I have to create a model of what I want. That’s why I was collecting honeycomb that day we met. I decide what I want it to look like, then I make it out of wax. After that, I encase it in a slurry of plaster. When it dries, then I melt the wax and pour it out, leaving the negative image in the plaster mold." Each new passage of narrative encouraged me. The characters developed personalities and idiosyncrasies that shaped the events of the story. The Ozark foodways and other folklore were an integral part of the narrative. Here was something that I was creating that had nothing to do with my research goals, yet everything to do with my research! Adriana was resourceful, she scratched at my consciousness in broad daylight now, knowing I would respond. Her ingenuity was visible in her character too; rather than be forced into an arranged marriage, she thought of ways to use her knowledge of the woods and her environment to fake her death. Her process of teasing out the answer to her situation was also my process. The one thing the raccoons had going for them was their wit. Their clever maneuvers outsmarted the dogs who relied mainly on scent. But a sly coon would double back over his trail, use the rivers and creeks to lose their scent and could even manipulate locks and latches on doors and pens because they hand human-like hands. Adriana was captivated by the masked, ring-tailed animals that sometimes mocked the sleeping hounds by running through the trees and across the roof of the bungalow and back into the woods. It took an entire pack of trained hunting dogs to trail and tree one little raccoon. Even at that, it took a coon hunter to respond to the incessant howling to shoot the poor, trapped creature out of the tree. Perhaps she felt some empathy toward them; trailed by that good-for-nothing Cotton and then trapped in her room, surrounded by dogs. But her problems were also my problems. I was getting only two or three hours of sleep each night because writing became more important than sleeping or eating. Almost every night I fell asleep from exhaustion with my laptop, when it started to fall, I'd wake up and write some more. I cut back my teaching load to half-time. When I finally closed the last line of Adriana’s 235 page narrative, my second novel was done too. By allowing Adriana to emerge from my imagination, I learned something very valuable. She helped me realize what I really wanted out of life, that I could use what I had spent so many years studying and apply it in new and exciting ways. I know that I'm where I am supposed to be. Although Adriana had considered her unusual way of knowing things, she had never vocalized her abilities to anyone. It was so much a part of who she was and how she dealt with the world around her that she took it for granted. Sometimes it was exasperating that others couldn’t feel the answer, feel the right choice.
