A Window into the Colorful World of Ibby Taylor Greer

Elizabeth "Ibby" (nee Taylor) Greer is a native of Springfield, Illinois, and was raised there and in Florida, and spent summers in Northern Michigan. She was educated in Florida and at Westover School in Connecticut and received her B.A. with Honors and Phi Beta Kappa from Hollins [College] University, and her M.A. with Honors in Comparative Literature from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is the mother of Andrew Taylor Call, a lawyer in Chicago. Married to T. Keister Greer, Esq., from 1990 until his death in 2008. Ibby has lived at The Grove in Rocky Mount for 20 years. She has served on many civic boards in the region over the past 25 years and is a certified Board Trainer and public speaker and the author of two books: "Moving Day: A Season of Letters," and "Paper Faces: Babyboomer Memoir," published Blue Ridge Traditions Magazine from 2003 to 2008, and owned and ran The Blue Lady Bookshop (in the building that housed Gen. Jubal A. Early's law office before the Civil War) from 2002 until 2008. She now has her art studio, Blue Lady Studio, on the Artisans Trail. Her art has been shown at several one-woman shows in Virginia. She was the 2009 recipient of the YWCA's Women of Achievement Award in the Arts. She has lived in London, Vienna, and all over the United States. Painting, writing, and visiting her son are the joys of her current life.

Q: You once told me that, since childhood, you have felt like an outsider. Can you explain that?

A: I think there are four components to my feeling this way for so long: 1. Position in my own family. 2. Social status in the community. 3. Religion and schooling. 4. Regional prejudices.

I was an attentive, alert middle child, whom both parents considered their "favorite," and was entrusted with secrets and important information in the family (by everyone) so I could carry on someday, so to speak.

Add to all this some other differences related to social status and religion. For the first 14 years of my life I spent part of the school year in Illinois and part in Florida. In a nutshell: I was perceived as a rich, inaccessible kid in my Illinois Catholic school and as an Irish Catholic misfit Midwesterner in my Protestant Florida schools, where Midwesterners and Irish Catholics were very rare. Later, from 1965-68 at a prep school in Connecticut, I was the Florida Catholic kid in a sea of Protestant people mostly from the New York City area or California. I never quite fit.

So, culturally, wherever I was, I never "fit." I started to feel more like an "observer" than someone actually living my life. That feeling has stayed with me, and I have been able to use it as a writer and artist. So, it was not all bad. I also learned more than I ever needed to know, probably, about social classes, religious discrimination, prejudices, and regional provincialism.

Q: When did you realize that writing was a calling you could not ignore?

A: I have been writing since I learned how to read and write. I also started to draw at the same time. These were activities I could do anywhere and that I enjoyed and was good at. They were also fun. I began more serious writing at my boarding school in Connecticut from 1965-1968, where writing and art were strong parts of the curriculum, and for which I was regularly recognized. Writing (and reading---I was never without one or more books to read) became part of who I was.

Q: What inspired you to buy the Blue Ridge Traditions magazine?

A: I bought Blue Ridge Traditions magazine in 2003 from its founder, Peggy Conklin, at her suggestion, and continued to put out a print version until just a few years ago, when costs of printing and a dearth of advertising dollars forced me to take it online (www.blueridgetraditions.com). I bought the established magazine, which focused on regional Blue Ridge history and culture because I had married into this region in 1990 and had come to respect and love its history. The magazine let me connect with all kinds of writers, photographers, designers, artists, historians, and artisans of this wonderful region. I thoroughly enjoyed my five-plus years of producing a top-quality print magazine.

A: Tell me about T. Keister Greer, how you met and your marriage to him.

Q: We met in March of 1990 because I had phoned the wrong number to renew a subscription for, as I had been told at my volunteer job, a Dorothy Greer. Because, as I found out later, the number for his law firm, was incorrect in the files, I ended up calling the private residence and got Mr. Greer, who sadly explained that his wife had died a year earlier. At the time, I had never heard of Rocky Mount, the Greers, and did not know any lawyers socially. I soon found out on our first date, on my 40th birthday, that Mr. Greer was a delightful gentleman, albeit 30 years my senior!

He was a famous litigator on two coasts, a member of the California and Virginia Bar Associations, who had lost his wife the previous March to cancer and his youngest daughter the previous October to Juvenile Diabetes. He was grief-stricken and lonely. He was enchanting to me. We fell in love over the next few weeks and actually married three months later. We had a joyful and fun 18-year marriage. I took very good care of him and his health and doctors have credited our marriage with giving him almost two extra decades of life.

Keister had grown up in the coalfield hamlets of MacDowell County, West Virginia, because the Greer family estate had burned in 1900, forcing his teenage father and grandparents to relocate to get work in the coalfields of West Virginia. Keister, as boy, wanted to get his family back to Virginia. He was a driven man, maybe a workaholic in the many decades of his successful legal career. He was driven to pull his family out of poverty and back to the life the Greer clan had known since emigrating in colonial times from southern Scotland. He succeeded in this.

He would say, if he were here, that the thing in his life he was proudest of was his service as a Marine Corps officer in World War II in the Okinawa Campaign.

In our marriage, this wonderful, generous, charming Virginia gentleman was a loving husband and a fabulous stepfather to my own son, Andrew Taylor Call, who was only 9 when we married. We traveled together, wrote books, did research, watched movies, took spontaneous car trips, did things with our families, and had a great time.

Q: Tell us about the book he wrote covering the famous moonshine trial on 1939.

A: Keister, and his late daughter Celeste, had begun research on this fascinating part of Virginia history many years before I met him. When he retired in 1999 he devoted all of his time to organizing the story of the longest trial in Virginia history. Every detail of the massive book (over 900 pages) is fact, not word-of-mouth memories or oral comments by people who had known of the moonshining activities, trials, etc. In fact, most of the families whose grandparents or parents were involved had not been told the truth by their families, as a way to protect them.

Keister recreated the [missing] jury transcripts and every detail of the events. The resulting book, "The Great Moonshine Conspiracy Trial of 1935," is a masterpiece of local color and accurate history. The author of a new novel based heavily on Keister's work, and done so even after Keister had specifically asked him not to lift material from his book, thus without Keister's permission, "The Wettest County on Earth," by one of the Bondurants whose ancestors had been very involved in the moonshining, will soon be made into a film and most likely will undo all that Keister tried to do in writing his own book. Keister wanted to show that moonshining here was a direct result of the poverty of the region after the Civil War, that the people were mostly good people caught up in a way to make a living. In Keister's book, even as he portrays the events, never says who the ringleader was. He said that if the courts of the time let certain people off, he was not going to say they were guilty. He lets the reader figure that out. Bondurant turns the history into a racy, violent, inaccurate portrayal of the whole story, and will make people think Franklin County and this region was full of nasty, violent, bad people. Too bad. It shows how fiction really can distort history.

Q: What is a day like for you when you are focused on painting?

A: A day I can commit to my painting is quite different from other kinds of days filled with committee work, boards, public speaking, writing, or traveling. An art day is non-verbal. I paint ideas, not things, so I let the ideas flow, and stand in front of the canvas (sometime I do three a day) and just paint. I had only a little over a year of formal training, from local artist and teacher Anne Way Bernard, who taught me just about everything I know. But I have always visited art museums, galleries, and art shows, and know a lot about good art. I am also an active member in a large group of artists from Franklin and Bedford Counties, Bald Knob Artists.

I stand in front of the canvas and basically decide if I am going to do one of my colorful paintings of shapes and colors, using Fiestaware china (my specialty) or an abstract using the same palette. I have done an equal number of both. I also do palette painting, creating rectangles of colorful "figures." I hate to be interrupted when writing or painting. But I always get interrupted. Few people respect the hours and schedules of someone who stays at home or works from the home.

Q: What did you hope to accomplish by creating the character Anne C. Bow in your novel Moving Day?

A: I have always wanted to write a novel, a recognizably "American novel," chock-full of local color, the pioneer spirit, and a strong, independent woman. I am an alumna of a college famous for its writers, Hollins University, and a great many of their well-known writers have set their novels in the South. So I, being from Illinois and having lived in more states than most people ever visit, set mine in Colorado, where I had lived seven years. I chose the epistolary format (letters) and created someone I was empathetic with, who happened to be a 74-year-old widow who was creative, religious/spiritual, friendly, and involved in her community, as I am. I think I created someone I might like to be like when I am older. I wanted to create a woman who handled anything life threw her way: family problems, widowhood, losses, heartbreak, lifestyle issues, everything! I think I succeeded. People who like the book love Ann C. Bow. I have known only one person who hated her and the book: a woman dying of lung cancer, who aggressively accosted me once and said, "You think you have all the answers, don't you? I hate your novel." Wow! What a reaction. But she was unable to accept the upbeat tone of my novel's heroin, a woman who was a survivor, but one who was not dying of cancer. I can almost understand.

Q: What are some important facts that someone living outside the Roanoke and Franklin County area might find interesting about the people and talent here?

A: Let me begin by saying I love the area and think there are a great many talented and interesting people here. I think we have to separate this question into three categories: people native to or old timers of Franklin County, the established people of Roanoke, the newcomers to both counties. Then, I might be able to answer this.

People from outside these areas need to know that the natives/old timers, established residents of both areas are proud. They like things the way they have been for a long time. They do not much like change. Newer residents of both counties and the lake area often offend or dismay the older crowds by not appreciating the traditions, the culture, the history, and the rationales for how things are done and perceived.

Aside from the Southern-non-Southern schisms hereabouts, there are issues of vocal-non-vocal, white and people of color. Change comes hard hereabouts. This region was seriously disrupted by the Civil War but even more so by the "Reconstruction," and, believe it or not, the issues and grudges and prejudices that stem from that era still exist in some areas here, and fester, and are used as a defense. I know so much more about the effects of that war, thanks to my recent marriage and location here in this small town. Virginia was designated "Military District Number One" by the federal government, a name and attitude that really did not go away until the 1940s when everyone had to pull together in World War II. Virginia was brought to its knees, was embarrassed by that, and still resents interference from the Federal Government and from non-Southern people, sometimes.

My advice to all outsiders, whether they deal with Roanoke or Franklin County: be respectful; these people have gone through a lot. They are accomplished, proud, and generous. But they do not like interference. Their language is different, but that does not mean they are all ignorant. Most of the idioms, phrasing, slang, and even grammar (of some rural Franklin County folk) have more in common with 17th century Britain (think King James Bible or Shakespeare) than modern New York City lingo. Don't assume these people are stupid or uncooperative. It may take longer than in the West or North or Midwest to work things out, to get a new idea accepted, etc., but with respect and patience, and by increasing our own knowledge of their history and traditions, it can be done.

Q: What do you see in the future for Ibby Taylor Greer?

A: I hope for love again, maybe another novel, success as a painter. I have my studio on the new Artisans Trail and want to contribute to the culture and growth of this area. I live in a famous historic home, which I open to the public for tours. I like being here. But I miss the joys and fun of marriage to a wonderful man.

Q: In closing, what else would you like are readers to know?

A: Don't know! I have already said too much, I am sure! I guess I would like people to know I love to meet new people, love to introduce new folks to the area. I want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem in this region. And I want to continue to bring different kinds of people together face to face.