"Little Martha Nell Hobbs, the name shortened by her parents

to Marnel because that was easier to say, had heard the story of

her miracle birth hundreds of times growing up...."

"Miracle of the Hills," by Fayetteville resident Kay Smith

Holt, is the story of Marnel Hobbs, born in the obscurity of a

Tennessee "holler" and in ignorance as abject as the region's poverty. Her

saga is simple enough: From her earliest years she aspires to

overcome her humble origins. In love with a distant cousin, she

nonetheless snatches the opportunity to leave the hills as the wife of a

wealthy Chicago teacher.

World War II turns the lives of the remote hill folk upside

down as surely as it did those of the distant upper class. Marnel

responds to the tugging of her spirit to return to her true home and her

true love.

There is a timelessness and a universality that give this yarn

its appeal. Its characters are every bit as bizarre as the characters

that really do inhabit the hills and hamlets of many rural

people's memories.

Holt has drawn from her own memory the hillbilly twang of

the Tennessee hills, and it is no doubt authentic, if sometimes

tedious. As she speaks, Marnel self-consciously corrects her own

grammar: "Folks had blocks of ice in their homes in Chicago, not layin'

out meltin' in a spring house down the hillside, if

they was...were...lucky enough to have any ice a'tall." "They had

drug stores where a bidey...body...person...could buy Ipana tooth

paste and hair curlers."

Instead of centering the author's point of view on a single

character, Holt pulls her readers inside the minds of nearly every

character in a richly populated book. She is at her best when she takes

the perspective of an intelligent mature woman, as in the scenes

that take place before and after Marnel's beloved mother-in-law

dies. She also does especially well with an educated, upper-class

school teacher.

* * * * *

Kay Smith Holt neither affirms nor denies that "Miracle of

the Hills" is autobiographical, but comparisons of her with her

heroine, Marnel Hobbs, are tempting. Born near Clifton, Tenn., and

married at 15, she had two children "right away," she said in a

recent telephone interview. "I left the hills young, and it was soon

obvious that the marriage was not working. With no education, what was

I going to do with two babies?"

She did something right: "My oldest son is now an M.D.,"

she said.

As a teen-aged mother in El Paso, she got her high

school diploma, then went to secretarial school. Now armed with

knowledge also precious to Marnel Holt added to her arsenal

when she "paid $6 down on a Smith-Corona, swung it up on the table

and said to my husband, 'This is your Armageddon.'

"When I got a job, [the marriage] was over."

Noticing that women with degrees were making four or

five times what she was, she went to junior college, then to

Georgia State University for both undergraduate and graduate studies.

The result: a 20-year career teaching business English at Massey

Junior College in Atlanta. Holt is now "in another marriage that's

working well," she said. "I would probably never have written the book,

but in the early 1990s, my husband retired from Delta, and we moved

to Tennessee, where I became executive director of the Wayne

County Chamber of Commerce.

"Those precious people...still speak the way they did when

I lived there," she continued. "It all came rushing back.

"I wrote the book, but never sent it in. I heard that the

average book gets 18 rejections, and I thought I'd be under the

ground before I got accepted, so I published it myself."

Fayette businesswoman and Sunday school classmate

Barbara Cannington read the book, and liked it. She offered to

become Holt's agent, and the two made up dramatizations of scenes from

the book. Soon "every family in church owned the book."

It needs revision, Holt said, adding that she was disappointed

in the way it printed. She is hoping the success it has had will

attract the attention of a "real" publisher.

Meanwhile, it is available through Cannington, who promotes

it with Holt's "little presentations." Senior groups especially enjoy

the memories the book inspires, Holt said, and "I love talking

about something I know about."

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