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�A Southern Appalachian Reader
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�A Southern Appalachian Reader
Edited by Nellie McNeil and Joyce Squibb
Associate Editor: Rita Quillen
Appalachian Consortium Press, Boone, North Carolina 28608
�The Appalachian Consortium was a non-profit educational organization
composed of institutions and agencies located in Southern Appalachia. From
1973 to 2004, its members published pioneering works in Appalachian studies
documenting the history and cultural heritage of the region. The Appalachian
Consortium Press was the first publisher devoted solely to the region and many of
the works it published remain seminal in the field to this day.
With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National
Endowment for the Humanities through the Humanities Open Book Program,
Appalachian State University has published new paperback and open access
digital editions of works from the Appalachian Consortium Press.
www.collections.library.appstate.edu/appconsortiumbooks
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license. To view a
copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses.
Original copyright © 1988 by the Appalachian Consortium Press.
ISBN (pbk.: alk. Paper): 978-1-4696-4210-9
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-4696-4212-3
Distributed by the University of North Carolina Press
www.uncpress.org
�Appalachian Consortium Press
Boone, North Carolina
The Appalachian Consortium is a non-profit educational organization comprised of institutions and
agencies located in the Southern Highlands. Founded in 1971, the initial objectives were to perpetuate,
preserve, and promote the heritage of Southern Appalachia. Today the scope and diversity of the
Consortium's objectives and activities have extended far beyond those upon which it was founded. Yet
today it remains committed to one guiding principle-an improved quality of life for the people of the
Southern Highlands.
Members of the Consortium are volunteers who plan and execute projects which primarily serve 156
mountain counties in seven states. They serve on eight standing committees (administration, editorial
board, folklife, museum, regional collections, regional cooperation and development, regional education,
and regional health services) which meet at various member locations throughout the service region. The
administrative office of the Appalachian Consortium may be reached at (828) 262-2064 or (888) 557-8163.
Objectives of the Appalachian Consortium are:
*Preserving the cultural heritage of Southern Appalachia
*Protecting the mountain environment
*Publishing manuscripts about the region
*Improving educational opportunities for area students and teachers
* Conducting scientific, social, and economic research
* Promoting a positive image of Appalachia
*Encouraging regional cooperation
The members of the Appalachian Consortium are:
* Appalachian State University
*Blue Ridge Parkway
*East Tennessee State University
* Mission Children's Hospital
*Lees-McRae College
*Lincoln Memorial University
*Mars Hill College
*North Carolina Division of Archives and History
*Southern Highlands Craft Guild
*Department of Museum Program & Studies-Tusculum College
*The University of Virginia's College at Wise
*U.S. Forest Service
*Warren Wilson College
*Western Carolina University
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�To Jack Higgs, our revered literature professor at East Tennessee
State University, goes credit for this anthology. The contagion he,
Tom Burton, and professors like them, created in their courses by introducing us to Appalachian literature caused us to design classes of
our own. Then when we complained about the lack of a suitable text,
Dr. Higgs responded, "Write one." His continued encouragement carried us to publication.
The Center for Appalachian Studies and Services and its director,
Richard Blaustein, made publication possible.
We thank our editors, Rita Quillen and Mayrelee Newman, and
our copy editor, Dale Winship.
We also thank Roberta Herrin, chair of the Appalachian Consortium publications committee, its members, and Jane Shook, Assistant
Director for the Press, for their helpful support.
We thank Cindy Francisco who provided clerical assistance and
Linda Fanslow and the late Clara Bennett who aided us in our research.
We send special thanks to Don Squibb, Joyce's husband, for going
out for pizza.
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�TABLE OF CONTENTS
Table Of Contents
xv
Illustrations & Photos
Introduction
Horace Kephart, Who Are the Mountaineers?
xvii
xix
I. THE PAST
CHAPTER 1
Oral Tradition... 3
Ballad of Claude Allen
Richard Chase, Cat 'n Mouse
Alice Marriott, Tsali of the Cherokees
Gratis Williams, Dialect and Speech
5
8
16
26
Jean Ritchie, From Singing Family of the Cumberlands
35
Carter Family Song, Single Girl, Married Girl
55
Ballad of John Henry
57
George Washington Harris, Old Skissism's Middle Boy
59
Composition Topics
66
Activities
66
ix
�x
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 2
Local Color and Realistic Tradition . . . 69
Mary Noailles Murfree, The Star in the Valley
John Fox, Jr., From A Cumberland Vendetta
Anne Armstrong, From This Day and Time
Mildred Haun, From The Hawk's Done Gone
James Still, From River of Earth
Jesse Stuart, From Daughter of the Legend
Composition Topics
Activities
71
94
120
136
155
162
174
174
CHAPTERS
Contemporary Authors Search for a Usable Past . . . 175
Thomas Wolfe, The Brother
James R. Stokely, Molly Mooneyham
James Agee, From A Death in the Family
Lee Smith, Saint Paul
Lou Crabtree, Homer-Snake
Eliot Wigginton, Ginseng fromFoxfire3
Bernard Stallard, The Writing Spider
176
189
194
209
226
236
245
Ed Cabbell, Appalachia: An Old Man's Dream Deferred
Jim Wayne Miller, Beginning, Ending
Jeff Daniel Marion, Ebbing & Flowing Spring
Fred Chappell, My Grandmother Washes Her Vessels
Marilou Awiakta, Where Mountain and Atom Meet
Composition Topics
Activities
247
252
254
257
262
264
264
�TABLE OF CONTENTS
xi
H. THE PRESENT
CHAPTER 4
How America Came to the Mountains ... 269
Alan Cheuse, Tripping the Lights Fantastic
Victor Depta,TVA
271
.277
Marilou Awiakta, Genesis
279
JohnEhle, FromTheRoad ..
283
Myles Horton, Building Democracy in the Mountains .
Composition Topics
Activities
... 298
310
310
CHAPTERS
Moving Mountains: The Struggle of the Coal Industry... 313
Don West, Harlan Portraits
Nine Pound Hammer
Harry Caudill, The Mountain, the Miner, and the Lord ...
Ron Short, From South of the Mountain
George Ella Lyon, Stripped
315
318
320
337
347
Lee Howard, The Last Unmined Vein
349
.
Ed win Hoffman, Strippers, No!
352
Richard Hague, In the Woods Beyond the Coalfields
375
Composition Topics
Activities
378
378
�xii
Table of Contents
CHAPTER 6
The Change Hits Home... 379
Jesse Stuart, Split Cherry Tree
Fred Chappell, Firewater
Wilma Dykeman, From Return the Innocent Earth
Jim Wayne Miller,
The Brier Losing Touch With His Traditions
Katherine Stripling Byer, Wide Open, These Gates
Composition Topics
Activities
381
397
402
418
421
423
423
CHAPTER 7
Appalachian Emigration ... 425
Robert Morgan, Bean Money
Bobbie Ann Mason, Nancy Culpepper
Jim Wayne Miller, Turn Your Radio On
Borden Deal, Antaeus
Jo Carson, My Brother Estes
Gurney Norman, A Correspondence
Robert Perm Warren, Sitting on Farm Lawn
on Sunday Afternoon
Lisa Alther, From Kinflicks
Composition Topics
Activities
427
431
449
452
465
468
476
479
485
485
�TABLE OF CONTENTS xiii
CHAPTERS
The Sense of Place in Appalachian Writing ... 487
Wendell Berry, The Strangers
Herman Hascal Giles, Man of the Land
Judy Odom, The Killing Jar
Rita Quillen, The Good Life
James Still, Heritage
Composition Topics
Activities
489
492
500
514
517
519
519
Acknowledgments
Suggested Bibliography
523
527
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�ILLUSTRATIONS
xv
Illustrations & Photos
Cover illustration by Kenneth Murray
1. Courtesy of Archives of Appalachia, East Tennessee State
University
2. Illustration by Sharon Squibb
3. Courtesy of Archives of Appalachia, East Tennessee State Univesity
4. Illustration by Harrison Cady, courtesy of Art and Architecture
Gallery, University of Tennessee
5. Photograph by Joe Clark
6. Courtesy of Tennessee Eastman Company
7. Photograph by Eddie Le Sueur
8. Photograph by Eddie Le Sueur
9. Courtesy of Archives of Appalachia, East Tennessee State
University
10. Photograph by Chris Jones
11. Photograph by Chris Jones
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�INTRODUCTION
xvii
Introduction
Over the past decade, the study of Appalachian literature has
blossomed with workshops, conferences, and summer institutes for
teachers cropping up throughout the region. Many educators in Appalachia seem eager to introduce their students to the literary heritage
of Appalachia. One problem, however, has prevented teachers from
instituting full-fledged Appalachian literature courses, particularly at
the high school level. The problem has been lack of a textbook. We
hope A Southern Appalachian Reader will fill that void.
This book is divided into two sections. Section I focuses on the
past and moves from the oral tradition of ballads and storytelling to
"local color" and modern realism that focused national attention on
Appalachia. Pieces by contemporary writers like Lee Smith and Jim
Wayne Miller are included and show the strong tendency to cast a
backward glance, to reminisce.
Section II deals with the present and shows the impact regional
institutions such as the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Appalachian
Regional Commission and the Highlander Research Center have had
on Appalachia. Chapter Seven explores the phenomenon of Appalachian emigration: the flight of mountain people to large urban
areas in search of a better life. Finally, this collection ends on the road
home. A strong sense of belonging to a place, to its land and its
people, is the focus of the last selections. All of Section II challenges
�xviii
Introduction
students to think about the result of rapid change in the life of the individual and on regional culture as a whole.
For most students, this will serve as a comprehensive introduction to the Appalachian region's history and literature. We have included as many writers as possible to give some overview of the
richness of the region's past. Most of all, this textbook is intended to
help students value the region's heritage and traditions. This appreciation will help students, whether they are native Appalachians
or not, to gain a deeper understanding of themselves and the forces
that shape regional life.
The study of literature often makes people think about themselves. Regional literature, particularly, makes a person even more conscious of behavior, beliefs, and other life patterns. As the poet and
scholar Dr. Jim Wayne Miller says:
We should be concerned with teaching the history and culture of our
different regions not for the past's sake, but for the sake of the present
and future.... Such view counters the rootless uniformity of popular
culture with the realization of rooted diversity.
Each student should finish this book with increased knowledge
and understanding not only of the literature, but also of himself and
his family. By including discussion questions, composition topics,
suggestions for out-of-class activities, and lists of additional materials,
we hope to inspire students toward self-knowledge. As a person
comes to value himself, he or she values others—another aim of this
book.
The Appalachian region is broad and rapidly changing. The startling demands of the future will be met more effectively by those with
a strong sense of history and a sense of responsibility to the land and
its people. We hope A Southern Appalachian Reader will be a starting
point for deeper study and will encourage the student's lifelong interest in and concern for one of America's most fascinating regions.
The Editors
�HORACE KEPHART
xix
HORACE KEPHART (1862-1931)
Horace Kephart came from Pennsylvania to the Southern
Appalachian Mountains in 1904. He was an avid naturalist who
played an important role in the founding of the Great Smoky
Mountain National Park and the Appalachian Trail.
His published works include: Camping and Woodcraft, Camping, The Camper's Manual, and Our Southern Highlanders.
During the more than sixty years since Our Southern Highlanders was published, it has been recognized as one of the most
important studies of Appalachians. Few other books on this
subject are more widely known or cited. It is the source for the
following selection.
Who Are The Mountaineers?
The Southern Appalachian Mountains happen to be parceled out among eight different States, and for that reason they
are seldom considered as a geographical unit. In the same way
their inhabitants are thought of as Kentucky mountaineers or
Carolina mountaineers, and so on, but not often as a body of
Appalachian mountaineers. And yet these inhabitants are as
distinct an ethnographic group as the mountains themselves
are a geographic group.
The mountaineers are homogeneous so far as speech and
�xx
Who Are The Mountaineers?
manners and experiences and ideals can make them. In the aggregate they are nearly twice as numerous and cover twice as
much territory as any one of the States among which they have
been distributed; but in each of these States they occupy only
the backyard, and generally take back seats in the councils of
the commonwealth. They have been fenced off from each other
by political boundaries and have no such coherence among
themselves as would come from common leadership or a sense
of common origin and mutual dependence.
And they are people without annals. Back of their
grandfathers they have neither screed nor hearsay. "Borned in
the kentry and ain't never been out o' hit11 is all that most of them
can say for themselves. Here and there one will assert, "My
foreparents war principally Scotch," or "Us Bumgyarners
[Baumgartners] was Dutch," but such traditions of a far-back
foreign origin are uncommon.
Who are these southern mountaineers? Whence came they?
What is the secret of their belatedness and isolation?...
The first frontiersmen of the Appalachians were those Swiss
and Palatine Germans who began flocking into Pennsylvania
about 1682. They settled westward of the Quakers in the fertile
limestone belts at the foot of the Blue Ridge and the Alleghanies.
Here they formed the Quakers' buffer against the Indians, and,
for some time, theirs were the westernmost settlements of
British subjects in America. These Germans were of the
Reformed or Lutheran faith. They were strongly democratic in
a social sense, and detested slavery. They were model farmers
and many of them were skilled workmen at trades.
Shortly after the tide of German immigration set into
Pennsylvania, another and quite different class of foreigners
began to arrive in this province, attracted hither by the same
lodestones that drew the Germans, namely, democratic institutions and religious liberty. These newcomers were the ScotchIrish, or Ulstermen of Ireland.
When James I., in 1607, confiscated the estates of the native
Irish in six counties of Ulster, he planted them with Scotch and
�HORACE KEPHART
xxi
English Presbyterians. These outsiders came to be known as
Scotch-Irish, because they were chiefly of Scotch blood and had
settled in Ireland. The native Irish, to whom they were alien
both by blood and by religion, detested them as usurpers, and
fought them many a bloody battle.
In time, as their leases in Ulster began to expire, the ScotchIrish themselves came in conflict with the Crown, by whom
they were persecuted and evicted. Then the Ulstermen began
immigrating in large numbers to Pennsylvania. As Froude
says, "In the two years that followed the Antrim evictions, thirty thousand Protestants left Ulster for a land where there was
no legal robbery, and where those who sowed the seed could
reap the harvest."
So it was that these people became, in their turn, our
westernmost frontiersmen, taking up land just outside the German settlements. Immediately they began to clash with the Indians, and there followed a long series of border wars, waged
with extreme ferocity, in which sometimes it is hard to say
which side was most to blame. One thing, however, is certain:
if any race was ordained to exterminate the Indians that race
was the Scotch-Irish.
They were a brave but hot-headed folk, as might be expected of a people who for a century had been planted amid
hostile Hibernians. Justin Winsor describes them as having "all
that excitable character which goes with a keen-minded adherence to original sin, total depravity, predestination, and
election," and as seeing "no use in an Indian but to be a target
for their bullets." They were quick-witted as well as quicktempered, rather visionary, imperious and aggressive.
Being by tradition and habit a border people, the ScotchIrish pushed to the extreme western fringe of settlement amid
the AUeghanies
West of the Susquehanna, however, the land was so rocky
and poor that even the Scotch shied at it, and so when eastern
Pennsylvania became crowded, the overflow of settlers passed
not westward but southwestward, along the Cumberland Valley, into Western Maryland, and then into the Shenandoah and
�xxii
Who Are The Mountaineers?
those other long, narrow, parallel valleys of western Virginia.
This western region still lay unoccupied and scarcely known
by the Virginians themselves. Its fertile lands were discovered
by Pennsylvania Dutchmen. The first house in western Virginia was erected by one of them, Joist Hite, and he established
a colony of his people near the future site of Winchester. A
majority of those who settled in the eastern part of the Shenandoah Valley were Pennsylvania Dutch, while the Scotch-Irish,
following in their train, pushed a little to the west of them and
occupied more exposed positions. There were representatives
of other races along the border: English, Irish, French
Huguenots, and so on; but everywhere the Scotch-Irish and
Germans predominated.
And the southwestward movement, once started, never
stopped. So there went on a gradual but sure progress of
northern peoples across the Potomac, up the Staunton, the Dan,
the Yadkin, until the western piedmont and foot-hill region of
Carolina was similarly settled, chiefly by Pennsylvanians.
The archivist of North Carolina, the late William L.
Saunders, Secretary of State, said in one of his historical
sketches that "to Lancaster and York counties, in Pennsylvania,
North Carolina owes more of her population than to any other
known part of the world.11 He called attention to the interesting fact that when the North Carolina boys of Scotch-Irish and
Pennsylvania Dutch descent followed Lee into Pennsylvania
in the Gettysburg campaign, they were returning to the homes
of their ancestors, by precisely the same route that those ancestors had taken in going south.
Among those who made the long trek from Pennsylvania
southward in the eighteenth century, were Daniel Boone and
the ancestors of David Crockett, Samuel Houston, John C. Calhoun, "Stonewall" Jackson, and Abraham Lincoln. Boone and
the Lincolns, although English themselves, had been neighbors
in Berks County, one of the most German parts of all eastern
Pennsylvania.
So the western piedmont and the mountains were settled
neither by Cavaliers nor by poor whites, but by a radically dis-
�HORACE KEPHART
xxiii
tinct and even antagonistic people who are appropriately
called the Roundheads of the South. These Roundheads had
little or nothing to do with slavery, detested the state church,
loathed tithes, and distrusted all authority save that of conspicuous merit and natural justice. The first characteristic that
these pioneers developed was an intense individualism. The
strong and even violent independence that made them forsake
all the comforts of civilization and prefer the wild freedom of
the border was fanned at times into turbulence and riot; but it
blazed forth at a happy time for this country when our liberties were imperilled.
Daniel Boone first appears in history when, from his new
home on the Yadkin, he crossed the Blue Ridge and the Unakas
into that part of western Carolina which is now eastern Tennessee. He was exploring the Watauga region as early as 1760.
Both British and French Indian traders and soldiers had been
in this region before him, but had left few marks of their
wanderings. In 1761 a party of hunters from Pennsylvania and
contiguous counties of Virginia, piloted by Boone, began to use
this region as a hunting-ground, on account of the great abundance of game. From them, and especially from Boone, the
fame of its attractions spread to the settlements on the eastern
slope of the mountains, and in the winter of 1768-69 the first
permanent occupation of eastern Tennessee was made by a few
families from North Carolina.
About this time there broke out in Carolina a struggle between the independent settlers of the piedmont and the rich
trading and official class of the coast. The former rose in bodies
under the name of Regulators and a battle followed in which
they were defeated. To escape from the persecution of the aristocracy, many of the Regulators and their friends crossed the
Appalachian Mountains and built their cabins in the Watauga
region. Here, in 1772, there was established by these "rebels"
the first republic in America, based upon a written constitution
"the first ever adopted by a community of American-born
freemen." Of these pioneers in "The Winning of the West,"
Theodore Roosevelt says: "As in western Virginia the first set-
�xxiv
Who Are The Mountaineers?
tiers came, for the most part, from Pennsylvania, so, in turn, in
what was then western North Carolina, and is now eastern
Tennessee, the first settlers came mainly from Virginia, and indeed, in great part, from this same Pennsylvania stock."
Boone first visited Kentucky, on a hunting trip, in 1769. Six
years later he began to colonize it, in flat defiance of the British
government, and in the face of a menacing proclamation from
the royal governor of North Carolina. On the Kentucky River,
three days after the battle of Lexington, the flag of the new
colony of Transylvania was run up on his fort at Boonesborough. It was not until the following August that these
"rebels of Kentuck" heard of the signing of the Declaration of
Independence, and celebrated it with shrill warwhoops
around a bonfire in the center of their stockade.
Such was the stuff of which the Appalachian frontiersmen
were made. They were the first Americans to cut loose entirely from the seaboard and fall back upon their own resources.
They were the first to establish governments of their own, in
defiance of king and aristocracy. Says John Fiske:
Jefferson is often called the father of modern American
democracy; in a certain sense the Shenandoah Valley and adjacent Appalachian regions may be called its cradle. In that
rude frontier society, life assumed many new aspects, old
customs were forgotten, old distinctions abolished, social
equality acquired even more importance than unchecked individualism. The notions, sometimes crude and noxious,
sometimes just and wholesome, which characterized Jeffersonian democracy, flourished greatly on the frontier and
have thence been propagated eastward through the older
communities, affecting their legislation and their politics
more or less according to frequency of contact and intercourse. Massachusetts, relatively remote and relatively ancient, has been perhaps least affected by this group of ideas,
but all parts of the United States have felt its influence powerfully. This phase of democracy, which is destined to continue so long as frontier life retains any importance, can
nowhere be so well studied in its beginnings as among the
�HORACE KEPHART
xxv
Presbyterian population of the Appalachian region in the
18th century.
During the Revolution, the Appalachian frontier was held
by a double line of the men whom we have been considering:
one line east of the mountains, and the other west of them. The
mountain region itself remained almost uninhabited by
whites, because the pioneers who crossed it were seeking better hunting grounds and farmsteads than the mountains afforded. It was not until the buffalo and elk and beaver had
been driven out of Tennessee and Kentucky, and those rolling
savannahs were being fenced and tilled, that much attention
was given to the mountains proper. Then small companies of
hunters and trappers from both east and west began to move
into the highlands and settle there.
These explorers, pushing outward from the cross-mountain trails in every direction, found many interesting things
that had been overlooked in the scurry of migration westward.
They discovered fair river valleys and rich coves, adapted to
tillage, which soon attracted settlers of a better class; and so,
gradually, the mountain solitudes began to echo with the ring
of axes and the lowing of herds. By 1830 about a million permanent settlers occupied the southern Appalachians. Naturally, most of them came from adjoining regions—from the foot
of the Blue Ridge on one side and from the foot of the Unakas
or of the Cumberlands on the other, and hence they were chiefly of the same frontier stock that we have been describing. No
colonies of farmers from a distance ever have been imported
into the mountains, down to our own day.
Deterioration of the mountain people began as soon as
population began to press upon the limits of subsistence. At
first, naturally, the best people among the mountaineers were
attracted to the best lands. But the number and extent of such
valleys was narrowly limited. The United States topographers
report that in Appalachia, as a whole, the mountain slopes oc-
�xxvi
Who Are The Mountaineers?
cupy 90 percent of the total area, and that 85 percent of the land
has a steeper slope than one foot in five. So, as the years passed,
a larger and larger proportion of the highlanders was forced
back along the creek branches and up along the steep hillsides
to "scrabble" for a living.
It will be asked, Why did not this overplus do as other
crowded Americans did: move west?
First, because they were so immured in the mountains, so
utterly cut off from communication with the outer world, that
they did not know anything about the opportunities offered
new settlers in far-away lands. Moving "west" to them would
have meant merely going a few days' wagon-travel down into
the lowlands of Kentucky or Tennessee, which already were
thickly settled by a people of very different social class. Here
they could not hope to be anything but tenants or menials,
ruled over by proprietors or bosses—and they would die rather
than endure such treatment. As for the new lands of the farther West, there was scarce a peasant in Ireland or in Scandinavia but knew more about them than did the southern
mountaineers.
Second, because they were passionately attached to their
homes and kindred, to their own old-fashioned ways. The
mountaineer shrinks from lowland society as he does from the
water and the climate of such regions. He is never at ease until
back with his home-folks, foot-loose and free.
Third, because there was nothing in his environment to
arouse ambition. The hard, hopeless life of the mountain farm,
sustained only by a meager and ill-cooked diet, begat laziness
and shiftless unconcern.
Finally, the poverty of the hillside farmers and branchwater people was so extreme that they could not gather funds
to emigrate with. There were no industries to which a man
might turn and earn ready money, no markets in which he
could sell a surplus from the farm.
So, while the transmontane settlers grew rapidly in wealth
and culture, their kinsfolk back in the mountains either stood
still or retrograded, and the contrast was due not nearly so
�HORACE KEPHART
xxvii
much to any difference of capacity as to a law of Nature that
dooms an isolated and impoverished people to deterioration.
So the southern highlanders languished in isolation, sunk
in a Rip Van Winkle sleep, until aroused by the thunder-crash
of the Civil War. Let John Fox tell the extraordinary result of
that awakening.—
The American mountaineer was discovered, I say, at the
beginning of the war, when the Confederate leaders were
counting on the presumption that Mason and Dixon's Line
was the dividing line between the North and South, and
formed, therefore, the plan of marching an army from
Wheeling, in West Virginia, to some point on the Lakes, and
thus dissevering the North at one blow.
The plan seemed so feasible that it is said to have materially
aided the sale of Confederate bonds in England. But when
Captain Garnett, a West Point graduate, started to carry it
out, he got no farther than Harper's Ferry. When he struck
the mountains, he struck enemies who shot at his men from
ambush, cut down bridges before him, carried the news of
his march to the Federals, and Garnett himself fell with a bullet from a mountaineer's squirrel rifle at Harper's Ferry.
Then the South began to realize what a long, lean, powerful
arm of the Union it was that the southern mountaineer
stretched through its very vitals; for that arm helped hold
Kentucky in the Union by giving preponderance to the
Union sympathizers in the Blue-grass; it kept the east Tennesseans loyal to the man; it made West Virginia, as the
phrase goes, 'secede from secession'; it drew out a horde of
one hundred thousand volunteers, when Lincoln called for
troops, depleting Jackson County, Kentucky, for instance, of
every male under sixty years of age and over fifteen; and it
raised a hostile barrier between the armies of the coast and
the armies of the Mississippi. The North has never realized,
perhaps, what it owes for its victory to this non-slaveholding southern mountaineer.
It may be added that no other part of our country suffered
�xxviii
Who Are The Mountaineers?
longer or more severely from the aftermath of war.
Throughout that struggle the mountain region was a nest for
bushwhackers and bandits that preyed upon the aged and
defenseless who were left at home, and thus there was left an
evil legacy of neighborhood wrongs and private grudges.
Most of the mountain counties had incurred the bitter hostility
of their own States by standing loyal to the Union. After Appomattox they were cast back into a worse isolation than they
had ever known.
Left, then, to their own devices, unchecked by any stronger
arm, inflamed by a multitude of personal wrongs, habituated
to the shedding of human blood, contemptuous of State laws
that did not reach them, enraged by Federal acts that impugned, as they thought, an inalienable right of man, it was inevitable that this fiery and vindictive race should fall speedily
into warring among themselves. Old scores were now to be
wiped out in a reign of terror. The open combat of bannered
war was turned into the secret ferocity of family feuds.
But the mountaineers of today are faced with a mighty
change. The feud epoch has ceased throughout the greater part
of Appalachia. A new era dawns. Everywhere the highways
of civilization are pushing into remote mountain fastnesses.
Vast enterprises are being installed. The timber and the
minerals are being garnered. The mighty waterpower that has
been running to waste since these mountains rose from the
primal sea is now about to be harnessed in the service of man.
Along with this economic revolution will come, inevitably,
good schools, newspapers, a finer and more liberal social life.
The highlander, at last, is to be caught up in the current of
human progress.
Who Are the Mountaineers?
1. Who were the first frontiersmen to settle in Appalachia?
Where did they settle?
�HORACE KEPHART
xxix
2. Who were the Scotch-Irish? What was their reason for
coming to America?
3. What qualities did the Scotch-Irish possess that made them
successful settlers in Appalachia?
�xxx
Who Are The Mountaineers?
Mo. 1
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�PARTI
The Past
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�CHAPTER 1
Oral Tradition
Appalachian literature is founded on oral tradition. Ballads and storytelling came to these mountains with the first
settlers, were passed down from generation to generation,
and today are more popular than ever.
Ballads, one of the earliest forms of poetry, date back to
the Middle Ages. A ballad is simply a story in song. The ballad draws from many sources: legend and folklore, local and
national history, and from the singer's own community. Although some ballads are humorous, most tend to be tragic
and tell stories of war, destruction, lost love, or supernatural
occurrences. "The Ballad of Claude Allen" depicts a tragedy
of everyday life.
Although many folklorists had collected ballads, A.P.
Carter of Southwest Virginia was the first to record them
commercially. This "hillbilly" music, as it is often called has
become the foundation of the country music industry. Like
music, story telling has a rich literary tradition in the mountains of Appalachia. The practice of passing down family
stories is apparent in the selection by Jean Ritchie. Sut
�Lovingoods's Yarns by George Washington Harris come from
the oral tradition and are highly crafted pieces of fiction.
�CLAUDE ALLEN
5
BALLAD OF CLAUDE ALLEN
This ballad tells the story of the execution of Claude Allen
and his father Floyd in HiUsville, Virginia, in 1913. Claude was
attending the trial of his father, who had been charged for assaulting a deputy and sentenced to a year in prison.
When Floyd's lawyer rose to ask for a retrial, the judge consented. At that time Claude went up to speak to his father.
Within minutes many people, including Claude, Floyd, and his
brother Sidna, began firing their guns. It was not clear who had
fired the first shot. The sheriff, prosecuting attorney, and judge
were all killed.
Both Floyd and Claude were tried and sentenced to die in
the electric chair. Before the execution, Claude was presented
a gold medal by the women of Virginia inscribed: "For bravery
in defending his father."
Note: This tune is that of the song commonly known as
"Wayfaring Stranger."
High up on yonder's lovely mountain
Claude Allen lays beneath the clay;
No more we hear his words of mercy
Or see his face till Judgment Day.
�6
Oral Tradition
Claude
U
fa-
J
Al-
len
and
his
j nj
'!.' ^ i r
J
ther Have
met
their
fa-
r r ' / r \<LjD
last;
Their
friends are
j f T' G-
end- ed
And
hope
J
their
glad
tal
their
dear
old
doom
trou- ble's
IJLJLJ ^ : J j I J.
souls
are
at
now at
\. Claude Allen and his dear old father
Have met their fatal doom at last;
Their friends are glad their trouble's ended
And hope their souls are now at rest.
2. Poor Claude was young and very handsome
And still had hopes until the end
That he might in some way or other
Escape his death at the Richmond's pen.
3. But the governor, being so hard-hearted,
Not caring what his friends might say,
He finally took his sweet life from him;
In the cold ground his body lay.
4. Claude's mother's tears were gently flowing,
All for the one she loved so dear.
It seemed no one could tell her troubles;
It seemed no one could tell but her.
rest.
�CLAUDE ALLEN
7
5. Poor Claude, he had a pretty sweetheart;
She mourns the loss of the one she loved.
She hopes to meet beyond the river,
A fair young face in heaven above.
6. Now, all young men, from this take warning;
Be careful how you go astray,
Or you might be like poor Claude Allen
And have this awful debt to pay.
The Ballad of Claude Allen
1. As you read this ballad, with whom do you sympathize?
How do the words of the song influence your feelings?
2. Find a clue in the song that shows how the people of
Virginia felt about the execution of Claude and Floyd.
�8
Oral Tradition
RICHARD CHASE (1904-1988)
Born in North Alabama near Huntsville, Richard Chase
received his B. A. from Antioch College in 1929. He lectured on
folklore and told tales in schools, colleges, and universities
throughout the United States. He founded an Appalachian
craft industry and conducted folk art workshops.
He edited a number of collections of folk songs and folk
tales for publication. Among these are the "Jack Tales" for
which he is best known. These tales, many of which probably
came from northwestern Europe, have been handed down orally from generation to generation, and have undergone many
variations over the years.
This story may remind readers of other tales about witches
and haunted houses.
Cat 'n Mouse
One time the boys' daddy decided he'd give 'em a hundred
dollars a-piece and let 7em go out by themselves to see what
would they do with it. Told 'em to be gone one year and then
to come back so he could see which one of 'em made the best
out of his money.
Well, the three of 'em set out together down the big road.
Then Will says, "Now, when we come to where the road forks
�RICHARD CHASE
9
three ways, we'll separate. There ain't no use in us goin' all
together."
So when they came to a crossroad, they stopped and talked
awhile, and directly Will called Tom off to one side and they
went to whisperin', then they both came over to Jack and
thro wed him down and took every cent of his money, divided
it, and left Jack a-layin' there. Will took one side-road and Tom
took the other'n. Jack got his senses back pretty soon and set
there a little while tryin' to study what to do. Then he decided
he'd go on and see what luck he might have, so he walked out
in the middle of the crossroads and throwed his hat up in the
air. Whichever road it landed in, he was goin' to go that way.
Well, his hat landed in the road straight ahead, so he took it and
on he went.
Hit was an old road, not traveled much, and pretty soon
Jack landed 'way out in a lonesome wilder-ness of a place.
Went on, went on; the road pretty nearly covered up with grass
and briars, and directly he came to a fine-lookin' white house
out there. Jack could see signs of somebody livin' there and he
had to have some place to stay the night. He hated to holler
'cause he was so ragged and dirty, but he 'lowed there wasn't
nothin' like tryin', so he hollered hello and waited awhile.
Nobody came out, so he went to the door and pulled the doorbell. The door opened and a big cat came out. Jack didn't know
what to think of that. The cat sat there looking at him and there
didn't no person come to the door, so Jack hollered again, "Who
keeps the house?"
"Cat 'n mouse," says the cat.
"Law me!" says Jack. "I've done got to a country where cats
can talk."
"Yes," the cat told him, "there's an old witch out here. She
got all my family but me and my sister. She witched her into a
cat, then to a mouse, and me into a cat. She'll try to witch me
into a mouse tonight."
Then Jack looked and saw a mouse creep out one side the
door, says, "Well, is there anything I can do to keep the old witch
from botherin' ye?"
�10
Oral Tradition
"Probably might be," says the cat. "You can help me, but my
sister, she'll stay a mouse. There can't be nothin' done for ye,
once she gets you into a mouse. You stay here by the door
tonight and kill any kind of big varmints you see and if 11 keep
the witch off."
Well, Jack got him a big club and got before the door, and
when it got plumb thick dark all sorts of bears and painters and
big wild animals came up the steps and Jack 'uld knock 'em and
beat 'em with his club, kept on fightin' all night. Next mornin'
that cat came out and it was a little bigger, looked a little bit like
a girl.
"Now tonight," she says, "the old witch'll send middle-size
varmints. You see can you keep them off, too."
Jack picked around that day and got what berries and such
he could find to eat, cut him a middle-size club and when it
commenced gettin'dark he got by the door again. Then all
kinds of pizen snakes and wildcats and weasels and boomers
and ground hogs came and tried to get in. Jack hit at 'em with
his club and knocked 'em off the porch and kept on a-givin' it
to 'em till daylight. Then the door opened and that girl came
out. She was pretty near the right size that time, but she still
had some signs of a cat's claws and whiskers and ears.
She says to Jack, "You done fine last night, Jack. Now
tonight she'll send all sorts of little varmints. You'll have a time
of it, I expect."
So Jack eat a few blackberries and huckleberries that day
and whittled him out some paddles and swatters and took up
his stand by the door when night came; and all sorts of pizen
scorpions and insects and spiders and hornets and big ants
came up and tried to cross the door sill, but Jack went to work
with his swatters and his paddles and it was a sight in the world
how he went after 'em. He thought there'd be a pile of dead
things there when it got daylight, but when it got light enough
for him to see, there wasn't a thing there on the porch.
Then the door opened and there stood the prettiest girl you
ever looked at.
"You did real well, Jack," she says. "You come on in the
�RICHARD CHASE
11
house now and Til fix ye somethin' to eat."
She baked Jack some cornbread and fixed him some coffee,
and while he was eatin', she says to him, "Now, you won't have
nothin' to contend with tonight but the old witch herself. You
got shet of all the plagues she had. Now, when she comes in
you be sure and not let her do anything in the world for ye. I'll
hide, and you and the old witch can go to it. You remember
now, if you let her do one thing for ye, shell witch us both into
cats."
So that night that girl went and hid somewhere, and Jack he
found him a needle and some thread, pulled up 'fore the fire
and went to patchin' his old raggedy coat. It wasn't long till a
little ugly wrinkled-up woman came hobblin' in the door,
looked like she was about a hundred years old. Her nose and
her chin was so long they hung down a-wobblin'. She got a
chair and pulled up close to Jack, says, "Howdy do, Jack."
"Howdy do, ma'm."
"Let me do that for ye, Jack. It looks awkward seein' a man
try to patch."
"No," says Jack, "I'll do my own patchin'."
The old witch looked sort of out-done, but Jack kept right
on, and directly he got up to fix him a little supper. Got some
meal and a pan and started mixin' bread."
"Let me do that for ye, Jack. I never did like to see a man
try to make bread."
"No," says Jack, "I can fix bread all right."
Then he went to the fire, raked him out some coals and set
the skillet over 'em. Then he cut some meat and started it to
fry in'.
"Let me 'tend the meat for ye, Jack. I never saw anything so
awkward as a man tryin' to cook."
"No, thank you, ma'm," says Jack, "I don't want you messin'
with my meat. Ill tend it myself."
Well, when Jack turned around to get his bread that old
witch got hold of the knife and went to turn Jack's meat over.
There was an old flesh fork a-hangin' there, big old fork they
used to cook meat on. Jack grabbed that up and ran at the old
�12
Oral Tradition
woman with it, hooked her and rammed her right on in the fire.
He held her down between the backlog and the forestick and
such a crackin' and a poppin' and a fryin'and a singein' you
never heard. Jack kept her there until she burnt up.
Then there stood that girl just a-laughin', says, "You sure
got her then, Jack. There'll be no more witchery done around
here."
So she fixed Jack a nice supper and the next mornin' when
they went out that place was just full of fine livestock—chickens and hogs and sheep and cattle and horses—and the road
was cleared out and the crops all standin' in the fields.
That girl says to Jack, "Ever7thing here belongs to you now,
Jack, for killin' that witch."
"You too?" says Jack.
"Well," she says, "yes; if you say so."
'Til sure say so," says Jack; "you're the main part of the
property."
So they went and got two fine horses and hitched 'em up to
the surrey, and went to the store and got Jack a new suit of
clothes and then found 'em a preacher and got married. Jack
he went to work about the place tendin' to his crops and his
livestock, and that young woman she cooked and did the
washin' and the milkin' and churnin' and all; and then Jack got
to studyin' how the year was about up. So he told the girl about
how he and Will and Tom had started out, and said they'd better fix up pretty soon to go back to see his daddy.
So they got ready and pulled out with the team and buggy
one mornin'. Jack had got his old clothes and throwed 'em in
under the seat. That girl had a pet fox and they took it along
too.
They came in sight of Jack's house and he said to her, "You
wait here a minute. I want to see what all's done happened
while I been gone, see if Will and Tom got back yet."
Then he put on his raggedy old clothes, put that fox under
his arm and went on to the house.
His father saw him comin' and came out to the gate, says,
"Hello, Jack. Glad to see ye. You look like you must not 'a had
�RICHARD CHASE
13
any luck; I see you got the same suit of clothes."
"Will and Tom come?" Jack asked him.
"Yes, they got in early this mornin'. They got new clothes
and both of them married nice-lookin' women. You wait here,
Jack, and let me go get you one of my suits of clothes so youll
have somethin' better to wear when you come in.tf
"No," Jack told him, Til just go ahead like I am."
So he went into the house, and when Will and Tom saw him
in his same ragged overhalls and coat, they com-menced
laughin' and makin' fun of Mm; and their wives they slipped
around and pinned dishrags to his coat-tails. Jack didn't pay no
mind. He talked to his daddy and his mother awhile. Ever'
now and then he'd squeeze down on that fox and it 'uld say,
"Gold enough
But none for you."
Will and Tom they couldn't understand that. Then directly Jack went on back where he'd left his wife. He got his good
new suit of clothes on again and then him and his wife drove
the surrey on down to the gate. Hitched the horse and Jack took
the pet fox under his arm.
Will looked out and saw 'em, says, "Who's that?"
Tom came and looked. "Ain't nobody we know. It's rich
folks. What you reckon they want?"
Their wives, they came and peeked around the door. And
about that time Jack's mother looked out the window, and says,
"That's Jack."
"No!" says Will "Why, that can't be Jack."
"Yes, it is, too," says Tom. "It is Jack, and look what a pretty fine-dressed woman he's got."
"Law me!" says Will's wife, "hit'll not do for her to see the
way I am." And she ran and hid under the bed.
Then Tom gave his wife a shove, says, "You run hide somewhere quick. Don't let her see you in that old cotton dress."
And she jumped off the porch and crawled in under the house.
Jack brought his wife on in and made her known to his
daddy and his mother, and Will and Tom just stood around.
Fin'ly Jack's wife said to 'em, "I thought Jack told me you
�14
Oral Tradition
boys was married. Where's your wives at?"
"Mine's under the bed," says Will. "She can come out if she
wants to."
She crawled out from under the bed, had feathers and dust
in her hair. Then Jack's woman asked if the other'n was home,
and Tom's wife she scrambled out from under the floor with
her hair full of trash and dirt all over her. Jack's wife spoke nice
to 'em, and they all talked awhile. Jack squeezed down on that
fox directly and it said,
"Gold enough
But none for you.
And by that time Will and Tom knowed what it meant.
Well, Jack took his daddy and his mother back with him and
his wife, and they was all independent rich. Will and Tom
never did do much good. And Jack and his wife and his folks
they lived happy.
Cat 'n Mouse
1. What happenings in this story remind you of tales you've
read or heard before?
2. What advice did the cat give Jack before he met the witch?
Did Jack follow the advice? What was the result?
3. The uncommon events in fairy tales often satisfy our own
dreams and desires. Is this true in the story "Cat n' Mouse"?
Explain.
4. According to Gratis Williams, mountain dialect often contains words with the final g left off, as in goin', working and
doin'. Find words in the story which fit this pattern.
�RICHARD CHASE
No. 2
15
�16
Oral Tradition
TSALI(? -1840)
Not all the Cherokee Indians marched the infamous Trail of
Tears, the forced relocation to camps in Oklahoma that left 3,000
Cherokee dead. Some escaped from the soldiers and hid in the
Great Smoky Mountains. A middle-aged Indian named Tsali,
also called Charley by the white men, was one of them.
According to legend, because of Tsali's resistance, he was
finally executed and buried in an unmarked grave along with
all his family except for one son. The soldiers spared his
youngest son, who joined the nearly 1,000 other Cherokee
refugees in the mountains.
This legend has been preserved. Tsali's remaining son told
his daughter, Norah Roper, who then told the story of her
grandfather's refusal to abandon his homeland to Alice Marriott. Her book American Indian Mythology includes the story.
Tsali of the Cherokees
In the time when their troubles began , the ordinary
Cherokees did not at first understand that anything was really
wrong. They knew that their tribal chiefs traveled back and
forth to the white man's place called Washington more often
l
ln the time when their troubles began, m the 1830's.
�ALICE MARRIOTT
17
than they used to do. They knew that when the chiefs came
back from that place there were quarrels in the tribal council.
Up in the hills and the back country, where Ant Keetoowah—
the true Cherokees—lived, word of the changes came more
slowly than the changes themselves came to the valley
Cherokees. Many of the hill people never left their farm lands,
and those who did went only to the nearest trading post and
back. Few travelers ever came into the uplands, where the mists
of the Smokies shut out the encroaching world.
So, when the news came that some of the chiefs of the
Cherokees had touched the pen, and put their names or their
marks on a paper, and agreed by doing so that this was no
longer Cherokee country, the Ani Keetoowah could not believe
what they heard. Surely, they said to each other, this news must
be false. No Cherokee—not even a mixed-blood—would sign
away his own and his people's lands. But that was what the
chiefs had done.
Then the word came that the chiefs were even more divided
among themselves, and that not all of them had touched the
pen. Some were not willing to move away to the new lands
across the Mississippi, and settle in the hills around Fort Gibson, Oklahoma.
"Perhaps we should hang on," the Ani Keetoowah said to one
another. "Perhaps we will not ha veto go away after all." They
waited and hoped, although they knew in their hearts that hope
is the cruelest curse on mankind.
One of the leaders of the Ani Keetoowah was Tsali. The white
men had trouble pronouncing his name, so they called him
"Charley," or "Dutch." Tsali was a full-blood, and so were his
wife and their family. They were of the oldest Keetoowah
Cherokee blood, and would never have let themselves be
shamed by having half-breed relatives.
Tsali and his four sons worked two hillsides and the valley
between them, in the southern part of the hill country. Tsali
and his wife and their youngest son lived in a log house at the
head of the hollow. The others had their own homes, spread
out along the hillsides. They grew corn and beans, a few
�18
Oral Tradition
English peas, squashes and pumpkins, tobacco and cotton, and
even a little sugar cane and indigo. Tsali's wife kept chickens
in a fenced run away from the house.
The women gathered wild hemp and spun it; they spun the
cotton, and the wool from their sheep. Then they wove the
thread into cloth, and sometimes in winter when their few cattle and the sheep had been cared for and the chickens fed and
there was not much else to do, the men helped at the looms
which they had built themselves. The women did all the cutting and the making of garments for the whole family.
Tsali and his family were not worldly rich, in the way that
the chiefs and some of the Cherokees of the valley towns were
rich. They had hardly seen white man's metal money in their
lives. But Tsali's people never lacked for food, or good clothing, or safe shelter.
The missionaries seldom came into the uplands then. Tsali
took his sons and their wives, and his own wife, to the great
dance ground where the seven Keetoowah villages gathered each
month at the time of the full moon. There they danced their
prayers in time to the beating of the women's terrapin-shell2 leg
rattles, around and around the mound of packed white ashes
on top of which bloomed the eternal fire that was the life of all
the Cherokees.
The occasional missionaries fussed over the children. They
gave them white men's names, so that by Tsali's time everyone
had an Indian name and an English one. The Cherokees listened to the missionaries politely, for the missionaries were
great gossips, and the Cherokees heard their news and ignored
the rest of their words.
"You will have to go soon," said one white preacher to Tsali.
"There's no hope this time. The lands have all been sold and
the Georgia troopers are moving in. You'll have to go west."
"We'll never leave," Tsali answered. "This is our land and
we belong to it. Who could take it from us—who would want
it? It's hard even for us to farm here, and we're used to hill
terrapin shell, turtle shell
�ALICE MARRIOTT
19
farming. The white men wouldn't want to come here—they'll
want the lands in the valleys, if the lowland people will give
them up.
They want these hills more than any other land," the missionary said. He sounded almost threatening. "Don't you see,
you poor ignorant Indian? They are finding gold—gold, man,
gold—downstream in the lower Keetoowah country. That
means that the source of the gold is in the headwaters of the
rivers that flow from here down into the valleys. I've seen gold
dust in those streams myself."
"Gold?" asked Tsali. "You mean this yellow stuff?" And he
took a buckskin pouch out of the pouch that hung from his sash,
and opened it. At the sight of the yellow dust the pouch contained the missionary seemed to go a little crazy.
"That's it!" he cried. "Where did you get it? How did you
find it? You'll be rich if you can get more."
"We find it in the rivers, as you said," Tsali replied. "We
gather what we need to take to the trader. I have this now because I'm going down to the valley in a few days, to get my wife
some ribbons to trim her new dress."
"Show me where you got it," the missionary begged. "We
can all be rich. I'll protect you from the other white men, if
you'll make me your partner."
"No, I think I'd better not," said Tsali thoughtfully. "My
sons are my partners, as I was my father's. We do not need
another partner, and as long as we have our old squirrel guns,
we do not need to be protected. Thank you, but you can go on.
We are better off as we are."
The missionary coaxed and threatened, but Tsali stood firm.
In the end, the white man went away without any gold except
a pinch that Tsali gave him, because the missionary seemed to
value the yellow dust even more than the trader did.
Then it was time to go to the trading post. When Tsali came
in the store, the trader said to him, "Well, Chief, glad to see you.
I hear you're a rich man these days."
"I've always been a rich man," Tsali answered. "I have my
family and we all have our good health. We have land to farm,
�20
Oral Tradition
houses to live in, food on our tables, and enough clothes. Most
of all, we have the love in our hearts for each other and our
friends. Indeed, you are right. We are very rich."
"That's one way of looking at it," said the trader, "but it isn't
what I was thinking about. From what I hear, there's gold on
your land, you've got a gold mine."
"A gold man?" repeated Tsali. "I never heard of a gold
man."
"No!" shouted the trader. "A gold mine, I said. A place
where you can go and pick up gold."
"Oh, that!" Tsali exclaimed. "Yes, we have some places like
that on our land. Here's some of the yellow dust we find there."
And he opened the pouch to show the trader. The trader
had seen pinches of Tsali's gold dust before, and taken it in
trade without saying much about it. Now he went as crazy as
the missionary. "Don't tell anybody else about this, Charley,"
he whispered, leaning over the counter."We'll just keep it to
ourselves. I'll help you work it out, and I'll keep the white men
away. We'll all be rich."
"Thank you," said Tsali, "but I don't believe I want to be rich
that way. I just want enough of this stuff to trade you for ribbons and sugar."
"Oh, all right," answered the trader sulkily, "have it your
way. But don't blame me if you are sorry afterwards."
"I won't blame anybody," said Tsali, and bought his ribbon.
A month later, when the Georgia militia came riding up in
the valley to Tsali's house, the missionary and the trader were
with them. The men all stopped in front of the house, and
Tsali's wife came out into the dogtrot, the open-ended passage
that divided the two halves of the house and made a cool
breezeway where the family sat in warm weather. She spoke
to the men.
"Won't you come in and sit down?"
"Where's the old man?" the militia captain asked.
"Why, he's working out in the fields," said Amanda. "Sit
down and have a cool drink of water while I send the boy for
him."
�ALICE MARRIOTT
21
"Send the boy quickly," the captain ordered. "We'll wait in
our saddles and not trouble to get down."
"All right, if you'd rather not," Amanda said. "Do you mind
telling me why you're here?"
"We're here to put you off this place," said the captain.
"Haven't you heard? This isn't Cherokee land any more; the
chiefs signed it over to the government and now if s open for
settlement. One or the other of these two gentlemen will
probably claim it."
"They can't do that!" Amanda protested. "It's our land—
nobody else's. The chiefs had no right to sign it away. My
husband's father worked this place, and his father before him.
This is our home. This is where we belong."
"No more," said the captain. "You belong in the removal
camps down by the river, with the rest of the Indians. They're
going to start shipping the Cherokees west tomorrow morning."
Amanda sat down on the bench in the dogtrot, with her legs
trembling under her. "All of us?" she asked.
"Every one of you."
"Let me call my son and send him for his daddy," Amanda
said.
"Hurry up!"
Amanda went into the house, calling to the boy, who was
just fourteen and had been standing, listening, behind the door.
She gave him his father's old squirrel gun, and he sneaked his
own blowgun and darts and slid out the back of the house.
Amanda went back to the dogtrot and sat and waited. She sat
there and waited, while the missionary, the trader, and the captain quarreled about which of their wives should cook in her
kitchen. She let them quarrel and hoped her men were all right.
Tsali and his older sons were working the overhill corn
field, when the boy came panting up, and told them what had
happened.
"Is your mother all right?" Tsali asked.
"She was when I left," the boy answered.
"We'll hide in the woods till they're gone," Tsali told his
�22
Oral Tradition
older sons. "If they find us, they'll have to kill us to put us off
this land."
'What about the women?" the oldest son asked.
"They'll be all right," Tsali answered. "Your mother's a
quick-thinking woman; she'll take care of them. If we can hide
in the caves by the river till dark, we'll go back then and get
them."
They slipped away into the woods, downhill to the river,
taking the boy with them, although he offered to go back and
tell the white men he couldn't find his father.
All afternoon Amanda waited. Her daughters-in-law saw
the strange men and horses in front of the big house and came
to join her. At dusk, the captain gave up and ordered his men
to make camp in the front yard. "We'll wait here until the men
came back," he said.
With the white men camped all around the house, the
women went into the kitchen and barred all the doors. It was
a long time before the campfires made from the fence pickets
ceased to blaze and began to smolder. It was a longer time until
the women heard it—a scratch on the back door, so soft and so
light that it would have embarrassed a mouse. Amanda slid
back the bar, and Tsali and his sons slipped into the darkened
room. There was just enough moonlight for them to make out
each other's shapes.
"We came to get you," Tsali said. "Come quickly. Leave
everything except your knives. Don't wait a minute."
Amanda and her daughters-in-law always wore their
knives at their belts, so they were ready. One at a time, Tsali
last, the whole family crept out of their home and escaped into
the woods.
In the morning, when the white men stretched and
scratched and woke, the Ani Keetoowoh were gone.
It was spring, and the weather was warm, but the rain fell
and soaked the Cherokees. They had brought no food, and they
dared not fire a gun. One of the daughters-in-law was pregnant, and her time was close. Amanda was stiff and crippled
with rheumatism. They gathered wild greens, for it was too
�ALICE MARRIOTT
23
early for berries or plums, and the men and boy trapped small
animals and birds in string snares the women made by pulling
out their hair and twisting it.
Day by day, for four weeks, the starving family listened to
white men beating through the woods. The Cherokees were
tired and cold and hungry, but they were silent. They even
began to hope that in time the white men would go away and
the Indians would be safe.
It was not to be. One trooper brought his dog, and the dog
caught the human scent. So the dog, with his man behind him,
came sniffing into the cave and Tsali and his family were caught
before the men could pick up their loaded guns.
The militiaman shouted, and other white men came thudding through the woods. They tied the Cherokee men's hands
behind them and bound them all together along a rope. The
militiamen pushed Tsali and his sons through the woods. The
women followed, weeping.
At last they were back at their own house, but they would
not have recognized it. The troopers had plundered the garden, and trampled the plants they didn't eat. The door from
the kitchen into the dogtrot hung askew, and the door to the
main room had been wrenched off its hinges. Clothes and bedding lay in filthy piles around the yard. What the militiamen
could not use, they ruined.
"Oh, my garden!11 cried Amanda, and when she saw the
scattered feathers, "Oh, my little hens!"
"What are you going to do with us?" Tsali demanded.
"Take you down to the river. The last boat is loading today.
There's still time to get you on it and out of here."
"I—will—not—go," Tsali said quietly. "You—nor you—
nor you— nobody can make me go."
"Our orders are to take all the Cherokees. If any resist, shoot
them."
"Shoot me, then!" cried Tsali. The captain raised his rifle.
"Stop!" Amanda screamed. She stepped over beside her
husband. "If you shoot, shoot us both," she ordered. "Our lives
have been one life since we were no older than our boy here. I
�24
Oral Tradition
don't want to go on living without my husband. And I cannot
leave our home any more than he can. Shoot us both."
The four sons stepped forward. "We will die with our
parents," the oldest one said. "Take our wives to the boat, if that
is the only place they can be safe, but we stay here." He turned
to his wife and the other young women.
"That is my order as your husband," Tsalfs son said. "You
must go away to the west, and make new lives for yourselves
while you are still young enough to do so." The wives sobbed,
and held out their arms, but the husbands turned their backs
on the women. "We will stay with our parents," all the young
men said.
The young boy, too, stood with his brothers, beside his
father. "Let this boy go," Tsali said to the white men. "He is so
young. A man grows, and plants his seed, and his seed goes
on. This is my seed. I planted it. My older sons and I have had
our chances. They will leave children, and their names will
never be forgotten. But this boy is too young. His seed has not
ripened for planting yet. Let him go to care for his sisters on
the way to the west."
"Very well," said the captain. "He can't do much harm if he
does live." He turned to the two militiamen. "Take the boy and
the young women away," he ordered. "Keep them going till
they come to the boats, and load them on board."
The young women and the boy, stunned and silenced, were
driven down the road before they could say good-by, nor
would the troopers let them look back. Behind them, as they
started on the long main road, they heard the sound of the shots.
�ALICE MARRIOTT
25
Tsali
1. In what ways do the values of Tsali differ from those of the
men who want his land?
2. Does Tsali fit your concept of a hero? Explain.
3. The conflict between the white man and the Indian is an
age-old one. What are some of the basic causes of this
conflict as illustrated in the story of Tsali?
4. The word seed is used symbolically at the end of this story.
Discuss its meaning.
5. Is there evil in this story? Is there good? Are they presented
implicitly or explicitly?
�26
Oral Tradition
GRATIS WILLIAMS (1911-1985)
Gratis Williams was a noted folklorist. He grew up in Big
Sandy Valley in Kentucky.
Williams attended Cumberland College in Williamsburg,
Kentucky. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees
from the University of Kentucky and his doctorate from New
York University. He taught at Appalachian State University
where he became dean of the graduate school and where in 1974
he served as Acting Chancellor.
His writings include scholarly works on the Southern
mountaineer and Appalachian speech.
The following was taken from a presentation he was invited
to make describing the many characteristics of the dialect of the
Southern Appalachian region.
Dialect and Speech
Begin, began, begun, for the mountaineer is begin, begin, begin
or once in a while begin, begun, begun. This is a fairly easy thing
to remember: the mountaineer has a prejudice against any past
tense in which the middle vowel in standard English has become an a. Also, he does not bother his head in any way with
fine distinctions in the use of such verbs as sit, set; lie, lay; rise,
raise. Do you recall how your English teachers beat your heads
�GRATIS WILLIAMS
27
just trying to help you get those things straight and made you
so self-conscious that you had to put on the brakes while you
figured out whether to say "sit" or "set"? The mountaineer
doesn't have that trouble; he is very economical. He says "set"
every time. He never says "sit," a putting-on-the-dog kind of
word. He wouldn't say "sat" at all. It's "set" every time. To him,
"lie" means to bear false witness, and except for that, he uses
"lay" every time. The sun will "rise," and one can have a "risin,"
a bealing or a boil, on him. In other instances, one uses a form
of "raise," as "He raised up." Perhaps that's enough about verbs,
except that once in a while one will be astonished to hear a
strange verb form that he has never heard before, like "skunt"
for "skinned" or "juked" for "ducked."
Here is a line from a song: "He beat his breast and away he
sworn." An old woman might say she "shot" the door, but more
often one would hear "shet." The mountain person also says
"tuck" for "took" and "shuck" for "shook," as "He tuck it outside
and shuck it." However, in mountain speech most double "o's"
are pure.
You can find vittles in a dictionary. It's a perfectly good
word, and the mountaineer pronounces it correctly. It means
food and is spelled victuals and pronounced vittles, the only
pronunciation allowed for it. There's nothing wrong with the
mountaineer's use of fetch, also a perfectly good word.
And poke, of course, Chaucer used. Everybody knows the
expression "pig in a poke," though most people that use it don't
really know what it means. Poke is a Middle English word
which means bag.
If one has a polysyllabic word for a name, then, in the hill
country he might have it reduced to one syllable or two.
"Ebenezer" might become "Eb" or "Ebby"; "Cassandra" might be
shortened to "Cassie"; or "Martelia" might become "Teal."
In the word sergeant we still preserve the old fashioned
pronunciation of that e before the r. We still say "sargent." The
old fashioned mountaineer, when he got around to using the
word eternal, said etarnal In time he dropped the first syllable
and said 'tarnal. Tarnation has to do with damnation, and is a
�28
Oral Tradition
mild curse word. It would be used only in a polite situation,
for when the mountaineer is in the right situation and wants to
curse he has a magnificent vocabulary. He knows how to put
things together. Scurillity, obscenity, and oaths he can weave
together in an almost poetic discharge. But he has to be in just
the right mood and in a real rage to do that. In polite society
he'd use such words as tarnation or tarnations.
Double negatives are used for emphasis, as Shakespeare
did, and the Bible does. Therefore, the more you want to make
a thing positive the more negatives you use. That's the way the
mountaineers do it. That's the way it should have remained.
The English teachers became bothered by negatives and started
applying mathematics. They began talking about one
negative's cancelling out another. "She don't never mean to do
nothing, nohow, no time, no way about it." Now can one be
more positive? I believe there are six negatives in a row in that
sentence.
I've already referred to the mountaineer's fondness for the
Middle English preposition a-. He's fond of prepositions
generally and the more of them he can put into a sentence the
more accurately he believes he is saying what he means.
Prepositional clusters in mountain speech are magnificent.
They are handled so skillfully that they sometimes sound like
one word. Unless you are really listening you don't notice
them. You have heard fur to (for to). "Fur to make a rabbit pie,
you've got first fur to catch a rabbit."
Once, when I was a little boy, my mother was making pies
one Saturday morning. I wanted one of those pies but she told
me, "No, these pies are for company." I waited until she was
busy in the kitchen, which joined the dining room. She had set
the pies on the window ledge in the dining room to cool before
putting them in the safe, a kind of cupboard, kept in the corner,
which had metal doors and sides with perforations in the metal
for ventilation. But the holes were so small that insects couldn't
get in. We had no refrigeration then. We had a big dining room
table with an ornately flowered oil cloth cover that came almost
to the floor all the way around. When I found my mother preoc-
�GRATIS WILLIAMS
29
cupied in the kitchen, I stole one of those pies and crept far back
under the table to eat it. I was doing quite well with it when I
heard my mother walk across the floor. All I could see were her
shoes. She walked over to the window ledge. There was this
very dramatic silence. I was holding my breath. My mother
was not making a sound. In a moment, she lifted the corner of
that tablecloth slowly, and peeked under it. With her face upside down, she said, "You come on up out from back down in
under there, or I'll wear every bit of hide from off n your back."
Let me repeat exactly what she said. "You come on up out from
back down in under there. I'll wear every bit of hide from off from
up on your back." One couldn't be more precise than that. But
a long time ago we were told that we don't need all of those
prepositions. You have to listen for them. They almost come out
as one word.
I want now to tell the beginning of a folktale, "The Fox and
the Bumblebee."
One'st they's a fox 'at 'lowed one mornin' he'd walk down to
the mouth of the creek to the store. He had to have him a
quarterlampal, an' a plug o' chawin backer, and he 'lowed by
gonnies he might buy 'im a can of sammons if the price uz
right. And whilst he uz a-sankerin along, a-thankin about
first one thang and then t'other, he seed one of these here big
yaller stripedy bellied bummel bees a-smoulin over a flare
blossom 'at uz a-growin on a mornin glory vine on one of the
postes thar by the side of the big road. So's'n he snuck up
right easy like and rech out and snabbed him and popped him
into a poke he had with'm, and then went on. Ditn't git stung
nary time. D'reckly, he come to this here house 'at as a-standin acrosst the branch. He walked right down ferninst the
door and hollerd "hello." A womern come and stuck her head
out and said, "Whaf d you have, mister?" The fox says, "How
about me a-leavin this here poke here whilst I go on down to
the mouth of the creek to the store? I've got to git me a quart
of lampal and a plug of chawin backer and I 'lowed by gonnies might buy me a can of sammons if the price is right." The
womern said, "Why, come right in, if you can git in. I been aaimin to reddin up this here old place fer mighten nigh a
�30
Oral Tradition
week, but a body can't never git around to a-doin nothin,
don't 'pear like. Jist putt it down yan side of the farplace, if
you can find room fer it"
Well, the fox he walked over and putt the poke down. Then,
he looked at the womern right straight like, and says to her,
says, "Now, don't you be a-openin that there poke whilst I'm
gone." And then he went on.
Well, agin he's out o' sight and sound of the house, the
womern says, "Now, I jist wonder whaf s in that there poke?
Aye gonnies, I'll see." So's'n she walked over and picked up
the poke, ontied the strang, onwropped it, flipped the poke
open, and the bee, o' course flew out, but her old rooster 'at
jist happent to be a-standin there tuck out atter it. But, the
dang thang got away. She tied the strang back, jist like it was,
best she could ricollect, putt the poke back down, hooved it
up a little in the middle so's'n hifd look like hit hatn't been
teched, and went on about her work. Atter a while the fox
comes back. He walks over and picks up the poke, onties the
strang, onwrops it, but the bummel bee o' course is gone. He
says, "Whur's my bummel bee?"
The womern says, 'Why, I jist ontied the strang and opened
the poke, and the bummel bee flew out. My old rooster jist
happent to be a-standin there tuck out atter it, but the dang
thang got away. 'Then," says the fox, "the rooster is mine."
So's'n he ketched the rooster and popped him into the poke
and then he went on.
You know the story, I suppose. It is one of those aroundand-around stories. The fox goes from one house to another,
repeating the same kind of deal.
It's incorrect in America to add a t as in onest, but old
fashioned Americans do. Onest and twicet are not restricted to
the mountains. One hears them in the Midwest also. Aye in
"aye gonnies11 means yes. Connies, a mild oath, might have
something to do with what belongs to God, but is perhaps a
dialectical pronunciation of "guineas," which were British gold
pieces. I used to hear my father say that. The mountaineer will
�GRATIS WILLIAMS
31
also say "by Jacks," which might mean "by Jackson" for Andrew
Jackson, a great hero of the mountain folk, who still swear by
him. According to records, many mountaineers continued to
vote for Andrew Jackson for President for a generation after he
died because they refused to vote for anybody else.
"By gollies" may perhaps mean "by God," but I don't know.
The go suggests God. Gollies might mean "God's laws." I've forgotten what gollies means, if I have ever known. "Gosh" means
"God's wash," God's bath water, I believe.
Outsiders say we'uns. I have never heard the mountaineers
use the terms we'uns, you'uns, and his'un, and I've listened carefully. The outsider coming to the mountains will hear you'uns
and our'n, and he'll go back home absolutely convinced that he
heard them say we'uns, too, but I don't believe I have ever heard
one say it. I always insist that they don't say it, but sometimes
people will say to me, "Oh, you just haven't been listening. I
know some who say it." I ask them to listen for it again and the
next time they hear it to write it down and send me a note about
it. I've received no notes. I believe people just think they have
heard it.
The syllabicated plural, as in ghostes and posies, was common in Middle English. One finds it in Chaucer's works. Third
person present tense verbs are also syllabicated sometimes, as
in "He boastes too much," or "She roastes chicken over a open
far."
The speech I was using in the story, incidentally, is the finest
speech that a semi-literate or illiterate grandmother might use
in telling her little grandson a story. That speech as delivered
is spoken by perhaps not more than one million of the eight or
nine million Appalachians still living in Appalachia. But
everybody of Appalachian origin will have, unless they have
worked very hard to improve their speech, some of the characteristics of the speech in the story I have told you. And that's
to put the speech in the story in perspective so you won't think
all mountain folks speak that way.
Younguns, right out of Anglosaxon, means children. It's an
Anglosaxon word that means "young ones." But it's not quite
�32
Oral Tradition
the same as "we'uns" and "you'uns." Let's assume that
"we'uns" is sometimes heard. Fve never heard it used but let's
assume it is. What does it mean? It means "we ones." Is there
anything grammatically wrong with that? No. It's just for emphasis. "You'uns," exactly the same, means "you ones."
"Your'n" means "your own." It's an idiomatic use. "Their'n,"
meaning "their own/1 is another.
"You all" is not typical mountain speech. It's an interloper,
an intruder, from outside. It's the kind of thing that self-conscious Southerners will drawl in order to call attention to themselves as Southerners, for Southerners are proud of their speech.
Mountaineers are ashamed of theirs.
"Sallet" is used for salad throughout the mountains but I
believe it is heard elsewhere in the country, too. You probably
hear it more often here. In the mountains it doesn't mean the
same as salad. One might hear a mountain person talk about
the salad and the sallet. He has two different things in mind.
Sallet is greens he gathers in the garden and cooks.
I remember my greatgrandfather, who died when I was 21.
He used very old fashioned English, and as far as I know he was
completely illiterate, but he would say "s'l" and "s'e" and "sas'I,"
and "sas'e," meaning "says I" and "says he." He died at the age
of 93. His speech went away back almost to the time of Daniel
Boone, who would have used these expressions, too.
Mountain folk use weak forms of some verbs that remain
strong verbs in standard English. Seed is one of them. They will
say see, seed, seed, or seen. They have retained the Anglosaxon
concept of the verb learn. In Anglosaxon, learn meant "to learn"
or "to teach" either. So to the man who lives in the hills, "to
teach" means simply to hold a school. He says teached instead
of taught, but learn has to do with the act of learning. A mountaineer might say of a teacher, "We don't want him back in this
community no more. He teached the poorest school I can
remember. He didn't learn the younguns a thing."
The mountain people have simply retained the old speech
because they have been isolated. They have retained what appears to have been general among the Scotch-Irish at the time
�GRATIS WILLIAMS
33
of the American Revolution.
Some of these Scotch-Irish moved to other places and they
carried their speech with them. One could go into the Ozarks,
for example, and hear the same kind of speech we have here.
One could go into Southern Indiana, where communities have
retained their Scotch-Irish descendants, and hear the same
kind of speech, or Ohio, or Illinois, or Missouri, even upstate
New York. Wherever they went they carried their speech with
them.
"Again" is used as an adverbial conjunctive. That's the way
it was in Middle English times. We had a man at Appalachian
State University who worked for us a long time, a fine professor who used that all the time and never was aware that it was
a mountain usage. One could hardly tell that he had a mountain origin, really. But he retained this and was not aware of
it. It's interesting, too, that the mountain person seems to think
again is two words, that gain is a noun and the object of the
preposition a. He thinks this is a noun, I suspect, although he
doesn't use the word as a noun. Hell say, "Well, he done it,
and I said something to him, and then he done it again. I didn't
want no trouble with him, but then he done it another gam, and
I let him have it right between the eyes." He will say, "He done
it again, and again, and then another gam." While I was in Kentucky last weekend I heard that. The mountaineer senses again
as an adverbial conjunction, but it has long since ceased to be
used as that in standard English.
Did you notice in the story of the bumblebee that the teller
of the story wanted to explain the obvious to you? "The bummel bee, of course, was gone." This reflects the literal mind of
the mountaineer. With all of his good qualities, he is also literal
minded. The Bible means just exactly what it says, not one
word more. The mountain preacher must preach exactly from
that Bible. If he has an argument to make, he marshals his arguments by quoting chapter and verse. Anything he says
away from the Bible is thought of as "not Godly." He retains
literal notions of politics, too. Politically, he tends to be just
what his pappy was and he doesn't want to change. General-
�34
Oral Tradition
ly, he has not learned how to be abstract. Since he works from
facts only, he seems unable to engage in abstractions. He
doesn't understand courts of law that deal with civil issues. In
fact, he doesn't trust the courts at all. He thinks the courts are
instruments that provide for the manipulation of his affairs by
his enemies. Typically, he would rather solve his own
problems.
Dialect and Speech
1. How is the mountaineer economical with verbs?
2. Suggest examples of polysyllabic names that are shortened
in the way Ebenezer and Cassandra are.
3. What was the original purpose of double negatives?
�JEAN RITCHIE 35
JEAN RITCHIE (1922- )
Jean Ritchie was born the fourteenth child in a family of
singers and storytellers in Viper, Kentucky.
After graduating from the University of Kentucky with a
degree in social work, she went to New York to work in the
Henry Street Settlement School. There she sang her way into
the hearts of the settlement residents and met foMorists Alan
Lomax and Burl Ives, who gave her opportunities to perform
and record. These opportunities lead to her worldwide fame
as a dulcimer player.
In 1952 she received a Fulbright Scholarship to study
folklore in the British Isles. She was one of the seven to make
up the original board of directors of the Newport Folk Festival.
Since the publication of her book Singing Family of the Cumberlands in 1955, she has continued to write, perform, and record.
In this excerpt from that book, she writes about her parents'
meeting and marriage and the influence of singing and
storytelling in the Ritchie family.
From Singing Family of the Cumberland^
Oftentimes we would pester Dad to tell us about how he
had met up with Mom, and how they had courted and so on.
Children are so curious about such things. But he would never
�36
Oral Tradition
want to talk about that to us, and always told us to hush—it
wasn't none of our business. He wouldn't get mad when we
asked him, but just acted like it shamed him, and he would look
sideways at Mom and give a little dry laugh and go out and
study the weather.
It was the evening of their golden wedding anniversary
that we finally got all the facts out of Mom and Dad. A soft
June evening. The whole community had been in and out of
our place that day, paying honor to them. We had cooked for
weeks to be able to accommodate everybody with chicken and
dumplings with all the trimmings, and it sure had been a big
day. All the people brought presents, too. Dad had several
gold tie-clasps and watch-chains, Mom had golden haircombs, earrings, and all kinds of jewelry, and there were stacks
of gold-trimmed trays, dishes, flower vases, and knickknacks,
all over the place. Best of all her presents Mom loved the one
she got from Dad—a gold wedding band. After all these years!
'I reckon that settles it. I'm really married/ she said.
Finally toward evening everybody went home, and we
were resting ourselves with hot tea around the table. Dad had
gone off to take a nap after the hard day. The ring must have
given Mom nerve, for after a while she went off into their room
and came back with a letter.
'I want all you children to see your Pa's letter/ she smiled.
'It's his first one he ever wrote to me. Handle it careful, it's old
and crackly. Hard to read, too, yellow and fady, but you can
tell what a pretty hand to write he was then. See how even the
strokes of it, and the lovely curlicues! He was allus the best
scribe in the countryside about, anybody will tell you that.'
Miss Abigail Hall
Dwarf, Kentucky, June the 23,93
Viper, Ky.
Unknown Friend,
A friend of yours, Miss Sallie Hall, says that you said you
wanted some pretty boy to write to you. I guess you was just
�JEAN RITCHIE
37
joking if you said that to Sallie, but nevertheless I take the liberty of addressing you, asking you to pardon me for my boldness.
You need not think I am good looking by me writing, for I
am not.
Some of the boys has told me you are a nice pretty girl and
of course I would love to see you, for I think we could be
friends, don't you?
I will give you a brief description of myself so you may
judge what I look like.
I am a young man 23 years of age, height 5 ft. 10 in. weight
150#, fair complexion, black eyes, light hair and stooped
shouldered.
If you axcept me as a correspondent I Think we could have
some real good fun writing to each other, and very likely our
correspondence would lead to something more serious.
There is nothing that gives me more pleasure than receiving nice letters from the girls except being honored with the
company of the writer.
I have several correspondents who are strangers to me but
we are interested in each others letters and if you answer this
favorable I think I can interest you next time. If you should
care to see my picture I will send you one with pleasure if you
will send me yours. (After I send mine).
Waiting anxiously for a favorable reply,
I remain Your Unknown Friend,
Balis Ritchie
Dwarf, Ky.
Dad came stomping to complain that he couldn't sleep for
the noise we were making, and, of course, he saw what it was
we were all exclaiming over.
'Abbie, what you a-doing?' He looked sheepish. But we
wouldn't hush, and we asked them all manner of questions.
Pretty soon they got to having such a good time recollecting
that they well forgot we were there in the room.
Mom began musing out loud. 'This'ns the very first love
�38
Oral Tradition
letter I ever got, and then next week he come to see me. Lordie, Balis, do you remember when's the first time you laid eyes
on me? It's a pure wonder you would have me after that, but
I didn't take to you much neither that first sight we had of one
another!
Tap and all of us were in the field above the house one day
in July. It was nigh dinnertime, and we'uz a working hard to
get our round hoed out when here come Betton, my baby sister,
just a-cutting through the stalks. She couldn't get good breath,
she had run so fast. Pap grabbed at her, scared to death. He
thought Mam was sick or something.
"There's a stranger home," she was just grinning and jumping up and down and acting so feisty. "He's the properest
thing. Says he's a schoolteacher. From over in Knott he
comes."
'"Well what's he wanting here?" Pap wondered. Pap was
a good man. He looked off toward the house and fanned himself with his old flop hat. At last he struck his hoe into the
ground and started off down the hill. "Dinnertime anyway.
Guess maybe I ought to be seeing what he needs of us."
'Betton hollered, "Hunh, he ain't a-wanting to see you.
He's come to spark Abbie. He says, 'Does Miss Abigail Hall
live here?'" She was a-mocking his voice. "And when I said
yes, he lit right down off n his hoss and come in, said howdy
to Mammy Sally, said he guessed he'd wait till Abigail got in
home." Betton, she tore out through the corn, and I threw the
hoe after her.
'"Hush you scamp. You don't have to holler so loud and
act so crazy. Wait'll I catch up with you, little feisty-britches!"
'Boys, I hated to go in home worse'n I ever hated to do anything. I was the messiest, dirtiest, poorest-looking critter you
ever did see. Barefooted, old brown calico dress all tore and
faded, old, black, dirty man's hat with holes in it big enough to
throw a cat through. Sweat a-streaming down to my toes, and
cornfield dust all over me. And the other girls and Philip 'uz
all a-teasing the life out of me cler down the hill, having them
a big time. Then to cap it all Mammy Sally run out into the side
�JEAN RITCHIE
39
yard and commenced blowing the living daylights out of the
old dinner-horn. Musta blowed it ten or fifteen times fore she
run out of breath. Any other time we'd a-thought the house
was afire or something, but today I knew it was just her way
of teasing me, too.
'Well, I got down to the back gate, and I couldn't stand the
thoughts of saying howdy to him and me looking thataway, so
I slipped around the backside of the house. Thinks I, I'll just
slip in the back room and change my clothes, put on some
shoes, and make Betton bring me the washpan back there.
Sailed around the corner of the house, and there he was adrying his hands on the towel, and a-grinning like he knew I'd
come thataway. Mammy Sally had set him up in the back room
to wash and get ready for dinner. Boys, I wisht then I could
sink plum through the earth. I wheeled and tuck back around
the house. I was so hot and sunburnt and mad that I couldn't
see straight. I thought I never would get over it, him a-catching me like that, and him so proper. I stomped into the kitchen,
and I just felt like laying them all out east and west.
'Mam whispered, "Well, lassie, wait till you see what a
proper man has come to see you!"
'I was about to bust out crying then, and I hollered, "I've
done and seen him! Mary-Ann or Rhodie can have him for all
I care too. I think he's the ugliest thing I ever saw in my life
and I'm not going to pay any attention to him."
'So I just washed my face and hands and that's all. Come
to the table barefooted and in my ragged dress. Couldn't think
of a solitary thing to say to that feller. He kept looking at me
and grinning, and I kept on looking at the vittles on my plate.
Mammy Sally and Pap and t'others seemed like they had a
good time talking to him and listening to him tell, but I couldn't
open my mouth to save me. It's a pure wonder he ever looked
at me again.
'He came back to see me though. Kept right on till we got
so we could talk to one another, and somewhere in during that
year we got to talking about marrying. So, we'uz promised. I
was sixteen and him twenty-three. That winter he had to study
�40
Oral Tradition
for his teaching certificate, and couldn't come over much, and
then, too, it was a long trip through the mountains from Knott
County in the winter weather. In wintertime at home we
generally had school for a few months, and I went steady that
year. He seemed so much smarter than me!
'I was in what you'd call about the sixth or seventh grade
nowadays, somewhere along there. But it was a hard matter
to keep my mind on book learning, so it didn't make much difference to me what grade I was in. I'd set with my eyes on the
snowy hills and dream about my wedding day. What it would
be like, how long off and how close up it seemed, and what
kind of cloth Pap would bring me for my dress. To this day I
can't work sums and fractions because my mind just wasn't on
the lessons that year. Tears like I wanted to study and learn,
but I couldn't somehow, to do any good.
'About the only thing I did learn that whole winter was, I
remember, one day some of us girls were a-walking together
at recess and Mary Jane Combs got to singing at a little song.
Foolish little thing, but I got struck on the words and that evening I walked home with her and made her sing it over until I
learnt it. After that I sung it around the house so much that
Mammy Sally threatened to whup me if I didn't hush. It was
"Somebody.1"
l.Some-
Some-
Some-
bo-
bo-
bo-
dy's
dy's
dy's
tall
fond
hair
Some- bo- dy's eyes are, too.
and
and
is
hand-
some,
true
ve-
2.1
ry
black
and
�JEAN RITCHIE
41
Somebody's tall and handsome,
Somebody's fond and true,
Somebody's hair is very black and
Somebody's eyes are, too.
I love somebody fondly,
I love somebody true,
I love somebody with all of my heart
And somebody loves me too.
Somebody came to see me,
Somebody came last nightSomebody ask me to be his bride
Of course I said all right.
I am somebody's darling,
I am somebody's pride,
And the day is not far distance
When I'll be somebody's bride.
Somebody's tall and handsome,
Somebody's fond and true,
Somebody's hair is very dark,
Somebody's eyes are, too.
'That's pretty. I remember it well, mighty well,' said Dad.
'Seems like I heard it, "Somebody's eyes are blue," though.'
Dad has brown eyes.
Mom looked flustered at that, and dropped her eyes to her
lap. You could hardly hear what she said when she spoke. She
was all smiling. 'It is supposed to be thataway. But I changed
it a little/ she said. We all stayed quiet and by and by she
remembered some more.
'On the day we got married I rose up before day and
crossed over the river down yonder at the shoal to where the
rhododendron was blooming there at the foot of the mountain.
Seems like it always did grow the tallest and bloom the biggest
whitest blossoms right there. I had got a notion to carry flowers
�42
Oral Tradition
at my wedding, and I had been spying on the rhododendron
for several days. I gathered my arms full of them and waded
back over and started to getting ready. I had to iron my dress,
taking care not to scorch it, it was so white. Dad got the goods
at the store. It was thin white goods with little ribs in it—now
I forget what we called it—and I made the dress myself, in the
pattern they made dresses then, with long puff sleeves and a
high neck and full gathered skirt.
'The morning passed away so quick, and before I knew it
Balis was there, and we were standing up together in the yard,
getting married. Uncle Ira Combs married us—I asked for him
special. Dad had on a new suit, and I thought I was sure getting a pretty man. They combed my hair and fastened it with
combs, and carrying the flowers made me feel pretty and fine.
'The old custom is to stay the first night at her father's
house, have a party and the wedding breakfast and so on, then
to go the next day to his father's house, for the infare. I remember we got up early that first morning of our married life, and
we saddled the horses before the rooster crowed and were on
the way to Clear Creek before the sun rose. That's thirty mile
easy. See if you catch folks today setting out to ride thirty mile
one day's trip on a nag! Only way we had though, and it was
a high good day we had for going. The sun was shining and it
was right warm and windy. My traveling dress was black
sateen with white collar and cuffs, and I wore that and rode
side-saddle. That was a funny time that trip. Doe Ritchie they
call him now, Sam his name is, he took a notion to go along
with us to the infare, and he's allus a right jokey kind of feller.
Going across the Duane Mountain he got to showing off what
a good rider he was, turned himself around right backards on
the old mare and went whooping and hollering, making that
nag just gallop along. Come to a bunch of cattle lying in the
road, and he says, "Watch me ride right through them cows
and not touch a one!" He rode in amongst them, but he
couldn't see so well, him setting backards, and as he was twisting around trying to keep the mare from stepping on a cow, a
little black yearling raised up right quick just as the horse went
�JEAN RITCHIE
43
over it. Hit the horse in the belly and she reared and Sam went
flying off on his head. Didn't have a thing to catch onto, the
way he was sitting. Swear we liked to have died laughing at
him, soon as we found out he wasn't hurt much.
'Well, we pulled in about dinnertime, and they's all waiting for us. I reckon all of Clear Creek was there to see us ride
in, and to take our infare with us. The dinner was sitting on
the table ready. Chicken and dumplings and turkey and dressing, fresh-killed pork, squirrel, cakes and pies and garden
truck. We all sat down to eat and we didn't get up from that
table until near dark, and then as I recollect it we wound up
with dancing and gaming and singing all night till clear
daybreak. Wasn't that a time!'
Dad broke out laughing with his own memories. 'We'd not
been married but a day or two when they took a notion to
shivaree us. Lordie mercy, seemed like they'uz a hundred
people come in on us, but we got to naming them after that and
it was just ten or fifteen boys and girls around on the Creek.
But they were a-meaning business and I guess they'd shore
have rid me on a rail, hadn't been for Mam getting so vexed
and getting ahead of them.
'We were staying at my Mam's then, Granny Katty's, until
we could move out to ourselves. Abbie and Katty had just
finished washing the supper dishes. We had been somewheres
that day, and had a right late supper. Katty was complaining
because it was so dark and she had to burn up so much coaloil to light our supper and their kitchen work afterwards. As I
recall, it was one of the black dark nights when you couldn't
see hand fore your face, no moon, and clouds kivering the stars
up solid. I sot on the porch awhile until I heard them come out
of the kitchen and I got up to go in where they were at, and
when my eyes hit that light I commenced batting my eyelids,
couldn't see a mortal thing. Little old oil lamp didn't give off
much light, you know, but that thick night had really settled in
my eyes and even that much light fixed me up so I couldn't see
for a minute.
'Whilst I was blinking in the doorway there, the women-
�44
Oral Tradition
folks got awful still and Abbie said, "Katty, do you hear something?"
"Why yes, I do hear like people whispering and giggling.
I thought it was Balis a-humming to himself but yander he
stands on the doorsill."
'Bout that time a man's voice hollered out, loud as a
thunderclap, "All right, Balis, come on out now you and Abbie!
We come to get you!"
'Didn't take Mam no time to get it sized up. "Them
scalawags. They're a-coming in now for to shivaree you young
uns. Confound their hides! You'd think they'd be dacent
enough to wait a week, anyways. Run, Abbie, you and Balis,
you-all can slip out the front way and run off down in the bottom there and hide. I'll tell them rascals you'uns went to
Hindman this morning early. Hurry!"
'She pushed the both of us out into the night and shot the
door soft, and me and Abbie here lit out down through the bottom, a-stumbling and a-falling along in gyarden truck. By that
time my eyes had give it up; I might just as well been stone
blind. Abbie, too. We couldn't see a natural blessed thing, but
we finally barked our shins on a log I knew to be close to the
road. Behind that log, betwixt it and the palings, was a sort of
a sink place with bresh and trees growing round it. We hid in
thar and boys, that was a master hiding place. Not too fur away
from the house but that we could hear them talk, and with the
lamp shining out the doors we could see them all wandering
around, all in a puzzlement as to where we had got to. One
said he knew we were thar, said he heard Abbie talking to Katty
in the kitchen. Katty said he was just teched in the head, hearing booger voices. Her dry, deep voice sounded out plain as
day.
'"Sarch about, sarch about, if you won't take my word for
it!" she'd say, and she sounded mad. She let out to give them
a piece of her mind then, and all the time me and Abbie was
killing ourselves laughing out there in the dark.
'"O, now Katty, all we was aiming to do was to catch them
home and get you to let us run some sets. Call them out now.
�JEAN RITCHIE
45
Do, Katty. Tell them we won't bother them, just run a set or
two, play Boston and Charlie around a little and then go home.
What do you say now?"
'"Ef'n you so much as offer to lay a hand on them young
uns, I'll make you wish you hadn't. Long as you agree to be
civil, though, I reckon you're welcome to stay and pop your
heels together some. But only for as long as you stay civil."
'They all give their solemn promise not to do any thing
mean to us, and she stepped out on the porch and hollered us
out. They all just whooped and hollered when we come in, and
they giggled and joshed us around, made sly remarks to one
another for a while. Katty and Abbie flew around setting out
candles and lamps and carrying the chairs out into the kitchen.
We scrooched the beds back against the wall and in no time
atall we were all a-stepping Charlie. Folks passing by in the
road heard that good music, and they'd come by in to see why
there was dancing at Katty Ritchie's and they not told about it.
The ones that came in after the play got sot in its numbers stood
around the wall and watched and holp us clap and sing the
words.
Charlie's neat, and Charlie's sweet
And Charlie he's a dandy,
Charlie he's the very lad
That stole my striped candy.
Very lively
0 I
«?
Flirt
4 * 1
Char-
J
lie's
J.
neat
3
and
1
U mi
«y
J
Char-
HH
1n
•*
Char-
J
lie's
L* ml
J
lie
J
he's
.
a
1
J
dan-
_^
dy,
C ml
J.
sweet,
stole my strip- ed
1
i rnfc«««™™«
1
1
Char-
F mi
J^i r^-r-il J ,141
ve- ry lad that
]
And
can- dy.
lie he's the
�46
Oral Tradition
Over the river to feed my sheep
And over the river, Charlie,
Over the river to feed my sheep
And to measure up by barley.
My pretty little pink, I once did think
I never could do without you,
Since I lost all hopes of you
I care very little about you.
Over the river to feed my sheep
And over the river Charlie,
Over the river to feed my sheep
And to measure up my barley.
Don't want your wheat, don't want your cheat,
And neither do I want your barley,
But I'll take a little of the best you got
To bake a cake for Charlie.
Over the river to feed my sheep
And over the river, Charlie,
Over the river to feed my sheep
And to measure up my barley.
'Well, 'peared like the longer we gamed, the more folks we
gyarnered in. And Granny Katty, she begun to get into the
sperrit of things—she allus did love merriment—and she fotch
out her gingerbread stackcake that she had baked for Sunday.
After I begged her awhile, she even let us drink a little bit of
the elderberry wine that I had holpen her make, and she got to
feeling better and better. Now, if there was anything your
Granny Katty was hard against, it was making a fool out of
yourself over likker, so she was keeping a lookout wherever a
knot of boys gathered up to see that no corn was circulating.
Once when she was passing by the only window in the house—
they didn't have may windows to speak of back then, just a little hole about a foot square, face high in the hall betwixt the
�JEAN RITCHIE
47
front room and the kitchen—well she passed by and she
thought she heard some chaps talking out thar, so she peeped
out, and sure enough, there in under the pear tree was four or
five of them speaking lowly among themselves. Granny knew
by the way they acted that they were up to something, so she
strained her ears and she heard them a-making it up to "git
Balis out and fix him up proper." Meaning to ride me on a rail,
and Lord knows what else.
'Granny Katty she just sailed in to the kitchen fireplace, and
grabbed her up a shovel full of firecoals, run to that window,
reared back, and let them red-hot cinders fly right at the middle of that knot of boys. She was a-letting fly with her tongue,
too, and wasn't nobody alive could do that better'n her.
/H
YOU low-down villifying varmints! Ain't got the sense
you'uz born with! Git from here and don't go showing your
face-and-eyes on my place another time this night, any one of
you! Scannle and shame!"
'Boys, them fellers never knew what hit them. They yipped
and bettered and lit out in all directions, knocking the f irecoals
out of their hair. Thar were fellers a-leaping the palings all
around the house thar for a few minutes.
'Then Granny and the rest of us had the best laugh about
it. They all got the p'int that Katty meant no foolery, though.
She made it plain that she had something worse to do to the
next bunch that got to sneaking out under pear trees and
scheming meanness. Then someone yelled:
'"O, the Devil take the pear tree! Les all go to Boston! Circle
up!"
'That was the last of the shivareeing that night. Abbie and
me they made be the head couple, and there were so many
people scrouged into the circle that it got midnight on us fore
we finished up with Boston.
Good-bye girls I'm goin to Boston,
Good-bye girls I'm goin to Boston,
Good-bye girls I'm goin to Boston,
Ear-lye in the morning.
�48
Oral Tradition
Strong dance beat,-not too fast
l.Good-
bye,
girls,
good- bye, girls, I'm
goin1
to
Bos-
goin1
I'm
goin' to Bos- ton;
ton,
ear-
lye
in
to
Bos-
ton;
good- bye, girls, I'm
the
morn-
in1.
Won't
we
look.
pret-
ty
in
the
ball-
room?
Won't
we
look.
pret-
ty
in
the
ball-
room?
Won't
we look pret- ty
in the
ball- room
morn- in'?
Saddle up girls and les go with them,
Saddle up girls and les go with them,
Saddle up girls and les go with them,
Ear-lye in the morning.
Out of the way, you'll get run over,
Out of the way, you'll get run over,
Out of the way, you'll get run over,
Ear-lye in the morning.
Rights and lefts will make it better,
ear- lye in the
�JEAN RITCHIE
49
Rights and lefts will make it better,
Rights and lefts will make it better,
Ear-lye in the morning
Won't we look pretty in the ballroom?
Won't we look pretty in the ballroom?
Won't we look pretty in the ballroom
Ear-lye in the morning?
Johnnie, Johnnie, goin to tell your Pappy,
Johnnie, Johnnie, goin to tell your Pappy,
Johnnie, Johnnie, goin to tell your Pappy
Ear-lye in the morning.
Won't we look pretty in the ballroom?
Won't we look pretty in the ballroom?
Won't we look pretty in the ballroom
Ear-lye in the morning?
'I well remember one song was sung that night. You know
how at plays they'll all drap down on the floor when they're
given out with games, and begin to sing, one after another?
Well, when they asked John S. Combs to sing, he sung one that
had for a long time been a favorite of mine, and I learnt it all
from him, after that. Fore he started his song, he said he aimed
to sing a pretty love song, since he reckoned that would be most
to mine and Abbie's liking right now. That made everybody
laugh and all the girls turn rosy in the face. You know what
song it is I'm talking about; that one that starts out, "I've been
a foreign lander, full seven long years or more."
I've been a foreign lander, full seven long years and more;
Among the bold commanders, where the thundering
cannons roar.
I've conquered all my enemies, both all on land and sea;
It is my dearest duel, your beauty has conquered me.
�50
Oral Tradition
I've
se-
mong
been
ven
the
a
for-
long
years
bold
com-
ing
can-
con- quered all my e- ne- mies,
is my dear- est du-
el, your
eign
land-
and
more,
mand-
nons
both
ers
roar.
er
where
full
the
I've
all on land and seaf
it
beau- ty has con- quered me.
If I should build a ship my love, without the wood of tree,
That ship would burst asunder if I prove false to thee.
If ever I prove false my love, the elements will turn,
The fire will freeze to ice, my love, the sea will rage and
burn.
Don't you remember Queen Ellen, all in her flowery reign,
As she walked out of her paradise, to cleanse the golden chain?
Her beauty and behavior, none with her could compare,
But you my dearest darling, are more divinely fair.
I wish I was a turtledove, just fluttering from my nest;
Fd sing so clear in the morning, with the dew all on
my breast;
�JEAN RITCHIE
51
So sweetly would be the music, so doleful and sad the tune,
I'd sing so clear in the morning in the beautiful month of
June.
I wish I was ten thousand mile, all on some lonesome shore,
Or among the rocky mountains, where the wild beasts howl
and roar.
The lark, the lilly owl, the eagle, and the little swallow too,
I would give them all, my dearest love, if I was married to
you.
'Lordie, now ain't it quare how things will come back to you
so plain like that! I hain't thought of that shivaree night in many
a long year now, and still and all it's like it just now happened.
Fifty year ago, fifty year, little doney-gal. What do you think of
that?
'Thirteen out of fourteen young tins all raised up grown, all
good girls and boys, all turned out like we hoped they would,
and better, only none of the girls growed to be as pretty as their
ma, and I guess I'm better-looking than any of the boys!
'I recollect now even to the end of that there party. Granny
Katty said one more song, or game, whichever we would
choose. Well, you know a game can allus outlast a song, don't
matter how many verses a song has. We'uz all feeling lovey
anyhow after all the sweet singing, so we played a kissing game,
and Granny she fined in. Fact of the matter I believe she was
the one that led off "Maria."
I wonder where Maria's gone,
I wonder where Maria's gone,
I wonder where Maria's gone,
Ear-lye in the morning.
Guess she's gone where I can't go,
Guess she's gone where I can't go,
Guess she's gone where I can't go,
Ear-lye in the morning.
�52
Oral Tradition
Yonder she comes and howdy-do!
Yonder she comes and howdy-do!
Yonder she comes and howdy-do!
Take a sweet kiss and pass on through!
Very fast
I.I
ri-
won- der where Mar-
a's
gone,
ear- lye in the
I
morn—
won-
i- a's gone, I
der
where
Ma-
won- der where Ma-
i-
a's
gone,
ing.
Then they finally all left out, and Katty flaxed about like
the Devil was atter her, blowing out lights east and west to save
waste. Did you think that night—thirteen young uns raised up
grown! Reckon we done our share for this old world, Abbie.
Reckon we ought to be thankful to the good Lord that we're still
alive after fifty years to tell the tale.f/
�JEAN RITCHIE
53
Singing Family of the Cumberlands
1. What was the occasion that prompted the children to find
out about Mom and Dad's courtship?
2. Describe Abbie's first meeting with Balis.
3. When Abbie and Balis were married, they were given an
infare and a shivaree. An infare is a wedding supper, and
a shivaree is a mock serenade with kettles, pots, and horns.
What marriage customs do we have today that may have
evolved from these two customs?
4.
According to Gratis Williams' essay on mountain speech
in Chapter 1, mountaineers have their own dialect just as
New Englanders, Southerners, and many others have.
Find dialectical expressions in this story which vary from
standard English.
�54
Oral Tradition
Mo. 3
-
�CARTER FAMILY SONG
55
THE CARTER FAMILY
In July of 1927 the Carter Family of Maces Springs, Virginia—A.P., his wife Sara, and her cousin Maybelle, who was
married to A.P/s brother—journeyed to Bristol on the Tennessee-Virginia line to meet Ralph Peer, Victor Records'
country music scout.
Here are Sara's words about that day. "We made three
records. 'Single Girl, Married Girl7 tipped it off."
Single Girl, Married Girl
Single girl, single girl, she's going dressed so fine,
Oh, she's going dressed so fine;
Married girl, married girl, she wears just any kind.
Oh, she wears just any kind.
Single girl, single girl, she goes to the store and buys,
Oh, she goes to the store and buys;
Married girl, married girl, she rocks the cradle and cries,
Oh, she rocks the cradle and cries.
Single girl, single girl, she's going where she please;
Oh, she's going where she please;
�56
Oral Tradition
Married girl, married girl, baby on her knee,
Oh, baby on her knee.
Single Girl, Married Girl
1. Do you agree with the message of this song? Explain.
2. Could the song apply to boys as well as girls? Why or why
not?
3. What advantages do married girls have that the song fails
to point out?
�JOHN HENRY
57
JOHN HENRY
This is one of the most popular American folk songs. It tells
of the legendary steel-driving man who died with a hammer in
his hand.
John Henry went upon the mountain
His hammer was striking fire.
But the mountain was too tall, John Henry was too small
So he laid down his hammer and he died, Lord, Lord,
Laid down his hammer and he died.
John Henry went into the tunnel
Had his captain by his side.
The last words that John Henry said:
Bring me a cool drink of water 'fore I die, Lord, Lord,
Cool drink of water 'fore I die.
John Henry had a little woman
And her name was Polly Ann
John Henry took sick and he had to go to bed
Polly drove steel like a man, Lord, Lord,
Polly drove steel like a man.
�58
Oral Tradition
Talk about John Henry as much as you please
Say and do all that you can.
There never was born in the United States
Never such a steel-driving man, Lord, Lord,
Never such a steel-driving man, Lord, Lord,
John Henry told his captain:
I want to go to bed.
Lord, fix me a pallet, I want to lay down,
Got a mighty roaring in my head, Lord, Lord,
Mighty roaring in my head.
They took John Henry to the graveyard
And they buried him under the sand.
Now every locomotive comes a-roaring by
Says: Yonder lies a steel-driving man, Lord, Lord,
Yonder lies a steel-driving man.
"John Henry"
1. John Henry is referred to as a steel-driving man. What does
this mean?
2. What was John Henrys job? When he went upon the
mountain, what did he do with his hammer?
3. What does this song say about dedication? Is this the main
idea of the song? Be able to defend your answer with proof
from the song.
�GEORGE WASHINGTON HARRIS
59
GEORGE WASHINGTON HARRIS (1814-1869)
Born in Pennsylvania, George Washington Harris moved to
Knoxville, Tennessee, at the age of five. After limited schooling, he was apprenticed to a jeweler. Then he became captain
of the first regularly-scheduled steamboat out of Knoxville
while he also advertised himself as "a craftsman in the metals
generally." Later he became a railroad conductor.
In 1867, Harris published his Sut Lovingood's Yarns, narrated
by an unpolished but good-natured Tennessee mountaineer.
Comic, sometimes bawdy, and full of dialect, these yarns spring
from a tradition in mountain storytelling, "the big lie," an exaggeration designed to make the listener laugh. But Harris was
more than a comedy writer. His stories poke fun at society's
most respected institutions—marriage, the church, and the
government. Sut Lovingood is not above exposing human
nature's dark or weak side with his antics. By making us laugh
at ourselves and our society, Harris attempts to instruct as well
as entertain. "Old Skissim's Middle Boy," which follows, is
about a devilish trick Sut played when he was a young boy.
Old Skissim's Middle Boy
When I war a littil over half grown, hed sprouted my tail
feathers, an' wer beginnin tu crow, thar wer a livin in the neigh-
�60
Oral Tradition
borhood a dredful fat, mean, lazy boy, 'bout my age. He wer
the middil son ove a ole lark, name Skissim. He tinkered ontu
ole clocks, an7 spinin wheels, et lye hominy, an7 exhortid at
meetin fur a livin, while this middil boy ove hisen, did the
sleepin fur the hole famurly. He cud beat a hog an' a hungry
dorg eatin, an' then beat his eatin wif his sleepin, es bad es his
eatin beat the eatin ove a rat, arter bein shut in a church, ur a
snake in a jug wif no mouf tu hit. They waked him tu eat, an'
then hed tu wake him agin tu make him quit eatin; waked him
tu go tu the spring, an' waked him tu start back agin; waked
him tu say his prayers, an' waked him tu stop sayin 'em. In fac
they wer allers a-wakin him, an' he wer allers a-goin tu sleep
agin. Ole Skissim waked 'im wif a waggin whip, an' a buckshot in the cracker, what he toted apupus. His mam waked him
wif the tea-kittU an' scaldin warter. Bof the buck-shot cracker
an' the warter los tar vartu et las, an' they jis' gin him over tu
onaindin sleepin, an' onmitigated hardness ove hed. Charley
Dickins's son, the fat boy, mout been es ni kin tu him es a secund
cuzzin, ef his mam wer a pow'ful wakeful 'oman.
I hedn't foun' out then, sartinly, that I wer a natrl born
durnd fool. I sorter suspishioned hit, but still hed hopes. So I
wer fool enuf tu think I wer smart enuff tu break him frum
snoozin all the time, so I lay wake ove nites fur a week, fixin
the way tu du hit; an' that minds me tu tell yu what I thinks ove
plannin an' studdyin: hit am ginerly no count. All pends, et
las' on what yu dus an' how yu kerries yursef at the moment ove
ackshun. Sarcumstances turn about pow'ful fas', an' all yu kin
du is tu think jis' es fas es they kin turn, an' jis' es they turn, an'
ef yu du this, I'm durned ef yu don't git out sumhow. Long
studyin am like preparin a supply ove warter intu a wum hole
barril, tu put out fire: when the fire dus cum, durn'd ef yu don't
hev tu hustil roun pow'ful fas', an' git more warter, fur that's
nun in the barril. But es I wer a-tellin yu, I studied out at las' a
plan what I thort wud wake the devil; an' I sot in tu kerrin hit
out.
The ole man Skissim an' his wife went tu a nite meetin, and
tuck the ballance ove his ur rather her brats—a feller shu'd allers
�GEORGE WASHINGTON HARRIS
61
be pow'ful keerful in speakin on that pint. I'se allers hearn that
hit tuck a mons'us wise brat to know hits daddy, an' I thinks hit
takes a wiser daddy tu know his own brats. Dad never wud
speak sartin bout eny ove our famerly but me, an7 he counted
fur that by sayin I wer by a long shot tu cussed a fool tu belong
tu enybody else, so I am a Lovingood. My long laigs sumtimes
sorter bothers me, but then mam tuck a pow'ful skeer et a sanhill crane a-sittin on a peel'd well-pole, an she out-run her shadder thuty yards in cumin half a mile. I speck I owes my laigs
an' speed tu that sarcumstance an7 not tu eny fraud on mam's
part.
Well, they went tu nite meetin an' lef him in the kitchin fas'
asleep, belevin tu fine him right thar when they cum back: but
they wer mistaken'd that pop, fur when they cum they foun the
widest awake boy ever born'd in that ur eny uther house, ur
outen doors either, an' es tu bein rite thar he warn't by a durn'd
site; he wer here, thar, an' every whar, et the same time, an' ef
he hed any apertite fur vittils jis' then, he didn't hang out his
sign, that I cud see.
They lef him sittin ontu a split-bottom cheer, plum asleep
all over, even tu his ole hat. I tuck about thuty foot ove clothes
line, an' tied him tu the cheer by his neck, body, an' arms, levin
his laigs loose. He looked sorter like the Lion in the spellinbook, when the rat wer a-cuttin a fish net off ove him. That
wern't a skeer'd rat, wer he? I hed him safe now tu practize on,
an' I sot in tu duin hit, sorter this way: I painted his face the
culler ove a nigger coalburner, scept a white ring roun his eyes;
an' frum the corners ove his mouf, sorter downards, slouchwise, I lef a white strip. Hit make his mouf look sorter like ontu
a hoss track an' ni ontu es big. He wer a fine picter tu study, ef
your mind wer fond ove skeery things. He look't savidge es a
sot steel trap, baited wif asnick, an wer jis' fit fur tresun, straterjim, an' tu spile things. Tu this day, when I dreams ove the
devil, dad, Passun Bullin, an' uther orful oppressive things, that
infunel boy, es he look't that nite, am durnd intermitly mix't wif
the hole ove em. I speck he's dead 'is the reason ove hit.
I screw'd ontu each ove his years a par ove iron hanvices,
�62
Oral Tradition
what his dad squeezed ole clocks, an' crac't warnuts wif, an'
they hung down like over-grow'd year-rings; I tied a gridiron
tu wun ankil, an' a par ove fire-tongs tu tuther; I pour'd a bottil ove groun red-pepper down his back, onder his shut; I turn'd
loose a pint ove June-bugs, what I kotch apupus, into his buzzum, an' buttoned em up; I tied a baskit full ove fire crakers tu
the cheer back, tu his har, an' tu his wrists; I button'd up a big
grey-whisker'd aggravated ole rat, tied wif a string intu the
slack ove his britches; tuther aind ove the string wer fas' ontu
his gallus button, an the rat, like all the res' ove that tribe, imejuntly sot in cuttin his way out; but owin tu his parvarse nater
ur the darkness ove the place, he sot in tu cuttin the wrong way;
he wer a workin towards the back-bone, an' furder frum the
britches, every cut. I learnt this fac' frum the cheer risin frum
the flure, an' falUn agin jis' tu rise imejuntly a littil higher, an'
sum souns, a mixtry ove snort, snore, grunt, an' groan, which
he wer beginin tu isoo tolabil fas, an' gettin louder every bounce
ove the cheer, an' becumin more like ontu a howl every pop. In
the beginin ove his oneasines he dream'd ove wagin whip, nex'
he dream'd ove a tea-kittil es big es a still, an lots ove bilin
warter, an' nex he drempt ove bof ove 'em; an' now he wer a
dreamin that the tea-kittil wer a steam ingine, a drivin the waggin whip, an' a cottin gin wif red hot saws fifteen hundred licks
a minit, an' that he wer in the cottin hopper.
I now thot hit ni ontu the proper time tu tetch the crackers,
so es tu hev everything bar hits shar in the kontemplated cummin waknin. An' I did hit. The fust handful ur so gwine off
help'd, wif the industry ove that energetic ole rat, the sarchin
ove the red pepper, an' the permiskus scratchin roun ove the
bugs, tu begin tu wake him sorter gradually, a littil faster nor
light bread rises, an' a littil slower then a yeathquake wakes
weazels. A few hundred more gwine off, still hevin the rat, pepper, an' insex tu back em, got him wide enuf awake tu bleve that
he wer threatened wif sum orful pussonal calamerty, what
wanted pow'ful quick work on his part tu dodge. He wer
awake now all over, even tu his durnd ole hat, an' he show'd
hit in es meny ways es a cat dus, lock'd up in a empty room wif
�GEORGE WASHINGTON HARRIS
63
a strange an' interprisin big dorg.
He grabbed the fire shovil, an' bounc'd half bent (the cheer
kep him frum straitin up) all over that kitchen, a strikin overhanded, onder-handed, up-handed, down-handed, an' lefhanded, at every 'spishus shadder he seed. He fit by the light
ove ten million sparks; he wer es active as a smut-mercheen in
full blast, an' every grain ove wheat a spark. An' he wer a hollerin everything anybody ever did holler in dredful tribulashun
ove spirit, even tu, "Now I lay me down tu sleep," an' "Gloree."
When I'se in trubbil, skeer, ur tormint, I dus but wun thing,
an' that's onresistabil, onekeled, an' durn'd fas' runnin, an' I jis'
keeps at hit till I gits cumfort. Now his big idear onder nise an'
varigated hurtin wer tu fite, an' keep on a-fitin, ontil peace ove
mine cum. I never seed sich keryins on in all my born'd days.
He made more fuss, hit more licks at more things, wer in more
places, an' in more shapes, in a shorter time, then eny mortal
auctioneer cud tell ef he hed es meny tungs es a baskit full ove
buckils. Every now an' then he'd gin his head a vishus, vigrus
shake, an' the han-vices wud hit him fore an' arter, till his skull
rattiled like ontu a ole gourd.
The ole Skisskn an' his tribe cum home frum meetin, an'
hearin the onyeathly riot, thort sumbody hed opened a
dorggery in thar kitchen an' that a neighborhood fite were
gwine on, an' every feller's dorg along. They rushed in tu drive
out the crowd, an' capter the whisky, an' a durnder more misfortinit mistake never wer make by a man, 'oman, an' a string
ove fifteen brats, since ole Bill Shivers went fur a runnin
threshin-meesheen tu smash hit, thinkin hit wer a big musickbox.
The ole hoss hisse'f imejuntly cum in contack wif a holesum
knock down, what calm'd him intu sumthin mons'us like sleep,
fur about a minit. Now a heap ove things ken happen in a minit,
purtickerly ef thar's sumbody who hes sot his hole soul tu the
bisiness ove makin em happen. Hit wer so in that kitchen. Agin
the ole feller cum tu, the ole 'oman wer knocked hed fust intu
the meal-barril, whar she wer breathin more meal nur air, an'
she wer snortin hit up over the aidges ove the barril like hit wer
�64
Oral Tradition
a fountin playin corn meal. The ol'est gal wer sturn fus' in a
soap-kittil, an' she wor a-makin suds outen sum ove hit. The
nex' wun wer laingthwise belly down in the pot corner. The
biggest boy wer whar the back-log orter been, ontu his all fours
a-scratchin up all the embers an' ashes, a-tryin tu cum out frum
thar. Anuther cub, in a jackid wif a wun inch tail, wer knocked plum thru the tin intu the safe amung the cold vitils an'
things. A littil gal, doll baby an' all, wer on the top shelf ove
cup-board, amung the delf, a-screamin like a little steam whistil.
The neighbors wer a-getherin in roun the nise an' rumpus,
an' not a durn'd wun hed the least idear ove what wer wrong,
sceptin ove me. I onderstood hit all, durn'd fool es I is. Tu
'scape frum bein 'spishioned, I sot in tu cuttin the cheer loose
es I got chances, an' a-keepin outen the range ove that flyin fire
shovil, fur hit wer still spreadin hurtin an' mischief on a perpetul moshun plan. Everybody hit totch fell, an' everything hit
cum agin got grief. The tin bucicits look'd like drunk men's hats.
Pails hed lef thar hoops, an' the delf war was in scrimpshuns.
When he got divorced from the cheer, I tho't he'd sorter simmer down. But no sir! He got wus, an' did his work faster an'
better; he wer as crazy as a bed-bug, an' as savidge as a maddorg.
I seed a-cummin, a ole widder, what wer a pow'ful pius
turn'd pusson, in the same church wif ole Skissim, an' she wer
the news-kerrier gineral ove the neighborhood. Folks sed that
they hed a religus feelin fur each uther, what led tu meny lovef eas, wif nobody at em but tharsefs, an' wer bof doin mouns'ous
well, considerin the thorn in the flesh. Sez she—
"Oh, my soul! Du tell me what hes happened! Oh lordy
massy!" sed I, "hits a-happenin yet!" a-lookin orful solemn in
the moonshine. Sez I, "I'll tell yu, es I knows yu won't speak
ove it; fur ef hit gits out, hit mout make the pepil sorter think
hard ove Mister Skissim. He cum home frum meetin plum
crazy, talkin about the seventh cumandment, an' he's sot intu
murderin hes folks wif a crowbar. He hes dun got his wife an'
six ove the brats: thar a-lyin in thar es cold es krout; an' he's hot
�GEORGE WASHINGTON HARRIS
65
arter the rest ove em; sez he's in a hurry tu git thru, es he hes yu
tu kill an' salt down afore day. Now I know by that he's turn'd
durned fool."
She never sed a word, but put out fur Squir Haley's, an'
swore her life agin ole Skissim, an' tuck out a warrint fur him
a-chargin murder, arson, blasfemy, fleabottomry an' rape. Hit
skeer'd ole Skissim ontil he run away.
By the time I got dun inlitenin the widder, that ar onquinchable boy hed the kitchen all tu hissef. Everybody wer feard tu
go ni the door. Now yu cudent guess in ten year what he then
went an' did. He jis' made a piller outen the cheer, an' sot intu
sleepin agin. Ef ever I'se call'd on tu stop his sleepin eny more
agin, I'll try a muskit an' sixteen buckshot, at jis' about ten steps.
Old Skissim's Middle Boy
1. The author uses many details and comparisons in
describing Skissim's lazy boy. Find examples of his most
vivid description.
2. What words of wisdom does Sut offer regarding the
advantage of thinking fast?
3. Describe the trick Sut played on the lazy boy. Was he able
to cure him of his laziness?
4.
What did Sut tell the pious widow that resulted in her
taking out a warrant for old Skissim's arrest?
5. Define dialect and discuss its importance to the humor in
Harris' writing.
�66
COMPOSITION TOPICS
1.
You will notice that a ballad is a story told in verse that is
usually meant to be sung. Write a ballad about a modern
hero, a sudden disaster, or a recent crime.
2.
Three selections in this chapter "Tsali of the Cherokees,"
"Cat 'n Mouse," and "The Ballad of Claude Allen" were told
in story or song before they were written. Talk to your
parents, grandparents, and neighbors about an interesting
event that they have heard about or experienced. Turn this
into a story.
ACTIVITIES
Compile a family scrapbook.
Throughout this study of Southern Appalachian literature as
you complete the activities, you will be creating your own book.
When you finish the study, you will have written your own
story. Many of you will have Appalachian stories. But because
of America's great cultural diversity, many of your stories will
reflect different ethnic origins. Regardless of your individual
heritage, you will be proud of your book.
Begin with a family tree. (See sample family tree on page 68.)
Here you have a picture of your ancestors, those people who
have helped make you what you are today. They will be the
characters in your book.
Write a character sketch of your parents, grandparents, and
great-grandparents whom you have known. Names and dates
hardly tell the story of the real people that they are. As you interview each, you will likely hear some stories about events in
each person's life. Make these stories a part of the character
sketch. It's all right to get help from family members. Write
�67
about the following items with as much detail as you can find:
1. Physical description
2. Personality
3. Ethnic origin
4. Date and place of birth
5. Address and description of the house where this person
grew up
6. Name and description of the community where this person
grew up
7. Education
8. Church affiliation
9. Jobs
10. Political party
11. What this person enjoys doing
12. Health—mental and physical
13. Major accomplishments—what the person is proud of in his
life
14. Valuable advice for getting along in life
Now illustrate each character sketch with a photograph of the
person. Also find old photographs of each person at a younger
age and include them.
�MY FAMILY TREE
�69
CHAPTER 2
Local Color & the Realistic Tradition
"Local color" means that the writer uses specific details
about a locale—the native speech, dress, customs, music, and
religious practices—in his works. No other group of writers
has had a more profound influence on Appalachian literature
than the original "local color" authors Mary Noailles Murfree
and John Fox, Jr. As several scholars point out, these early
writers have influenced the literature of the region right up
to the present day. Most importantly, their stories shaped an
image of Appalachia for the rest of America.
In The Southern Mountaineer in Fact and Fiction, Gratis Williams says that the publication in 1884 of Mary Noailles
Murfree's book In the Tennessee Mountains "marks the time at
which the Southern mountain people had become recognized
as a people possessing their own idiosyncrasies, and not to
be confused with other southern types."
Henry Shapiro carries this idea even further in his bookAppalachia on Our Mind. He points out that the local color
writers have had a long-range effect on the image of Appalachia, People like Murfree and Fox published their works
�70
in the new, nationally circulated magazines The Atlantic
Monthly, Harper's and Lippincott's. The Civil War also
heightened awareness of regional differences. The war correspondents at the front served as the first local colorists.
During the last three decades of the nineteenth century, the
American public developed a taste for reading about the unusual, the exotic. Appalachia seemed unusual and exotic.
Shapiro maintains that the early local color writers created
the idea of Appalachia by presenting a consistent picture of it
as a backward place inhabited by strange people. In other
words, Appalachia was different from the rest of America.
Murfree and Fox use this idea of the "otherness" of Appalachia in several works. For example, "The Star in the Valley," the selection in this chapter by Murfree, focuses on an
outsider's perceptions of the region and on the clash in
values that this outsider brings to a remote mountain community.
Three writers in this section—Haun, Armstrong, and
Still—produced works in the Realistic tradition in American
literature. This tradition grew out of local color. The realists,
wishing to record life as it is, refrain from philosophical interpretations of their stories. Free of romantic prettiness, realistic writing emphasizes truthful treatment of the place, the
people, and the events in a story and lets us see life cut to the
bone. The characters in these stories by Haun, Armstrong,
and Still reveal themselves to the reader and give insight into
their feelings, motives, and personalities. Because they differ
from the sometimes superficial and theatrical characters
created by the local colorists, they present a less romantic
stereotype.
�MARY NOAILLES MURFREE
71
MARYNOAILLESMURFREE (1850-1922)
Mary NoaiUes Murfree, born into an aristocratic family in
Middle Tennessee, came to know mountain people and their
ways from spending summers visiting Beersheba resort in the
Cumberland Mountains. Because it seemed improper for a
young lady of her social standing to write stories, she first
published her work, including the piece here from the collection In the Tennessee Mountains, under the pseudonym Charles
Egbert Craddock.
She was educated at the Nashville Female Academy and the
Chegary Institute in Philadelphia. The University of the South
awarded her a honorary Doctor of Letters in 1922.
In this story, Reginald Chevis visits a mountain community
and meets a poor, uneducated girl, Celia Shaw. She intervenes
in a feud and prevents bloodshed. Her heroism and high principles earn her the respect and admiration of Chevis, but only
disdain from her own people.
The Star in the Valley
He first saw it in the twilight of a clear October evening. As
the earliest planet sprang into the sky, an answering gleam
shone red amid the glooms in the valley. A star too it seemed.
And later, when the myriads of the fairer, whiter lights of a
�72
Local Color and Realistic Tradition
moonless night were all athrob in the great concave vault bending to the hills, there was something very impressive in that
solitary star of earth, changeless and motionless beneath the
ever-changing skies.
Chevis never tired of looking at it. Somehow it broke the
spell that draws all eyes heavenward on starry nights. He often
strolled with his cigar at dusk down to the verge of the crag,
and sat for hours gazing at it and vaguely speculating about it.
That spark seemed to have kindled all the soul and imagination
within him, although he knew well enough its prosaic source,
for he had once questioned the gawky mountaineer whose services he had secured as guide through the forest solitudes
during this hunting expedition.
"That thar spark in the valley?" Hi Bates had replied,
removing the pipe from his lips and emitting a cloud of strong
tobacco smoke. "'Tain't nuthin' but the light of Jerry Shaw's
house, 'bout haffen mile from the foot of the mounting. Ye pass
that thar house when ye goes on the Christel road, what leads
down the mounting off the Back-bone. That's Jerry Shaw's
house,—thaf s what it is. He's a blacksmith, an' he kin shoe a
horse toler'ble well when he ain't drunk, ez he mos'ly is."
"Perhaps that is the light from the forge," suggested Chevis.
"That thar forge ain't run more'n half the day, let 'lone o'
nights. I hev never hearn tell on Jerry Shaw a-workin' o'
nights,—nor in the daytime nuther, ef he kin get shet of it. No
sech no 'count critter 'twixt hyar an' the Settlemint."
So spake Chevis's astronomer. Seeing the star even through
the prosaic lens of stern reality did not detract from its poetic
aspect. Chevis never failed to watch for it. The first faint glinting in the azure evening sky sent his eyes to that red reflection
suddenly aglow in the valley; even when the mists rose above
it and hid it from him, he gazed at the spot where it had disappeared, feeling a calm satisfaction to know that it was still shining beneath the cloud curtain. He encouraged himself in this
bit of sentimentality. These unique eventide effects seemed a
fitting sequel to the picturesque day, passed in hunting deer,
with horn and hounds, through the gorgeous autumnal forest;
�MARY NOAILLES MURFREE
73
or perchance in the more exciting sport in some rocky gorge
with a bear at bay and the frenzied pack around him; or in the
idyllic pleasures of birdshooting with a thoroughly-trained
dog; and coming back in the crimson sunset to a well-appointed
tent and a smoking supper of venison or wild turkey,—the
trophies of his skill. The vague dreaminess of his cigar and the
charm of that bright bit of color in the night-shrouded valley
added a sort of romantic zest to that keen susceptibility of impressions which Reginald Chevis considered eminently characteristic of a highly wrought mind and nature.
He said nothing of his fancies, however, to his fellow
sportsman, Ned Varney, nor to the mountaineer. Infinite as
was the difference between these two in mind and cultivation,
his observation of both had convinced him that they were alike
incapable of appreciating and comprehending his delicate and
dainty musings. Varney was essentially a man of this world;
his mental and moral conclusions had been adopted in a calm,
mercantile spirit, as giving the best return for the outlay, and
the market was not liable to fluctuations. And the mountaineer
could go no further than the prosaic fact of the light in Jerry
Shaw's house. Thus Reginald Chevis was wont to sit in contemplative silence on the crag until his cigar was burnt out, and
afterward to lie awake deep in the night, listening to the majestic lyric welling up from the thousand nocturnal voices of these
mountain wilds.
During the day, in place of the red light a gauzy little curl
of smoke was barely visible, the only sign or suggestion of
human habitation to be seen from the crag in all the many miles
of long, narrow valley and parallel tiers of ranges. Sometimes
Chevis and Varney caught sight of it from lower down on the
mountain side, whence was faintly distinguishable the little
log-house and certain vague lines marking a rectangular inclosure; near at hand, too, the forge, silent and smokeless. But
it did not immediately occur to either of them to theorize concerning its inmates and their lives in this lonely place; for a time,
not even to the speculative Chevis. As to Varney, he gave his
whole mind to the matter in hand,—his gun, his dog, his
�74
Local Color and Realistic Tradition
game,—and Ms note-book was as systematic and as romantic
as the ledger at home.
It might be accounted an event in the history of that log-hut
when Reginald Chevis, after riding past it eighty yards or so,
chanced one day to meet a country girl walking toward the
house. She did not look up, and he caught only an indistinct
glimpse of her face. She spoke to him, however, as she went by,
which is the invariable custom with the inhabitants of the sequestered nooks among the encompassing mountains, whether
meeting stranger or acquaintance. He lifted his hat in return,
with that punctilious courtesy which he made a point of according to persons of low degree. In another moment she had
passed down the narrow sandy road, overhung with gigantic
trees, and, at a deft, even pace, hardly slackened as she
traversed the great log extending across the rushing stream, she
made her way up the opposite hill, and disappeared gradually
over its brow.
The expression of her face, half-seen though it was, had attracted his attention. He rode slowly along, meditating. "Did
she go into Shaw's house, just around the curve of the road?"
he wondered. "Is she Shaw's daughter, or some visiting neighbor?"
That night he looked with a new interest at the red star, set
like a jewel in the floating mists of the valley.
"Do you know," he asked of Hi Bates, when the three men
were seated, after supper, around the camp-fire, which sent
lurid tongues of flame and a thousand bright sparks leaping
high in the darkness, and illumined the vistas of the woods on
every side, save where the sudden crag jutted over the valley,—
"Do you know whether Jerry Shaw has a daughter,—a young
girl?"
"Ye-es,tf drawled Hi Bates, disparagingly, "he hev."
A pause ensued. The star in the valley was blotted from
sight; the rising mists had crept to the verge of the crag; nay, in
the undergrowth fringing the mountain's brink, there were
softly clinging white wreaths.
"Is she pretty?" asked Chevis.
�MARY NOAILLES MURFREE
75
"Waal, no she ain't," said Hi Bates, decisively. "She's a pore,
no 'count critter." Then he added, as if he were afraid of being
misapprehended, "Not ez thar is any harm in the gal, ye
onderstand. She's a mighty good, soft-spoken, quiet sort o' gal,
but she's a pore, white-faced, slim little critter. She looks like
she hain't got no sort'n grit in her. She makes me think o' one
them slim little slips o' willow every time nor I sees her. She
hain't got long ter live, I reckon," he concluded, dismally.
Reginald Chevis asked him no more questions about Jerry
Shaw's daughter.
Not long afterward, when Chevis was hunting through the
deep woods about the base of the mountain near the Christel
road, his horse happened to cast a shoe. He congratulated himself upon his proximity to the forge, for there was a possibility
that the blacksmith might be at work; according to the account
which Hi Bates had given of Jerry Shaw's habits, there were half
a dozen chances against it. But the shop was at no great distance and he set out to find his way back to the Christel road,
guided by sundry well-known landmarks on the mountain
side: certain great crags hanging above the tree-tops, showing
in grander sublimity through the thinning foliage, or beetling
bare and grim; a dismantled and deserted hovel, the red-berried vines twining amongst the rotting logs; the full flow of a
tumultuous stream making its last leap down a precipice eighty
feet high, with yeasty, maddening waves below and a rainbowcrowned crystal sheet above. And here again the curves of the
woodland road. As the sound of the falling water grew softer
and softer in the distance, till it was hardly more than a drowsy murmur, the faint vibrations of a far-off anvil rang upon the
air. Welcome indeed to Chevis, for however enticing might be
the long rambles through the redolent October woods with dog
and gun, he had no mind to tramp up the mountain to his tent,
five miles distant, leading the resisting horse all the way. The
afternoon was so clear and so still that the metallic sound
penetrated far through the quiet forest. At every curve of the
road he expected to see the log-cabin with its rail fence, and
beyond the low-hanging chestnut-tree, half its branches resting
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
upon the roof of the little shanty of a blacksmith's shop. After
many windings a sharp turn brought him full upon the humble
dwelling, with its background of primeval woods and the purpling splendors of the western hills. The chickens were going
to roost in a stunted cedar-tree just without the door; an incredibly old man, feeble and bent sat dozing in the lingering
sunshine on the porch; a girl, with a pail on her head, was crossing the road and going down a declivity toward a spring which
bubbled up in a cleft of the gigantic rocks that were piled one
above another, rising to a great height. A mingled breath of
cool, dripping water, sweet-scented fern, and pungent mint
greeted him as he passed it. He did not see the girl's face, for
she had left the road before he went by, but he recognized the
slight figure, with that graceful poise acquired by the prosaic
habit of carrying weights upon the head, and its lithe, swaying
beauty reminded him of the mountaineer's comparison,—a slip
of willow.
And now, under the chestnut-tree, in anxious converse with
Jerry Shaw, who came out hammer in hand from the anvil, concerning the shoe to be put on Strathspey's left fore-foot, and the
problematic damage sustained since the accident. Chevis's
own theory occupied some minutes in expounding, and so absorbed his attention that he did not observe, until the horse was
fairly under the blacksmith's hands, that, despite Jerry Shaw's
unaccustomed industry, this was by no means a red-letter day
in his habitual dissipation. He trembled for Strathspey, but it
was too late now to interfere. Jerry Shaw was in that stage of
drunkenness which is greatly accented by an elaborate affectation of sobriety. His desire that Chevis should consider him
perfectly sober was abundantly manifest in his rigidly steady
gait, the preternatural gravity in his bloodshot eyes, his sparingness of speech, and the earnestness with which he enunciated the acquiescent formulae which had constituted his share
of the conversation. Now and then, controlling his faculties by
a great effort, he looked hard at Chevis to discover what doubts
might be expressed in his face concerning the genuineness of
this staid deportment; and Chevis presently found it best to af-
�MARY NOAILLES MURFREE
77
feet too. Believing that the blacksmith's histrionic attempts in
the role of sober artisan were occupying his attention more than
the paring of Strathspey's hoof, which he held between his
knees on his leather apron, while the horse danced an animated
measure on the other three feet, Chevis assumed an appearance
of indifference, and strolled away into the shop. He looked
about him, carelessly, at the horseshoes hanging on a rod in the
rude aperture that served as a window, at the wagon-tires, the
plowshares, the glowing fire of the forge. The air within was
unpleasantly close, and he soon found himself again in the
door-way.
"Can I get some water here?11 he asked, as Jerry Shaw
reentered, and began hammering vigorously at the shoe destined for Strathspey.
The resonant music ceased for a moment. The solemn,
drunken eyes were slowly turned upon the visitor, and the
elaborate affectation of sobriety was again obtrusively apparent
in the blacksmith's manner. He rolled up more closely the bluechecked homespun sleeve from his corded hammer-arm,
twitched nervously at the single suspender that supported his
copper-colored jeans trousers, readjusted his leather apron
hanging about his neck, and, casting upon Chevis another
glance, replete with a challenging gravity, fell to work upon the
anvil, every heavy and well-directed blow telling with the
precision of machinery.
The question had hardly been heard before forgotten. At
the next interval, when he was going out to fit the horse, Chevis
repeated his request.
"Water, did ye say?" asked Jerry Shaw, looking at him with
narrowing eyelids, as if to shut out all other contemplation that
he might grapple with this problem. "Thai's no fraish water
hyar, but ye kin go yander ter the house an ax fur some; or," he
added, shading his eyes from the sunlight with his broad, blackened hand, and looking at the huge wall of stone beyond the
road, "ye kin go down yander ter the spring, an7 ax that thar gal
fur a drink."
Chevis took his way, in the last rays of sunshine, across the
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
road and down the declivity in the direction indicated by the
blacksmith. A cool gray shadow fell upon him from the heights
of the great rocks, as he neared them; the narrow path leading
from the road grew dank and moist, and presently his feet were
sunk in the still green and odorous water-loving weeds, the
clumps of fern, and the pungent mint. He did not notice the
soft verdure; he did not even see the beautiful vines that hung
from earth-filled niches among the rocks, and lent to their forbidding aspect something of a smiling grace; their picturesque
grouping, where they had fallen apart to show this sparkling
fountain of bright up-springing water, was all lost upon his artistic perceptions. His eyes were fixed on the girl standing beside the spring, her pail filled, but waiting, with a calm,
expectant look on her face, as she saw him approaching.
No creature could have been more coarsely habited: a green
cotton dress, faded to the faintest hue; rough shoes, just visible
beneath her skirts; a dappled gray and brown calico sun-bonnet, thrown aside on a moss-grown boulder near at hand. But
it seemed as if the wild nature about her had been generous to
this being toward whom life and fortune had played the niggard. There were opaline lights in her dreamy eyes which one
sees nowhere save in sunset clouds that brood above dark hills;
the golden sunbeams, all faded from the landscape, had left a
perpetual reflection in her bronze hair; there was a subtle affinity between her and other pliant, swaying, graceful young
things, waving in the mountain breezes, fed by the rain and
dew. She was hardly more human to Chevis than certain lissome little woodland flowers, the very name of which he did
not know, pure white, star-shaped, with a faint green line
threading though each of the five delicate petals; he had seen
them embellishing the banks of lonely pools, or growing in
dank, marshy places in the middle of the unfrequented road,
where perhaps it had been mended in a primitive way with a
few rotting rails.
"May I trouble you to give me some water?" asked
Chevis, prosaically enough. She neither smiled nor replied.
She took the gourd from the pail, dipped it into the lucent
�MARY NOAILLES MURFREE 79
depths of the spring, handed it to him, and stood awaiting its
return when he should have finished. The cool, delicious water
was drained, and he gave the gourd back. "I am much obliged,"
he said.
"Ye're welcome," she replied, in a slow, singing monotone.
Had the autumn winds taught her voice that melancholy
cadence?
Chevis would have liked to hear her speak again, but the
gulf between his station and hers—so undreamed of by her (for
the differences of caste are absolutely unknown to the independent mountaineers), so patent to him—could be bridged by
few ideas. They had so little in common that for a moment he
could think of nothing to say. His cogitation suggested only the
inquiry, "Do you live here?" indicating the little house on the
other side of the road.
"Yes," she chanted in the same monotone, "I lives hyar." She
turned to lift the brimming pail. Chevis spoke again: "Do you
always stay at home? Do you never go anywhere?"
Her eyes rested upon him, with a slight surprise looking out
from among their changing lights. "No," she said, after a pause;
"I hev no call to go nowhar ez I knows on."
She placed the pail on her head, took the dappled sun-bonnet in her hand, and went along the path with the assured,
steady gait and the graceful backward poise of the figure that
precluded the possibility of spilling a drop from the vessel.
He had been touched in a romantic way by the sweet beauty
of this little woodland flower. It seemed hard that so perfect a
thing of its kind should be wasted here, unseen by more appreciative eyes than those of bird, or rabbit, or the equally uncultured human beings about her; and it gave him a baffling
sense of the mysterious injustice of life to reflect upon the difference in her lot and that of others of her age in higher spheres.
He went thoughtfully through the closing shadows to the shop,
mounted the re-shod Strathspey, and rode along the rugged ascent of the mountain, gravely pondering on worldly inequalities.
He saw her often afterward, although he spoke to her again
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
but once. He sometimes stopped as he came and went on the
Christel road, and sat chatting with the old man, her
grandfather, on the porch, sunshiny days, or lounged in the
barn-like door of Jerry Shaw's shop talking to the half-drunken
blacksmith. He piqued himself on the readiness with which he
became interested in these people, entered into their thoughts
and feelings, obtained a comprehensive idea of the machinery
of life in this wilderness,—more complicated than one could
readily believe, looking upon the changeless face of the wide,
unpopulated expanse of mountain ranges stretching so far
beneath that infinite sky. They appealed to him from the basis
of their common humanity, he thought, and the pleasure of
watching the development of the common human attributes in
this peculiar and primitive state of society never palled upon
him. He regarded with contempt Varney's frivolous displeasure and annoyance because of Hi Bates's utter insensibility
to the difference in their social position, and the necessity of
either acquiescing in the supposititious equality or dispensing
with the invaluable services of the proud and independent
mountaineer; because of the patois of the untutored people, to
hear which, Varney was wont to declare, set his teeth on edge;
because of their narrow prejudices, their mental poverty, their
idle shiftlessness, their uncouth dress and appearance. Chevis
flattered himself that he entertained a broader view. He had
not even a subacute idea that he looked upon these people and
their inner life only as picturesque bits of the mental and moral
landscape; that it was an aesthetic and theoretical pleasure their
contemplation afforded him; that he was as far as ever from the
basis of common humanity.
Sometimes while he talked to the old man on the sunlit
p orch, the "slip o' willow" sat in the door-way, listening too, but
never speaking. Sometimes he would find her with her father
at the forge, her fair, ethereal face illumined with an alien and
fluctuating brilliancy, shining and fading as the breath of the
fire rose and fell. He came to remember that face so well that
in a sorry sketch-book where nothing else was finished, there
were several laborious pages lighted up with a faint reflection
�MARY NOAILLES MURFREE
81
of its beauty. But he was as much interested perhaps, though
less poetically, in that massive figure, the idle blacksmith. He
looked at it all from an ideal point of view. The star in the valley was only a brilliant, set in the night landscape, and suggested a unique and pleasing experience.
How should he imagine what luminous and wistful eyes
were turned upward to where another star burned,—the light
of his campfire on the crag; what pathetic, beautiful eyes had
learned to watch and wait for that red gleam high on the
mountain's brow,—hardly below the stars in heaven it seemed!
How could he dream of the strange, vague, unreasoning trouble
with which his idle comings and goings had clouded that young
life, a trouble as strange, as vague, as vast, as the limitless sky
above her.
She understood him as little. As she sat in the open doorway, with the flare of the fire behind her, and gazed at the red
light shining on the crag, she had no idea of the heights of
worldly differences that divided them, more insurmountable
than precipices and flying chutes of mountain torrents, and
chasms and fissures of the wild ravine: she knew nothing of
the life he had left, and of its rigorous artificialities and gradations of wealth and estimation. And with a heart full of pitiable
unrealities she looked up at the glittering simulacrum of a star
on the crag, while he gazed down on the ideal star in the valley.
The weeks had worn deep into November. Chevis and Varney were thinking of going home; indeed, they talked of breaking camp day after to-morrow, and saying a long adieu to wood
and mountain and stream. They had had an abundance of good
sport and a surfeit of roughing it. They would go back to town
and town avocations invigorated by their holiday, and taking
with them a fresh and exhilarating recollection of the forest life
left so far behind.
It was near dusk, on a dull, cold evening, when Chevis dismounted before the door of the blacksmith's little log-cabin.
The chestnut-tree hung desolate and bare on the eaves of the
forge; the stream rushed by in swift gray whirlpools under a
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
sullen gray sky; the gigantic wall of broken rocks loomed
gloomy and sinister on the opposite side of the road,—not so
much as a withered leaf of all their vines clung to their rugged
surfaces. The mountains had changed color: the nearest ranges were black with the myriads of the grim black branches of
denuded forest; far away they stretched in parallel lines, rising
tier above tier, and showing numberless gradations of a dreary,
neutral tint, which grew ever fainter in the distance, till merged
in the uniform tone of the sombre sky.
Indoors it was certainly more cheerful. A hickory fire dispensed alike warmth and light. The musical whir of a spinningwheel added its unique charm. From the rafters depended
numberless strings of bright red pepper-pods and ears of popcorn; hanks of woolen and cotton yarn; bunches of medicinal
herbs; brown gourds and little bags of seeds. On rude shelves
against the wall were ranged cooking utensils, drinking vessels,
etc., all distinguished by that scrupulous cleanliness which is a
marked feature of the poor hovels of these mountaineers, and
in striking contrast to the poor hovels of lowlanders. The rushbottomed chairs, drawn in a semicircle before the rough, ill-adjusted stones which did duty as hearth, were occupied by
several men, who seemed to be making the blacksmith a
prolonged visit; various members of the family were humbly
seated on sundry inverted domestic articles, such as wash-tubs,
and splint-baskets made of white oak. There was circulating
among Jerry Shaw's friends a flat bottle, facetiously
denominated "tickler," readily emptied, but as readily
replenished from a keg in the corner. Like the widow's cruse
of oil, that keg was miraculously never empty. The fact of a still
near by in the wild ravine might suggest a reason for its perennial flow. It was a good strong article of apple-brandy, and its
effects were beginning to be distinctly visible.
Truly the ethereal woodland flower seemed strangely incongruous with these brutal and uncouth conditions of her life,
as she stood at a little distance from this group, spinning at her
wheel. Chevis felt a sudden sharp pain of pity for her when he
glanced toward her; the next instant he had forgotten it in his
�MARY NOMLLES MURFREE
83
interest in her work. It was altogether at variance with the ideas
which he had hitherto entertained concerning that humble
handicraft. There came across him a vague recollection from
his city life that the peasant girls of art galleries and of the lyric
stage were wont to sit at the wheel. "But perhaps they were
spinning flax," he reflected. This spinning was a matter of walking back and forth with smooth, measured steps and graceful,
undulatory motion; a matter, too, of much pretty gesticulation,—the thread in one hand, the other regulating the whirl of
the wheel. He thought he had never seen attitudes so charmJerry Shaw hastened to abdicate and offer one of the rushbottomed chairs with the eager hospitality characteristic of
these mountaineers,—a hospitality that meets a stranger on the
threshold of every hut, presses upon him, ungrudgingly, its
best, and follows him on his departure with protestations of
regret out to the rickety fence. Chevis was more or less known
to all of the visitors, and after a little, under the sense of
familiarity and the impetus of the apple-brandy, the talk flowed
on as freely as before his entrance. It was wilder and more antagonistic to his principles and prejudices than anything he had
hitherto heard among these people, and he looked on and listened, interested in this new development of a phase of life
which he had thought he had sounded from its lowest note to
the top of its compass. He was glad to remain; the scene had
impressed his cultivated perceptions as an interior by Teniers
might have done, and the vehemence and lawlessness of the
conversation and the threats of violence had little reality for
him; if he thought about the subject under discussion at all, it
was with a reassuring conviction that before the plans could be
carried out the already intoxicated mountaineers would be
helplessly drunk. Nevertheless, he glanced ever and anon at the
young girl, loath that she should hear it, lest its virulent, angry
bitterness should startle her. She was evidently listening, too,
but her fair face was as calm and untroubled as one of the pure
white faces of those flower-stars of his early stay in the mountains.
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
"Them Peels ought n't ter be let live!11 exclaimed Elijah Burr,
a gigantic fellow, arrayed in brown jeans, with the accompaniments of knife, powder-horn, etc., usual with the hunters of the
range; his gun stood, with those of the other guests, against the
wall in a corner of the room. "They ought n't ter be let live, an7
Fd top all three of 'em fur the skin an' horns of a deer."
"That thar is a true word," assented Jerry Shaw. "They
oughter be run down an' kilt,—all three o' them Peels."
Chevis could not forbear a question. Always on the alert to
add to his stock of knowledge of men and minds, always
analyzing his own inner life and the inner life of those about
him, he said, turning to his intoxicated host, "Who are the Peels,
Mr. Shaw,—if I may ask?"
"Who air the Peels?" repeated Jerry Shaw, making a point
of seizing the question. "They air the meanest men in these hyar
mountings. Ye might hunt from Copperhead Ridge ter Clinch
River, an' the whole spread o' the valley, an' never hear tell o'
no sech no 'count critters."
"They ought n't ter be let live!" again urged Elijah Burr. "No
man ez treats his wife like that dad-burned scoundrel Ike Peel
do oughter be let live. That thar woman is my sister an' Jerry
Shaw's cousin,—an' I shot him down in his own door year afore
las'. I shot him ter kill; but somehow 'nother I war that shaky,
an' the cussed gun hung fire a-fust, an' that thar pore wife o'
his'n screamed an' hollered so, that I never done nuthin' arter
all but lay him up for four month an' better for that thar pore
critter ter nuss. He'll see a mighty differ nex' time I gits my
chance. An' 't ain't fur off,11 he added threateningly.
"Wouldn't it be better to persuade her to leave him?" suggested Chavis pacifically, without, however, any wild idea of
playing peacemaker between fire and tow.
Burr growled a fierce oath, and then was silent.
A slow fellow on the opposite side of the fireplace explained: "Thai's whar all the trouble kem from. She wouldn't
leave him, fur all he treated her awful. She said ez how he were
mighty good to her when he warn't drunk. So 'Lijah shot him."
This way of cutting the Gordian knot of domestic difficul-
�MARY NOAILLES MURFREE
85
ties might prove efficacious but for the shakiness induced by
the thrill of fraternal sentiment, the infusion of apple-brandy,
the protest of the bone of contention, and the hanging fire of the
treacherous gun. Elijah Burr could remember no other failure
of aim for twenty years.
"He won't git shet of me that easy again!" Burr declared,
with another pull at the flat tickler. "But ef it hed n't hev been
fur what happened last week, I mought hev let him off fur
awhile," he continued, evidently actuated by some curiously
distorted sense of duty in the premises. "I oughter hev kilt him
afore. But now the cussed critter is a gone coon. Dadburn the
whole tribe!"
Chevis was desirous of knowing what had happened last
week. He did not, however, feel justified in asking more questions. But apple-brandy is a potent tongue-loosener, and the
unwonted communicativeness of the stolid and silent mountaineers attested its strength in this regard. Jerry Shaw, without
inquiry, enlightened him.
"Ye see," he said, turning to Chevis, "'Lijah he thought ez
how ef he could git that fool woman ter come to his house, he
could shoot Ike fur his meanness 'thout botherin' of her, an'
things would all git easy agin. Waal, he went thar one day when
all them Peels, the whole lay-out, war gone down ter the Settlemint ter hear the rider preach, an' he jes' run away with two
of the brats,—the littlest ones, ye onderstand,—a-thinkin' he
mought tole her off from Ike that thar way. We hearn ez how
the pore critter war nigh on ter distracted 'bout 'em, but Ike
never let her come arter 'em. Leastways, she never kem. Las'
week Ike kem fur 'em hisself,—him an' them two cussed
brothers o' his'n. All 'Lijah's folks war out'n the way; him an'
his boys war off a-huntin', an' his wife hed gone down ter the
spring, a haffen mile an' better, a-washin' clothes; nobody war
ter the house 'ceptin' them two chillen' o' Ike's. An' Ike an' his
brothers jes' tuk the chillen away, an' set fire ter the house; an'
time 'Lijah's wife got thar, 't war nuthin' but a pile o' ashes. So
we've determinated ter go up yander ter Laurel Notch, twenty
mile along the ridge of the mounting, ter-night, an' wipe out
�86
Local Color and Realistic Tradition
them Peels,—'kase they air a-goin' ter move away. That thar
wife o' Ike's, what made all the trouble, hev fretted an' fretted
at Ike till he hev determinated ter break up an' wagon across
the range ter Kaintucky, whar his uncle lives in the hills thar.
Dee hev gin his cornsent to go jes' ter pleasure her, 'kase she air
mos' crazed ter git Ike away war 'Lijah can't kill him. Ike's
brothers is a-goin', too. I hearn ez how they'll make a start at
noon ter-morrer."
"They'll never start ter Kaintucky ter-morrer," said Burr
grimly. "They'll git off, afore that, fur hell, stiddier Kaintucky.
I hev been a-tryin' ter make out ter shoot that thar man ever
sence that gal war married ter him, seven year ago,—seven year
an' better. But what with her a-foolin' round, an' a-talkin', an'
a-goin' on like she war distracted—she run right 'twixt him an'
the muzzle of my gun wunst, or I would hev hed him that time
fur sure—an' somehow 'nother that critter makes me so shaky
with her ways of goin' on that I feel like I hain't got good sense,
an' can't git no good aim at nuthin'. Nex' time, though, thar'll
be a differ. She ain't a-goin' ter Kaintucky along of him ter be
beat fur nuthin' when he's drunk."
It was a pitiable picture presented to Chevis's open-eyed
imagination,—this woman standing for years between the two
men she loved: holding back her brother from his vengeance
of her wrongs by that subtle influence that shook his aim; and
going into exile with her brute of a husband when that influence
had waned and failed, and her wrongs were supplemented by
deep and irreparable injuries to her brother. And the curious
moral attitude of the man: the strong fraternal feeling that alternately nerved and weakened his revengeful hand.
"We air goin' thar 'bout two o'clock ternight," said Jerry
Shaw, "and wipe out all three o' them Peels,—Ike an' his two
brothers."
"They oughtn't ter be let live," reiterated Elijah Burr, moodily. Did he speak to his faintly stirring conscience, or to a woeful premonition of his sister's grief?
"They'll all three be stiff an' stark afore daybreak," resumed
Jerry Shaw. "We air all kin ter 'Lijah, an' we air goin' ter holp
�MARY NOAILLES MURFREE
87
him top off them Peels. Thai's ten of us an' three o' them, an'
we won't hev no trouble 'bout it. An' we'll bring that pore critter, Ike's wife, an' her chillen hyar ter stay. She's welcome ter
live along of us till 'Lijah kin fix some sort'n place fur her an'
the little chillen, Thar won't be no trouble a-gittin rid of the
men folks, ez thar is ten of us an' three o' them, an' we air goin'
ter take 'em in the night."
There was a protest from an unexpected quarter. The whir
of the spinning-wheel was abruptly silenced. "I don't see no
sense," said Celia Shaw, her singing monotone vibrating in the
sudden lull,—"I don't see no sense in shootin' folks down like
they were nuthin' better nor bear, nor deer, nor suthin' wild. I
don't see no sense in it. An' I never did see none."
There was an astonished pause.
"Shet up, Cely! Shet up!" exclaimed Jerry Shaw, in mingled
anger and surprise. "Them folks ain't no better nor bear, nor
sech. The hain't got no right ter live,—them Peels."
"No, that they hain't!" said Burr.
"They is powerful no 'count critters, I know," replied the little woodland flower, the firelight bright in her opaline eyes and
on the flakes of burnished gold gleaming in the dark masses of
her hair. "They is always a-hangin' round the still an' a-gittin'
drunk; but I don't see no sense in a-huntin' 'em down an' akillin' 'em off. 'Pears ter me like they air better nor the dumb
ones. I don't see no sense in shootin' 'em."
"Shet up, Cely! Shet up!" reiterated Shaw.
Celia said no more. Reginald Chevis was pleased with this
indication of her sensibility; the other women—her mother and
grandmother—had heard the whole recital with the utmost indifference, as they sat by the fire monotonously carding cotton.
She was beyond her station in sentiment, he thought. However,
he was disposed to recant this favorable estimate of her higher
nature when, twice afterward, she stopped her work, and, filling the bottle from the keg, pressed it upon her father, despite
her unfavorable criticism of the hangers-on of stills. Nay, she
insisted. "Drink some more," she said. "Ye hain't got half
enough yit." Had the girl no pity for the already drunken crea-
�88
Local Color and Realistic Tradition
ture? She seemed systematically trying to make him even more
helpless than he was.
He had fallen into a deep sleep before Chevis left the house,
and the bottle was circulating among the other men with a
rapidity that boded little harm to the unconscious Ike Peel and
his brothers at Laurel Notch, twenty miles away. As Chevis
mounted Strathspey he saw the horses of Jerry Shaw/s friends
standing partly within and partly without the blacksmith's
shop. They would stand there all night, he thought. It was
darker when he commenced the ascent of the mountain than he
had anticipated. And what was this driving against his face,—
rain? No, it was snow. He had not started a moment too soon.
But Strathspey, by reason of frequent travel, knew every foot of
the way, and perhaps there would only be a flurry. And so he
went on steadily up and up the wild, winding road among the
great, bare, black trees and the grim heights and chasms. The
snow fell fast,—so fast and so silently, before he was half-way
to the summit he had lost the vague companionship of the
sound of his horse's hoofs, now muffled in the thick carpet so
suddenly flung upon the ground. Still the snow fell, and when
he had reached the montain's brow the ground was deeply
covered, and the whole aspect of the scene was strange. But
though obscured by the fast-flying flakes, he knew that down
in the bosom of the white valley there glittered still that
changeless star.
"Still spinning, I suppose," he said to himself, as he looked
toward it and thought of the interior of the log-cabin below.
And then he turned into the tent to enjoy his cigar, his aesthetic
reveries, and a bottle of wine.
But the wheel was no longer awhirl. Both music and the
musician were gone. Toiling along the snow-filled mountain
ways; struggling with the fierce gusts of wind as they buffeted
and hindered her, and fluttered derisively among her thin,
worn, old garments; shivering as the driving flakes came full
into the pale, calm face, and fell in heavier and heavier wreaths
upon the dappled calico sun-bonnet; threading her way
through unfrequented woodland paths, that she might shorten
�MARY NOAILLES MURFREE
89
the distance; now deftly on the verge of a precipice, whence a
false step of those coarse, rough shoes would fling her into
unimaginable abysses below; now on the sides of steep ravines,
falling sometimes with the treacherous, sliding snow, but never
faltering; tearing her hands on the shrubs and vines she
clutched to help her forward, and bruised and bleeding, but still
going on; trembling more than with the cold, but never turning
back, when a sudden noise in the terrible loneliness of the
sheeted woods suggested the close proximity of a wild beast,
or perhaps, to her ignorant, superstitious mind, a supernatural
presence,—thus she journeyed on her errand of deliverance.
Her fluttering breath came and went in quick gasps; her failing limbs wearily dragged through the deep drifts; the cruel
winds untiringly lashed her; the snow soaked through the
faded green cotton dress to the chilled white skin,—it seemed
even to the dull blood coursing feebly through her freezing
veins. But she had small thought for herself during those long,
slow hours of endurance and painful effort. Her pale lips
moved now and then with muttered speculations: how the
time went by; whether they had discovered her absence at
home; and whether the fleeter horsemen were even now
ploughing their way through the longer, winding mountain
road. Her only hope was to outstrip their speed. Her prayer—
this untaught being!—she had no prayer, except perhaps her
life, the life she was so ready to imperil. She had no high, cultivated sensibilities to sustain her. There was no instinct stirring within her that might have nerved her to save her father's,
or her brother's, or a benefactor's life. She held the creatures
that she would have died to warn in low estimation, and spoke
of them with reprobation and contempt. She had known no
religious training, holding up forever the sublimest ideal. The
measureless mountain wilds were not more infinite to her than
that great mystery. Perhaps, without any philosophy, she stood
upon the basis of a common humanity.
When the silent horsemen, sobered by the chill night air and
the cold snow, made their cautious approach to the little porch
of Ike Peel's log-hut at Laurel Notch, there was a thrill of dis-
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
mayed surprise among them to discover the door standing half
open, the house empty of its scanty furniture and goods, its
owners fled, and the very dogs disappeared; only, on the rough
stones before the dying fire, Celia Shaw, falling asleep and
waking by fitful starts.
"Jerry Shaw swore ez how he would hev shot that thar gal
o' his'n,—that thar Cely," Hi Bates said to Chevis and Varney
the next day, when he recounted the incident, "only he didn't
think she hed her right mind; a-walkin' through this hyar deep
snow full fifteen mile,—it's fifteen mile by the short cut ter
Laurel Notch,—ter git Ike Peel's folks of f 'fore 'Lijah an' her dad
could come up an' settle Ike an' his brothers. Leastways, 'Lijah
an' the t'others, fur Jerry hed got so drunk he could n't go; he
war dead asleep till ter-day, when they kem back a-f otchin' the
gal with 'em. That thar Cely Shaw never did look ter me like
she hed good sense, no how. Always looked like she war queer
an' teched in the head."
There was a furtive gleam of speculation on the dull face of
the mountaineer when his two listeners broke into enthusiastic
commendation of the girl's high heroism and courage. The
man of ledgers swore that he had never heard of anything so
fine, and that he himself would walk through fifteen miles of
snow and midnight wilderness for the honor of shaking hands
with her. There was that keen thrill about their hearts sometimes felt in crowded theatres, responsive to the cleverly simulated heroism of the boards; or in listening to a poet's mid-air
song; or in looking upon some grand and ennobling phase of
life translated on a great painter's canvas.
Hi Bates thought that perhaps they too were a little "teched
in the head."
There had fallen upon Chevis a sense of deep humiliation.
Celia Shaw had heard no more of the momentous conversation
than he; a wide contrast was suggested. He began to have a
glimmering perception that despite all his culture, his sensibility, his yearnings toward humanity, he was not so high a
thing in the scale of being; that he had placed a false estimate
upon himself. He had looked down on her with a mingled pity
�MARY NOAILLES MURFREE
91
for her dense ignorance, her coarse surroundings, her low station, and a dilettante's delight in picturesque effects, and with
no recognition of the moral splendors of that star in the valley.
A realization, too, was upon him that fine feelings are of most
avail as the motive power of fine deeds.
He and his friend went down together to the little log-cabin.
There had been only jeers and taunts and reproaches for Celia
Shaw from her own people. These she had expected, and she
had stolidly borne them. But she listened to the fine speeches
of the city-bred men with a vague wonderment on her flowerlike face,—whiter than ever to-day.
"It was a splendid—a noble thing to do," said Varney,
warmly.
"I shall never forget it," said Chevis, "it will always be like a
sermon to me."
There was something more that Reginald Chevis never forgot: the look on her face as he turned and left her forever; for
he was on his way back to his former life, so far removed from
her and all her ideas and imaginings. He pondered long upon
that look in her inscrutable eyes,—was it suffering, some keen
pang of despair?—as he rode down and down the valley, all
unconscious of the heart-break he left behind him. He thought
of it often afterward; he never penetrated its mystery.
He heard of her only once again. On the eve of a famous
day, when visiting the outposts of a gallant corps, Reginald
Chevis happened to recognize in one of the pickets the gawky
mountaineer who had been his guide through those autumnal
woods so far away. Hi Bates was afterward sought out and
honored with an interview in the general's tent; for the accidental encounter had evoked many pleasant reminiscences in
Chevis's mind, and among other questions he wished to ask
was what had become of Jerry Shaw's daughter.
"She's dead,—long ago," answered Hi Bates. "She died
afore the winter war over the year ez ye war a-huntin' thar. She
never hed good sense ter my way o' thinkin', nohow, an' one
night she run away, an' walked 'bout fifteen mile through a big
snow-storm. Some say it settled on her chist. Anyhow, she jes'
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
sorter fell away like afterward, an' never held up her head good
no more. She always war a slim little critter, an' looked like she
war teched in the head."
There are many things that suffer unheeded in those mountains: the birds that freeze on the trees; the wounded deer that
leaves its cruel kind to die alone; the despairing, flying fox with
its pursuing train of savage dogs and men. And the jutting crag
whence had shone the camp-fire she had so often watched—
her star, set forever—looked far over the valley beneath, where
in one of those sad little rural graveyards she had been laid so
long ago.
But Reginald Chevis has never forgotten her. Whenever he
sees the earliest star spring into the evening sky, he remembers
the answering red gleam of that star in the valley.
�MARY NOAILLES MURFREE
93
The Star in the Valley
1. What was the star in the valley which Reginald Chevis saw?
Does the word star take on new meaning as the story
progresses?
2. What is Jerry Shaw's relationship to the Peels? How does
he feel about them? What plans does he make to upset
Celia?
3. When Chevis learns of Celia Shaw's death, he feels a sense
of humiliation. What has he come to realize about himself
and about the girl?
4.
Find the following words in the story. Write the sentence
containing each work. Guess its meaning from the context.
Look it up in the dictionary to see if your definition is
correct. Write a sentence of your own using each word.
acquiescent
aperture
affinity
cogitation
ethereal
eminent
idyllic
inscrutable
opaline
prosaic
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
JOHN FOX, JR. (1862-1919)
John Fox, Jr., born a Kentuckian, later lived in Big Stone
Gap, Virginia. He graduated from Harvard University and became a writer and lecturer. After President Theodore
Roosevelt attended one of his presentations, he invited Fox to
the White House to read stories and sing mountain songs.
He is best known for his novels The Little Shepherd of
Kingdom Come and The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. These novels
and other works depict the lives of mountaineers in southwest
Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia. While
recounting the bitter feud between the Stetsons and the Lewallens in this excerpt from A Cumberland Vendetta, he also reflects
the universal theme of brotherly love.
From A Cumberland Vendetta
Just where young Stetson stood, the mountains racing
along each bank of the Cumberland had sent out against each
other, by mutual impulse, two great spurs. At the river's brink
they stopped sheer, with crests uplifted, as though some hand
at the last moment had hurled them apart, and had led the
water through the breach to keep them at peace. To-day the
crags look seamed by thwarted passion; and, sullen with firs,
they made symbols of the human hate about the base of each.
�JOHN FOX, JR.
95
When the feud began, no one knew. Even the original
cause was forgotten. Both families had come as friends from
Virginia long ago, and had lived as enemies nearly half a century. There was hostility before the war, but, until then, little
bloodshed. Through the hatred of change characteristic of the
mountaineer the world over, the Lewallens were for the Union.
The Stetsons owned a few slaves, and they fought for them.
Peace found both still neighbors and worse foes. The war
armed them, and brought back an ancestral contempt for
human life; it left them a heritage of lawlessness that for mutual
protection made necessary the very means used by their feudal
forefathers; personal hatred supplanted its dead issues, and
with them the war went on. The Stetsons had a good strain of
Anglo-Saxon blood, and owned valley-lands; the Lewallens
kept store, and made "moonshine"; so kindred and debtors and
kindred and tenants were arrayed with one or the other leader,
and gradually the retainers of both settled on one or the other
side of the river. In time of hostility the Cumberland came to
be the boundary between life and death for the dwellers on
each shore. It was feudalism born again.
Above one of the spurs each family had its home: the Stetsons, under the seared face of Thunderstruck Knob; the Lewallens, just beneath the wooded rim of Wolfs Head. The eaves
and chimney of each cabin were faintly visible from the porch
of the other. The first light touched the house of the Stetsons;
the last, the Lewallen cabin. So there were times when the one
could not turn to the sunrise nor the other to the sunset but
with a curse in his heart; for his eyes must fall on the home of
his enemy.
For years there had been peace. The death of Rome
Stetson's father from ambush, and the fight in the court-house
square, had forced it. After that fight only four were left—old
Jasper Lewallen, and young Jasper, the boy Rome, and his
uncle, Rufe Stetson. Then Rufe fled to the West, and the Stetsons were helpless. For three years no word was heard of him,
but the hatred burned in the heart of Rome's mother, and was
traced deep in her grim old face while she patiently waited the
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
day of retribution. It smouldered, too, in the hearts of the
women of both clans who had lost husbands or sons or lovers;
and the friends and kin of each had little to do with one another,
and met and passed with watchful eyes. Indeed, it would take
so little to turn peace to war that the wonder was that peace had
lived so long. Now trouble was at hand. Rufe Stetson had come
back at last, a few months since, and had quietly opened store
at the county-seat, Hazlan—a little town five miles up the river,
where Troubled Fork runs seething into the Cumberland—a
point of neutrality for the factions, and consequently a battleground. Old Jasper's store was at the other end of the town,
and the old man had never been known to brook competition.
He had driven three men from Hazlan during the last term of
peace for this offence, and everybody knew that the fourth must
leave or fight. Already Rufe Stetson had been warned not to
appear outside his door after dusk. Once or twice his wife had
seen skulking shadows under the trees across the road, and a
tremor of anticipation ran along both banks of the Cumberland....
All were smoking and silent. Several spoke from the
shadows as Rome stepped on the porch, and Rufe Stetson faced him a moment in the doorway, and laughed.
"Seem kinder s'prised?" he said, with a searching look.
"Wasn't lookin' for me? I reckon I'll s'prise sev'ral ef I hev goodluck."
The subtlety of this sent a chuckle of appreciation through
the porch, but Rome passed in without answer.
Isom lay on his bed within the circle of light, and his face in
the brilliant glow was white, and his eyes shone feverishly.
"Rome," he said, excitedly, "Uncle Rufe's hyeh, 'n' they
laywayed him, 'n'—" He paused abruptly. His mother came
in, and at her call the mountaineers trooped through the
covered porch, and sat down to supper in the kitchen. They
ate hastily and in silence, the mother attending their wants, and
Rome helping her. The meal finished, they drew their chairs
�JOHN FOX, JR.
97
about the fire. Pipes were lighted, and Rufe Stetson rose and
closed the door.
"Thai's no use harryin' the boy," he said; "I reckon he'll be
too puny to take a hand."
The mother stopped clearing the table, and sat on the rock
hearth close to the fire, her withered lips shut tight about a
lighted pipe, and her sunken eyes glowing like the coal of fire
in its black bowl. Now and then she would stretch her knotted
hands nervously into the flames or knit them about her knees,
looking closely at the heavy faces about her, which had
lightened a little with expectancy. Rufe Stetson stood before
the blaze, his hands clasped behind him, and his huge figure
bent in reflection. At intervals he would look with half-shut
eyes at Rome, who sat with troubled face outside the firelight.
Across the knees of Steve Marcum, the best marksman in the
mountains, lay the barrel of a new Winchester. Old Sam Day,
Ruf e's father-in-law and counsellor to the Stetsons for a score
of years, sat as if asleep on the opposite side of the fireplace
from the old mother, with his big square head pressed down
between his misshapen shoulders.
"The time hev come, Rome." Rufe spoke between the puffs
of his pipe, and Rome's heart quickened, for every eye was
upon him. "Thai's goin' to be trouble now. I hear as how
young Jasper hev been talkin' purty tall about ye—'lowin' as
how ye air afeard o' him."
Rome felt his mother's burning look. He did not turn
towards her nor Rufe, but his face grew sullen, and his voice
was low and harsh. "I reckon he'll find out about that when
the time comes," he said, quietly—too quietly, for the old
mother stirred uneasily, and significant glances went from eye
to eye. Rufe did not look up from the floor. He had been told
about Rome's peculiar conduct, and, while the reason for it was
beyond guessing, he knew the temper of the boy and how to
kindle it. He had thrust a thorn in a tender spot, and he let it
rankle. How sorely it did rankle he little knew. The voice of
the woman across the river was still in Rome's ears. Nothing
cuts the mountaineer to the quick like the name of coward. It
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
stung him like the lash of an oxwhip then; it smarted all the
way across the river and up the mountain. Young Jasper had
been charging him broadcast with cowardice, and Jasper's
people no doubt believed it. Perhaps his own did—his uncle,
his mother. The bare chance of such a humiliation set up an
inward rage. He wondered how he could ever have been such
a fool as to think of peace. The woman's gossip had swept
kindly impulses from his heart with a fresh tide of bitterness,
and, helpless now against its current, he sullenly gave way, and
let his passions loose to drift with it.
"Whar d' ye git the guns, Rufe?" Steve was testing the action of the Winchester with a kindling look, as the click of the
locks struck softly through the silence.
"Jackson; 'way up in Breathitt, at the end of the new road."
"No wonder y'u've been gone so long."
"I had to wait thar fer the guns, 'n' I had to travel atter dark
comin' back, 'n' lay out'n the bresh by day. Hit's full eighty
mile up thar."
"Air ye shore nobody seed ye?"
The question was from a Marcum, who had come in late,
and several laughed. Rufe threw back his dusty coat, which
was ripped through the lapel by a bullet.
"They seed me well 'nough fer that," he said, grimly, and
then he looked towards Rome, who thought of old Jasper, and
gave back a gleam of fierce sympathy. There were several nods
of approval along with the laugh that followed. It was a
surprise—so little consideration of an escape so narrow—from
Rufe; for, as old Gabe said, Rufe was big and good-natured,
and was not thought fit for leadership. But there was a change
in him when he came back from the West. He was quieter; he
laughed less. No one spoke of the difference; it was too vague;
but every one felt it, and it had an effect. His flight had made
many uneasy, but his return, for that reason, brought a stancher
fealty from these; and this was evident now. All eyes were
upon him, and all tongues, even old Sam's waited now for his
to speak.
"Whut we've got to do, we've got to do mighty quick," he
�JOHN FOX, JR.
99
began, at last. 'Things air changing I seed it over thar in
Breathitt. The soldiers 'n' that scar-faced Jellico preacher hev
broke up the fightin' over thar, 'n' if we don't watch out, they'll
be a-doin' it hyeh, when we start our leetle frolic. We hain't
got no time to fool. Old Jas knows this as well as me, 'n' thar's
goin' to be mighty leetle chance for 'em to layway 'n' pick us
off from the bresh. Thar's goin' to be fa'r fightin' f er once, thank
the Lord. They bushwhacked us durin' the war, 'n' they've
laywayed us 'n' shot us to pieces ever sence; but now, of God
A'mighty's willin', the thing's a-goin' to be settled one way or
t'other at last, I reckon."
He stopped a moment to think. The men's breathing could
be heard, so quiet was the room, and Rufe went on telling in
detail, slowly, as if to himself, the wrongs the Lewallens had
done his people. When he came to old Jasper his voice was
low, and his manner was quieter than ever.
"Now old Jas have got to the p'int whar he says as how
nobody in the county kin undersell him 'n' stay hyeh. Old Jas
druv Bond Vickers out'n the mount'ins fer tryin' hit. He druv
Jess Hale away; 'n' them two air our kin."
The big mountaineer turned then, and knocked the ashes
from his pipe. His eyes grew a little brighter, and his nostrils
spread, but with a sweep of his arm he added, still quietly:
"¥' aU know whut he's done."
The gesture lighted memories of personal wrongs in every
breast; he had tossed a firebrand among fagots, and an angry
light began to burn from the eyes that watched him.
"Ye know, too, that he thinks he has played the same game
with me; but ye don't know, I reckon, that he had ole Jim Stover
'n' that mis'able Eli Crump a-hidin' in the bushes to shoot
me"—again he grasped the torn lapel; "that a body warned me
to git away from Hazlan; 'n' the night I left home they come
thar to kill me, 'n' s'arched the house, 'n' skeered Mollie 'n'the
leetle gal 'most to death."
The mountaineer's self-control was lost suddenly in a
furious oath. The men did know, but in fresh anger they leaned
forward in their chairs, and twisted about with smothered cur-
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
ses. The old woman had stopped smoking, and was rocking
her body to and fro. Her lips were drawn in upon her toothless gums, and her pipe was clinched against her sunken breast.
The head of the old mountaineer was lifted, and his eyes were
open and shining fiercely.
"I hear as how he says I'm gone fer good. Well, I have been
kinder easy-goin', hatin' to fight, but sence the day I seed
Rome's dad thar dead in his blood, I hev had jes one thing I
wanted to do. Thar wasn't no use stayin' hyeh; I seed that.
Rome thar was too leetle, and they was too many fer me. I
knowed it was easier to git a new start out West, 'n' when I
come back to the mount'ins, hit was to do jes—whut—I'm—
going—to—do—now." He wheeled suddenly upon Rome, with
one huge hand lifted. Under it the old woman's voice rose in
a sudden wail:
"Yes; 'n' I want to see it done befoh I die. I hain't hyeh fer
long, but I hain't goin' to leave as long as ole Jas is hyeh, 'n' I
want ye all to know it. Ole Jas hev got to go fust. You hear me,
Rome? I'm a-talkin' to you, boy; I'm a-talkin' to you. Hit's yo
time now!"
The frenzied chant raised Rome from his chair. Rufe himself took up the spirit of it, and his voice was above all caution.
"Yes, Rome! They killed him, boy. They sneaked on him,
'n' shot him to pieces from the bushes. Yes; hit's yo' time now!
Look hyeh, boys!" He reached above the fireplace and took
down an old rifle—his brother's—which the old mother had
suffered no one to touch. He held it before the fire, pointing to
two crosses made near the flash-pan. "Thai's one fer ole Jim
Lewallen! Thai's one fer ole Jas! He got Jim, but ole Jas got
him, 'n' that's his cross thar yit! Whar's yo' gun, Rome? Shame
on ye, boy!"
The wild-eyed old woman was before him. She had
divined Rufe's purpose, and was already at his side, with
Rome's Winchester in one hand and a clasp-knife in the other.
Every man was on his feet; the door was open, and the boy
Isom was at the threshold, his eyes blazing from his white face.
Rome had strode forward.
�JOHN FOX, JR.
101
"Yes, boy; now's the time, right hyeh before us all!"
The mother had the knife outstretched. Rome took it, and
the scratch of the point on the hard steel went twice through
the stillness—"one more fer the young un;" the voice was the
old mother's—then twice again.
The moon was sinking when Rome stood in the door alone.
The tramp of horses was growing fainter down the mountain.
The trees were swaying in the wind below him, and he could
just see the gray cliffs on the other shore. The morning seemed
far away; it made him dizzy looking back to it through the
tumult of the day. Somewhere in the haze was the vision of a
girl's white face—white with distress for him. Her father and
her brother he had sworn to kill. He had made a cross for each,
and each cross was an oath. He closed the door; and then he
gave way, and sat down with his head in both hands. The
noises in the kitchen ceased. The fire died away, and the chill
air gathered about him. When he rose, the restless eyes of the
boy were upon him from the shadows.
It was court-day in Hazlan, but so early in the morning
nothing was astir in the town that hinted of its life on such a
day. But for the ring of a blacksmith's anvil on the quiet air,
and the fact that nowhere was a church-spire visible, a stranger
would have thought that the peace of Sabbath overlay a village
of God-fearing people. A burly figure lounged in the porch of
a rickety house, and yawned under swinging sign, the rude letters of which promised "private entertainment" for the traveller
unlucky enough to pass that way. In the one long, narrow main
street, closely flanked by log and framed houses, nothing else
human was in sight. Out from this street, and in an empty
square, stood the one brick building in the place, the courthouse, brick without, brick within; unfinished, unpencilled,
unpainted; panes out of the windows, a shutter off here and
there, or swinging drunkenly on one hinge; the door wide
open, as though there was no privacy within—a poor structure,
with the look of a good man gone shiftless, and fast going
wrong.
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
Soon two or three lank brown figures appeared from each
direction on foot; then a horseman or two, and by-and-by
mountaineers came in groups, on horse and on foot. In time
the side alleys and the court-house square were filled with horses and mules, and even steers. The mountaineers crowded
the narrow street: idling from side to side; squatting for a bargain on the wooden sidewalks; grouping on the porch of the
rickety hotel, and on the court-house steps; loitering in and out
of the one store in sight. Out in the street several stood about
a horse, looking at his teeth, holding his eyes to the sun, punching his ribs, twisting his tail; while the phlegmatic owner sat
astride the submissive beast, and spoke short answers to rare
questions. Everybody talked politics, the crop failure, or the
last fight at the seat of some private war; but nobody spoke of
a Lewallen or a Stetson unless he knew his listener's heart, and
said it in a whisper. For nobody knew when the powder would
flash, or who had taken sides, or that a careless word might not
array him with one or the other faction.
A motley throng it was—in brown or gray homespun, with
trousers in cowhide boots, and slouched hats with brims
curved according to temperament, but with striking figures in
it: the patriarch with long, white hair, shorn even with the base
of the neck, and bearded only at the throat—a justice of the
peace, and the sage of his district; a little mountaineer with
curling black hair and beard, and dark, fine features; a grizzled
giant with a head rugged enough to have been carelessly
chipped from stone; a bragging candidate claiming
everybody's notice; a square-shouldered fellow surging
through the crowd like a stranger; an open-faced, devil-maycare young gallant on fire with moonshine; a skulking figure
with brutish mouth and shifting eyes. Indeed, every figure
seemed distinct; for, living apart from his neighbor, and troubling the law but little in small matters of dispute, the mountaineer preserves independence, and keeps the edges of his
individuality unworn. Apparently there was not a woman in
town. Those that lived there kept housed, and the fact was significant. Still, it was close to noon, and yet not a Stetson or a
�JOHN FOX, JR.
103
Lewallen had been seen. The stores of Rufe and old Jasper
were at the extremities of the town, and the crowd did not
move those ways. It waited in the centre, and whetted impatience by sly trips in twos and threes to stables or side alleys
for "mountain dew." Now and then the sheriff, a little man
with a mighty voice, would appear on the court-house steps,
and summon a witness to court, where a frightened judge gave
instructions to a frightened jury. But few went, unless called;
for the interest was outside: every man in the streets knew that
a storm was nigh, and was waiting to see it burst.
Noon passed. A hoarse bell and a whining hound had announced dinner in the hotel. The guests were coming again
into the streets. Eyes were brighter, faces a little more flushed,
and the "moonshine" was passed more openly. Both ways the
crowd watched closely. The quiet at each end of the street was
ominous, and the delay could last but little longer. The
lookers-on themselves were getting quarrelsome. The vent
must come soon, or among them there would be trouble.
"Thar comes Jas Lewallen!" At last. A dozen voices spoke
at once. A horseman had appeared far down the street from
the Lewallen end. The clouds broke from about the sun, and
a dozen men knew the horse that bore him; for the gray was
prancing the street sidewise, and throwing the sunlight from
his flanks. Nobody followed, and the crowd was puzzled.
Young Jasper carried a Winchester across his saddle-bow, and,
swaying with the action of his horse, came on.
"What air he about?"
"He's a plumb idgit"
"He mus' be crazy."
"He's drunk!"
The wonder ceased. Young Jasper was reeling. Two or
three Stetsons slipped from the crowd, and there was a galloping of hoofs the other way. Another horseman appeared from
the Lewallen end, riding hastily. The new-comer's errand was
to call Jasper back. But the young dare-devil was close to the
crowd, and was swinging a bottle over his head.
"Come back hyeh, Jas! Comehyeh!" The new-comer was
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
shouting afar off while he galloped. Horses were being untethered from the side-alleys. Several more Lewallen riders
came in sight. They could see the gray shining in the sunlight
amid the crowd, and the man sent after him halted at a safe distance, gesticulating; and they, too, spurred forward.
"Hello boys!" young Jasper was calling out, as he swayed
from side to side, the people everywhere giving him way.
"Fun to-day, by—! fun to-day! Who'll hev a drink! Hyeh's
hell to the Stetsons, whar some of 'em'll be 'fore night!"
With a swagger he lifted the bottle to his lips, and, stopping
short, let it fall untouched to the ground. He had straightened
in his saddle, and was looking up the street. With a deep curse
he threw the Winchester to his shoulder, fired, and before his
yell died on his lips horse and rider were away like a shaft of
light. The crowd melted like magic from the street. The Stetsons, chiefly on foot, did not return the fire, but halted up the
street, as if parleying. Young Jasper joined his party, and they,
too, stood still a moment, puzzled by the irresolution of the
other side.
"Watch out! they're gittin' round ye! Run for the courthouse, ye fools!—ye, run!" The voice came in a loud yell from
somewhere down the street, and its warning was just in time.
A wreath of smoke came about a corner of the house far
down the street, and young Jasper yelled, and dashed up a
side-alley with his followers. A moment later judge, jury, witnesses, and sheriff were flying down the court-house steps at
the point of Lewallen guns; the Lewallen horses, led by the
gray, were snorting through the streets; their riders, barricaded
in the forsaken court-house, were puffing a stream of fire and
smoke from every window of court-room below and juryroom above.
The streets were a bedlam. The Stetsons were yelling with
triumph. The Lewallens were divided, and Rufe placed three
Stetsons with Winchesters on each side of the court-house, and
kept them firing. Rome, pale and stern, hid his force between
the square and the Lewallen store. He was none too quick. The
rest were coming on, led by old Jasper. It was reckless, riding
�JOHN FOX, JR.
105
that way right into death; but the old man believed young
Jasper's life at stake, and the men behind asked no questions
when old Jasper led them. The horse's hoofs beat the dirt street
like the crescendo of thunder. The fierce old man's hat was
gone, and his mane-like hair was shaking in the wind.
Louder—and still the Stetsons were quiet—quiet too long. The
wily old man saw the trap, and, with a yell, whirled the column
up an alley, each man flattening over his saddle. From every
window, from behind every corner and tree, smoke belched
from the mouth of a Winchester. Two horses went down; one
screamed; the other struggled to his feet, and limped away with
an empty saddle. One of the fallen men sprang into safety behind a house, and one lay still, with his arms stretched out and
his face in the dust.
From behind the barn, house, and fence the Lewallens gave
back a scattering fire; but the Stetsons crept closer, and were
plainly in greater numbers. Old Jasper was being surrounded,
and he mounted again, and all, followed by a chorus of bullets
and triumphant yells, fled for a wooded slope in the rear of the
court-house. A dozen Lewallens were prisoners, and must
give up or starve. There was savage joy in the Stetson crowd,
and many-footed rumor went all ways that night.
Despite sickness and Rome's strict order, Isom had ridden
down to the mill. Standing in the doorway, he and old Gabe
saw up the river, where the water broke into the foam over the
ford, a riderless gray horse plunging across. Later it neighed
at a gate under Wolf's Head, and Martha Lewallen ran out to
meet it. Across under Thunderstruck Knob that night the old
Stetson mother listened to Isom's story of the fight with ghastly joy in her death-marked face.
All night the court-house was guarded and on guard. At
one corner of the square Rufe Stetson, with a few men, sat on
watch in old Sam Day's cabin—the fortress of the town, built
for such a purpose, and used for it many times before. The
prisoners, too, were alert, and no Stetson ventured into the
open square, for the moon was high; an exposure anywhere
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
was noted instantly by the whistle of a rifle-ball, and the mountaineer takes few risks except under stress of drink or passion.
Rome Stetson had placed pickets about the town wherever
surprise was possible. All night he patrolled the streets to keep
his men in such readiness as he could for the attack that the
Lewallens would surely make to rescue their living friends and
to avenge the dead ones.
But the triumph was too great and unexpected. Two
Braytons were dead; several more were prisoners with young
Jasper in the court-house; and drinking began.
As the night deepened without attack, the Stetsons drank
more, and grew reckless. A dance was started. Music and
"moonshine" were given to every man who bore a Winchester.
The night was broken with drunken yells, the random discharge of firearms, and the monotone of heavy feet. The two
leaders were helpless, the inaction of the Lewallens puzzled
them. Chafed with anxiety, they kept their eyes on the courthouse or on the thicket of gloom where their enemies lay. But
the woods were as quiet as the pall of shadows over them.
Once Rome, making his rounds, saw a figure crawling through
a field of corn. It looked like Crump's, but before he could fire
the man rolled like a ball down the bushy bank to the river. An
instant later some object went swiftly past a side-street—somebody on horseback. A picket fired an alarm. The horse kept
on, and Rome threw his rifle on a patch of moonlight. When
the object flashed through, his finger was numbed at the trigger. In the moonlight the horse looked gray, and the rider
seated sidewise. A bullet from the court-house clipped his hatbrim as he ran recklessly across the street to where Steve Marcum stood in the dark behind old Sam's cabin.
"Jim Hale '11 git him as he goes up the road," said Steve,
calmly—and then with hot impatience, "Why the hell don't he
shoot?"
Rome started forward in the moonlight, and Steve caught
his arm. Two bullets hissed from the court-house, and he fell
back.
A shot sounded from the bushes far away from the road.
�JOHN FOX, JR.
107
The horse kept on, and splashed into Troubled Fork, and Steve
swore bitterly.
"Hit ain't Jim. Hit's that mis'able Bud Vickers; he's been astandin' guard out'n the bushes 'stid o' the road. That was a
spy, I tell ye, 'n' the coward let him in and let him out. They'll
know now we're all drunk! Whut's the matter?"
Rome's mouth was half open. He looked white and sick,
and Steve thought he had been hit, but he took off his hat.
"Purty close!" he said, with a laugh, pointing at the bullet-hole
through the brim.
Steve, unsuspicious, went on: "Hit was a spy, I tell ye. Bud
was afeard to stan' in the road, 'n' I'm goin' out thar 'n' twist
his damned neck. We've got 'em, Rome! I tell ye, we've got
'em! Ef we kin git through this night, and git the boys sober in
the morning, we've got 'em shore!"
The night did pass in safety, darkness wore away without
attack, and morning broke on the town in its drunken stupor.
Then the curious silence of the Lewallens was explained. The
rumor came that old Jasper was dead, and it went broadcast.
Later, friends coming to the edge of the town for the bodies of
the dead Lewallens confirmed it. A random ball had passed
through old Lewallen's body in the wild flight for the woods.
During the night he had spent his last breath in a curse against
the man that fired it.
Then each Stetson, waked from his drunken sleep, drank
again when he heard of the death. The day bade fair to be like
the night, and again the anxiety of the leaders was edged with
fear. Old Jasper dead and young Jasper a prisoner, the chance
was near to end the feud. There would be no Lewallen left to
lead their enemies. But, again, they were well-nigh helpless.
Already they had barely enough men to guard their prisoners.
Of the Marcums, Steve alone was able to handle a Winchester.
Outside the sounds of the carousal were in the air and growing louder. In a little while, if the Lewallens but knew it, escape would be easy and the Stetsons could be driven from the
town.
"Oh, they know it," said Steve. "They'll be a-whoopin'
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
down out o' them woods purty soon, 'n' we're goin' to ketch
hell. Fd like to know mighty well who that spy was last night.
That cussed Bud Vickers says it was a ha'nt, on a white hoss,
with long hair flyin' in the wind, 'n' that he shot plumb through
it. I jus' wish I'd a had a chance at it"
Still, noon came again without trouble, and the imprisoned
Lewallens had been twenty-four hours without food. Their
ammunition was getting scarce. The firing was less frequent,
but the watch was as close as ever. Twice a Winchester had
sounded a signal of distress. All knew that a response must
come soon; and come it did. A picket, watching the river road,
saw young Jasper's horse coming along the dark bushes far up
the river, and brought the news to the group standing behind
old Sam's cabin. The gray galloped into sight, and, skirting the
woods, came straight for the town—with a woman on his back.
The stirrup of a man's saddle dangled on one side, and the
woman's bonnet had fallen from her head. Some one challenged her.
"Stop, I tell ye! Don't ye go near that court-house! Stop, I
tell ye! I'll shoot! Stop!"
Rome ran from the cabin with a revolver in each hand. A
drunken mountaineer was raising a Winchester to his
shoulder. Springing from the back of the gray at the courthouse steps was Martha Lewallen.
"I'll kill the fust man that lifts his finger to hurt the gal,"
Rome said, knocking the drunken man's gun in the air. "We
hain't fightin' women!"
It was too late to oppose her, and the crowd stood helplessly watching. No one dared approach, and, shielding with her
body the space of the opening door, she threw the sack of food
within. Then she stood a moment talking and, turning,
climbed to her saddle. The gray was spotted with foam, and
showed the red of his nostrils with every breath as, with face
flushed and eyes straight before her, she rode slowly towards
the crowd. What she was about! Rome stood rigid, his forgotten pistols hanging at each side; the mouth of the drunken
mountaineer was open with stupid wonder; the rest fell apart
�JOHN FOX, JR.
109
as she came around the corner of the cabin and, through the
space given, rode slowly, her skirt almost brushing Rome,
looking neither to the right nor to the left; and when she had
gone quite through them all, she wheeled and rode, still slowly, through the open fields towards the woods which sheltered
the Lewallens, while the crowd stood in bewildered silence
looking after her. Yells of laughter came from the old courthouse. Some of the Stetsons laughed, too; some swore, a few
grumbled; but there was not one who was not stirred by the
superb daring of the girl, though she had used it only to show
her contempt.
"Rome, you're a fool; though, fer a fac', we can't shoot a
woman; 'n' anyways I ruther shoot her than the hoss. But
lemme tell ye, thar was more'n than sump'n to eat in that bag!
They air up to some dodge."
Ruf e Stetson had watched the incident through a port-hole
of the cabin, and his tone was at once jesting and anxious.
"That grub won't last more'n one day, I reckon," said the
drunken mountaineer. "We'll watch out fer the gal nex' time.
We're boun' to git 'em one time or t' other."
"She rid through us to find out how many of us wasn't dead
drunk," said Steve Marcum, still watching the girl as she rode
on towards the woods; f"n' I'm a-thinkin' they'll be down on
us purty soon now, 'n' I reckon we'll have to run fer it. Look
thar, boys!"
The girl had stopped at the edge of the woods; facing the
town, she waved her bonnet high above her head.
"Well, whut in the—" he said, with slow emphasis, and then
he leaped from the door with a yell. The bonnet was a signal
to the beleaguered Lewallens. The rear door of the court-house
had been quietly opened, and the prisoners were out in a body
and scrambling over the fence before the pickets could give an
alarm. The sudden yells, the crack of Winchesters, startled
even the revellers; and all who could, headed by Rome and
Steve Marcum, sprang into the square, and started in pursuit.
But the Lewallens had got far ahead, and were running in zigzag lines to dodge the balls flying after them. Half-way to the
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
woods was a gully of red clay, and into this the fleetest leaped,
and turned instantly to cover their comrades. The Winchesters
began to rattle from the woods, and bullets came like rain from
everywhere.
"T-h-up! T-h-up! T-h-up!" there were three of them—the
peculiar soft, dull messages of hot lead to living flesh. A Stetson went down; another stumbled; Rufe Stetson, climbing the
fence, caught at his breast with an oath, and fell back. Rome
and Steve dropped for safety to the ground. Every other Stetson turned in a panic, and every Lewallen in the gully leaped
from it, and ran under the Lewallen fire for shelter in the
woods. The escape was over.
"That was a purty neat trick," said Steve, wiping a red streak
from his cheek. "Nex' time she tries that, she'll git herself into
trouble."
At nightfall the wounded leader and the dead one were carried up the mountain, each to his own home; and there was
mourning far into the night on one bank of the Cumberland,
and, serious though Ruf e Stetson's wound was, exultation on
the other. But in it Rome could take but little part. There had
been no fault to find with him in the fight. But a reaction had
set in when he saw the girl flash in the moonlight past the sights
of his Winchester, and her face that day had again loosed
within him a flood of feeling that drove the lust for revenge
from his veins. Even now, while he sat in his own cabin, his
thoughts were across the river where Martha, broken at last,
sat at her death vigils. He knew what her daring ride that day
had cost her, with old Jasper dead out there in the woods; and
as she passed him he had grown suddenly humbled, shamed.
He grew heartsick now as he thought of it all; and the sight of
his mother on her bed in the corner, close to death as she was,
filled him with bitterness. There was no help for him. He was
alone now, pitted against young Jasper alone. On one bed lay
his uncle—nigh to death. There was a grim figure in the corner,
the implacable spirit of hate and revenge. His rifle was against
the wall. If there was any joy for him in old Jasper's death, it
was that his hand had not caused it, and yet—God help him!—
�JOHN FOX, JR. Ill
there was the other cross, the other oath.
The star and the crescent were swinging above Wolfs
Head, and in the dark hour that breaks into dawn a cavalcade
of Lewallens forded the Cumberland, and galloped along the
Stetson shore. At the head rode young Jasper, and Crump the
spy.
Swift changes had followed the court-house fight. In spite
of the death of Ruf e Stetson from his wound, and several other
Stetsons from ambush, the Lewallens had lost ground. Old
Jasper's store had fallen into the hands of the creditors—"furriners"—for debts, and it was said his homestead must follow.
In a private war a leader must be more than leader. He must
feed and often clothe his followers, and young Jasper had not
the means to carry on the feud. The famine had made corn
dear. He could feed neither man nor horse, and the hired
feudsmen fell away, leaving the Lewallens and the Braytons
and their close kin to battle alone. So Jasper avoided open combat and resorted to ambush and surprise; and, knowing in
some way every move made by the Stetsons, with great daring
and success. It was whispered, too, that he no longer cared
who owned what he might want for himself. Several dark
deeds were traced to him. In a little while he was a terror to
good citizens, and finally old Gabe asked aid of the governor.
Soldiers from the settlements were looked for any day, and
both factions knew it. At the least this would delay the war,
and young Jasper had got ready for a last fight which was close
at hand.
Half a mile on the riders swerved into a wooded slope.
There they hid their horses in the brush, and climbed the spur
stealthily. The naked woods showed the cup-like shape of the
mountains there—a basin from which radiated upward
wooded ravines, edged with ribs of rock. In this basin the Stetsons were encamped. The smoke of a fire was visible in the
dim morning light, and the Lewallens scattered to surround
the camp. The effort was vain. A picket saw the creeping
figures; his gun echoed a warning from rock to rock, and with
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
yells the Lewallens ran forward. Rome sprang from sleep near
the fire, bareheaded, rifle in hand, his body plain against a huge
rock, and the bullets hissed and spat about him as he leaped
this way and that, firing as he sprang, and shouting for his men.
Steve Marcum alone answered. Some, startled from sleep, had
fled in panic; some had run deeper into the woods for shelter.
And bidding Steve save himself, Rome turned up the mountain, running from tree to tree, and dropped unhurt behind a
fallen chestnut. Other Stetsons, too, had turned, and answering bullets began to whistle to the enemy. But they were widely separated and ignorant of one another's position, and the
Lewallens drove them one by one to new hiding-places, scattering them more. To his right Rome saw Steve Marcum speed
like a shadow up through a little open space, but he feared to
move. Several Lewallens had recognized him, and were
watching him alone. He could not even fire; at the least exposure there was a chorus of bullets about his ears. In a moment they began to come obliquely from each side; the
Lewallens were getting around him. In a moment more death
was sure there, and once again he darted up the mountain. The
bullets sang after him like maddened bees. He felt one cut his
hat and another sting his left arm, but he raced up, up, till the
firing grew fainter as he climbed, and ceased an instant altogether. Then, still farther below, came a sudden crash of
reports. Stetsons were pursuing the men who were after him,
but he could not join them. The Lewallens were scattered
everywhere between him and his own men, and a descent
might lead him to the muzzle of an enemy's Winchester. So he
climbed over a ledge of rock and lay there, peeping through a
crevice between two bowlders, gaining his breath. The firing
was far below him now, and was sharp. Evidently his pursuers
were too busy defending themselves to think further of him,
and he began to plan how he should get back to his friends.
But he kept hidden, and, searching the cliffs below him for a
sheltered descent, he saw something like a slouched hat just
over a log, scarcely fifty feet below him. Presently the hat was
lifted a few inches; a figure rose cautiously and climbed
�JOHN FOX, JR.
113
towards the ledge, shielding itself behind rock and tree. Very
quietly Rome crawled back to the face of the cliff behind him,
and crouched behind a rock with his cocked rifle across his
knees. The man must climb over the ledge; there would be a
bare, level floor of rock between them—the Lewallen would be
at his mercy—and Rome, with straining ears, waited. There
was a foot-fall on the other side of the ledge; a soft clink of metal
against stone. The Lewallen was climbing slowly—slowly.
Rome could hear his heavy breathing. A grimy hand slipped
over the sharp comb of the ledge; another appeared, clinched
about a Winchester—then the slouched hat, and under it the
dark, crafty face of young Jasper. Rome sat like the stone before
him, with a half-smile on his lips. Jasper peered about with the
sly caution of a fox, and his face grew puzzled and chagrined
as he looked at the cliffs above him.
"Stopthar!"
He was drawing himself over the ledge, and the low, stern
voice startled him, as a knife might have done, thrust suddenly from the empty air at his breast. Rome rose upright against
the cliff, with his resolute face against the stock of Winchester.
"Drap that gun!11
The order was given along Stetson's barrel, and the weapon
was dropped, the steel ringing on the stone floor. Rome
lowered his gun to the hollow of his arm, and the two young
leaders faced each other for the first time in the life of either.
"Seem kinder s'prised to see me," said the Stetson, grimly.
"Hev ye got a pistol?"
Young Jasper glared at him in helpless ferocity.
"Naw!"
"Knife?"
He drew a long-bladed penknife from his pocket, and
tossed it at Rome's feet.
"Jes' move over thar, will ye?"
The Lewallen took his stand against the cliff, Rome picked
up the fallen rifle, and leaned it against the ledge.
"Now, Jas Lewallen, thar's nobody left in this leetle trouble
'cept you 'n' me, 'n' ef one of us was dead, I reckon t'other could
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
live hyeh, 'n' thar'd be peace in these mountains. I thought o'
that when I had ye at the end o' this Winchester. I reckon you
would 'a' shot me dead ef I had poked my head over a rock as
keerless as you." That is just what he would have done, and
Jasper did not answer.fTve swore to kill ye, too," added Rome,
tapping his gun; Tve got a cross fer ye hyeh."
The Lewallen was no coward. Outcry or resistance was
useless. The Stetson meant to taunt him, to make death more
bitter; for Jasper expected death, and he sullenly waited for it
against the cliff.
"You've been banterin' me a long time now, 'lowin' as how
ye air the better man o' the two; 'n' I've got a notion o' givin'
ye a chance to prove yer tall talk. Hit's not our way to kill a
man in cold blood, 'n' I don't want to kill ye anyways ef I kin
he'p it. Seem s'prised ag'in. Reckon ye don't believe me? I
don't wonder when I think o' my own dad, 'n' all the meanness yo' folks have done mine; but I've got a good reason fer
not Idllin' ye—ef I kin he'p it. Y'u don't know what it is, 'n'
y'u'll never know; but I'll give ye a chance now fer yer life ef
y'u'll sw'ar on a stack o' Bibles as high as that tree thar that
y'u'll leave these mount'ins ef I whoops ye, 'a nuver come back
ag'in as long as you live. /'// leave, ef ye whoops me. Now,
whut do ye say? Will ye sw'ar!"
"I reckon I will, seein' as I've got to," was the surly answer.
But Jasper's face was dark with suspicion, and Rome studied
it keenly. The Lewallens once had been men whose word was
good, but he did not like Jasper's look.
"I reckon I'll trust ye," he said, at last, more through confidence in his own strength than faith in his enemy; for Jasper
whipped would be as much at his mercy as he was now. So
Rome threw off his coat, and began winding his homespun
suspenders about his waist. Watching him closely, Jasper did
the same.
The firing below had ceased. A flock of mountain vultures
was sailing in great circles over the thick woods. Two eagles
swept straight from the rim of the sun above Wolf's Head, beating over a turbulent sea of mist for the cliffs, scarcely fifty yards
�JOHN FOX, JR.
115
above the ledge, where a pine-tree grew between two rocks.
At the instant of lighting, they wheeled away, each with a
warning scream to the other. A figure lying flat behind the pine
had frightened them, and now a face peeped to one side,
flushed with eagerness over the coming fight. Both were ready
now, and the Lewallen grew suddenly white as Rome turned
again and reached down for the guns.
"I reckon I'll put 'em a lettle furder out o' the way," he said,
kicking the knife over the cliff; and, standing on a stone, he
thrust them into a crevice high above his head.
"Now, Jas, we'll fight this gredge out, as our grandads have
done afore us."
Lewallen and Stetson were man to man at last. Suspicion
was gone now, and a short, brutal laugh came from the cliff.
"I'll fight ye! Oh, by God, I'll fight ye!"
The ring of the voice struck an answering gleam from
Rome's gray eyes, and the two sprang for each other. It was
like the struggle of primeval men who had not yet learned even
the use of clubs. For an instant both stood close, like two wild
beasts crouched for a spring, and circling about to get at each
other's throats, with mouths set, eyes watching eyes, and hands
twitching nervously. Young Jasper leaped first, and the Stetson, wary of closing with him, shrank back. There were a few,
quick, heavy blows, and the Lewallen was beaten away with
blood at his lips. Then each knew the advantage of the other.
The Stetson's reach was longer; the Lewallen was shorter and
heavier, and again he closed in. Again Rome sent out his long
arm. A turn of Jasper's head let the heavy fist pass over his
shoulder. The force of the blow drove Rome forward; the two
clinched, and Jasper's arms tightened about Stetson's waist.
With a quick grasp for breath Rome loosed his hold, and, bending his enemy's head back with one hand, rained blow after
blow in his face with the other. One terrible stroke on the jaw,
and Jasper's arms were loosed; the two fell apart, the one
stunned, the other breathless. One dazed moment only, and
for a third time the Lewallen came on. Rome had been fighting a man; now he faced a demon. Jasper's brows stood out
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
like bristles, and the eyes under them were red and fierce like
a mad bull's. Again Rome's blows fell, but again the Lewallen
reached him, and this time he got his face under the Stetson's
chin, and the heavy fist fell upon the back of his head, and upon
his neck, as upon wood and leather. Again Rome had to gasp
for breath, and again the two were fiercely locked—their
corded arms as tense as serpents. Around and around they
whirled, straining, tripping, breaking the silence only with
deep, quick breaths and the stamping of feet, Jasper firm on the
rock, and Rome's agility saving him from being lifted in the air
and tossed from the cliff. There was no pause for rest. It was
a struggle to the end, and a quick one; and under the stress of
excitement the figure at the pine-tree had risen to his knees—
jumping even to his feet in plain view, when the short, strong
arms of the Lewallen began at last to draw Rome closer still,
and to bend him backward. The Stetson was giving way at last.
The Lewallen's vindictive face grew blacker, and his white
teeth showed between his snarling lips as he fastened one leg
behind his enemy's, and, with chin against his shoulder, bent
him slowly, slowly back. The two breathed in short, painful
gasps; their swollen muscles trembled under the strain as with
ague. Back—back—the Stetson was falling; he seemed almost
down, when—the trick was an old one—whirling with the
quickness of light, he fell heavily on his opponent, and caught
him by the throat with both hands.
"'Nough?" he asked, hoarsely. It was the first word uttered.
The only answer was a fierce struggle. Rome felt the
Lewallen's teeth sinking in his arm, and his fingers tightened
like twisting steel, till Jasper caught his breath as though strangling to death.
"'Nough?" asked the hoarse voice again.
No answer; tighter clinched the fingers. The Lewallen
shook his head feebly; his purple face paled suddenly as Rome
loosed his hold, and his lips moved in a whisper.
"'Nough!"
Rome rose dizzily to one knee. Jasper turned, gasping, and
lay with his face to the rock. For a while both were quiet, Rome,
�JOHN FOX, JR.
117
panting with open mouth and white with exhaustion, looking
down now and then at the Lewallen, whose face was turned
away with shame.
The sun was blazing above Wolf's Head now, and the stillness about them lay unbroken on the woods below.
"I've whooped ye, Jas," Rome said, at last; "I whooped ye
in a fa'r fight, 'n' I've got nothin' now to say 'bout yer tall talk,
'n' I reckon you hevn't nuther. Now, hit's understood, hain't
it, that /u'll leave these mount'ins?
"Y'u kin go West," he continued, as the Lewallen did not
answer. "Uncle Rufe used to say thar's a good deal to do out
thar, 'n' nobody axes questions. Thar's nobody left hyeh but
you 'n' me, but these mount'ins was never big 'nough fer one
Lewallen 'n' one Stetson, 'n' you've got to go. I reckon ye won't
believe me, but I'm glad I didn't hev to kill ye. But you've
promised to go, now, 'n' I'll take yer word fer it." He turned
his face, and the Lewallen, knowing it from the sound of his
voice, sprang to his feet.
"Oh—!"
A wild curse burst from Rome's lips, and both leaped for
the guns. The Lewallen had the start of a few feet, and Rome,
lamed in the fight, stumbled and fell. Before he could rise
Jasper had whirled, with one of the Winchesters above his head
and his face aflame with fury. Asking no mercy, Rome hid his
fae with one arm and waited, stricken faint all at once, and
numb. One report struck his ears, muffled, whip-like. A dull
wonder came to him that the Lewallen could have missed at
such close range, and he waited for another. Some one
shouted—a shrill halloo. A loud laugh followed; a light
seemed breaking before Rome's eyes, and he lifted his head.
Jasper was on his face again, motionless; and Steve Marcum's
tall figure was climbing over a bowlder towards him.
"That was the best fight I've seed in my time, by God" he
said coolly, "'n', Rome, y'u air the biggest fool this side o' the
settlements, I reckon. I had dead aim on him, 'n' I was jest athinkin' hit was a purty good thing fer you that ole long-nosed
Jim Stover chased me up hyeh, when, damn me, ef that boy up
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
thar didn't let his ole gun loose. I'd a-got Jas myself ef he hadn't
been so all-fired quick o' trigger."
Up at the root of the pine-tree Isom stood motionless, with
his long rifle in one hand and a little cloud of smoke breaking
above his white face. When Rome looked up he started down
without a word. Steve swung himself over the ledge.
"I heerd the shootin'," said the boy, "up thar at the cave, 'n'
I couldn't stay thar. I knowed ye could whoop him, Rome, 'n'
I seed Steve, too, but I was afeard—" Then he saw the body.
His tongue stopped, his face shrivelled, and Steve, hanging
with one hand to the ledge, watched him curiously.
"Rome," said the boy, in a quick whisper, "is he daid?"
"Come on!" said Steve, roughly. "They'll be up hyeh atter
us in a minute. Leave Jas's gun thar, 'n' send that boy back
home."
That day the troops came—young Blue Grass Kentuckians.
That night, within the circle of their camp-fires, a last defiance
was cast in the teeth of law and order. Flames rose within the
old court-house, and before midnight the moonlight fell on four
black walls. That night, too, the news of young Jasper's fate was
carried to the death-bed of Rome's mother, and before day the
old woman passed in peace. That day Stetsons and Lewallens
disbanded. The Lewallens had no leader; the Stetsons, no
enemies to fight. Some hid, some left the mountains, some gave
themselves up for trial. Upon Rome Stetson the burden fell.
Against him the law was set. A price was put on his, head, his
house was burned—a last act of Lewallen hate—and Rome was
homeless, the last of his race, and an outlaw.
�JOHN FOX, JR.
119
A Cumberland Vendetta
1. Compare the backgrounds, families, and occupations of the
Stetsons and Lewallens.
2. What was the main reason that Rufe Stetson wanted vengeance upon the Lewallens? What had Ruf e Stetson done that
angered Jasper Lewallen?
3. Explain the symbolism of the cross as it is used in this selection.
4.
Discuss the following quotation as it applies to this story:
"Love is a passion which kindles honor into noble acts."
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
ANNE W.ARMSTRONG (1872-1958)
Anne W. Armstrong was born in Michigan but moved to
Knoxville, Tennessee, when she was a child. She was a successful businesswoman who published articles and two novels, The
Seas of God (1915) and This Day and Time (1930). As an assistant
manager for industrial relations at Eastman Kodak, she became
the first woman to lecture at the Harvard School of Business.
Mrs. Armstrong retired to Sullivan County, Tennessee, in
the 1920's where she lived until the building of South Holston
Dam forced her to move. She died at the Barter Inn in
Abingdon, Virginia. She knew William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson and was a friend of Thomas Wolfe. In the manner of the realistic writer, Anne Armstrong presents a slice of
life showing Ivy Ingolsby, a strong and independent woman
from This Day and Time, talking with her neighbors about
everyday life.
From This Day and Time
The river glittered and flashed in the morning sun. A light
breeze blew through the open doors, bringing the fresh pungent fragrance of the pines to mingle with appetizing smells issuing more and more strongly from the lean-to. Ivy, bustling
about, busy with a dozen things, kept exclaiming to herself:
�ANNE ARMSTRONG
121
"Did ever a body see sech a pretty day?" She had had no word
from Shirley. No doubt Mr. Pemberton was better....
Almost before she knew it, the birthday party had grown to
its present proportions. Besides Mrs. Philips, she had asked
Bertha Jane Dillard. "Of course, Bertha Jane, she's dry. She
don't never have much o' nothin' to say. But, pore little old
thing, she don't never git to go nowheres sence her mammy's
gone, her sech a sight o' work to do!" After Bertha Jane, it had
occurred to her to ask Short, just back from the mines. Then
Molly Diggs, happening along on the way to the store, she had
asked Molly. And in the midst of her preparations on Saturday
morning, who should appear but Luke, his teeth gleaming, the
color coming and going in his bronzed cheeks, Luke holding
up a pair of squirrels he had shot. Luke had said: "Ivy, I brung
ye a mess o' squirrels fer to-morrow." And there had been nothing to do but ask him. Well, there would be plenty for
everybody.
Molly was the first to arrive, in a dark-blue calico, sprigged
with white.
Ivy herself, not wishing to outshine her guests, fearful also
lest with so much cooking she might drop something on her,
had resisted the temptation to wear her silk dress and had put
on a plain green linen that Shirley had given her.
"Law, Molly, hain't hit the nicest!" she exclaimed delightedly at sight of the bright new tin cake-pan Molly had brought as
a birthday remembrance for Old Mag.
Molly helped her move the table from the lean-to into the
front of the cabin and to spread the white table-cloth that Shirley had given her. "I believe, Molly, hit belongs jest a leetle mite
the fur way."
Molly leaned over, examining the table-cloth with her staring, red-rimmed eyes. "Why, laws a mercy, Ivy, them's roses
a-runnin' along hit!" She ran her red bony hand over the satiny
damask, picking up a corner of the cloth to smell of it.
"An' good as new, fer the world," Ivy said, flying back and
forth to the step-stove, so that nothing should burn. "Hain't
more 'an two or three broke places, an' them darned nice." She
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
had gathered a cluster of wild lilies, arranging them in a glass
fruit-jar. "I 'ull have me a flower-pot fer the dinner-table, same
as Shirley allays done." She placed the jar in the center of the
table. "Hain't no flowers on earth prettier 'an these here
leopard-spot lilies!"
Lifting the cover from a frying-pan, she pierced with her
fork one piece after another of the frying ground-hog, while
Molly sniffed pleasurably. "Whistle-pig, Molly! Parbiled hit
first, same as I done the squirrels. Gid, he went plumb to the
mountain fer hit. Law, Molly, hain't hit nice? Jest so tender!
Falls to pieces ef you teches hit!"
Ivy began to cut corn from the cob now, standing at the shelf
that ran along the outside of the little back porch. Molly, her
mouth full of snuff, pared the potatoes, stopping from time to
time to step to the edge of the porch and spit.
"Mis' Byrd's a-goin' to have another baby, hain't she?"
Molly said, suddenly dropping her voice to a whisper and
bringing her burning eyes close to Ivy's.
"Law, yes, an' hit 'ull be a girl this time, her a-stickin' out in
front so fur. When hit's a boy, they carries 'em all around more."
Molly resumed her paring, but soon started whispering
again. "Ivy, had you heern about Pernie Botts? Pernie, she kilt
her baby, a-stompin' on hit."
Ivy drew back and stared. "Forevermore!"
"Pernie were in the bed an' she felt the baby a-comin', so she
jumped up an' down right hard on the floor. She busted hit's
skull."
"The Lord have mercy!" Ivy screamed.
"Pernie, she mashed hit's face till you couldn't tell hit were
nothin' human."
"Law, Molly, I hain't never heern nothin' to beat hit in all
the days o' my life!"
"Well, Shell, he bigged Pernie, an' Shell, he denied her when
Pernie 'lowed they orter marry."
"Don't make no difference—I don't see how no woman alivin' kin kill a little baby, hit hem, an' them so sweet!"
They were still pursuing the subject when a noise warned
�ANNE ARMSTRONG
123
them that Enoch was returning. Ivy had sent him for extra
chairs and dishes. He was coming down the path, a big basket
in one hand, a bucket in the other, followed in single file by
Adam and Simon Peter, each carrying a splint-bottom chair on
top of his head, with Enoch's little dog bouncing in and out of
the procession, barking and nipping at two half-grown hounds
that had followed the Philips boys.
"Mis' Philips sent ye some sweet milk," Enoch announced
breathlessly.
"A gallon ef hit's a drap!—Now, don't you boys nasty your
clothes. Hit's a right smart spell afore dinner."
She was setting the table a few moments later when Enoch
announced that Short Dillard and Bertha Jane were approaching.
Ivy ran to the gate. "Forevermore! Why, Short, you're awalkin' good, hain't ye?—Bertha Jane—" but she stopped short.
It was the first time she had seen the girl since her mother's
death in the early spring. "Law, honey, how are ye?"
"Well enough, I reckon," Bertha Jane murmured huskily.
Her short ill-fitting dress hung on her loosely, its vivid pink intensifying the pallor of her small childish face. Smiling shyly,
she held out a bunch of marigolds and zinnias mixed with some
sprays of sweet fennel. "I didn't have nothin' else. Reckon hit
'ulldo?"
"Law, honey, ye couldn't a brung nothin' on earth no nicer!
Look, Molly, this here flower-pot Bertha Jane brung fer Mag's
birthday."
Short, a heavy-set youth, whose broad amiable face was still
bleached from his weeks in the hospital, and who was walking
with a stick, limping heavily, now proffered the tin bucket he
was carrying. His father had found a bee-tree and taken sixty
pounds of honey from it.
"Land o' livin'—sixty pounds! Well, I thank ye terrible,
Short, you an' your pap, both.—Now, Bertha Jane, you jest set
here an' rest. No, there hain't a earthly thing fer ye to do;
Molly's a-helpin' me, an' looks like you're kinder out o'
breath.—What do you reckon ails ye, Bertha Jane?"
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
Bertha Jane smiled faintly. "Hit's the tubercles, I reckon."
"Do you reckon—? Are you a-spittin' blood?"
Bertha Jane nodded. "An' Mammy, she had 'em."
"Law, yes, hit were the tubercles kilt your mammy, I reckon. They're ketchin', folks says—law, me!'
Ivy rejoined Molly in the lean-to.
"Uncle Abel," Molly whispered, with a snicker, "he's bound
to git ye—a-sendin' honey!"
Ivy held up a warning finger. "Don't ye name hit, Molly,
afore Short an' Bertha Jane, him their daddy!"
All at once a furious barking and yelping was heard. A big
bony mongrel belonging to Luke had dashed into the yard,
starting a fight with the other dogs, as Luke himself appeared
from one direction, and from another Gid was seen, coming
down the ridge, twirling two chairs above his head, with Nova,
a blaze of red, mincing along the road, a few steps behind him.
Ivy, Molly, and Bertha Jane had all run to the door.
"Hain't her dress pretty?" Bertha Jane murmured, gazing
wistfully at Nova, almost at the gate now, carrying a vanity case,
her red organdie dress standing out crisp and dazzling.
"Yourn is a heap prettier," Ivy whispered. "I never did like
no red dress!"
"Good God A'mighty!" Gid shouted, imitating Andy
Weaver's familiar sniffle, as he peeped over the heads in the
doorway. "Ton my honor! Why, what in the world?" He set
the chairs down inside the cabin with a loud clatter; then, striking an attitude, surveyed the already loaded table while the
others stood around to admire his foolery.
"Ivy, are ye a-aimin' to give me an' Novy a infare as fine as
this here?"
The word "infare" set everyone shrieking. Jokes were cracked and a rough and tumble frolic started, even Short, though
handicapped by his artificial leg, to which he was not yet accustomed, entering into the boisterous fun.
In the midst of the hubbub someone reported that Old Mag
and Mrs. Philips were coming. Yes, there they were! Old Mag,
her bare head high in the hot noonday sun, stalking along a lit-
�ANNE ARMSTRONG
125
tie in advance of Mrs. Phillips.
"Don't Mag look nice!" burst from Ivy, as the two women
drew nearer, Old Mag in a new dress of lavender gingham,
barred with white. Ivy took a china bowl decorated with roses
from the chest of drawers, holding it up for the others to see.
"Seems like a berry-bowl allays comes in handy."
She forced Mag into a chair.
"Well, I do know!" Mag panted, glancing at the festive table.
"Ivy, ef you hain't the beatin'est woman!" She was smiling
broadly, but in her embarassment took down her wisp of hair,
holding the hairpins in her mouth, then coiled it up again.
Nova had brought a small silk handkerchief, her mother a
red-bordered face-towel; and Luke drew forth a paper bag of
stick candy from one pocket, two oranges from another. The
berry-bowl, the cake-pan, Bertha Jane's bouquet—all the gifts
were showered at once into Mag's capacious lap.
Old Mag took up one thing after another, handling the gifts
tremblingly. She tried to speak. It was no use. Her head
dropped to her breast.
"Ef she hain't a-blubberin'!" Mrs. Philips's keen black eyes
were filled at once with amusement and a little concern. The
others had backed away, but Mrs. Philips placed her hand on
Mag's shoulder "Law, Mag, you must git your countenance!
Ivy's done hit to please ye!"
Mag lifted her head. The tears were streaming down her
furrowed, weather-beaten face. She raised her hand helplessly, the big-knuckled, seamed, and coarsened hand of one who
has done much outdoor work, trying fumblingly to wipe her
wet face with the back of it. "I hain't never done nothin' to
deserve sech as this!"
"Law, Mag"—Ivy had found her voice—"there hain't no
kinder person a-livin'! There hain't no free-hearteder—to what
ye've got!"
Mag shook her head. "I hain't no good woman!" She looked
around from one to the other, humbly, heartbrokenly. Her dull,
cavernous eyes blinded with tears, she reached down, trying to
pull up her skirt, weighted with the birthday gifts.
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
In a flash Gid recovered himself. Picking up the small
square of silk, Nova's gift, he forced it into his mother's big
clumsy hand. "Here, use this, old lady, an' no more bawlin',
without ye want me to lick hell outen ye!"
Old Mag burst out laughing, the others, in sudden relief, all
joining in.
Luke insisted now that they should follow the usual custom. "Come, folks, we must put Mag under the table, so she
won't stop a-growin'!" There was a wild scramble, Old Mag,
by no means feeble, pushing them off, and everyone roaring
with laughter. Finally Mag's gaunt frame was stretched out on
the floor, Ivy jerking down the skirt of her dress, disarrayed in
the tussle, and skrieking at the same time that the others should
save her table, which was rocking back and forth, threatening
to crash any instant.
"Well, you-all kin set down," Ivy announced at last. "I reckon the last one o' ye is starved to death."
Everyone continued, however, to stand around awkwardly. Mag and Mrs. Philips and Molly all sought the front porch
to spit again. Nova opened the vanity case to dab her face once
more.
"Mag, you set here," Ivy broke the hush that had fallen, indicating a chair at the top of the table, facing the front door, "an'
Gid to the side o' ye. Mis' Philips, you set yander, opposite
Mag. The balance kin set where they likes."
Mrs. Philips and Old Mag both stroked the white cloth.
"Law, Ivy, hain't it nice!" Both of them, as Molly had done, picked up the corner of the cloth and smelled of it.
Fresh fun was created when Nova, showing her dimples,
slipped into the chair on the other side of Gid from his mother.
General joking was resumed now and dishes that were on the
table began to be circulated.
Rosy with heat, dripping with perspiration, Ivy bustled
back and forth to the lean-to, passing food that the table had no
space to hold and urging her guests to help themselves liberally. "Law, I don't want nobody to be in no ways bashful!"
�ANNE ARMSTRONG
127
She was conscious of a vague sense of relief. Here, among
her own people, there was no strain for fear she might do or say
the wrong thing, something that would betray her poor rough
upbringing in Rocky Hollow.
And how proud she was! She saw the room, almost as
though she stood outside of it, as a picture she would hold in
her mind unforgettably—her two high tightly stuffed beds, like
fat pincushions, shining out, each from its corner, in the freshly washed bed-spreads, the bunches of herbs hanging from the
rafters, Uncle Jake's clock on the chimney-shelf, the table extending almost from door to door, beautiful in the white cloth
Shirley had given her, with the jar of wild lilies, with the gay
flowers Bertha Jane had brought, resplendent with brightcolored jellies and pickles—then, everyone in clean Sabbath attire, and vivid patches where Nova and Bertha Jane sat in their
scarlet and pink dresses—a living picture that glowed softly in
the tempered light, that threw off enchanting odors, odors of
steaming food mingled with the slightly suffocating sweet of
the lilies, with the aromatic scent of the fennel in Bertha Jane's
bouquet.... Oh, if only Jim should step in now!
The big platter of string-beans and potatoes boiled with
bacon soon needed replenishing. Mounds of soda-biscuits,
toppling pyramids of corn-bread, dishes of fried corn and fried
cabbage, fried squirrels, the fried whistle-pig, bowls of gravy,
of stewed tomatoes, of raw onions—all melted away until
Enoch and Adam and Simon Peter, who were stationed about
the table, eyeing it hungrily as they waved their green branches
to keep the flies away, began to look at each other in consternation. But still Ivy plied her guests with fresh food and drink.
"Bertha Jane, have ye another glass o' sweet milk.—Law, Mag,
your coffee's plumb cold—let me pour ye some hot.—Luke, ye
hain't a-settin' back a'ready? Why, you hain't hardly began!—
Molly, try them spiced beets. They're fine, they hain't a mite
stringy.—Law, Gid, you an' Novy is lovesick, I reckon—youall ain't eatin' a bite!—Mis' Philips, help yourself to the honey,
an', Short, would ye pass the cheese?—Hain't none o' ye tasted
the jelly—there's apple an' plum an' blackberry/1
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
The lean days of spring were over, almost forgotten. Now,
in the day of plenty, folks could eat to repletion, gorge themselves joyfully.
"Ivy, everything's grand!11 Mag helped herself for the third
time to fried cabbage. "Lord a' mercy, I'm a-eatin' a sight—fer
me!—F ve had a right smart o' indigestion here lately, an' I don't
kmow what on earth's a-causin' hit."
But although the whole meal was praised, nothing else
called forth such enthusiasm as the whistle-pig. Everyone
agreed that no other wild meat could compare with it, unless
perhaps coon—everyone except Short Dillard. "Law, people,
ef you wants somethin' good, hit's mush-rats! Hain't no eatin'
on earth 'ull tech young mush-rats!"
"A heap o' folks thinks polecat is mighty good eatin',11 Old
Mag added to the discussion, "but phew! a polecat, hit allays
tastes to me like hit smells."
The noise of eating at length began to subside, the clatter
and click of dishes and cutlery grew gradually fainter. The river
could be heard once again, a dull murmur. Everyone was sitting back to rest, before starting on the pies and cake, for which
they had made their plates ready, when a warning "Hello!" told
them that Doke Odum was descending from the road.
"In the name o' God, hain't you folks done eatin'? Why, the
cows is a-comin' home!"
Doke's overalls—one patch laid upon another, innumerable shades of faded blue—for once were clean. He was
freshly shaven and a pale bluish rim around the edge of his
black bushy hair showed that it had been recently trimmed.
"No, thank ye, Molly, jest keep your seat—I've had my dinner."
Standing at the foot of the table, his battered hat in his hand,
Doke's eyes roved over it with good-humored envy. The table
was somewhat disordered now, the cloth splattered with gravy
and spotted with coffee, but it was still abundantly supplied
with tempting dishes, while the blackberry and apple pies and
the coconut cake were only starting to be passed.
Molly finally prevailed upon Doke to take her chair, and
soon he was completely at home. "Mis' Philips, retch me that
�ANNE ARMSTRONG 129
spoon o' yourn, ef you're done with hit. Hain't no need to nasty
up another.—Short, I heern the company give ye seventy-five
dollars. By God, anybody where wants 'em kin have both o'
my legs—fer that!"
"There's some of 'em said I orter git a right smart more,11
Short explained, after the laughter had died down, "but I
couldn't find out nothin' fer certain. They made me sign some
papers, an' I asked 'em to read the papers to me, so I could tell
what I were a-signin'. But they said they never had no time.
One of them fellers in the office, he said: 'You're a nice bird!
Think we want to rob a pore miner?' That there's jest the way
he spoke hit There's the very words he used. Then I asked the
doctor ef any more money were a-comin' to me, but, boys, he
shet me up proper! Well, sir, there's the shortest-spoken man
ever I seed—I don't bar none! Short as piecrust."
Bertha Jane leaned forward when her brother had finished,
her small pallid face dyed crimson. "Short," she said, smiling
shyly and clearing her throat, "ef he gits two hundred, he's agoin' to git us a parlor set."
"The Lord have mercy!" Old Mag and Ivy shouted in unison.
"A parlor-set!"
By the time Ivy sat down she was too tired to eat. She
lingered over her plate, resting, trying to swallow a few bites.
The others were moving about, yawning, stretching themselves, belching unashamedly, patting their full stomachs.
Molly and Mrs. Philips at length started washing the dishes.
Luke and Doke had taken up their stand in the shade of the
corn-crib, where they could hail any passer-by, leaning against
it, with Short seated on a bank near by, all three of them whittling lazily.
All at once, Ivy remembered the tooth-brush which she had
placed conspicuously on top of the chest of drawers. One day,
some weeks before, when she was complaining of toothache, a
woman from town, spending the day at the Pemberton cottage,
had recommended the use of a tooth-brush. Ivy had answered,
a trifle resentfully: "Birch twigs, to chew 'em, is way yonder
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
better to clean a body's teeth." But now she called out: "Don't
you-all want to use my tooth-brush? A tooth-brush is way
yonder better 'an birch twigs to clean a body's teeth."
She was showing the brush to Gid and Nova, who had come
inside from the porch—"Hain't hit a nice un? I paid a quarter
fer hit"—when Luke announced softly from the doorway, smiling and raising his eyebrows: "Ivy, there's a stranger come to
see ye!"
A stranger! Suddenly Ivy felt weak and dizzy. Her heart
seemed to be missing beats. She looked out the door, the others
craning their necks. No, it was not Jim.
"What's his business?" she asked dully.
"I couldn't tell ye. He asked ef this were where Mistress Ivy
Ingoldsby lived. But I reckon he's a-settin' out," Luke added,
in his gentle drawling voice, a gleam of mischief in his soft dark
eyes. "He's a-wearin' flowers in his hat."
Gid emitted a snort.
The stranger was standing against the paling fence, outside
the gate. Turning as Ivy came towards him, he eyed her with
unconcealed curiosity. A tall raw-boned man, he wore a newlooking suit of clothes and a broad-brimmed black hat with two
or three short-stemmed zinnias thrust through the band.
"Is this Mistress Ivy Ingoldsby?" he inquired in a deep rumbling voice, looking Ivy boldly in the eye.
"Yes, sir."
"My name's Yancy I'm a widdy man, a grass-widdy man.
I live yon side the mountain, in Shady Valley."
Ivy held the gate open. "Won't ye come in, sir?"
"I kin state my business with ye here." He eyed her again
unhurryingly. "Ef ever I saw ye afore, I don't know hit—but
I've heern tell o' ye."
"Ye say ye have?"
"Big Bill Byrd—me an' him worked togither, loggin'—Bill,
he were allays a-braggin' on ye."
"Won't ye come in, sir, an' have ye a cheer?"
The man glanced towards the cabin suspiciously. "Hit's
best to see ye to yourself.—I'm a-huntin' me a wife—Bill, he
�ANNE ARMSTRONG
131
'lowed you was the workin'est woman ever he seen."
"I hain't no lazy-bones," Ivy admitted, with an embarrassed
laugh.
"My woman, she died on me, hit were two years back. I got
me another, but this here last un—well, she were a powerful
hand to waste, an' I tell ye what's the truth, a woman kin throw
out more by the window with a spoon 'an a man kin throw in
at the door with a shovel."
"Law, yes."
"Looked like me an' her couldn't make it." He spat, waiting
for some time before he resumed: "Me an' her's parted. Well,"
he said explosively after another long pause, "seems like I
wasn't much satisfied with her nohow. I 'lowed I 'ud git me a
woman this time where hain't a-gittin' up in years. How old
are ye, Ivy?" he asked abruptly.
"I were twenty-six last May."
He studied Ivy's neat, vigorous figure in the green linen
dress appraisingly for a moment or so. "You're stout, hain't
ye?"
"Law, I hain't in no ways weakly," Ivy laughed nervously.
"Bill Byrd, he said you was savin', an' kep everything nice."
"Law, I hain't no nasty woman!"
"Four o' my children is married, but I've got five little fellers,
an' a man cain't do no good a-lookin' atter hisself an' young
uns."
"Law, no." Ivy had dropped her eyes again.
"I hain't no hard man to fix fer, more 'n I wants biscuits fer
my breakfast. There's fellers where's satisfied with nothin'
on'y beans an' corn-bread. But I wants my wheat bread, me, of
a mornin'."
"Yes, sir."
"I hain't no braggart, nobody cain't put no name o' braggart
on me, but I've got me a good house."
"Law, I reckon," Ivy breathed, more and more embarrassed.
"I don't want no house so fine a man cain't spit in hit, but
I've got me a good sound house, two rooms. I put me some new
oak boards on the roof here lately an' hit don't hardly leak a
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
drap." He spat again, deliberately. Tve got me a good gang o'
chickens—I've got several, forty or fifty, I reckon, an7 I've got
two nice fat shotes where 7ull be plenty large to kill afore
Thanksgivin'." The stranger looked around him. "Ivy, ye hain't
got ary pig to your name, have ye?"
"Law, no, sir,—shotes is so expensive, to buy 'em, this day
an time, an' I never did keep me no sow."
Tve got two cows, or did have. I sold one day afore yesterday, but I kep' the best un, her fresh, an7 the milk jest a-pourin'."
Ivy caught a titter from the cabin.
The stranger came nearer, bringing his red hatchet-shaped
face with its prominent nose close to hers. "1'ull buy ye a dress,
an' a new pair o' slippers."
Ivy drew back. "Thank ye, but I've got plenty clothes."
The stranger gave a short laugh. He looked at her with
astonishment. "You say ye have—? Well, I reckon ye wouldn't
mind to get a new outfit, nohow." He stood a long time now,
looking down reflectively at the river, off at the mountains.
"Well, Ivy, I thought I 'ud come to see ye. I think you'd suit me,
an' we orter marry."
"Law, mister," Ivy burst forth now, her cheeks flaming, "I've
got a man—me an' him hain't never been divorced!"
The stranger nodded. "I know ye hain't got ye no divorce,
Ivy." He drew out a thick roll of bills. "I come prepared to git
ye one."
"Thank ye, an' I wouldn't doubt hit, sir, you 'ud make a
good man fer some woman where's a-wantin' to marry, but I'm
a-makin' hit by myself, a-makin' hit good, an' atter the man I
had, the way he done me—law, I don't want no man on earth!
But won't ye come in, sir, an' rest yourself? Won't ye have some
dinner?"
The stranger put the roll of bills back into his pocket.
"We've done et, but you've come a fer piece, sir, an' I know
I kin find ye a bite o' somethin', ef hit hain't no more 'an a snack."
"Well," the stranger said at last, thoughtfully, and looking
off into the distance again, "well, I reckon there hain't but one
thing fer me to do." He dropped his head, letting it hang for a
�ANNE ARMSTRONG
133
moment or so, then threw it back with a jerk. "Well, good-day
to ye. Ef you should change your mind, ef you should take a
notion to write, my name's Jack Yancy, Shady Post Office. I
think you 'ud suit me tollable well. Well, good-day. I 'ull be agoin' along. I 'ull be travelin' back over the mountain." He
climbed the path to the road, pausing at the corn-crib to remove
his hat and wipe his forehead. "Hit's a warm day, gentlemen,
sort o' close like."
"That were old big-mouth Jack Yancy," Mag exclaimed, as
soon as the stranger was out of ear-shot, "nobody but him;
useter live somewhars over around Popular Tree, an' so ill
nobody on earth cain't live with him."
"Jack Yancy," Doke nodded, "that's him! Kilt his woman,
the first un, a-kickin' her in the belly when she were in the family way."
"Hesh your mouth, Doke!" Ivy said.
"'My name's Yancy/" Gid started rumbling. "'I'm a widdy
man, a grass-widdy man. Ivy, I think you 'ud suit me good.
We orter marry.'"
Everyone was roaring with laughter by this time, and Ivy
began to repeat what the stranger had said to her: "Them was
the very words he said. That there's jest the way he spoke hit."
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
This Day and Time
1. What do you learn about Ivy Ingoldsby and her friends as
you read about the birthday party at Ivy's house?
2. Describe the custom which Ivy and the others perform at
Old Mag's party.
3. Why does Jack Yancy come to Ivy's house and what does
he offer her? Do you think she was tempted by this offer?
Explain.
4. Jack Yancy makes a very straightforward proposal to Ivy.
Is this the kind of proposal you would make or like to
receive? Explain.
�No, 4
ANNE ARMSTRONG
135
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
MILDRED HAUN (1911-1966)
A native of Hamblen County, Tennessee, Mildred Haun
grew up in the Hoot Owl District of Cocke County. She lived
there in the Smoky Mountains until she moved to Franklin,
Tennessee, where she attended high school and prepared for
college. At Vanderbilt, she studied with the famous Southern
poets John Crowe Ransom and Donald Davidson. After completing her M.A. at Vanderbilt, she studied for a year at the
University of Iowa.
For subject matter, Haun always returned to what she
knew best—the people in Cocke County. Her stories focus on
the hardship and cruelty of life in her region. Her collection of
stories The Hawk's Done Gone was published in 1941. It is the
only book she published in her lifetime. These searing stories
arise from a dark and fascinating world where superstition and
the supernatural are dominant forces.
In the title story from The Hawk's Done Gone the narrator
stands helpless while her husband and son yield her priceless
heirlooms to an antique collector. To her, each piece represents
her life. As she sees these reminders carried away, she is powerless. We see her slowly losing her grip on life and reality, and
giving in to despair.
�MILDRED HAUN
137
From The Hawk's Done Gone
I wonder why Ad and Linus never tried to sell me off to
them hunters for old things. I would be a sight for somebody
to look at. Big and motley and rough-looking. Old and still
strong for my age. I miss the things they have sold. These newfangled things are weak. They make me feel weak too. But I
ought not to be setting here nursing this old Bible. I ought to
get out and pick some sallet for supper.
The Bible is about the only thing I have left, though. I
thought I couldn't thole it when Ad and Linus first started selling off my stuff. I hate them folks that come around hunting
for things to put in the Smoky Mountain Museum. And I nigh
hate Linus for letting them have my things. Linus is Ad's
youngest boy by his first old woman and he has been spoiled
rotten. Ad is the one that spoiled him too. Ad has turned
everything over to him and let him run it to suit hisself—my
own stuff too.
William Wayne was the only one of them antique hunters
that was decent. Him and that painted-up woman he called
Miss Robinson come together. I recollect that first day when
they come. I was bent over the tub washing. Miss Robinson,
she strutted up like she thought she was something on a stick,
all dyked out in a purple silk dress and spike-heeled shoes. The
first thing she did was to commence complaining about having
to walk through the mud.
Miss Robinson's old hawk eyes seed everything I had. She
got around Linus and got nigh everything I wanted to keep.
She picked out the things she wanted. Looked at both of my
corded bedsteads. One of them wasn't in very good shape, she
said, and she didn't know whether she would take it or not. I
felt like giving her a piece of my mind. And I did flare up a little. I looked at her straight and I said, "Who said anything
about you taking either one of them? Them is the first
bedsteads my pa ever made—made them for him and Ma to
start housekeeping on. I was born in this one hyear and all my
youngons were born in it."
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
I recollect the way I said it to her. I recollect the way William Wayne looked—almost like the soldier boy looked at me
that day—that first day. William Wayne had brown eyes—big
brown eyes that smiled as much as his mouth did. He put me
in mind of the soldier, smiling all the time and talking so gentle.
But Charles would be old by now. Old enough to be dead. He
was older than me back then. I was just fifteen year old and he
was a full-grown man. At least he was old enough to be out
fighting the Yankees. At first I thought William Wayne might
be Charles's boy maybe. But then I knowed Charles wouldn't
ever have any other boy. William Wayne had pity for me and
he hated to take my bedsteads away.
It didn't matter who had pity, though, for Linus and Miss
Robinson made the bargain. The very next day Miss Robinson
would send a wagon up here with two brought-on bedsteads,
pretty ones, she said, to swop for my two wild-cherry ones.
And nigh all my quilts too. That huzzy said she would take
all the pretty ones. Said some of them were mighty dirty but
she could have them cleaned. My "Harp of Columbia." Of
course, Miss Robinson's hawk eyes got set on it the very first
thing. The one I was piecing on when Charles come.
I was setting in here in the big house piecing on it when I
heard the soldiers walk up into the yard—setting here in the
old hickory rocking chair with Ma's red-and-tan checked
homespun shawl around my shoulders. I kept it in my hand
when I started to get the water for them. I held it all the time
while Charles went to the spring. He looked at the quilt when
he come back.
"What's that you are making there?" he asked. He took
hold of it and fingered it like it was a piece of gold. "I never
could handle them little squares and three-cornered pieces
with my big fingers," he said. And his hands were big. But I
knowed right then I wasn't afeard of Charles.
I could tell from the way he kept looking at me he thought
I was pretty too. He didn't tell me till all the other soldiers went
over in the horse lot to catch up Old Kate. He didn't come right
out plain and tell me then. "I'll bet your name is Edith—or
�MILDRED HAUN
139
Mary one."
"Huh uh—Mary's just part of it."
"Mine is Charles—Charles Williams. What is the rest of
yours?"
"Hit's Dorthula—Mary Dorthula White."
"It's pretty too." In that deep voice. He kept feeling of the
quilt. And looking at me. "Does that little red blanket on your
shoulders keep you warm?"
That "Harp of Columbia" quilt was the one I always held
in my lap and worked on when anybody come to see me during
the while Joe was growing inside me. I told Joe about using it
to hide him. Joe thought a heap of that quilt. I think it was the
prettiest one I ever made. With Joe's stitches on it My
stitches—short and straight. And Joe's over there in the
corner—long and crooked. Miss Robinson didn't take notice
of them, I reckon. But somebody took Joe's stitches out, I know,
before they hung it up for folks to look at. Nobody else would
care. But I would rather had the hair pulled out of my head
than had Joe's stitches pulled out of that quilt. The way he
looked up at me with them eyes he had—Charles's eyes—and
begged me to let him quilt. I couldn't help but let him do it.
"And you won't pull mine out, will you, Ma?" I promised him
his stitches never would be pulled out.
That night, after Miss Robinson and William Wayne left,
while Ad and Linus were both out of the room, I set there on
the bed and run my fingers over Joe's stitches. I reckon they
wouldn't be counted pretty stitches by anyone else. I felt like
getting inside the feather tick and being took off too. I couldn't
sleep that night. I laid awake and squeezed that quilt in my
hand.
It was lucky for me the next day. Ruby Arwood was called
to straw and I had to be over there with Ruby all day. When I
come in that night it seemed more different from home than
ever. Nearly all my things gone—spinning wheel, warping
bars and everthing. Even my big bone knitting needles, and
my tatting shuttle that I made for myself. I didn't give up then
and I am not going to give up now. Dona Fawver will be dying
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
pretty soon and Dona couldn't stand for anybody to lay her out
save me. I ought to go see her today.
I couldn't help but see the bedsteads the first thing when I
come in the room that evening. There was that big old brass
bed, all scarred up, setting over there in the corner, and that little old rickety bent up green one in front of the window. Both
of them had the rods so scarred up they looked like they had
been through the war. No telling who had used them. No telling what kind of old dirty folks had been sleeping in them. But
Linus was setting in there bragging about them being so pretty. New stuff, he said, brought-on stuff. One of them was
worth a dozen home-made things, he said.
I didn't look at them any more than I had to. I went on and
got supper. When I turned the beds down I seed they had some
big old dirty-looking gray blankets on them. I felt of them.
They weren't even wool—just plain cotton. They were somebody else's old things too. I would rather sleep on the floor
than to sleep on them old pads with cotton all wadded up in
them. Ad and Linus said they were what all folks used that
weren't old fogies. But I ought to be hunting the guineas' nestes. And I promised Mollie McGregor my receipt for corn
relish.
It didn't seem right with them bedsteads in the room. And
my little green and gold mug gone. It was my ma's mug. I
used to think it so pretty. The time I had the measles Ma let me
drink water out of it. I got thirsty every few minutes till Ma
caught on and took to bringing it in the dipper.
I used to get down and rub my hands over it. That was
after Charles drunk out of it. I fixed Charles some peach brandy in it. And some wild-cherry wine one night. Charles liked
that wine. I had it hid out in the yard under that rock. I dug a
hole there and had it in it. The Rebels never did one time think
about looking there. Charles got spoiled to it, and he wanted
wild-cherry wine every time he would come back. "In that
green pitcher with gold houses on it," he would say. "In that
pitcher lined with gold."
I let him have wine too. It seemed like it made his brown
�MILDRED HAUN
141
eyes sparkle more. Charles had dark eyes, and hair all combed
back slick as ice. He was tall—big and tall. That was what
made me take to him. I felt stronger when I was close to him.
When he handed me the dipper his hand touched mine and it
made me feel strong. His hands were big, but they weren't
rough. They didn't have any big old knotty veins showing
under the skin. They had nigh the strength of Letitia Edes's.
Sometimes I thought Charles would mash me, the way he held
me.
I was fixing to scour that second time when Miss Robinson
come hunting for what she called antiques. I had sandrock beat
up and scattered all over the floor and I had the water nigh hot
enough to commence. What little furniture I had left was out
in the yard. Miss Robinson's eye took to the trundle bed. She
said she would give Linus a dollar for it. Said she guessed she
could pay a dollar even if it was a mighty old and wore-looking. It made me hurt inside when I seed Miss Robinson hand
Linus the money. My eyes and nose stung like they had pepper in them. Seemed like my heart was trying to swell up and
bust.
It was the bed Grandma had slept on when she was little.
Then Ma, and then me, on up till I was fifteen year old. Joe
slept on it all his life up till I married Ad. Them little horses'
heads cut out on the head and foot. I couldn't bear to watch
them tote it out to the wagon.
That little old bed seemed like it was just as much a part of
me as my own right hand. Ma used to pull it out from under
her own bed and tuck me in. "Good night, Mary Dorthula.
Goodnight. Sleep tight. All right." I would lay there and look
out the window. Lay there and watch the witches make tea.
Lay there good and warm and think about princes that would
come riding by someday.
It was the trundle bed that me and the soldier boy piled
down on—Joe's pa. I loved Charles, and I don't care what
other f olkses have said about me because I had Joe before I married Ad. I wonder if the Yankees killed him. He said he would
come back as soon as the war was over. One of my own
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
brothers might have killed him, there's not any telling. I
wonder how Charles would look with his eyes shut and all the
color gone out of his face. And not able to talk. I don't want
to see him that way. I wonder how he would think I looked
that way. He talked about the color in my cheeks.
Charles wasn't like the other Rebels. I don't hold any
grudgment against him for what he did. It wasn't anybody's
fault but mine. There is not any fault to it—I love Charles. He
made the rest of the Rebels not take Old Kate, the only horse
left here on the place. And he make them shut up their mouths
when they went to talking blackgyuardish in front of me and
trying to jest me. Charles was gentle. His voice was deep as a
well, and everthing he said come from down in him. It didn't
sound so hollow like it come from the roof of his mouth.
Somehow or nother I didn't feel afeared of the Rebels with
Charles in the bunch. Even if I was here by myself. It was the
day that Belle Wisecarver lay a corpse and Aunt Cindy—Aunt
Cindy was staying with me while both my brothers were away
fighting the Rebels—she went over to Wisecarvers' that evening and said she would be needed that night. She said if any
soldiers should happen to come by, for me to let them have
whatever they wanted.
It was along about sundown when the soldiers come. I was
setting all scrooched up in that hickory rocking chair with Ma's
red-and-tan checked homespun shawl throwed around my
shoulders. Sewing on my "Harp of Columbia" quilt. I had got
to the curve of the harp and I couldn't make the curve without
puckering the thing to save my life. Them three-cornered
pieces wouldn't fit together. I had just said to myself that I
was going to put it up and go after the cow.
Just as I started to fold it up I heard a big commotion out
in the front yard. It sounded like a bunch of cattle coming up.
"Hales' blamed old cattle out again," I said to myself and raised
up to look out. Instead of it being cattle, it was men—soldier
men. They were already on the porch.
Seeing them made me feel like I was being stuck all over
with pins. I stood there by the side of the chair and looked like
�MILDRED HAUN
143
a scared deer, I guess. I didn't even offer to move. They come
right on in the door. And the man with the red mustache, he
said, "We want some fresh water." I held the quilt in my hands
and went out on the back porch after the bucket. "I'll go to the
spring and get fresh water," I turned around and said. That
was when I first took note of Charles.
'Til go. Give me the bucket." He took the bucket out of my
hand. "Where is it?"
"Hit's right over there under that oak tree."
"Here, you hold the dipper."
The other Rebels searched around in the house while Charles went to the spring. They wanted to take them two hams
out of the smokehouse. Charles got back in time to stop them
from that. "Just leave them where they are," he said in that
voice. All the other soldiers must have been afeared of Charles. They all minded what he said for them to do. Then the soldier men went over there and looked at Old Kate. Held open
her mouth, looked at her feet, and everything. Some of them
thought they ought to take her; some thought she wasn't worth
taking.
Charles stood and talked to me during the while. He run
his hand through my hair and said it was the softest hair he
ever seed. I've always took good care of my hair ever since
then. Charles seemed to forget all the other men, and he stayed
there on the back porch with me. He kept on looking at my
hair. I ought to get it combed now. "Little Red Ridinghood
wore a shawl like that," Charles said. That shawl come in
handy to wrap Joe up in too.
Directly the other Rebels come out of the barn lot and one
of them was setting up on Old Kate. They had the bridle and
everything. Well, Charles went out there and pulled that man
off. He opened the gate and turned Old Kate back into the lot.
Hung the bridle up there on the post just like he was at home.
That was another thing I liked about Charles. He did everything easy—just like a red bird. It wasn't any trouble for him
to move around from one place to another. I didn't know
anybody could ever be that big without being gawlky.
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
Charles went on away with the rest of the soldiers. I stood
on the edge of the porch and watched him out of sight. I could
tell from the way he kept looking around that he would come
back to see me. He asked me out there on the back porch who
I lived with. "Aunt Cindy/11 told him. "Aunt Cindy stays here
with me while the boys are away fighting the Rebels. But she
has gone over to Wisecarvers' because Belle is dead."
"Is she coming back tonight?"
"Shell be needed to set up with the corpse."
"Are you afraid?"
"I'm not afraid of you." I don't know what made me give
him an answer like that. I reckon it was just because I wanted
to.
It was a little after dark when Charles come back that night
and there were a few stars shining in the sky. I went to bed just
as it got good dark. Before I fixed the bed I went out on the
porch and looked up the Lead Hill to see if I could see Charles
coming. I listened but I couldn't hear a sign of anything. So I
pulled out the trundle bed and crawled in. I was still sleeping
in the trundle bed then.
I was a-laying there. The stars were coming out pretty thick
by now. The bull frogs were just beginning to holler so I
knowed it was as dark as it would be. I laid there waiting. I
just had a feeling. Directly it come. "Mary Dorthula," and then,
"Hello."
"Come on in, Charles." I knowed in reason it was Charles.
"I slipped off. The others were asleep." When he talked in
the dark his voice sounded like a hen clucking to her little
chickens.
Charles kept on coming back. Aunt Cindy didn't say anything against it. For nine straight nights he come back. The
Rebels stayed in the mountains that long, hunting for folkses
that were hiding out to keep from joining either one of the
sides. Folkses like the ones that dodged and went over into old
Kentuck.
That was one reason I never have told anybody who Joe's
pa was. Charles being a Rebel and both of my brothers
�MILDRED HAUN
145
Yankees. Folks around would have hated Joe sure enough. Joe
wasn't like other bastards. But I reckon it was a good thing he
died or got killed when he did.
I was never ashamed of having Joe before I got married. He
favored his pa. At least he had his eyes and pert nigh his
voice—and his protecting ways. Always tried to save me from
something. Like the mammy hen saying, "Hide in the weeds.
Til fight the hawk."
Charles would have come back and married me if it had
been so he could. That last night, he told me he would come
the next night if they didn't march on. Said if they did march
on he would come back soon as the war was over, or as soon as
it was so he could come. I kept looking for him and kept high
hopes for seven whole years. But he ain't come yet.
That is the reason I can't help but believe he was killed by
the Yankees. He loved me. And he would have come back if
something hadn't happened to him. He said he would, said I
was the sweetest girl he ever seed. Told me that night it was
getting a little coolish and I had a fire. The fire shined against
his face and I could see it in the dark. He said he liked my yellow curly hair and blue eyes.
But I liked Charles's brown hair and eyes and his dark skin
better. His skin was dark as a piece of fresh sod. I liked to run
my hands over it. It was just natural dark. It wasn't made that
way by the sun. Charles wouldn't have said he was coming
back if he hadn't been aiming on doing it. He didn't talk with
just his tongue.
Charles said he liked that trundle bed. "It lays so good."
Every night he would sleep with me till nigh daylight. Then I
would wake him up and he would go back. "I'll be back." He
told me that every night. He told me that the ninth night he was
here too. And I laid awake all night the next night waiting for
him to holler, "Mary Dorthula, hello." I liked to hear him holler
that. Like an old hen calling to her little chickens, "Come on
here now, so the hawk won't get you."
I never did get to go anywhere with Charles, to any poke
suppers or anything like that. We had to be sneaking as
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
'possums for fear the other Rebels would catch on. Maybe they
did. Maybe that is the reason he never did come back.
But the third night he come he set out there on the edge of
my bed and told me stories, ones he had read, he said. The one
about Bob and Julia. Robert loved Julia. "Just like I love you."
And I couldn't help but cry when Robert got killed and didn't
get to marry Julia. But I didn't want Charles to see me cry.
That was the night I had a fire. It was the first real cold
night we had had that fall and I built a fire late that evening.
When dark come I pulled the trundle bed out in front of the
fireplace and laid down on it. It was a dark night and cold too.
I didn't know whether he would come or not that night. Directly, the frogs begun to holler. I looked out the window and I
couldn't see but two stars anywhere. Just two stars in the sky,
it was so dark and cold.
"MaryDorthula. Hello."
"Come on in, Charles."
"It's warm in here."
"I'm proud you come."
"I like the firelight. I can see your eyes."
"Set down, Charles."
"This trundle bed. It is soft."
Charles set down on the edge of the bed with his face
toward me and his knees upon the bed. And told me them
stories. I listened—"And Rob loved Julia just like—well, he
liked curly hair." And he said speeches to me. Poems, he called
them. I watched his face in the firelight. His mouth said,
"Whom there was none to praise and very few to love." And
his eyes looked at me and I knowed what he meant. But he just
didn't come out plain and say it. I liked it that way.
Charles tried to sing some too. But he couldn't sing as well
as he talked. I don't believe he knowed much to sing.
"The Yankee run,
The Yankee flew,
The Yankee tore
His shirttail in two."
Charles wouldn't have ever run from anybody or anything.
�MILDRED HAUN
147
The next night was cold too. It was dark as pitch again. I
didn't lay down. I set by the fire and played the accordion and
sung. I didn't hear him come through the cow-field gate that
night. There he stood in the doorway before I knowed it. I was
just singing away:
"Then to the wars, to the wars he did go
To see whether he could forget his love or no.
For seven long years he served unto his king
And in seven more years was returning home again."
Of course, I had been singing that over and over ever since
it got good dark. I wanted to be sure and be singing it when
he come. Well, Charles, he stood there in the door. He looked
like he didn't know whether to run out the door or jump up
into the air. We looked at one another.
"Mary Dorthula."
"I didn't mean to be singing that."
"Sing it again."
Charles set there on the trundle bed by the side of me and
made me sing it over and over till he learned it. "Just one more
time, and then I'll know it." And he didn't tell me till the last
night that he had been standing out there at the door ever since
good dark listening to me sing that over and over.
That was the time he made me talk all night. "As soon as
you tell me one more story I'll go to sleep." But I knowed he
wouldn't. I didn't want him to. Just some little old hant tales
was all I knowed. I told them till away up into the night, after
the fire had died down and it was so dark you couldn't see
across the room.
Charles would hold his breath sometimes. He liked the tale
about the woman making fire at midnight in that old house.
And the one about the man going to give his daughter to the
boy who could find water on his place. "I'm not sleepy." I
could tell he liked for me to talk. He set a heap a store by me.
And I set a heap a store by him, and by the trundle bed on account of him. It was cold when the fire died out. "I'll have to
get another quilt," I said.
"Where was the one you were making on?"
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
'Til soon have it pieced." But it wasn't soon. And now.
What is wrong with my eyes? No. The sun has just gone
down behind Letitia Edes Mountain. It was about this time of
evening when the soldiers come marching up. Time to go milk.
"We want a drink of water. . . .Little Red Ridinghood. . .The
squares are so little."
Of course Ad and Linus didn't think about things like that
when Miss Robinson come along. The trundle bed was just a
trundle bed to them. Ad knowed Joe had slept on it up till he
was a great big hulk of a boy. But that didn't bother Ad any
more than a flea bite.
It made me feel numb all over when I seed what Linus was
doing. I went back in the kitchen and hid my face in my coattail till Ad and Linus come back from carrying it out to the
wagon. I could tell them the place would never be the same
without it. That trundle bed had been a part of every speck of
bliss I had ever had.
All the time Ad and Linus were selling off my old stuff they
were cutting logs so they could build that fine new house. A
fine new house—that was all they could talk about. I heard it
till the words jumped up and down in the middle of my head
and fit with one another. Ad and Linus talked about it more
than Barshia had back when he had it on his mind. I never did
believe they would get it built till I seed them put the top on it.
They fooled me one time. They finally got all the logs sawed
and hauled. They took them up to Jim Heath's sawmill and
swopped them for planks—thin planks made out of pine. Not
good oak like the logs they cut and took up there.
I stood it all right while they were building on the house. I
just didn't watch them much. They set it up right in front of
my log house. Right in front of it. It covered all the pretty level
part of the yard. But the house was plumb out on the edge of
the bank. That made it look like a chicken coop on top of a mole
hill.
I tried to keep my mind off it as much as I could while they
were building it. It didn't take them any time to put it up—just
two days. Little old light thing. It will just about topple over
�MILDRED HAUN
149
if ever the wind comes up the hollow. I won't much care. What
is that I hear? Sounds like the wind blowing. I wish it would
and blow it over. Cattle? Hales' cattle? Them soldier boys.
That is it. Til go. . . here, you hold the dipper." Like a hen
saying, "Let me kill the bee before you swallow it"
Both days that they worked on the house a big crowd of
menfoiks come to help. And a big crowd of womenfolks come
in to help me with the cooking. I was proud to see them come.
I listened to them talk instead of watching the menfolks work
on the house. I like to hear womenfolks talk. After hearing
Charles talk all other menfolks sound harsh and hateful.
The womenfolks talked about everything them two days.
They were honest. They didn't wish harm to anybody. Seems
like I can hear them now:
Granny, they say Penelope Courtney is going to need you
again soon—you'll have to start a new life with the new
house—the men are working like ticks in a tar bucket—"I'll be
back." Granny, what happened to the little green and gold
pitcher you had?—Have you heard about Arwoods' cow adying?—Sue Ella says her hens are not laying to do any good,
must be bewitched—"I slipped off."—Have you heard that new
song about the flying man's baby that got killed?—Do you like
your new bedsteads better than your old ones?—Did you
know that Brocks and Whetsels are at outs again?—What do
you pack your clean clothes away in now?—"They were all asleep."—I've been sending milk and butter over to the Arwoods—Like a hen saying, "Come on out of the weeds now,
the hawk's done gone."—How much did you get for your ma's
three-cornered cupboard?—Wonder who will give Arwoods a
calf to bring up in place of the cow that died?—Are you getting so new-fangled you aren't going to spin any more?—I seed
the Smoky Mountain folks pass with your ash hopper—Hit's
a pity Joe is not here—Wonder what ever become of Wilbur?—
What ever become of that butter dish Joe used to cry for the
knobs off of?—"Ma, break me off them marbles, will you?"—
"This trundle bed it lays so good."
I listened to them all day. They meant well. But, of course,
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
they didn't know everything. I would hate not to ever see any
of them again. Ruby Arwood will be having a baby soon and
then Penelope. Dona Fawver will be dying soon too. And I
will have to lay Dona out. And Teelie Edes—I want to see if
she has got any witch marks on her. No telling how long I will
have to stay in this world. I will have to go on doctoring till I
learn somebody else how to take my place. But it is time to put
supper on now, and I meant to pick a mess of sallet. I wish I
had some gumption in me. This old new-fangled chair—not
like the hickory rocker I was setting in. 'Tm not sleepy."
Then the menfolks tore my house down. They got me
moved into the new house and Ad and Linus norrated it
around they were going to tear the old one down. A big bunch
of men come in one day and they set to work on it. The womenfolks come back again too. I don't believe I could have tholed
it if they hadn't. They seemed like they understood more that
day. They didn't make any name of my old things being gone.
They sung funny songs and told tales and laughed all the time
both of the days they were here. Them asking me riddles and
things sort of kept my mind off the house being torn down.
Imah Baines sung one of the songs I learned Charles—the one
that Charles said he liked next best:
"Come, rede us fathers, come rede us mothers,
The Yankee tore his shirttail in two."
"Just sing it one more time. I'll know it then."
Grandma had been born in that house. Pa was born there.
Ma was carried over the door sill and swept the walls down
with a sage-grass broom. Charles said when he come back he
wanted to live up here at the end of the hollow in that house
forever. "And slop the hogs and things....Just put that ham
back.. .Raise hogs and boys."
Them things didn't matter to Ad and Linus. They tore it
down a log at a time. They had a job of it too. The logs were
big. I managed to stay as busy as I could. And I kept cotton in
my ears part of the time to keep from hearing them tear the logs
�MILDRED HAUN
151
apart. I couldn't help but hear when they pushed over the stick
chimney. I used to hold Joe's hand and we would stand and
watch the smoke come twirling out of it. Joe would stand as
still as a froze snake and watch it. MWe help make the sky, don't
we, Ma?"
Ad and the men had a big time when they found some notes
that Tiny Brock had wrote to Joe at school. Joe had stuck them
in a chink there in the wall. Linus read them out loud to all
them old men. "Hello, Dern Sweetheart," they all started off.
There wasn't e'er a time he didn't put in the word "dern." That
meant Tiny was his secret sweetheart. He didn't want Miss
Omie to know it, and he didn't want anyone else to know it.
But their sparking wasn't dern at all, of course. It is hard to
keep a fire smothered—the blaze will always show. Charles
never did call me his dern sweetheart. But I was. He had to
keep it a secret or the other Rebels wouldn't have let him come.
And he never did write to me. Never had any chance to. But
the way he said my name, "Mary Dorthula. Hello." And the
way he looked at me and didn't say anything. Words don't
mean much anyhow. You're safe as long as you stay under my
wing.
The men all laughed at Joe's little notes when they heard
them. They pitched them out on the ground and piled logs on
top of them. They found a little speech too. One Joe had hid
there. His teacher cut it out of something and give it to him to
learn and say. He used to say it over to me. "The spider wove
his silvery web until his work was done." Hit was pretty. And
Joe's voice sounded almost like Charles's did when he said
speeches. I'll fight the hawk, Mary Dorthula.
Joe had hid that speech in the chink and it had slipped back
furder than he aimed for it to. They pitched it out on the
ground. They pitched everything on the ground. Joe loved the
old house. I told him one day what Charles said about the
house that first day when he seed it. "It is just made to fit into
the shape of this hollow. No other house would look right here.
It will be here when I come back... .It will always be here... .I'll
be back."
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
Tm proud you come."
This old new-fangled chair. Cheap. It is enough to break
a body's neck. It is getting dusk outside. Time to have milking done. It will soon be dark. Time for Charles and Joe to
come in from loafing at the store.
The last evening the men worked on the house, all the
womenfolks went home and left me here by myself. Ad
hollered for me to fetch some water. I took that old tin bucket. Water don't taste good out of it like it did out of my staved
bucket—the one they sold.
I took the tin bucket and went. As I started down the steps
I seed they had the house about tore down—just hadn't moved
the sills yet. I sort of hoped they would let the sills stay there.
I had heard Grandpa talk about them sills. The best that could
be made, he said. It took six men to lift one of them. They had
stayed solid even if Ad hadn't patched the roof, and the rain
had come right on through. I feared Grandpa would rise up
out of his grave when the sills were moved. Charles said there
wasn't any such material as that nowadays. "They'll be here
always. I'll be here always. Hogs and boys." I'll bet the old
sow is hungry. It is dark outside. It gets dark soon in the fall
of the year this way. I like long nights. I wouldn't want to be
in a place where there never come any night.
I tried not to look at the pile of logs. When I got over to the
spring something made me look back. I seed that big pile of
logs there to be burnt. Somehow or nother, thinking about it
took nigh all the strength I had in me. I set down there on the
bank of the branch.
I set down without thinking. I don't know how long I set
there. Then I heard Ad yelling, "What in the hell are you doing?
You'd be a good one to send after water if the devil's guts were
on fire." "Here, you hold the dipper." I was numb all over. I
had to try two or three times before I could even drag myself
up. I finally managed to pick the bucket up and start.
Listen. Yeah, that is him. The cow-field gate. Opening.
Shut. Ad and Linus. It is time. Loafing at the store all day.
And his shirt not patched. "Mary Dorthula. Hello." "I'm
�MILDRED HAUN
153
proud you come." "Little Red Ridinghood."
When I got to the house with the water I seed Ad and Linus
take hold of the last sill. They couldn't budge it. Nigh all the
men had to help. I was holding the bucket for Old Man Arwood to get him a drink. That strength in Charles's hands.
And when I seed them lift that sill up and lay it over out of the
way, something went wrong with me. I don't know what it
was. But I went weak all over. And that bucket fell out of my
hand. "You hold the dipper. I'll take the bucket.11 It hit the
ground kerwhollop. I sort of went blank there for a short span.
I hear something on the porch. Them back. And supper
not ready. I am a little chilly. The fire. I guess I had better
punch it. My neck—it is so limber. This chair. "Just one more
time and then I'll know it."
But I come back to myself before anybody took note of it, I
think. Old Man Arwood said he would take the bucket back
to the spring. Til go. Where is it?"
"Right there under that tree."
"Here, you hold the dipper."
I reckon the men just thought I was awkward and dropped
the bucket. I believe Ad sort of noticed me. I don't know
though.
There are two stars. Just two in the sky. It is dark tonight.
And cold. And I didn't get his overalls patched. Them frogs.
They know it is time. I will punch up the fire. I'm tired of this
chair anyhow—lets my head fall over like I've got the limber
neck.
"MaryDorthula. Hello."
"Come on in... .I'll soon have it done."
"I slipped off... that little red blanket...the others were
sleeping."
"I'm proud you come.. .1 didn't mean to be singing."
"Again.. .But if I touch you—"
"This trundle bed, Charles, it lays so good."
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
The Hawk's Done Gone
1. What did Mary Dorthula White's possessions mean to the
antique hunters? To Ad and Linus? To Mary Dorthula?
2. What was Mary Dorthula's biggest concern related to the
loss of her "Harp of Columbia" quilt?
3.
In what ways were Wayne Williams, the antiquer, and
Charles, the Rebel soldier, similar?
�JAMES STILL
155
JAMES STILL (1906- )
James Still, who was born in Double Creek, Alabama, has
been called "the psalmist of the mountains." A 1929 graduate
of Lincoln Memorial University, Still earned an M. A. at Vanderbilt University in 1930. He has lived since 1939 in an old log
house on Dead Mare Branch near the Hindman Settlement
School in Kentucky. Before devoting himself to writing full
time, Mr. Still was the librarian at the settlement school. He also
taught for ten years at Morehead State University.
He has published poetry, short stories, books for children,
and novels. His short stories have been anthologized in such
collections as the Best American Short Stories and the O. Henry
Memorial Prize Stories. Mr. Still is also a frequent commentator
on National Public Radio.
When James Still turned 80 on July 16,1986, the Hindman
Settlement School threw a party to honor the man and his work.
Several hundred people gathered from all over to pay tribute
to one of the Appalachian region's finest authors.
When his novel River of Earth was published 46 years ago,
Time magazine called it a "work of art." It won the Southern
Authors award. Still in print, the book continues to attract
readers and critical acclaim. This excerpt shows why.
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
From River of Earth
The mines on Little Car closed in March. Winter had been
mild, the snows scant and frost-thin upon the ground. Robins
stayed the season through, and sapsuckers came early to drill
the black birch beside our house. Though Father had worked
in the mines, we did not live in the camps. He owned the scrap
of land our house stood upon, a garden patch, and the black
birch that was the only tree on all the barren slope above Blackjack. There were three of us children running barefoot over the
puncheon floors, and since the year's beginning Mother carried a fourth balanced on one hip as she worked over the rusty
stove in the shedroom. There were eight in the family to cook
for. Two of Father's cousins, Harl and Tibb Logan, came with
the closing of the mines and did not go away.
"It's all we can do to keep bread in the children's mouths,"
Mother told Father. "Even if they are your blood kin, we can't
feed them much longer." Mother knew the strings of shucky
beans dried in the fall would not last until a new garden could
be raised. A half-dozen soup bones and some meat rinds were
left in the smokehouse; skippers had got into a pork shoulder
during the unnaturally warm December, and it had to be
thrown away. Mother ate just enough for the baby, picking at
her food and chewing it in little bites. Father ate sparingly,
cleaning his plate of every crumb. His face was almost as thin
as Mother's. Harl and Tibb fed well, and grumblingly, upon
beans and corn pone. They kicked each other under the table,
carrying on a secret joke from day to day, and grimacing at us
as they ate. We were pained, and felt foolish because we could
not join in their laughter. "You'll have to ask them to go,"
Mother told Father. "These lazy louts are taking food out of
the baby's mouth. What we have won't last forever." Father
did not speak for a long time; then he said simply: "I can't turn
my kin out." He would say no more. Mother began to feed us
between meals, putting less on the table. They would chuckle
without saying anything. Sometimes one of them would make
a clucking noise in his throat, but none of us laughed, not even
�JAMES STILL
157
Euly. We would look at Father, his chin drooped over his shirt
collar, his eyes lowered. And Fletch's face would be as grave
as Father's. Only the baby's face would become bird-eyed and
bright.
When Uncle Samp, Father's great-uncle, came for a couple
of days and stayed on after the week-end was over, Mother
spoke sternly to Father. Father became angry and stamped his
foot on the floor. "As long as we've got a crust, it'll never be
said I turned my folks from my door," he said. We children
were frightened. We had never seen Father storm like this, or
heard him raise his voice at Mother. Father was so angry he
took his rifle-gun and went off into the woods for the day,
bringing in four squirrels for supper. He had barked them,
firing at the tree trunk beside the animals' heads, and bringing
them down without a wound.
Uncle Samp was a large man. His skin was soft and white,
with small pink veins webbing his cheeks and nose. There
were no powder burns on his face and hands, and no coal dust
ground into the heavy wrinkles of his neck. He had a thin gray
mustache, over a hand-span in length, wrapped like a loose
cord around his ears. He vowed it had not been trimmed in
thirty years. It put a spell on us all, Father's cousins included.
We looked at the mustache and felt an itching uneasiness. That
night at the table Harl and Tibb ate squirrel's breasts and
laughed, winking at each other as they brushed up brown
gravy on pieces of corn pone. Uncle Samp told us what this
good eating put him in mind of, and he bellowed, his laughter
coming deep out of him. The rio lamp trembled on the table.
We laughed, watching his face redden with every gust, watching the mustache hang miraculously over his ears. Suddenly
my brother Fletch began to cry over his plate. His shins had
been kicked under the table. Mother's face paled, her eyes becoming hard and dark. She gave the baby to Father and took
Fletch into another room. We ate quietly during the rest of the
meal, Father looking sternly down the table.
After supper Mother and Father took a lamp and went out
to the smokehouse. We followed, finding them bent over the
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
meat box. Father dug into the salt with a plow blade, Mother
holding the light above him. He uncovered three curled rinds
of pork. We stayed in the smokehouse a long time, feeling contented and together. The room was large, and we jumped
around like savages and swung head-down from the rafters.
Father crawled around on his hands and knees with the
baby on his back. Mother sat on a sack of black walnuts and
watched us. "Hit's the first time we've been alone in two
months," she said. "If we lived in here, there wouldn't be room
for anybody else. And it would be healthier than that leaky
shack we stay in." Father kept crawling with the baby, kicking
up his feet like a spoiled nag. Fletch hurt his leg again. He
gritted his teeth and showed us the purple spot where he had
been kicked. Father rubbed the bruise and made it feel better.
'Their hearts are black as Satan," Mother said. "I'd rather live
in this smokehouse than stay down there with them. A big
house draws kinfolks like a horse draws nitflies."
It was late when we went to the house. The sky was overcast and starless. During the night, rain came suddenly, draining through the rotten shingles. Father got up in the dark and
pushed the beds about. He bumped against the footboard and
wakened me. I heard Uncle Samp snoring in the next room.
They were mightily tickled about something. They laughed in
long, choking spasms. The sound came to me as though afar
off, and I reckon they had their heads under the covers so as
not to waken Uncle Samp. I listened and wondered how it
was possible to laugh with all the dark and rain.
Morning was bright and rain-fresh. The sharp sunlight fell
slantwise upon the worn limestone earth of the hills, and our
house squatted weathered and dark on the bald slope. Yellowbellied sapsuckers drilled their oblong holes in the black birch
by the house, now leafing from tight-curled buds. Fletch and
I had climbed into the tree before breakfast, and when Mother
called us we were hungry for our boiled wheat.
We were alone at the table, Harl and Tibb having left at
daylight for Blackjack. They had left without their breakfast,
�JAMES STILL
159
and this haste seemed strange to Mother. "This is the first meal
they've missed," she said.
Uncle Samp slept on in the next room, his head buried
under a quilt to keep the light out of his face. Mother fed the
baby at her breast, standing by Father at the table. We ate our
wheat without sugar, and when we had finished, Mother said
to Father: "We have enough bran for three more pans of bread.
If the children eat it by themselves, it might last a week. It won't
last us all more than three meals. Your kin will have to go
today."
Father put his spoon down with a clatter. "My folks eat
when we eat," he said, "and as long as we eat." The corners of
his mouth were drawn tight into his face. His eyes burned, but
there was no anger in them. 'Til get some meal at the store,"
he said.
Mother leaned against the wall, clutching the baby. Her
voice was like ice. "They won't let you have it on credit. You've
tried before. We've got to live small. We've got to start over
again, hand to mouth, the way we began." She laid her hand
upon the air, marking the words with nervous fingers. "We've
got to tie ourselves up in such a knot nobody else can get in."
Father got his hat and stalked to the door. "We've got to do hit
today," she called. But Father was gone, out of the house and
over the hill toward Blackjack.
Mother put the baby in the empty wood box while she
washed dishes. Euly helped her, clearing the table and setting
out a bowl of boiled wheat for Uncle Samp. I went outside with
Fletch, and we were driving the sapsuckers from the birch
when Uncle Samp shouted in the house. His voice crashed
through the wall, pouring between the seamy timbers in raw
blasts of anger. Fletch was up in the tree, near the tiptop, so I
ran ahead of him into the shedroom. Mother stood in the middle of the floor listening. Baby Green jumped up and down in
the wood box. Euly ran behind the stove.
I ran into the room where Uncle Samp was and saw him
stride from the looking glass to the bed. His mouth was slack.
A low growl flowed out of him. He stopped when he saw me,
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
drawing himself up in his wrath. Then I saw his face, and I was
frightened. I was suddenly paralyzed with fear. His face was
fiery, the red web of veins straining in his flesh, and his mustache, which had been cut off within an inch of his lips, sticking out like two small gray horns. He rushed upon me, caught
me up in his arms, and flung me against the wall. I fell upon
the floor, breathless, not uttering a sound. Mother was beside
me in a moment, her hands weak and palsied as she lifted me.
I was only frightened, and not hurt. Mother cried a little,
making a dry sniffling sound through her nose; then she got
up and walked outside and around the house. Uncle Samp
was not in sight. She came back and gave Fletch the key to the
smokehouse. "We're going to move up there,11 she said. "Go
unlock the door." I helped Euly carry the baby out in the wood
box. We set him on the shady side of the woodpile. We began
to move the furniture, putting the smaller things in the
smokehouse, but leaving the chairs, beds, and tables on the
ground halfway between. The stove was heaviest of all, and
still hot. The rusty legs broke off on one side, and the other two
bent under it. We managed to slide it into the yard. Mother
carried the clock and the rio lamp to the smokehouse. The
clock rattled with four pennies Fletch kept inside it.
After everything had been taken out we waited in the backyard while Mother went around the house again, looking off
the hill. Uncle Samp was nowhere in sight, and neither Harl
nor Tibb could be seen. Then she went inside alone. She stayed
a long time. We could hear her moving across the floor. When
she came out and closed the door there was a haze of smoke
behind her, blue and smelling of burnt wood.
In a moment we saw the flames through the back window.
The rooms were lighted up, and fire ran up the walls, eating
into the old timbers. It climbed to the ceiling, burst through
the roof, and ate the rotten shingles like leaves. Fletch and I
watched the sapsuckers fly in noisy haste from the black birch,
and he began to cry hoarsely as the young leaves wilted and
hung limp from scorched twigs. The birch trunk steamed in
the heat.
�JAMES STILL
161
When the flames were highest, leaping through the charred
rafters, a gun fired repeatedly in the valley. Someone there had
noticed the smoke and was arousing the folk along Little Carr
Creek. When they arrived, the walls had fallen in, and Mother
stood among the scattered furnishings, her face calm and triumphant.
River of Earth
1. In this selection Mother and Father both feel a sense of
responsibility to family. Why is this a source of conflict in
the household?
2.
At one point Mother says to Father, "We've got to tie
ourselves up in such a knot nobody else can get in." What
does she mean by this statement?
3. What event prompted Mother to move to the smokehouse?
Was this move a solution to her problems?
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
JESSE STUART (1907-1984)
Jesse Stuart was born in W-Hollow, a farm near Riverton,
Kentucky, and attended a one-room country school which he
later used as the setting for some of his stories. He worked to
put himself through Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee, where James Still and Don West were among his
classmates. He studied for one year at Vanderbuilt University.
There he wrote his autobiography which he later published as
Beyond Dark Hills.
Stuart taught school, which included stints at the American
University in Cairo, Egypt, and at the University of Nevada.
He also farmed, worked in industry, and served in the Navy.
During 1962 and 1963, he served as a specialist abroad for the
Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs.
Jesse Stuart received many honors and awards in all areas
of writing. He appeared on the American literary scene in 1934
with Man With a Bull-Tongue Plow. His poetry, short stories,
and juvenile fiction were very popular and appeared frequently in magazines and literary journals. In 1943, his short story
collection Men of the Mountains won the Academy of Arts and
Sciences Award, and the novel Taps for Private Tussle received
the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Award.
The National Education Association selected The Thread
That Runs So True as the best book of 1949. Stuart also received
the Academy of American Poets Award in 1961. Kentucky
�JESSE STUART
163
honored him with the designation of Poet Laureate in 1954.
This excerpt from Daughter of the Legend is about a young
couple at a worship service where faith is tested.
From Daughter of the Legend
We've got a river to cross and a mountain to climb," Deutsia said. f!We go over to the Clinch right here."
She led the way along the narrow footpath toward the
river.
"How do we cross?" I asked. "Boat?"
Deutsia laughed at my words.
"Ill show you."
On the bank of the Clinch we stood where a tall sycamore
had uprooted and had fallen across two-thirds of the width of
this mountain river. We walked over the body of a giant tree
that had often served as a bridge. I could tell by the way the
bark was worn. We grabbed the bushy leafless top branches
of the tree and held to a branch above us, then walked on as far
as I thought it safe for two people to walk.
"Sit on this limb, pull off your shoes and roll your pant legs
up," she said.
Deutsia started taking off her oxfords.
I rolled my pants until they were tight around my legs.
"Can you hold your shoes and mine?" she asked me.
"I think so," I said.
I held the four shoes by the strings.
"Now keep your hand on my shoulder."
I laid my hand on her shoulder as she lifted her dress and
stepped down from the sycamore top into the water.
"Step where I do," she said. "Be careful."
When I put my foot where she had just put hers, it went
down on a rock. And I followed her, stepping where she
stepped. She was keeping her dress dry, but her hair was dragging the water behind her.
When we reached the river bank, Deutsia shook the water
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
from her hair and we sat on a rock and put our shoes back on.
"Come," Deutsia said gleefully, taking my hand.
I followed her up a path beneath the pines, around and over
the rocks, under the bright-leafed maples, the brown-leafed
white oaks and red-leafed gums.
"I want my pipe and a good smoke," I said when we reached
the top where the wind chilled the sweat on our faces.
"Isn't it wonderful up here?11 Deutsia said.
I struck a match to light my pipe but the wind erased the
flame.
"Too much wind up here. I can't light my pipe."
"We'll fix that"
With her back to the wind she spread her dress, making it
a barrier against the wind so I could light my pipe.
"You know how to do everything," I said.
She smiled.
We hurried over the wind-swept rocks where scrawny
seedling pine needles stuck our legs and huckleberry vines,
sawbriars and greenbriars pulled at our shoelaces. Then we
came to a ridge road where we looked at the setting sun, large
as a spread umbrella and the color of a hot red hollyhock.
"We'll make it on time," she said.
In less than ten minutes we came to a pine grove where dry
pine needles crunched beneath our feet and where within the
dense grove we could hear singing. Our road made a sharp
turn and we came directly upon a gathering of people, sitting
on split-log benches. The pines had been cut away, except for
a few on which lanterns hung, and around the cleared enclosure
that was the churchhouse were thick walls of the thickly
studded trees. By the time we had walked down to sit on a
bench, the singing had begun. We were in an outdoors
churchhouse.
By the lantern light I could see many of the faces that I'd
noticed around the courthouse. I also saw many strange faces.
Two of the boys played a snappy tune on their guitars, almost
like a fast square dance tune, while the people that faced us,
and many of the congregation sitting on the benches, sang
�JESSE STUART
165
"Feasting on the Mountain."
In front of the choir the preacher stood with a rough handmade table before him, his hand upon his opened Bible. Down
beside him were the wire cages like the ones Yd seen at the
shacks on Sanctuary Mountain.
"What church is this?" I whispered to Deutsia.
"Holiness Faith Healers."
"What's in that cage up there?"
"Rattlesnakes."
"Why do they have rattlesnakes?"
"Wait a minute and you'll see."
As we whispered I saw eyes stare at us, telling us without
saying a word to quit whispering in church. I wondered, too,
if they also meant me to take my arm from around Deutsia, but
I looked around and other men were sitting close to their girls
with their arms around them.
Before the song was finished a fat woman in front of us
jumped up, clapping her hands above her head, shouting,
"Glory to God! Glory to God! We'll feast on the mountain up
there!" And she pointed toward the sky when she said "up
there." She danced a tune on the pine needles and shouted
while they finished the song.
"Glory to God, Sister Witherspoon," the preacher said, as
the choir sat down on their log seats that were just a little higher
than ours. "We'll feast on the mountain up there! Glory to
God!"
Sister Witherspoon sat down, her body jerking and her
hands a-quiver, her face covered with drops of sweat that
shone brightly in the lantern light.
The preacher stood at the table before us, dressed in his
faded clean-washed overalls and blue work shirt with his
sleeves rolled to his elbows and his shirt collar unbuttoned.
There was a beard on his face and his hair was uncombed.
When he opened his mouth he showed two rows of discolored
front teeth. He was a tall man but bent over like a windwhipped oak on the mountaintop, and his eyes looked down
at us like a hawk's eyes when they look over a flock of chick-
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
ens.
'Til take my text," he said, "from the sixteenth chapter and
the eighteenth verse of St. Mark."
He bent over his opened Bible and began to read, stumbling
slowly over the words as a barefoot boy stumbles over rocks
when he first pulls off his shoes in the spring.
n/
They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick,
and they shall recover/"
"That's the Word, folks," he said, his long black mustache
working up and down as he spoke. "That's the Gospel for ye.
And soon as we have another song, I'll give ye the message that
God told me to give ye."
The choir rose from their log seats, the young men with the
guitars looked at each other, one nodded a signal to the other
and then there was a fast plucking of strings, a wild outburst
of many-tongued discordant voices singing, "I'll be a Holiness
until I Die." I knew that this was a dance tune, for my feet began
to move, to pat on the pine needles, and I looked about me and
other feet were doing the same.
"Glory, glory," the preacher shouted, looking upward
toward the pine-needle ceiling. "Won't we all be Holiness until
we die? Until we reach that Heaven in the sky?"
"You bet we will, Brother Dusty," yelled a dark-complexioned man with a deep booming voice like a mountain
wind surging down into a hollow. "You bet we will, Brother
Dusty! I'm saved and sanctified and I can't sin no more,
Brother Dusty!"
And he clapped his big fire-shovel hands and twitched his
mouth, wiggling the horns of his black mustache as his feet
patted the tune on the pine needles. After a few pats with his
feet, he let out a yell. "Whoopee! Glory to God! Sing children!
Sing! Glory be to God, we'll all be Holiness till we die! We'll
all be Holiness when we reach that Heaven in the sky! Glory!
Glory! Glory be to God! Glory be to God!" he was shouting
in a big voice like the wind, high above the voices in the choir.
"Glory be, brothers! Glory be, sisters! Glory be to the God that
�JESSE STUART
167
gives us power to heal the sick and the afflicted, that gives us
the power to handle the serpents and if we are right with God,
they won't bite us! Blessed be the name of the Sweet Jesus that
gives us power to handle fire and won't let it burn us! Send us
the Light, Sweet Jesus!"
"Amen, Brother Cliff," Preacher Dusty said to the big man,
who was standing now, jerking as I'd never seen a man jerk
before.
"The serpents and the fire will test you, Brother Cliff," a tall
woman screamed as she arose from her seat. She waved her
hands into the air above her tousled hair. "If you ain't right
with Jesus, the serpent will send his fangs into ye and turn loose
his venom and the flame will wither yer flesh...scorch and
burn it...Ah, the Devil is in ye when the serpent will fang ye
and the flames scorch ye...Ah, it's the sign that ye ain't right
with Jesus!"
She danced a tune, her head thrown back, her face toward
the pine-bough ceiling. Her eyes were closed, her mouth was
open and she mumbled words that I couldn't understand.
Now Brother Dusty was walking between the rows of seated
people, looking straight ahead at something I couldn't see. His
hands were spread before him and he, too, was mumbling
words I couldn't understand.
"What are they saying?" I asked Deutsia. I had to shout to
get my words above the singing and the mumbling of many
people.
"They are talking in the Unknown Tongue," she said.
"Can you understand them?"
"No."
"Listen, young man," a big man with a red beardy face said
to me in a loud voice. "I belong to the real Unknown Tongues.
And I've been a-sittin' here a-tryin' to make out what they're
a-sayin' and the only word that they have said that I can understand is 'sweet tater/ I come here tonight a-thinkin' they
would talk in the language of my Church! But they're aspeakin' a tongue only the Devil in his hell can understand!"
Before he had finished saying these words the big woman,
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
with her eyes closed, sprawled on the ground, her body jerking and her lips and eyelids twitching. There she lay before
Deutsia and me, her dress high upon her body showing her big
legs, her cotton bloomers and her red outing petticoat. She
stared vacantly toward her Heaven in the sky as she mumbled
her unknown words.
"Speak to Jesus, Sister HalMe," a woman said, sitting on the
seat above her. "Tell Him that you love Him. Thank Him for
the magic power to heal! Speak to Him tonight as you've never
spoken to Him before and help Him fight the mean old Devil
to a finish on this night. Tell Him to he'p bind the Devil's
hands, to he'p us shet his filthy mouth, and chain him in the
endless pit fer eternity."
And she jumped up and started running in circles, shouting "Glory to Sweet Jesus" as she ran. Maybe she started the
others; I don't know. It seemed that everybody arose from his
seat but Deutsia and me. People—men, women and boys—
grabbed each other and started swinging as I'd seen them
swing in figure eight of an old square dance. But the dancers
never piled upon the floor and kicked and moaned and said
words no one could understand as these people did. Amid the
singing and the wild confusion of people going around and
around, stumbling over the women and men on the ground
with pine needles in their hair and sticking to their clothes,
many young couples still sat on the benches with their arms
about each other, kissing.
Small children held babies in their laps while their mothers
and fathers shouted and rolled. I saw little girls and little boys
run madly through the crowd, stepping on men's hands and
women's tangled hair, screaming as they went. They were
afraid of all this confusion. Once I saw a small boy run out
screaming into the dark pine woods, his hands high in the air,
his heels touching his rump as he ran.
Brother Dusty tried to preach by shouting his words and
waving his big gnarled hands to get his God-given message to
his congregation above the din and roar of the rolling, kicking
and quivering people. I could hear a few of Brother Dusty's
�JESSE STUART
169
words. "Hell is nineteen miles straight, straight under the
ground," I heard him scream as he pointed down to the ground.
I looked above me and insects were swarming around the
smoky-globed lanterns. High on this mountain the insects, too,
had found the Light and the lantern warmth as well.
I've been to many a church in the mountains, I thought, as
I looked beneath the split wooden log we were sitting on to see
what was a holding it up, but I have never seen anything like
this. As I was touching the rough oak posts that had been
placed in auger holes in the bottom of the logs we sat on, I heard
a scream among the people and wild screams among the tenorvoiced children. I got up and saw Brother Dusty with a big rattler around his neck. He was patting the rattlers head while it
flicked out its tongue to catch and listen to the sound of the confusion, a greater sound of voices than a rattler ever hears when
left alone free to roam his mountain world among the rocks
and wild huckleberry vines. Brother Dusty turned this way
and that to show the rattler to all the people. From where we
sat, I could see the rattler's tail a-quiver on the ground beneath
us.
"Sweet Jesus gives me the power," Brother Dusty said.
"There ain't no Devil in this man. Not nary bit o' th' Devil in
this flesh. Saved and sanctified and can't sin any more. They
shall take up serpents. Ain't this the fulfillment, folks? Ain't
it? Oh for that home among the stars where the angels sing
and play their guitars!"
"Amen, Brother Dusty."
I wondered if only Brother Dusty would handle a rattlesnake, fondle it and coddle it and let it listen to his congregation, let it wrap itself about his neck as if it were a necktie. This
giant rattler must have been heavy about his neck, it looked
him in the eyes with its cold, hard lidless eyes and put wild
fears into the small children who looked up at it. But the rattler didn't scare Brother Dusty. All eyes of the shouting people
turned toward him, but not the eyes of the people lying on the
floor jerking. Their eyes were closed and their jerks came
easier. Many had jerked until they could move no more and
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
they lay on the pine-needle floor lifeless and exhausted, with
drool running from the corners of their mouths.
"That's closer than I want to get to a rattlesnake," I said to
Deutsia.
When I said these words to her, I looked at her soft faircomplexioned face, her blue eyes that focused the rattler
around Brother Dusty's neck, and wondered if her religion was
this snake religion. I could never attend this church with her
if we married, I thought. I would never trust a rattlesnake. Too
many had almost got me in the timber woods. There were
fangs of the mountain rattler embedded in my boots.
When I turned my face from her to look over the congregation again, I saw something that made me want to run to the
pine woods as Fd seen the small boy run. I saw many men and
women, with rattlesnakes around their necks and in their arms.
And they were fondling them with no more fear than I would
have had if Fd handled a piece of rope.
"These're Sweet Jesus' children," Brother Dusty said.
"There ain't no part of the Devil in 'em. Not a chip from the
Devil's tree o' sin in 'em. Not a drop of the Devil's blood! Yes,
we've had people bitten by the serpent but the serpent knows
the ones that's got the Devil in 'em. He knows the facts, people,
for he can smell th' Devil in a man a mile away, and he can
taste the Devil in' em when he bites!"
I wondered if these little children had the Devil in them as
they ran screaming when their mothers and fathers came out
among the congregation with these vicious, rusty-looking rattlers around their necks and in their arms. Many women held
the snakes to their bosoms.
Women came from their trances and took up the snakes.
The wire-caged doors were all opened now, and Fd never seen
as many rattlers in one place. Now I knew why Fd seen the
snakes in cages at the shacks on Sanctuary Mountain. These
people that came to this church on this night and brought their
snakes had kept them in cages so they wouldn't go to sleep.
For this was October, a time when rattlers should be in their
winter beds.
�JESSE STUART
171
There was so much to see. I turned my eyes toward the
table that Brother Dusty had used for a pulpit, and saw women
who didn't have rattlers to prove their faith standing with
flaming pine torches, holding the flames to their hands, the rich
heavy smelly pine smoke going up in dark heavy spirals
toward their faces.
"The flame can't sear this flesh," one screamed, but I knew
the flame was searing her flesh, the way she twitched.
"I know I'm a child of Sweet Jesus," a fair-haired woman
screamed. "When the flame don't burn, it is the sign!"
"I feel the fire within," another screamed, "but not this
worldly fire from the torch that can't sear the flesh because God
won't burn His children!"
The children didn't fear the flames; they feared the ugly
writhing snakes. They would gather close to watch these
women stick the flames to their hands. With one hand these
women held the pine torch and applied the flame to the other
hand. That evening was something I would never forget.
While I sat watching the women apply the torches to their flesh,
I saw Brother Dusty with his rattler still around his neck. His
big hand was playing with its head, and his big fingers were
fingering its lips. I took my arm from around Deutsia to use if
the rattler came too near, for I was afraid.
"What's the matter, young man?" Brother Dusty said as he
stood before me with his rattlesnake too near for my comfort.
"Don't get that rattler close to me."
"Be saved tonight, young man," he said. "It's the Devil in
you. You're possessed with seedy, vile sin."
"Keep back that rattler," I warned him again.
"What about you, honey?" the woman said to Deustia.
Deustia didn't answer her, but with her soft hand she
stroked the rattler's head.
"That snake acts as if it knows you," I said to her. I got up
from the seat and began to back away.
"It won't bite," she said.
"They ain't no Devil in this pretty girl," Brother Dusty said.
"Let's go, Deutsia," I said, pulling her by the hand. "Let's
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Local Color and Realistic Tradition
clear out of here!"
Deutsia and I turned to walk back the way we came.
"I don't belong in this church," Deutsia said in a whisper as
we started back to the rear.
Tm glad you don't."
We faced a crowd of people standing at the rear. Many had
their hands and faces bandaged.
"I don't belong to any church," she said.
"What's wrong with these people, anyway?" I asked.
"Burnt hands and bitten by rattlesnakes," she said. "They
had Devil in 'em."
"What's all this crowd doing back here?" I asked in a low
tone.
"They come to watch what goes on," she said. "They don't
belong."
"Look to your left," I whispered.
Deutsia turned her head to look.
"See what I see?"
"Yes."
There stood Fern Hailston and Ben Dewberry among the
crowd of onlookers. They were smiling as they watched the
crowd of worshipers. Then I saw them looking at us, but when
Ben saw me looking at them he quickly turned his head as if
he didn't see me. I knew he was ashamed of me.
"Gee, I'm glad to get out of here," I said.
We were out in the pine woods now, where darkness
hovered over the earth like a black brooding hen.
"How did you like this church?" she asked me.
"I've never seen anything like it."
"This is the last revival meeting before the rattlesnakes go
to sleep. That's why I wanted you to see it."
"Wonder how Ben and Fern got up here?" I asked.
"I don't know," Deutsia said. "Miss Fern ought to be a good
mountain climber."
"I didn't worry so much about climbing the mountain," I
said. "It's the getting down."
"We'll get down the mountain easier than we got up," Deut-
�JESSE STUART
173
sia said
"We can do anything together."
"I feel strong with you," Deutsia said, "and I need you. I
need you always."
We started down the mountain toward the curving ribbon
of river. Down we went, away from the wind, the stars and
moon.
Daughter of the Legend
I
From what point of view is this story told? In what ways
does point of view contribute to the effect of this story?
2. What does the word literal mean? Would you say the worshipers in the story interpret the Bible literally? Support
your answer with examples.
3. What is the setting of the story? Does it help make the story
believable?
�174
COMPOSITION TOPICS
1. In "The Star in the Valley11 and in the excerpt from A Cumberland Vendetta, heroic characters are willing to die for their
principles. Which of these characters do you most admire?
Write a composition supporting your choice.
2. Listen to the conversation around you. Notice both slang
expressions and regional pronunciation such as those
found in some of the stories you have just read. Write a
short narrative with dialogue using expressions you have
heard.
ACTIVITIES
You have read about heroes in this section. Even though
they sometimes appear as ordinary people, most families have
heroes. Write about someone in your family who is a hero. Tell
who he or she is, his or her relationship to you, and what the
person did that is heroic. Tell the hero's story in a narrative to
make it more interesting. You may want to illustrate this story
with photographs or your own drawings.
You have also read stories in this section about family loyalties. Write about a time a member of your family helped
another person or about a time you helped some family member.
�175
CHAPTER 3
Contemporary Authors
Search for a Usable Past
One important aspect of Appalachian writing has been
reminiscing by looking back and recording the past. As
Chapter 3 will show, this trend continues in the works of
contemporary Appalachian writers.
All these selections are about memory. The memory
may be personal—a visit with an old friend or a talk with a
grandmother. Or it may be a more general reminiscence
such as finding ginseng in the woods or enjoying country
life.
By sifting through these memories, writers find materials
that make good stories and poems and that help readers find
value in themselves and their heritage.
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Contemporary Authors Search for a Usable Past
THOMAS WOLFE (1900-1938)
Thomas Wolfe left his birthplace, Asheville, North
Carolina, at fifteen to enroll at the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill, where he edited the college magazine and wrote
a one-act play. He received his M. A. degree from Harvard and
later taught English at New York University. In 1930 he
received a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Although Wolfe was a prolific writer, he published only
two novels, Look Homeward Angel, and Of Time and the River,
before his untimely death in 1938. You Can't Go Home Again and
The Web and the Rock were published posthumously.
In all his novels Wolfe himself is the central character, thinly disguised, first as Eugene Gant and later as George Webber.
In this excerpt from The Hills Beyond, a collection of Wolfe's
shorter writings, Eugene Gant returns to his boyhood home to
recapture his childhood, only to find that the lost boy has gone
forever.
The Brother
"This is King's Highway," the man said.
And then Eugene looked and saw that it was just a street.
There were some big new buildings, a large hotel, some restaurants and "bar-grill" places of the modern kind, the livid
�THOMAS WOLFE
177
monotone of neon lights, the ceaseless traffic of motor cars—
all this was new, but it was just a street. And he knew that it
had always been just a street, and nothing more—but somehow—well, he stood there looking at it, wondering what else
he had expected to find.
The man kept looking at him with inquiry in his eyes, and
Eugene asked him if the Fair had not been out this way.
"Sure, the Fair was out beyond here," the man said. "Out
where the park is now. But this street you're looking for—
don't you remember the name of it or nothing?" the man said.
Eugene said he thought the name of the street was
Edgemont, but that he wasn't sure. Anyhow it was something
like that. And he said the house was on the corner of that street
and of another street.
The man said" "What was that other street?"
Eugene said he did not know, but that King's Highway was
a block or so away, and that an interurban line ran past about
a half a block from where he once had lived.
"What line was this?" the man said, and stared at him.
"The interurban line," Eugene said.
Then the man stared at him again, and finally, "I don't
know no interurban line," he said.
Eugene said it was a line that ran behind some houses, and
that there were board fences there and grass beside the tracks.
But somehow he could not say that it was summer in those
days and that you could smell the ties, a wooden, tarry smell,
and feel a kind of absence in the afternoon after the car had
gone. He only said the interurban line was back behind somewhere between the backyards of some houses and some old
board fences, and that King's Highway was a block or two
away.
He did not say that King's Highway had not been a street
in those days but a kind of road that wound from magic out of
some dim and haunted land, and that along the way it had got
mixed in with Tom the Piper's son, with hot cross buns, with
all the light that came and went, and with coming down
through Indiana in the morning, and the smell of engine
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Contemporary Authors Search for a Usable Past
smoke, the Union Station, and most of all with voices lost and
far and long ago that said "King's Highway."
He did not say these things about King's Highway because
he looked about him and saw what King's Highway was. All
he could say was that the street was near King's Highway, and
was on the corner, and that the interurban trolley line was close
to there. He said it was a stone house, and that there were stone
steps before it, and a strip of grass. He said he thought the
house had had a turret at one corner, he could not be sure.
The man looked at him again, and said, "This is King's
Highway, but I never heard of any street like that."
Eugene left him then, and went on till he found the place.
And so at last he turned into the street, finding the place where
the two corners met, the huddled block, the turret, and the
steps, and paused a moment, looking back, as if the street were
Time.
For a moment he stood there, waiting—for a word, and for
a door to open, for the child to come. He waited, but no words
were spoken; no one came.
Yet all of it was just as it had always been, except that the
steps were lower, the porch less high, the strip of grass less
wide, than he had thought. All the rest of it was as he had
known it would be. A graystone front, three-storied, with a
slant slate roof, the side red brick and windowed, still with the
old arched entrance in the center for the doctor's use.
There was a tree in front, and a lamp post; and behind and
to the side, more trees than he had known there would be. And
all the slatey turret gables, all the slatey window gables, going
into points, and the two arched windows, in strong stone, in
the front room.
It was all so strong, so solid, and so ugly—and all so enduring and so good, the way he had remembered it, except he did
not smell the tar, the hot and caulky dryness of the old cracked ties, the boards of backyard fences and the coarse and sultry
grass, and absence in the afternoon when the street car had
gone, and the twins, sharp-visaged in their sailor suits, pumping with furious shrillness on tricycles up and down before the
�THOMAS WOLFE
179
house, and the feel of the hot afternoon, and the sense that
everyone was absent at the Fair.
Except for this, it all was just the same; except for this and
for King's Highway, which was now a street; except for this,
and for the child that did not come.
It was a hot day. Darkness had come. The heat rose up and
hung and sweltered like a sodden blanket in St. Louis. It was
wet heat, and one knew that there would be no relief or coolness in the night. And when one tried to think of the time when
the heat would go away, one said: "It cannot last. It's bound
to go away," as we always say it in America. But one did not
believe it when he said it. The heat soaked down and men
sweltered in it: the faces of the people were pale and greasy
with the heat. And in their faces was a patient wretchedness,
and one felt the kind of desolation that one feels at the end of
a hot day in a great city in America—when one's home is far
away, across the continent, and he thinks of all that distance,
all that heat, and feels, "Oh God! but it's a big country!"
And he feels nothing but absence, absence, and the desolation of America, the loneliness and sadness of the high, hot
skies, and evening coming on across the Middle West, across
the sweltering and heat-sunken land, across all the lonely little
towns, the farms, the fields, the oven swelter of Ohio, Kansas,
Iowa, and Indiana at the close of day, and voices, casual in the
heat, voices at the little stations, quiet, casual, somehow faded
into that enormous vacancy and weariness of heat, of space,
and of the immense, the sorrowful, the most high and awful
skies.
Then he hears the engine and the wheel again, the wailing
whistle and the bell, the sound of shifting in the sweltering
yard, and walks the street, and walks the street, beneath the
clusters of hard lights, and by the people with sagged faces,
and is drowned in desolation and in no belief.
He feels the way one feels when one comes back, and
knows that he should not have come, and when he sees that,
after all, King's Highway is—a street; and St. Louis—the
enchanted name—a big, hot, common town upon the river,
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Contemporary Authors Search for a Usable Past
sweltering in wet, dreary heat, and not quite South, and nothing else enough to make it better.
It had not been like this before. He could remember how
it would get hot, and how good the heat was, and how he
would lie out in the backyard on an airing mattress, and how
the mattress would get hot and dry and smell like a hot mattress full of sun, and how the sun would make him want to
sleep, and how, sometimes, he would go down into the basement to feel coolness, and how the cellar smelled as cellars always smell—a cool, stale smell, the smell of cobwebs and of
grimy bottles. And he could remember, when you opened the
door upstairs, the smell of the cellar would come up to you—
cool, musty, stale and dank and dark—and how the thought of
the dark cellar always filled him with a kind of numb excitement, a kind of visceral expectancy.
He could remember how it got hot in the afternoons, and
how he would feel a sense of absence and vague sadness in the
afternoons, when everyone had gone away. The house would
seem so lonely, and sometimes he would sit inside, on the
second step of the hall stairs, and listen to the sound of silence
and of absence in the afternoon. He could smell the oil upon
the floor and on the stairs, and see the sliding doors with their
brown varnish and the beady chains across the door, and thrust
his hands among the beady chains, and gather them together
in his arms, and let them clash, and swish with light beady
swishings all around him. He could feel darkness, absence,
varnished darkness, and stained light within the house,
through the stained glass of the window on the stairs, through
the small stained glasses by the door, stained light and absence,
silence and the smell of floor oil and vague sadness in the house
on a hot mid-afternoon. And all these things themselves
would have a kind of life: would seem to wait attentively, to
be most living and most still.
He would sit there and listen. He could hear the girl next
door practice her piano lessons in the afternoon, and hear the
street car coming by between the backyard fences, half a block
away, and smell the dry and sultry smell of backyard fences,
�THOMAS WOLFE
181
the smell of coarse hot grasses by the car tracks in the afternoon, the smell of tar, of dry caulked ties, the smell of bright
worn flanges, and feel the loneliness of backyards in the afternoon and the sense of absence when the car was gone.
Then he would long for evening and return, the slant of
light, and feet along the street, the sharp-faced twins in sailor
suits upon their tricycles, the smell of supper and the sound of
voices in the house again, and Grover coming from the Fair.
That is how it was when he came into the street, and found
the place where the two corners met, and turned at last to see
if Time was there. He passed the house; some lights were burning, the door was open, and a woman sat upon the porch. And
presently he turned, came back, and stopped before the house
again. The corner light fell blank upon the house. He stood
looking at it, and put his foot upon the step.
Then he said to the woman who was sitting on the porch:
'This house—excuse me—but could you tell me, please, who
lives here in this house?"
He knew his words were strange and hollow, and he had
not said what he wished to say. She stared at him a moment,
puzzled.
Then she said: "I live here. Who are you looking for?"
He said, "Why, I am looking for—"
And then he stopped, because he knew he could not tell her
what it was that he was looking for.
"There used to be a house—" he said.
The woman was now staring at him hard.
He said, "I think I used to live here."
She said nothing.
In a moment he continued, "I used to live here in this
house," he said, "when I was a little boy."
She was silent, looking at him, then she said: "Oh. Are you
sure this was the house? Do you remember the address?"
"I have forgotten the address," he said, "but it was
Edgemont Street, and it was on the corner. And I know this is
the house."
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"This isn't Edgemont Street," the woman said. "The name
is Bates."
"Well, then, they changed the name of the street," he said,
"but this is the same house. It hasn't changed."
She was silent a moment, then she nodded: "Yes. They did
change the name of the street. I remember when I was a child
they called it something else," she said. "But that was a long
time ago. When was it that you lived here?"
"In 1904."
Again she was silent, looking at him.. Then presently: "Oh.
That was the year of the Fair. You were here then?"
"Yes." He now spoke rapidly, with more confidence. "My
mother had the house, and we were here for seven months.
And the house belonged to Dr. Packer," he went on. "We
rented it from him."
"Yes," the woman said, and nodded, "this was Dr. Packer's
house. He's dead now, he's been dead for many years. But this
was the Packer house, all right."
"That entrance on the side," he said, "where the steps go up,
that was for Dr. Packer's patients. That was the entrance to his
office."
"Oh," the woman said, "I didn't know that. I've often
wondered what it was. I didn't know what it was for."
"And this big room in front here," he continued, "that was
the office. And there were sliding doors, and next to it, a kind
of alcove for his patients—"
"Yes, the alcove is still there, only all of it has been made
into one room now—and I never knew just what the alcove was
for."
"And there were sliding doors on this side, too, that opened
on the hall—and a stairway going up upon this side. And
halfway up the stairway, at the landing, a little window of
colored glass—and across the sliding doors here in the hall, a
kind of curtain made of strings of beads."
She nodded, smiling. "Yes, it's just the same—we still have
the sliding doors and the stained glass window on the stairs.
There's no bead curtain any more," she said, "but I remember
�THOMAS WOLFE
183
when people had them. I know what you mean."
"When we were here," he said, "we used the doctor's office
for a parlor—except later on—the last month or two—and then
we used it for a bedroom."
"It is a bedroom now," she said. "I run the house—I rent
rooms—all of the rooms upstairs are rented—but I have two
brothers and they sleep in this front room."
Both of them were silent for a moment, then Eugene said,
"My brother stayed there too."
"In the front room?" the woman said.
He answered, "Yes."
She paused, then said: "Won't you come in? I don't believe
it's changed much. Would you like to see?"
He thanked her and said he would, and he went up the
steps. She opened the screen door to let him in.
Inside it was just the same—the stairs, the hallway, the sliding doors, the window of stained glass upon the stairs. And
all of it was just the same, except for absence, the stained light
of absence in the afternoon, and the child who once had sat
there, waiting on the stairs.
It was all the same except that as a child he had sat there
feeling things were Somewhere—and now he knew. He had sat
there feeling that a vast and sultry river was somewhere—and
now he knew! He had sat there wondering what King's Highway was, where it began, and where it ended—now he knew!
He had sat there haunted by the magic word "downtown"—
now he knew!—and by the street car, after it had gone—and
by all things that came and went and came again, like the cloud
shadows passing in a wood, that never could be captured.
And he felt that if he could only sit there on the stairs once
more, in solitude and absence in the afternoon, he would be
able to get it back again. Then he would be able to remember
all that he had seen and been—the brief sum of himself, the
universe of his four years, with all the light of Time upon it—
that universe which was so short to measure, and yet so far, so
endless, to remember. Then would he be able to see his own
small face again, pooled in the dark mirror of the hall, and peer
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once more into the grave eyes of the child that he had been, and
discover there in his quiet three-years' self the lone integrity of
"I," knowing: "Here is the House, and here House listening;
here is Absence, Absence in the afternoon; and here in this
House, this Absence, is my core, my kernel—here am I!"
But as he thought it, he knew that even if he could sit here
alone and get it back again, it would be gone as soon as seized,
just as it had been then—first coming like the vast and drowsy
rumors of the distant and enchanted Fair, then fading like cloud
shadows on a hill, going like faces in a dream—coming, going,
coming, possessed and held but never captured, like lost voices
in the mountains long ago—and like the dark eyes and quiet
face of the dark, lost boy, his brother, who, in the mysterious
rhythms of his life and work, used to come into this house, then
go, and then return again.
The woman took Eugene back into the house and through
the hall. He told her of the pantry, told where it was and
pointed to the place, but now it was no longer there. And he
told her of the backyard, and the old board fence around the
yard. But the old board fence was gone. And he told her of the
carriage house, and told her it was painted red. But now there
was a small garage. And the backyard was still there, but
smaller than he thought, and now there was a tree.
"I did not know there was a tree," he said. "I do not remember any tree."
"Perhaps it was not there," she said. "A tree could grow in
thirty years." And then they came back through the house again
and paused at the sliding doors.
"And could I see this room?" he said.
She slid the doors back. They slid open smoothly, with a
rolling heaviness, as they used to do. And then he saw the room
again. It was the same. There was a window at the side, the
two arched windows at the front, the alcove and the sliding
doors, the fireplace with the tiles of mottled green, the mantel
of dark mission wood, the mantel posts, a dresser and a bed,
just where the dresser and the bed had been so long ago.
�THOMAS WOLFE
185
"Is this the room?" the woman said. "It hadn't changed?"
He told her that it was the same.
"And your brother slept here where my brothers sleep?"
"This is his room," he said.
They were silent. He turned to go, and said, "Well, thank
you. I appreciate your showing me."
She said that she was glad and that it was no trouble, "and
when you see your family, you can tell them that you saw the
house," she said. "My name is Mrs. Bell. You can tell your
mother that a Mrs. Bell has the house now. And when you see
your brother, you can tell him that you saw the room he slept
in, and that you found it just the same."
He told her then that his brother was dead.
The woman was silent for a moment. Then she looked at
him and said: "He died here, didn't he? In this room?"
He told that it was so.
"Well, then," she said, "I knew it. I don't know how. But
when you told me he was here, I knew it."
He said nothing. In a moment the woman said, "What did
he die of?"
"Typhoid."
She looked shocked and troubled, and said involuntarily,
"My two brothers—"
"That was a long time ago," he said. "I don't think you need
to worry now."
"Oh, I wasn't thinking about that," she said. "It was just
hearing that a little boy—your brother—was—was in this
room that my two brothers sleep in now—"
"Well, maybe I shouldn't have told you then. But he was a
good boy—and if you'd known him you wouldn't mind."
She said nothing, and he added quickly: "Besides, he didn't
stay here long. This wasn't really his room—but the night he
came back with my sister he was so sick—they didn't move
him."
"Oh," the woman said, "I see." And then: "Are you going
to tell your mother you were here?"
"I don't think so."
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"I—I wonder how she feels about this room."
H
I don't know. She never speaks of it."
"Oh... .How old was he?"
"He was twelve."
"You must have been pretty young yourself."
"I was not quite four."
"And—you just wanted to see the room, didn't you? That's
why you came back."
"Yes."
"Well—"indefinitely—"I guess you've seen it now."
"Yes, thank you."
"I guess you don't remember much about him, do you? I
shouldn't think you would."
"No, not much."
The years dropped off like fallen leaves: the face came back
again—the soft dark oval, the dark eyes, the soft brown berry
on the neck, the raven hair, all bending down, approaching—
the whole appearing to him ghost-wise, intent and instant.
"Now say it—Groverl"
"Gova."
"No—not Gova—Groverl.. .Say it!"
"Gova."
"Ah-h—you didn't say it. You said Gova. Grover—now
say it!"
"Gova."
"Look, I tell you what I'll do if you say it right. Would you
like to go down to King's Highway? Would you like Grover
to set you up? All right, then. If you say Grover and say it
right, I'll take you to King's Highway and set you up to ice
cream. Now say it right—Groverl"
"Gova."
"Ah-h, you-u. Old Tongue-Tie, that's what you are... .Well,
come on, then I'll set you up anyway."
It all came back, and faded, and was lost again. Eugene
turned to go, and thanked the woman and said good-bye.
"Well, then, good-bye," the woman said, and they shook
�THOMAS WOLFE
187
hands. "I'm glad if I could show you. I'm glad if—" She did
not finish, and at length she said: "Well, then, that was a long
time ago. You'll find everything changed now, I guess. It's all
built up around here now—and way out beyond here, out
beyond where the Fair Grounds used to be. I guess you'll find
it changed."
They had nothing more to say. They just stood there for a
moment on the steps, and then shook hands once more.
"Well, good-bye."
And again he was in the street, and found the place where
the corners met, and for the last time turned to see where Time
had gone.
And he knew he would never come again, and that lost
magic would not come again. Lost now was all of it—the street,
the heat, King's Highway, and Tom the Piper's son, all mixed
in with the vast and drowsy murmur of the Fair, and with the
sense of absence in the afternoon, and the house that waited,
and the child that dreamed. And out of the enchanted wood,
that thicket of man's memory, Eugene knew that the dark eye
and the quiet face of his friend and brother—poor child, life's
stranger, and life's exile, lost like all of us, a cipher in blind
mazes, long ago—the lost boy was gone forever, and would
not return.
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The Brother
1. Eugene seems to have trouble communicating with the man
from whom he asks directions. Why do you think this is
so?
2. What sensory imagery (smell, touch, sound, etc.) does the
author use to capture Eugene's childhood memories?
3. When Eugene found the house he was looking for, what
expectations did he probably have? Were his expectations
fulfilled? Why or why not?
4. What clues to Eugene's past can be found through his
return?
�JAMES R. STOKELY
189
JAMES R. STOKELY, JR. (1913-1977)
James Stokely was born in Newport, Tennessee, and
graduated from the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. He
and his wife Wilma Dykeman, a noted writer of both fiction and
non-fiction, co-authored a number of books and articles. Their
book Neither Black nor White received a Sidney Hillman Foundation award.
His poem "Molly Mooneyham" is about a mountain woman
who has lived long enough to see the old mountain life transformed into the jet age. We come to admire her perspective, as
she delivers a monologue of reminiscences.
Molly Mooneyham
It's been a hard life, Lord knows,
But I've craved every minute of it.
I only had a snatch of schooling
And a sniff of this world's gold
But I wrestled with thirteen sisters and brothers
And now a whole slew of my own blood
Has fetched younguns of their own
We're a sight when we all get together!
We tell tales that were never told.
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I don't go for these new-fangled washing motors;
Til stick to my black pot and battling stick
Till I die. They work out the dirt.
Twice a week I've had lines full of shirts and pants
I made myself, and the wind stirring beneath the sun
Was the best drying machine in the world.
Fd see rainbows in all the colored aprons
And the overalls were wind-filled balloons
Stretching from the clutch of our wire
Toward Rube McBee's pigpen over the hill.
Lord God, I was born wagging my tongue!
I never needed a swig of the devil's sauce
To loosen the joints and juices of my old frame.
There's nothing like big chunks of green timber
To make the pot boil, and I always rinse three times
After beating the batch on the white oak log.
Is there any smell better than fresh clean clothes
Packed in a hand-woven basket
Or bread rising from one's own oven?
Beats a wild plum thicket in April
Or burning leaves in November.
What else goes on around these parts?
Plenty for them that has the rise-up-and-reach.
After the rheumatiz and the high blood struck me
I still work my garden in the cool of dawn;
I kneel to scratch the dark rocky loam
Down in the corn and sweet 'tater patch
With 'Tucky Wonders running all over the place
And moon-eyed melons peeking out from the vines.
I've sent everyone of my younguns
Through Cataloochee High, and four to college.
Lord God, I never had one yet to balk!
Three of 'em are now teaching in Sky City
And the youngest is training down at Cape Kennedy.
He's got a bead on the stars, digging in deep,
A-rooting where the acorns are, I vow.
�JAMES R. STOKELY
What a living pleasure it is to know
Your own flesh is climbing the big bean stalk!
I'm afeared of gas and power-driven gadgets;
Til stick to my single-bit axe and crosscut saw
Till the Old Master tells me it's time.
I like to have my feet on Catalooch earth
And my eyes on the hinges of heaven.
I love to tell the old, old story;
I sometimes slip down inside myself a long spell
Brooding over the miseries of this old world
Then rise up to shout in open meeting
When they start singing "Beulah Land,"
"Amazing Grace" or "In the Cross"
Be my glory ever!
Rest beyond the river!
Glory! Glory! Glory! Glory!
We need grief in our hearts for each other.
Son, are you saved? In Jesus-name?
Are you giving the Big No to hell?
There's nobody takes after life more than I do;
I like to cram hickory sticks in my cook stove
And brown up a batch of bisquits
To mix with homemade sausage and gravy,
And I never set a meal, in the fiercest snow,
Without a dish of Limbertwig or Sourjohn jelly.
I aim to get up at sun's first-glance
When roosters are crowing and clawing the ground,
Put in a full gee-haw at being a woman,
Then sink back to the old feathertick at black dark
When pullets have flown to the highest limb.
Sometimes I dream of my man, Mitch Mooneyham,
And how he ran the wrong way
When the red oak was falling
But I'm raring to go when the fire-ball peeps up
And lay hold of a new-born situation.
191
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I canned over seven hundred jars last summer,
Beans, beets, squash, 'maters, blackberries, corn,
And dried twenty bushels of Pippins and Winesaps.
I've never taken a pill in all my life
And I've lasted eighty-three year
Come Saturday week.
Lord, what I wouldn't give for another round!
I'd like another chance to do my dance.
Say you live near Smoky Town? Well, now,
I've never seen the sights there,
Don't know about these here plays and op'rys,
But I've heard the meadow lark sing
And cocked an ear or two, I vow,
When guineas cackled in the hillside clover
And old Catalooch Creek chuckled to itself
As it wandered down to meet the big river.
I've never viewed a picture museum
But I haven't missed a sunset yet
Nor a thunderstorm either, for that matter.
Many's the time I've laid up at noon
After churning the cream to a buttery pulp
And watched a fern unfold by the springhouse door.
Lord! Lord! It's been a hello-come to!
I never had a cookie jar of greenbacks to hoard
And I never haunted the cage of a bank in Smoky Town
But I claimed gold for my own in daffodils,
Dandelions, muscadines, peaches and pears,
Not to mention pheasants and bushy-tailed squirrels
And, say, did you ever spy forsythia in full bloom
Or sip clear cold water out of a speckled gourd?
I never had a doctor to catch my babies;
I just shared with Granny Haun and my man
The miracle of creation.
He died a month before Timothy was born.
I've been forty years a widow
But in each sparkling eye was his shadow.
�JAMES R. STOKELY
193
I loved to watch their crinkly little faces
Tune up and squall—Lord be!—
And then I liked it when they took my breast
And grew quiet, like something far and lost
And never been on this earth before.
Molly Mooneyham
1 Why wasn't Molly Mooneyham interested in a new-fangled
washing machine? What would she have missed if she had
had one?
2. Discuss the following lines: "I only had a snatch of
schooling and a sniff of this world's gold." "He's got a bead
on the stars, digging in deep, a-rooting where the acorns
are,Ivow.ff Td like another chance to do my dance." What
do they tell you about Molly?
3. What is Molly Mooneyham's attitude toward picture
museums, banks, and doctors? Is her world limited?
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JAMES AGEE (1909-1955)
Knoxville native James Agee turned out a substantial body
of work in his forty-six years. While at Harvard, he published
his first book, a poetry collection entitled Permit Me Voyage,
which was selected by the Yale Series for Younger Poets in
1934.
After college, Agee worked for Time and Nation. As a staff
writer for Fortune Magazine, he spent a summer living with a
family of Alabama sharecroppers, an experience that resulted
in his book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Agee, also a film
critic and noted screen writer, wrote the scripts forFace-to-Face
and The African Queen.
The next selection is from his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel,
A Death in the Family, published after his death in 1957. It is a
moving, poignant story of a youngboy's visit to his great-greatgrandmother.
From A Death in the Family
After dinner the babies and all the children except Rufus
were laid out on the beds to take their naps, and his mother
thought he ought to lie down too, but his father said no, why
did he need to, so he was allowed to stay up. He stayed out on
the porch with the men. They were so full up and sleepy they
�JAMES AGEE
195
hardly even tried to talk, and he was so full up and sleepy that
he could hardly see or hear, but half dozing between his
father's knees in the thin shade, trying to keep his eyes open,
he could just hear the mild, lazy rumbling of their voices, and
the more talkative voices of the women back in the kitchen,
talking more easily, but keeping their voices low, not to wake
the children, and the rattling of the dishes they were doing, and
now and then their walking here or there along the floor; and
mused with half-closed eyes which went in and out of focus
with sleepiness, upon the slow twinkling of the millions of
heavy leaves on the trees and the slow flashing of the blades of
corn, and nearer at hand, the hens dabbing in the pocked dirt
yard and the ragged edge of the porch floor, and everything
hung dreaming in a shining silver haze, and a long, low hill of
blue silver shut off everything against a blue-white sky, and he
leaned back against his father's chest and he could hear his
heart pumping and his stomach growling and he could feel the
hard knees against his sides, and the next thing he knew his
eyes opened and he was looking up into his mother's face and
he was lying on a bed and she was saying it was time to wake
up because they were going on a call and see his great-greatgrandmother and she would most specially want to see him
because he was her oldest great-great-grandchild. And he and
his father and mother and Catherine got in the front seat and
his Granpa Follet and Aunt Jessie and her baby and Jim Wilson and Ettie Lou and Aunt Sadie and her baby got in the back
seat and Uncle Ralph stood on the running board because he
was sure he could remember the way and that was all there
was room for, and they started off very carefully down the lane,
so nobody would be jolted, and even before they got out to the
road his mother asked his father to stop a minute, and she insisted on taking Ettie Lou with them in front, to make a little
more room in the back, and after she insisted for a while, they
gave in, and then they all got started again, and his father
guided the auto so very carefully across the deep ruts into the
road, the other way from LaFollette as Ralph told him to
("Yeah, I know," his father said, "I remember that much
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anyhow.")/ that they were hardly joggled at all, and his mother
commented on how very nicely and carefully his father always
drove when he didn't just forget and go too fast, and his father
blushed, and after a few minutes his mother began to look uneasy, as if she had to go to the bathroom but didn't want to say
anything about it, and after a few minutes more she said, "Jay,
I'm awfully sorry but now I really think you are forgetting."
"Forgetting what?" he said.
"I mean a little too fast, dear," she said.
"Good road along here," he said. "Got to make time while
the road's good." He slowed down a little. "Way I remember
it," he said, "there's some stretches you can't hardly ever get a
mule through, we're coming to, ain't they, Ralph?"
"Oh mercy," his mother said.
"We are just raggin you," he said. "They're not all that bad.
But all the same we better make time while we can." And he
sped up a little.
After another two or three miles Uncle Ralph said, "Now
around this bend you run through a branch and you turn up
sharp to the right," and they ran through the branch and turned
into a sandy woods road and his father went a little slower and
a cool breeze flowed through them and his mother said how
lovely this shade was after that terrible hot sun, wasn't it, and
all the older people murmured that it sure was, and almost immediately they broke out of the woods and ran through two
miles of burned country with stumps and sometimes whole tree
trunks sticking up out of it sharp and cruel, and blackberry and
honeysuckle all over the place, and a hill and its shadow ahead.
And when they came within the shadow of the hill, Uncle Ralph
said in a low voice, "Now you get to the hill, start along the base
of it to your left till you see your second right and then you take
that," but when they got there, there was only the road to the
left and none to the right and his father took it and nobody said
anything, and after a minute Uncle Ralph said, "Reckon they
wasn't much too choose from there, was they?" and laughed
unhappily.
"That's right,11 his father said, and smiled.
�JAMES AGEE
197
"Reckon my memory ain't so sharp as I bragged/1 Ralph
said.
"You're doin fine," his father said, and his mother said so
too.
"I could a swore they was a road both ways there," Ralph
said, "but it was nigh on twenty years since I was out here."
Why for goodness sake, his mother said, then she certainly
thought he had a wonderful memory.
"How long since you were here, Jay?" He did not say anything. "Jay?"
Tm a-studyin it," he said.
"There's your turn," Ralph said suddenly, and they had to
back the auto to turn into it.
They began a long, slow, winding climb, and Rufus half
heard and scarcely understood their disjointed talking. His
father had not been there in nearly thirteen years; the last time
was just before he came to Knoxville. He was always her
favorite, Ralph said. Yes, his grandfather said, he reckoned
that was a fact, she always seemed to take a shine to Jay. His
father said quietly that he always did take a shine to her. It
turned out he was the last of those in the auto who had seen
her. They asked how she was, as if it had been within a month
or two. He said she was failing lots of ways, specially getting
around, her rheumatism was pretty bad, but in the mind she
was bright as a dollar, course that wasn't saying how they
might find her by now, poor old soul; no use saying. Nope,
Uncle Ralph said, that was a fact; time sure did fly, didn't it;
seemed like before you knew it, this year was last year. She
had never yet seen Jay's children, or Ralph's, or Jessie's or
Sadie's, it was sure going to be a treat for her. A treat and a
surprise. Yes it sure would be that, his father said, always supposing she could still recognize them. Mightn't she even have
died? his mother wanted to know. Oh no, all the Follets said
they'd have heard for sure if she'd died. Matter of fact they had
heard she had failed a good bit. Sometimes her memory
slipped up and she got confused, poor old soul. His mother
said well she should think so, poor old lady. She asked, care-
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fully, if she was taken good care of. Oh, yes, they said. That
she was. Sadie's practically giving her life to her. That was
Grandpa Follet's oldest sister and young Sadie was named for
her. Lived right with her tending to her wants, day and night.
Well, isn't that just wonderful, his mother said. Wasn't
anybody else could do it, they agreed with each other. All married and gone, and she wouldn't come live with any of them,
they all offered, over and over, but she wouldn't leave her
home. I raised my family here, she said, I lived here all my life
from fourteen years on and I aim to die here, that must be a
good thirty-five, most, a good near forty year ago, Grampaw
died. Goodness sake, his mother said, and she was an old old
woman then! His father said soberly, "She's a hundred and
three years old. Hundred and three or hundred and four. She
never could remember for sure which. But she knows she
wasn't born later than eighteen-twelve. And she always reckoned it might of been eighteen-eleven.11
"Great heavens, Jay! Do you mean that?" He just nodded, and
kept his eyes on the road. "Just imagine that, Rufus," she said.
"Just think of that!"
"She's an old, old lady," his father said gravely; and Ralph
gravely and proudly concurred.
"The things she must have seen!" Mary said, quietly. "Indians. Wild animals." Jay laughed. "I mean man-eaters, Jay.
Bears, and wildcats—terrible things."
"There were cats back in these mountains, Mary—we called
em painters, that's the same as a panther—they were around
here still when I was a boy. And there is still bear, they claim."
"Gracious Jay, did you ever see one? A panther?"
"Saw one'd been shot."
"Goodness," Mary said.
"A mean-looking varmint."
"I know," she said. "I mean, I bet he was. I just can't get
over—why she's almost as old as the country, Jay."
"Oh, no," he laughed. "Ain't nobody that old. Why I read
somewhere, that just these mountains here are the oldest..."
"Dear, I meant the nation," she said. "The United States, I
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mean. Why let me see, why it was hardly as old as I am when
she was born.11 They all calculated for a moment.''Not even as
old/1 she said triumphantly.
"By golly," his father said. "I never thought of it like that."
He shook his head. "By golly," he said, "that's a fact."
"Abraham Lincoln was just two years old," she murmured.
"Maybe three," she said grudgingly. "Just try to imagine that,
Rufus," she said after a moment. "Over a hundred years." But
she could see that he couldn't comprehend it. "You know what
she is?" she said, "she's Granpa Follet's grandmother*"
"That's a fact, Rufus," his grandfather said from the back
seat, and Rufus looked around, able to believe it but not to imagine it, and the old man smiled and winked. "Woulda never
believed you'd hear me call nobody 'Granmaw,' now would
you?"
"No sir," Rufus said.
"Well, yer goana," his grandfather said, "quick's I see her."
Ralph was beginning to mutter and to look worried and
finally his brother said, "What's eaten ye, Ralph? Lost the
way?" And Ralph said he didn't know for sure as he had lost
it exactly, no, he wouldn't swear to that yet, but by golly he was
damned if he was sure this was hit anymore, all the same.
"Oh dear, Ralph, how too bad" Mary said, "but don't you
mind. Maybe we'll find it. I mean maybe soon you'll recognize landmarks and set us all straight again."
But his father, looking dark and painfully patient, just
slowed the auto down and then came to a stop in a shady place.
"Maybe we better figure it out right now," he said.
"Nothin round hyer I know," Ralph said, miserably. "What
I mean, maybe we ought to start back while we still know the
way back. Try it another Sunday."
"Oh, Jay."
"I hate to but we got to get back in town tonight, don't forget. We could try it another Sunday. Make an early start." But
the upshot of it was that they decided to keep on ahead awhile,
anyway. They descended into a long, narrow valley through
the woods of which they could only occasionally see the dark
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ridges and the road kept bearing in a direction Ralph was almost sure was wrong, and they found a cabin, barely even cut
out of the woods, they commented later, hardly even a corn
patch, big as an ordinary barnyard; but the people there, very
glum and watchful, said they had never even heard of her; and
after a long while the valley opened out a little and Ralph began
to think that perhaps he recognized it, only it sure didn't look
like itself if it was it, and all of a sudden a curve opened into
half-forested meadow and there were glimpses of a gray house
through swinging vistas of saplings and Ralph said, "By golly,"
and again, "By golly, that is hit That's hit all right. Only we
come on it from behind!" And his father began to be sure too,
and the house grew larger, and they swung around where they
could see the front of it, and his father and his Uncle Ralph and
his Grandfather all said, "Why sure enough," and sure enough
it was: and, "There she is," and there she was: it was a great,
square-logged gray cabin closed by a breezeway, with a frame
second floor, and an enormous oak plunging from the packed
dirt in front of it, and a great iron ring, the rim of a wagon
wheel, hung by a chain from a branch of the oak which had
drunk the chains into itself, and in the shade of the oak, which
was as big as the whole corn patch they had seen, an old woman
was standing up from a kitchen chair as they swung slowly in
onto the dirt and under the edge of the shade, and another old
woman continued to sit very still in her chair.
The younger of the two old women was Great Aunt Sadie,
and she knew them the minute she laid eyes on them and came
right on up to the side of the auto before they could even get
out. "Lord God," she said in a low, hard voice, and she put her
hands on the edge of the auto and just looked from one to the
other of them. Her hands were long and narrow and as big as
a man's and every knuckle was swollen and split. She had hard
black eyes, and there was a dim purple splash all over the left
side of her face. She looked at them so sharply and silently
from one to another that Rufus thought she must be mad at
them, and then she began to shake her head back and forth.
"Lord God," she said again. "Howdy, John Henry," she said.
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201
"Howdy, Sadie," his grandfather said.
"Howdy, Aunt Sadie," his father and his Aunt Sadie said.
"Howdy, Jay," she said, looking sternly at his father,
"howdy, Ralph," and she looked sternly at Ralph. "Reckon you
must be Jess, and yore Sadie. Howdy, Sadie."
"This is Mary, Aunt Sadie," his father said. "Mary, this is
Aunt Sadie."
Tm proud to know you," the old woman said, looking very
hard at his mother. "I figured it must be you," she said, just as
his mother said, Tm awfully glad to know you too." "And this
is Rufus and Catherine and Ralph's Jim-Wilson and Ettie Lou
and Jessie's Charlie after his daddy and Sadie's Jessie after her
Granma and her Aunt Jessie," his father said.
"Well, Lord God," the old woman said. "Well, file on out."
"How's Granmaw?" his father asked, in a low voice,
without moving yet to get out.
"Good as we got any right to expect," she said, "but don't
feel put out if she don't know none-a-yews. She mought and
she mought not. Half the time she don't even know me."
Ralph shook his head and clucked his tongue. "Pore old
soul," he said, looking at the ground. His father let out a slow
breath, puffing his cheeks.
"So if I was you-all I'd come up on her kind of easy," the
old woman said. "Bin a coon's age since she seen so many folks
at onct. Me either. Mought skeer her if ye all come a whoopin
up at her in a flock."
"Sure," his father said.
"Ayy," his mother whispered.
His father turned and looked back. "Whyn't you go see her
the first, Paw?" he said very low. "Yore the eldest."
"Tain't me she wants to see," Grandfather Follet said, "Hit's
the younguns ud tickle her most."
"Reckon that's the truth, if she can take notice," the old
woman said. "She shore like to cracked her heels when she
heared yore boy was born," she said to Jay, "Mary or no Mary.
Proud as Lucifer. Cause that was the first," she told Mary.
"Yes, I know," Mary said. "Fifth generation, that made."
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"Did you get her postcard, Jay?"
"What postcard?"
"Why no," Mary said.
"She tole me what to write on one a them postcards and put
hit in the mail to both a yews so I done it. Didn't ye never get
it?"
Jay shook his head. "First I ever heard tell of it," he said.
"Well I shore done give hit to the mail. Ought to remember. Cause I went all the way into Polly to buy it and all the
way in again to put it in the mail."
"We never did get it," Jay said.
"What street did you send it, Aunt Sadie?" Mary asked.
"Because we moved not long be..."
"Never sent it to no street," the old woman said. "Never
knowed I needed to, Jay working for the post office."
"Why, I quit working for the post office a long time back,
Aunt Sadie. Even before that."
"Well I reckon that's how come then. Cause I just sent hit
to Tost Office, Cristobal, Canal Zone, Panama/ and I spelt hit
right,too. C-r-i..."
"Oh," Mary said.
"Aw," Jay said. "Why, Aunt Sadie, I thought you'd a
known. We been living in Knoxvul since pert near two years
before Rufus was born."
She looked at him keenly and angrily, raising her hands
slowly from the edge of the auto, and brought them down so
hard that Rufus jumped. Then she nodded, several times, and
still she did not say anything. At last she spoke, coldly, "Well,
they might as well just put me out to grass," she said. "Lay me
down and give me both barls threw the head."
"Why, Aunt Sadie," Mary said gently, but nobody paid any
attention.
After a moment the old woman went on solemnly, staring
hard into Jay's eyes: "I knowed that like I know my own name
and it plumb slipped my mind."
"Oh what a shame," Mary said sympathetically.
"Hit ain't shame I feel," the old woman said, "hit's sick in
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203
the stummick."
"Oh I didn't m..."
"Right hyer!" and she slapped her hand hard against her
stomach and laid her hand back on the edge of the auto. "If I
git like that too," she said to Jay, "then who's agonna look out
ferher?"
"Aw, tain't so bad, Aunt Sadie," Jay said. "Everybody slips
up nown then. Do it myself an I ain't half yer age. And you
just ought see Mary."
"Gracious, yes," Mary said. "I'm just a perfect scatterbrain."
The old woman looked briefly at Mary and then looked
back at Jay. "Hit ain't the only time," she said, "not by a long
chalk. Twarn't three days ago I..." she stopped. "Takin on
about yer troubles ain't never holp nobody," she said. "You
just set hyer a minute."
She turned and walked over to the older woman and
leaned deep over against her ear and said quite loudly, but not
quite shouting, "Granmaw, ye got company." And they
watched the old woman's pale eyes, which had been on them
all this time in the light shadow of the sunbonnet, not changing, rarely ever blinking, to see whether they would change
now, and they did not change at all, she didn't even move her
head or her mouth. "Ye hear me, Granmaw?" The old woman
opened and shut her sunken mouth, but not as if she were
saying anything. "Hit's Jay and his wife and younguns, come
up from Knoxvul to see you," she called, and they saw the
hands crawl in her lap and the face turned towards the younger
woman and they could hear a thin, dry crackling, no words.
"She can't talk any more," Jay said, almost in a whisper.
"Oh no," Mary said.
But Sadie turned to them and her hard eyes were bright.
"She knows ye," she said quietly. "Come on over." And they
climbed slowly and shyly out onto the swept ground. "I'll tell
her about the rest a yuns in a minute," Sadie said.
"Don't want to mix her up," Ralph explained, and they all
nodded.
It seemed to Rufus like a long walk over to the old woman
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because they were all moving so carefully and shyly; it was almost like church. "Don't holler," Aunt Sadie was advising his
parents, "hit only skeers her. Just talk loud and plain right up
next her ear."
"I know," his mother said. "My mother is very deaf, too."
"Yeah," his father said. And he bent down close against her
ear. "Granmaw?" he called, and he drew a little away, where
she could see him, while his wife and his children looked on,
each holding one of the mother's hands. She looked straight
into his eyes and her eyes and her face never changed, a look
as if she were gazing at some small point at a great distance,
with complete but idle intensity, as if what she was watching
was no concern of hers. His father leaned forward again and
gently kissed her on the mouth, and drew back again where
she could see him well, and smiled a little, anxiously. Her face
restored itself from his kiss like grass that has been lightly
stepped on; her eyes did not alter. Her skin looked like brownmarbled stone over which water has worked for so long that it
is as smooth and blind as soap. He leaned to her ear again.
Tm Jay," he said. "John Henry's boy." Her hands crawled in
her skirts: every white bone and black vein showed through
the brown-splotched skin; the wrinkled knuckles were like
pouches; she wore a red rubber guard ahead of her wedding
ring. Her mouth opened and shut and they heard her low, dry
croaking, but her eyes did not change. They were bright in
their thin shadow, but they were as impersonally bright as two
perfectly shaped eyes of glass.
"I figure she know you," Sadie said quietly.
"She can't talk, can she?" Jay said, and now that he was not
looking at her, it was as if they were talking over a stump.
"Times she can," Sadie said. "Times she can't. Ain't only
so seldom call for talk, reckon she loses the hang of it. But I figger she knows ye and I am tickled she does."
His father looked all around him in the shade and he looked
sad, and unsure, and then he looked at him. "Come here,
Rufus," he said.
"Go to him," his mother whispered for some reason, and
�JAMES AGEE
205
she pushed his hand gently as she let it go.
"Just call her Granmaw," his father said quietly. "Get right
up by her ear like you do to Granmaw Lynch and say,
'Granmaw, I'm Rufus/"
He walked over to her as quietly as if she were asleep, feeling strange to be by himself, and stood on tiptoe beside her and
looked down into her sunbonnet towards her ear. Her temple
was deeply sunken as if a hammer had struck it and frail as a
fledgling's belly. Her skin was crosshatched with the razorfine slashes of innumerable square wrinkles and yet every
slash was like smooth stone; her ear was just a fallen intricate
flap with a small gold ring in it; her smell was faint yet very
powerful, and she smelled like new mushrooms and old spices
and sweat, like his fingernail when it was coming off. "Granmaw, I'm Rufus," he said carefully, and yellow-white hair
stirred beside his ear. He could feel coldness breathing from
her cheek.
"Come out where she can see you," his father said, and he
drew back and stood still further on tiptoe and leaned across
her, where she could see. Tm Rufus," he said, smiling, and
suddenly her eyes darted a little and looked straight into his,
but they did not in any way change their expression. They
were just colors: seen close as this, there was color through a
dot at the middle, dim as blue-black oil, and then a circle of
blue so pale it was almost white, that looked like glass,
smashed into a thousand dimly sparkling pieces, smashed and
infinitely old and patient, and then a ring of dark blue, so fine
and sharp no needle could have drawn it, and then a clotted
yellow full of tiny squiggles of blood, and then a wrong-side
furl of red-bronze, and little black lashes. Vague light sparkled
in the crackled blue of the eye like some kind of remote
ancestor's anger, and the sadness of time dwelt in the bluebreathing, oily center, lost and alone and far away, deeper than
the deepest well. His father was saying something, but he did
not hear and now he spoke again, careful to be patient, and
Rufus heard, "Tell her Tm Jay's boy.' Say, I'm Jay's boy
Rufus.'"
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And again he leaned into the cold fragrant cavern next her
ear and said, Tm Jay's boy Rufus," and he could feel her face
turn towards him.
"Now kiss her," his father said, and he drew out of the
shadow of her bonnet and leaned far over and again entered
the shadow and kissed her paper mouth, and the mouth
opened, and the cold sweet breath of rotting and of spice broke
from her with the dry croaking, and he felt the hands take him
by the shoulders like knives and forks of ice through his
clothes. She drew him closer and looked at him almost glaring, she was so filled with grave intensity. She seemed to be
sucking on her lower lip and her eyes filled with light, and then,
as abruptly as if the two different faces had been joined without
transition in a strip of moving-picture film, she was not serious
any more but smiling so hard that her chin and her nose almost
touched and her deep little eyes giggled for joy. And again the
croaking gurgle came, making shapes which were surely
words but incomprehensible words, and she held him even
more tightly by the shoulders, and looked at him even more
keenly and incredulously with her giggling, all but hidden
eyes, and smiled and smiled, and cocked her head to one side,
and with sudden love he kissed her again. And he could hear
his mother's voice say, "Jay," almost whispering, and his father
say, "Let her be," in a quick, soft, angry voice, and when at
length they gently disengaged her hands, and he was at a little
distance, he could see that there was water crawling along the
dust from under her chair, and his father and his Aunt Sadie
looked gentle and sad and dignified, and his mother was trying
not to show that she was crying, and the old lady sat there
aware only that something had been taken from her, but growing quickly calm, and nobody said anything about it.
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A Death in the Family
1. From what point of view is this story told? How might the
account of the family visit have been different if it had been
told from the great-great-grandmother's point of view?
2. How does Aunt Sadie react to the surprise visit?
3. What evidence is there that Sadie is out of touch with the
family but that the family is strongly linked?
4. In what ways might Rufus' trip with his family to visit his
aging great-great-grandmother be compared to a trip back
into the past?
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5
�LEE SMITH
209
LEE SMITH (1945- )
Currently a faculty member at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, Lee Smith was born and reared in Grundy, a
small town in the coal-mining region of southwest Virginia.
She sets much of her work in towns suggested by her memories
of Grundy.
Although she began writing as a child, her English teachers
at St. Catherine's School in Richmond where she attended high
school influenced her to choose writing as a career. She went
to HoUins College because it had a strong writing program.
While there, she realized that writing is all she ever wanted to
do. She has published six novels: The Last Day the Dogbushes
Bloomed (1968), Something in the Wind (1971)t Fancy Strut (1973),
Black Mountain Breakdown (1981), Oral History (1983), and Family Linen (1985). She also has a collection of stories called
Cakewalk. Her work has twice earned the O. Henry Award for
short fiction.
This short story from Cakewalk explores one of her major
themes—the changing family and community in an Appalachian Mountain setting.
Saint Paul
It all started so far back—way before my daddy died, or
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Danny, and before I got myself in trouble as they say—when
I was still playing jacks and paper dolls and skipping rocks in
that still place at the bend of Dawson's Creek, back when I was
a little girl in our house, which looked just exactly like all the
others in the bottom where we lived, and the Honeycutts lived
on the hill. Mr. Honeycutt owned the mine, Consolidated Coal
Inc., where my daddy and the other men worked, and he
owned our house too because we rented it from the company,
only I didn't know that then. All I knew was that the
Honeycutts' house was different from all of ours, big and white
and crazy-looking, with towers that poked up all over the
place, and porches that stuck right out where you never
thought a porch out to be, and woodwork all over it like lace
on a wedding dress. It sat a good ways back from the road,
with a stone wall around the yard, and in the summertime
these red rambler roses grew all over the wall. The Honeycutts
had lots of grass, too, and a man they hired to come and cut it,
and big old shade trees, one of which had a rope swing hanging down from it that I liked to swing on better than anything.
The Honeycutts used to let me swing whenever I wanted to,
whether Marlene was out in the yard or not. But usually she
was, and so we swang on that swing, or played in a lean-to we
made out back in the woods behind the garden, or else we
played with her dolls—and Marlene had dolls from all over the
world, like a little doll with slanty eyes from China and a doll
from Holland with wooden shoes. I can't even remember what
we all we did. Now this is Marlene Honeycutt, who was exactly four days apart from me in age, and we were best friends.
We stuck our fingers with needles and mixed our blood to
prove it.
Marlene's mother, Mrs. Honeycutt, wore high-heel shoes
every day of the week. But she let Marlene and Paul play with
the rest of us, from the time we were all big enough to cross the
road—if you could ever get Paul to play, that is. Mostly we
never could. Marlene had long curly yellow hair and freckles
and a smile that showed all of her teeth. Paul had yellow hair
too, but his was light-colored and thin and flyaway, like a dan-
�LEE SMITH
211
delion going to seed, and it seemed like he never smiled. He
wasn't mean or anything, just serious—Paul was serious all the
time. He stared hard at everything with these big old blue eyes
of his that always looked soft, somehow, the way cow eyes do.
Buddy Lipscomb and Merle Rainey and the other boys in
the bottom used to tease him and be real mean to him, like one
time they tied him up to a tree and left him there all afternoon,
and another time I remember Buddy acted like Paul had said
something bad about him, and he knocked him down on the
mine road and Paul's head bled like crazy when it hit a rock.
Only Paul never said a word about it to anybody, never told
on Buddy whose daddy would have whipped him good if he
knew, and of course Paul never had said anything to Buddy
Lipscomb in the first place, anyway. So after a while all the
boys just left him alone, since he wouldn't fight back, and Paul
stayed pretty much to himself as I recall. He used to lay up
there in their yard on a hammock all summer long, reading big
old books. Marlene and I went back and forth, all around the
yard, playing—she had a poodle puppy then—but we didn't
pay Paul any more mind than we would have if he had been a
book himself. One time Mr. Honeycutt bought him the fanciest
bike you ever saw, but Paul didn't ride it at all and it just sat
up there in the shed. I would have died to have a bike like that
but I never did ask to ride, not one time. I wouldn't have asked
for the world.
I stayed clear of Paul, like all the rest of the kids from the
bottom. Paul was a genius, Marlene said. I didn't know about
that, but we were all glad when the Honeycutts sent him off to
school because he never did anything in the schoolroom
anyway but make a hundred and draw plans of buildings and
airplanes and machines, mumbling numbers to himself. At
lunchtime he used to eat all alone on the back steps or have a
big discussion with Mr. Boling, a fat little man from Wheeling,
which was the closest big town, who came three days a week
to teach advanced math and science. Mr. Boling smelled funny
and blinked his eyes a lot. Paul talked to Mr. Boling in a real
high voice, and waved his hands in the air. Lord! I was glad
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when Paul was gone.
And what I want you to understand here is that I never
thought about Paul for one minute after he left. I was too busy
at home, which I have not even said one word about so far. Of
course our house was not like the Honeycutts'—they had tall
dark rooms and thick rugs, and it smelled like furniture polish
all the time. We had five rooms—mine and Danny's, Mamma
and Daddy's, the kitchen and the front room and the bathroom,
if that counts—and it smelled like whatever we were having
for supper that night. We had a nice green living room suite in
the front room with see-through plastic on it so it would last,
and linoleum on the floors, and yellow flowers on the
wallpaper in the room where I stayed with Danny. At least the
flowers used to be yellow.
I don't remember my daddy much before he got hurt, except that he was a big man with a loud laugh and a real pretty
singing voice. The first Christmas after the accident, I recall
that Mrs. Honeycutt sent us a whole baked ham, but my mama
wouldn't touch a bite! and Daddy just laid in a recliner chair
back in the kitchen, near the stove, from then until the time he
died. It seemed to me like he shrank up before he died.
Now my mamma, who was a worrier from the word go
anyway, really started in worrying then, even though the company said we could stay in the house as long as we wanted,
and we had Daddy's insurance money too from the union. But
Mama used to sit in the front room shriveling up Kleenex and
saying "Lord! Lord!" in that way she had. This left me to do
the cooking and washing and the taking care of Danny, which
I did. I didn't mind that either—he was always the sweetest
child. Danny had brown eyes like Daddy's, and a happy disposition as they say. I took him everyplace with me. I was glad
to have him along.
I remember one time we all took him swimming, the summer after Daddy died. Marlene went, and my first cousins
Ruthie and Loretta, and Buddy and Merle and a whole bunch
of us. We used to go in that hole at the bend of Da wson's Creek,
where the water came off the rocks in a big rush and then it got
�LEE SMITH
213
real deep and you could swing out on a rope right over the
deepest part. I can still see Danny swinging through the air on
that long rope, how he went swooping out through the sun and
then the shade in his little red bathing suit, and came up squealing to beat the band. He could swim real good for his age. Marlene and I laid out on a big flat rock and listened to her radio
and watched him. We listened to Elvis Presley, who was just
catching on then. I had a two-piece bathing suit and I was already getting breasts, ahead of Marlene who was still flat as a
pancake, and I was feeling so good laying there in the sun that
when Paul showed up all of a sudden on the bank—he was
home from school for the summer—I sat up and hollered at
him. "Hey, Paul," I said—I think I waved—"come on and go
swimming with us." But Paul said he had some things to do.
Only he didn't leave for a while. He stood right there on the
bank and watched us for a long time before he left. Danny was
swinging out on the rope and Merle kept splashing water on
Marlene and me.
I guess I remember this whole day so good because of what
happened three years later, when Danny drowned. Not in
Da wson's Creek but out on the lake where he had gone fishing
with some bigger boys from Ajax. This was when Danny was
eleven and I was turning sixteen. I cried my eyes out, of
course—it was like Danny had been my baby, in a way, and as
I said he was always so sweet.
But if I thought my mama was bad before, it was nothing
compared to the way she got then. She laid in the bed for three
weeks solid, until the nurse from the County Health came in
and gave her glucose in her veins. She wouldn't do a thing.
Now here I am trying to go to high school, remember, and take
care of Mama too. Finally she got up, but she wasn't the same
after that.
I remember she had this calendar she had gotten from the
hardware store in Ajax, and it was up over the kitchen sink to
hide a hole in the wall where a pipe or something used to go—
anyway, we had this pretty calendar from the hardware store
with a big full-color picture of four baby deer on it, drinking
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out of a spring. Now Mama got a thing about those deer. "Billie Jean,H she used to tell me, "I wish you would look at that little deer to the right, there. I wish you'd just look in his eyes.
Don't they look like Danny's eyes, honey? Don't they?" Then
she started saying, "Danny has come back from the grave, Billie Jean, to be with us right here and now. He is looking out at
me through those deer eyes, I can feel it every time I come in
the kitchen, and when I walk back and forth, I tell you, his eyes
just follow me wherever I go."
Now a person can only take so much of that, and I got to
the point where I didn't know whether I was coming or going.
Finally I thought OK, Billie Jean, you've got two choices: you
can either moon around here and go crazy too, or else you can
go out and have some fun. So I went. This is when I got wild,
I'll make no bones about it, but I'll tell you one thing: there is
only so much to do on a date in a place like that where the
movie over in Ajax didn't change but once a week, and I was
not the only one that did it, either. I was real pretty, though—
I looked like an Indian, people said I took after my daddy that
way—and when you're real pretty, everybody just naturally
notices what you do, and there is always somebody going to
start something about you behind your back.
Oh, I did it all! First I started wearing makeup, then I
started smoking cigarettes, then I used to take a drink of liquor
if one of the boys just happened to bring it along, then I started
letting them feel of my breasts when they kissed me goodnight. I didn't give a damn, either! I wanted them to touch me
like they did. Well, Billie Jean, you've got to do something, is
what I thought. Marlene used to ask me questions about all of
it—where I went and what I did—since the Honeycutts
wouldn't let her date anybody, thinking, I guess, that she was
too good for all of the boys in the bottom, and I told her everything. I used to go over to her house to spend the night and we
made pizza from a mix and smoked cigarettes out the window,
so her mother wouldn't find out. Except she did, finally, and
after that Marlene couldn't see me anymore except in school
and then she went away, too, her senior year, like Paul had.
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Now, Paul—I never set eyes on him but once or twice in all
those years. One summer I was kissing a boy from Ajax, Cord
Parsons I think it was, in a glider on my front porch and all of
a sudden I heard somebody clear their throat and say my name
in the funniest voice, and when I looked up there was Paul not
fifteen feet from where we sat. Paul had gotten tall and skinny, I guess he must have been in college by then. I didn't know
how long he'd been standing there before he said my name.
Cord Parsons stood right up and said, "Now you listen here,1'
but by that time, Paul was gone. He had faded right off in the
dark.
This was the same summer he went off hitchhiking for one
solid month without a dime in his pockets in order to "find himself," according to his father, who got drunk at the 4th of July
company picnic and told some men about it. He said Paul had
taken a vow of silence and it was all a bunch of foolishness and
he said he wished Paul would get a decent job. Mrs. Honeycutt
left the picnic by herself, she was so mad at her husband I guess,
and she lost about fifteen pounds that month worrying before
Paul finally came home. They talked it all up and down the
bottom, how Paul had gone off hitchhiking and made his
mother lose so much weight, but I didn't see him again myself
until one time late that August, when I was walking up the road
to the company store where the P.O. is, to mail some bills for
Mama, and I saw Paul sitting out in the middle of the
Honeycutts' yard cross-legged, staring straight up at the sun.
"Hi, Paul," I said, but he didn't move a muscle and I don't
think he even knew I was there. So I hurried right on by—Marlene had gotten stuck up by then, whenever she was home, and
we weren't friends anymore and it always made me sad to see
those roses on their wall. At the P.O. I told Mr. Looney, the
postmaster, about Paul sitting out in the yard, and Mr. Looney
said that in his opinion Paul had always had a screw loose
someplace, anyway. He said he knew about cross-legged sitting, though—that was meditating, he said, like religion. He
said he guessed Paul was going to turn into a saint next, ha ha!
Mr. Looney winked at me. He was a smart man who could have
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really gone places, everybody said, if he hadn't stayed home
for twenty years to take care of his mother.
Which was not what I planned to do! So when Jimmy Bell
Dean, Jr. started asking me out when I was a senior, I was
tickled to deatli—first because I guess I was flattered, him
being so much older and a doctor's son, and then because he
was so good-looking, a big blond boy like Troy Donahue in A
Summer Place, which I had seen two or three times. Everybody
said we made the cutest couple, which we did. Johnny Bell
took me to motels outside of Wheeling for the weekend, where
we spent all day in those big beds and then drank bourbon and
Coke in the bars that night, and I didn't give a damn what
anybody thought. I was in love! I even hoped I'd get pregnant
so Johnny Bell would have to marry me, but when I did, he
wouldn't.
I remember when I told him I was pregnant: we were sitting up on the ridge in his red Chevrolet one winter day after
he had picked me up from school, just splitting a beer and looking out at all the mountains, which had snow on them as I
recall, and smoke was coming out of all the chimneys
everywhere, and I had on this electric blue mohair sweater he
had given me not one week before, under my coat—well, I told
him, and Johnny Bell liked to have choked on his beer, so I told
him again, and he put his head down on the steering wheel for
a while and then he said he'd take me over to Wheeling for a
rabbit test, and if I was telling the truth, we'd get rid of it. He
said somebody like me wasn't going to force him into anything.
"Take me home, Johnny Bell," I said, and I slammed that
door as hard as I could when I got out. And then I went ahead
and had the baby in spite of them all. In spite of Dr. Johnny
Bell, Sr., coming over to see my mama, wearing a hat, and
saying his son would accept no responsibility, and in spite of
the principal making me quit school when I started to show.
Mrs. Lucas gave me a waitress job at the Ben Franklin Cafe,
over in Ajax, and I remember I had gone back to the kitchen to
get some french fries when my water broke. So Mrs. Lucas
drove me to the hospital in Ajax herself, and I still had my
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waitress smock on.
Listen: I have not ever regretted it, not for one minute,
having that baby. Now this is Betsy, who has been one of the
biggest joys of my life, and she has children of her own today.
A baby is a baby, is the way I see it, and they're all made exactly the same way, and the amount of paperwork involved—or
not involved—does not amount to a Mil of beans. Anyway I
had Betsy, who was the prettiest little child right from the start.
And one day when Betsy was not but three weeks old, the funniest thing happened. I went out to get the mail and there was
this white envelope in the box. Typed, with no return address.
I took it in the house and opened it up, and it had six onehundred dollar bills, folded up in a sheet of plain white paper.
Not a word on that sheet! When I showed all this to Mama,
she liked to have died. She dropped a pan right in the floor as
I recall.
"Well, I guess it's from the Deans,11 she finally said, and said
if it was, then I was going to throw every bit of it straight in the
fire.
"Now, Billie Jean," my mama said, but I went right over to
the phone and called up Dr. Dean at his office. Not in, they
said. I told them who I was and said it was an emergency, and
of course he came to the phone right away.
"Certainly not!" Dr. Dean said when I asked him if he or
Johnny Bell had sent me that money in the mail. "As far as we
are concerned, young lady, any connection we have had with
you is at an end."
"Well, that suits me just fine!" I said, and hung up on him.
That money came in handy, too—I called it the mystery
money—and we lived on it until Betsy was three or four
months old and I went back to work for Mrs. Lucas at the cafe,
and then when she retired, I took over as manager of it. It was
long hours, but I didn't mind it, the pay was OK and the people
were nice, and I had Betsy to come home to every night. I
couldn't for the life of me remember exactly why it was that I
used to like to run around so much. As for Mama, she had
perked up considerably having Betsy around, to the point of
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her being almost a normal person again.
It was about two years later that I married Loyd Raymond,
a druggist in Ajax who came in the cafe for about thirty cups
of coffee every day for a month and a half before he ever got
up nerve to ask me out. Loyd was shy but he was sweet, and
he was just crazy about Betsy: he used to play hide and seek
with her out in the yard, just like a kid. He used to get down
in the woodpile and then jump out. We built a new brick home
around the bend from the bottom where we had lived all those
years, and we had another baby, Loyd Junior, and my mama
lived with us until she died. So I was married to Loyd
Raymond for eighteen years in all, and I couldn't complain of
a thing. Loyd was an easy man to get along with, and a good
man, and I have to say it—he was just crazy about me, too. If
he knew I wanted something, he'd go right out and get it before
I even opened my mouth. We were both of us funny that
way—a lot of times we'd be thinking the same thing, and then
we'd say it out loud together. Loyd bought me a diamond dinner ring for our tenth anniversary, and every summer we went
to Myrtle Beach. I never looked at another man while he was
alive, even though Loyd himself wasn't much to look at—but
he was one good man to live with, I'll say that. It was such an
awful shame when he died so young, but a bad heart runs in
his family, and after I got over the shock of it I went back to the
community college and got my CPA license, and turned what
used to be the den into my office. So I have made a decent
living, and the kids turned out good if I do say so myself, and
I can't say I spent much time thinking about the Honeycutts
even though I passed their house at least two times a day, coming or going to the P.O. up at the store, or maybe over to Ajax.
I did go by there right after Mr. Honeycutt died, to tell Mrs.
Honeycutt I was sorry and to take her some potato salad, because I believe in letting bygones be bygones and she was a
good woman in her way.
"Thank you so much, Billie Jean," she said in this wavery
voice, and she said how cute Loyd Junior was. I had brought
him along, too. I asked after Marlene and she said Marlene had
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219
been married previously, and then divorced, but that now she
had remarried and seemed quite happy. Mrs. Honeycutt's
voice went up and down on the "happy," and tears welled up
in her eyes. She was all bent over in one of those big ugly
armchairs that I used to think were so beautiful—now, you can
give me French Provincial any day!—and I could see that she
herself was not long for this world either. So then I asked after
Paul, too, just to be polite, and Mrs. Honeycutt said that Paul
was a professor of philosophy and religion at one of those big
famous Eastern universities—I forget which one she said, but
you would have heard of it. She said Paul had never married
much to her dismay, and so she had no grandchildren at all
since Marlene had never had any children, either. Then she
started to cry again.
"There's one of the books Paul wrote," she said, pointing to
a big thick book lying there on the coffee table with all the sympathy cards and little figurines and things she kept around.
"But you can't read it," she said.
I picked it up. "Why can't I read it?" I asked.
"Well, I mean you wouldn't want to" Mrs. Honeycutt said,
and she smiled for the first time since I had been there. "It's all
about the nature of God as different people have thought of it
through the ages, or at least that's what it says in the introduction, but you couldn't prove it by me. I tell you, it's dry as a
bone."
I laughed and put the book down on the coffee table. "Paul
always was a brain," I said.
"He certainly was!" Mrs. Honeycutt said. "He..." but then
I guess she forgot what she was going to say next because she
let her voice trail off into thin air and just sat there, staring
through me like I had already left. So I did, and as soon as we
got in the car, Loyd Junior said he was glad to get out of there.
He said that house gave him the creeps.
I was not surprised when Betsy came home from work
about a month later with the news that Mrs. Honeycutt had
passed away in her sleep, and I went over there again, to see if
I could help, when I heard that Marlene had come home to
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clean out the house.
"Oh, Billy Jean!" Marlene said when she opened the door
and saw me standing there. "Look at you! You're just the
same, I'm so glad to see you, oh look at your she said, and
hugged me, and for a minute it was almost like it had been
before we smoked those cigarettes out the window and she had
to go off to school. Almost. But I was a widow with a grown
daughter and a nice big son and a business of my own by then
and Til admit it—I have filled out some, you might say. And
I've got these streaks of gray in my hair that I won't let Neva
at the Clip 'N Curl touch up—"I earned that gray hair!" I tell her,
"and you just let it alone!"—and anyway I guess I look a good
ten years older than Marlene. Marlene had spent a lot of those
years—you can always tell it—holding onto her looks, and she
was as thin as a rail with her hair all frizzed out in one of those
fashionable new hairdos they wear now. Marlene looked like
a model out of Cosmopolitan magazine, and every piece of
jewelry she had on was solid gold. She smoked a lot, though,
and picked at things with her nails. "Can I help you with the
house?" I asked, and she said maybe I could help her supervise
it, but the company had hired a bunch of women for her and
they were already packing everything up. And they were,
too—you never saw so much carrying on and packing in your
life. So we just sat down in the middle of it all and had us a
long heart-to-heart, and that was when Marlene said the
strangest thing:
"You know," she told me, and then she laughed and said,
"Well, you don't know, I know you don't, how much I envied
you when we were teenagers."
"Oh, come on Marlene," I said, but Marlene swore that it
was true.
"I wanted to be just like you, I even wanted to look just like
you, and I wanted to do everything you did. I was just so bored
with my life..." and she went on about how her boredom had
gotten her into her first impossible marriage, which is what she
called it, but she said that now at least she was getting her feet
on the ground, and again I had that funny feeling that she had
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221
somehow gotten years and years younger than me—but then
she dropped the bombshell.
"I'll tell you something else you never knew," she said. By
then we had found two little green glasses and we were drinking some sherry wine. "My brother, Paul, was always in love
with you, too. We were both kind of in love with you, if you
know what I mean, only I believe Paul was really in love and
he never got over you, either."
"Why Paul never even asked me out!" I said, and she said
it was probably because I used to be so wild and all, and Paul
knew he couldn't compete. But she said she always thought
he wouldn't have loved me, either, if I hadn't been so wild, and
I said this was all hogwash in my opinion, and then we got to
giggling and giggling and finally we went upstairs to see how
the women were coming along in the linen closets and the
cedar closet and the bedrooms. They were almost through.
Everything was stripped and your voice echoed out in all the
rooms. Except for one—Paul's—because Marlene said Paul
had asked expressly that she leave it alone since he was coming back here to spend the fall semester and write another book
before they sold the house, and so the women had not been in
there at all.
Now this is something I would not ordinarily have done,
I'll admit it, but I was so confounded by what Marlene had just
told me, and I had drunk that sherry wine—anyway, I went in
Paul's room and—I'll come right out and say it—snooped
around, while Marlene was down in the front hall writing all
those women a check. At first I found exactly what you'd
think—books and books, lots of stuff like chemistry sets and
little old scale model kits of buildings, like cathedrals for instance, instead of airplanes which you would normally expect
to find in what had been a boy's room, only of course that boy
was Paul. But then in a closet, on a shelf with a lot of other
boxes holding collections of various sorts, I saw this fancy
wooden box with initials carved in the top, BJL, and those were
my initials, you know, before I married. Mine! Well, I didn't
have much time. I could hear Marlene's voice and the women's
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voices in the downstairs hall, all of them going up like voices
do when people are saying goodbye. But I opened the box
anyway—I would have died if I hadn't opened it—and sure
enough, it was full of things about me, such as that red velvet
bow I used to wear in my hair, and my initial ankle chain I lost
the year I was fourteen, pictures the Honeycutts had taken of
us all in their front yard, and weird little dried-up flowers and
stuff like that. All of a sudden I felt like I was going to get sick
to my stomach. Also I heard the door close down there in the
front hall, so I took one picture out of the box, to keep—Marlene and me and Paul by the rope swing, grinning into the
sun—and then I closed the box back tight and shoved it to the
back of the shelf. It made me sick, as I said. In fact my heart
was beating so bad I thought I was going to have a cardiac arrest, which I did not. In fact I hugged Marlene goodbye, and
told her how good it was to see her—this was true—and I drove
straight home and never said a word to anybody, not even my
first cousin Ruthie who is divorced and lives next door now,
about what Marlene had said or what I'd seen.
But I did stick that picture of us three children up in the
corner of the mirror of my bedroom, don't ask me why. I
wasn't about to put it in a frame or anything, like I keep all the
pictures of Loyd and Betsy and Loyd Junior and so on, but I
stuck it up there in my mirror just the same, while I went on
about my life. I started to date a little bit, just for companionship primarily, and also I made some money that year on a
piece of land I'd bought earlier, and so that summer I took the
kids to Disney World even though I thought Betsy was too old
to enjoy it—but you're not ever too old for Disney World, as
we found out. We all had a fine time. I never thought for a
minute, all during that summer, about what I must have
known, some place deep down inside of me, what I was going
to do when Paul Honeycutt came back to live in their house
that fall.
I wasn't even nervous knocking on the door. This was
early September, marigolds still blooming, overgrown, along
the walk. Nobody came and I knocked again. I knew he was
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223
in there, and sure enough, after another minute or so, he opened
the door just a crack.
H
Yes?tf he said. Then he said, "Billie Jean?" His voice still
went up at the end.
"It's me, all right," I said. "Aren't you going to open up and
let me in?" and so he did, and in I went.
Age had been good for Paul Honeycutt, I saw right away,
like it sometimes is for a man. He was still tall, still skinny, and
his blond flyaway hair had thinned to a kind of adorable fuzz
around his ears. Anyway, it struck me as adorable right then.
He had big thick glasses, which looked good. The glasses
seemed to hold his features in the right place on his face. Paul
Honeycutt looked exactly like what he was, a brainy professor
who didn't have anybody to take care of him. And this was obvious, too, by the shape the house was in—dusty, and what little furniture was left was mostly covered up with old white
cloths. It looked spooky.
"Now you know me and you know I have never believed
in beating around the bush," I told him, and I took off my red
cardigan sweater and dropped it over a wingchair and went
straight up to him and put my arms around his waist. "I know
everything!" I said. "I know how you sent me that money right
after I had Betsy, and I know how you have felt about me all
my life. So don't try to deny it, Paul Honeycutt, I knowl And
I'll tell you something else"—I was holding him so close that I
could hear his heart just beating like a bird batting around inside of his chest—"we are not old people right now, either one
of us, and it's never too late to make up for lost time."
But Paul Honeycutt pushed me away. Shoved me so hard
I turned my ankle, almost fell. "No," he said. "No, Billie Jean,
you don't understand—" and he fluttered his hands in the air,
back and forth, like he used to do when he talked about math
with Mr. Boling, back in school. He acted like he was scared to
death, like a man who has seen a ghost. "It wasn't you, it wasn't
ever really you, it was the idea of you, which made possible the
necessary—" and he went on, and then I started noticing some
other things about him that I hadn't seen at first when I came
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in, how his eyes rolled back and forth, and he wore his pants so
high, and the corners of his mouth jerked when he talked. "I
couldn't possibly," he said. "I could never actually—ft
But I had heard enough. "Well;11 said. "OK. If you're so
dumb you'd rather have the idea of me than the real me in the
flesh, as they say, then you can keep it. Goodbye!" I said, and
walked right out and slammed the door. My ankle hurt but I
kept walking even when I remembered my sweater I wasn't
about to go back and get it, I'll tell you that! So I left my sweater
in that house, and it's there to this day, only he's probably put
it up in a wooden box or something, in his room. Who knows?
And I don't care. I've got my own business to think about
and also I am considering marrying this Preston P. Diggers,
who I met at a CPA convention in Wheeling, and who has got
serious intentions, it looks like, in my direction. He's a real nice
man. I'd have to be a fool not to snap him up when he pops the
question, which I am sure he will. As for Paul Honeycutt, poor
thing, he never went back to the university, or wrote his book,
and so they never sold the house and he's still there. He doesn't
come out except to walk to the company store for groceries, I
hear, and his hair is wild and white and he talks to himself on
the road as he goes. My grandchildren, Betsy's girls, run when
they see him coming, that's a fact. All the children do. Its been
six or seven years since he came back. But here's a funny thing:
as much as I love Preston Diggers, which I do, I have never yet
taken down that little picture of Marlene and Paul and me
which I stuck up in the corner of the mirror so long ago. And
sometimes late at night when I'm brushing my hair before I go
to bed, or I get up early and look in the mirror before it gets really light outside, you know, when the bedroom is still fuzzy
gray, why it seems to me that Paul Honeycutt is looking right
out at me from his little-boy face, staring straight into my eyes,
and I know what my mama, bless her heart, meant about my
little brother Danny and that deer—and all of it strikes me, for
a minute, as so sad.
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Saint Paul
1. How do Paul's differences separate him from others?
2. Throughout the story, Billie Jean suffers many hardships.
What qualities does she possess that enable her to endure?
3. Find examples of Billie Jean's family loyalty.
4. At the end of the story Billie Jean is convinced that Paul loves
her, but he shoves her away. What does Paul mean when
he says, "It wasn't you, it was the idea of you.. . ft ?
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LOU CRABTREE (1913- )
Lou Crabtree left Abingdon, Virginia, her birthplace, only
long enough to earn a degree from Radford University and to
study drama at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in
New York. She taught school for thirty-six years to children,
teen-agers, adults, and foreigners learning English. She is also
a farmer.
She has had stories published in many literary magazines.
In 1984 the Barter Theatre toured "Calling on Lou,11 a dramatic
presentation of her poems and short stories. In 1984 Louisiana
State University Press published her first collection of stories,
Sweet Hollow.
This story from Sweet Hollow, told by a child, creates sympathy for Homer, Old Marth's blacksnake.
Homer-Snake
Old Marth claimed all the blacksnakes were hers. She
tongue-lashed the roving Murray boys, who went into people's
barns and caught snakes and took them by their tails and cracked them like whips. This cracking broke the body of the snake
and sometimes snapped off its head. It was terrible to see the
Murray boys wring a snake around a few times, then give a
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227
jerk and off snap the head.
Old Marth lived in her cabin next to our cabin down in the
hollow of the river hills. She pinned her gray hair with long
wire hairpins. I watched her stick the wire hairpins into her
hair with little flicks of the wrist. It hurt her head, I thought.
Only when she was bothered did her hair escape the pins and
fall in gray wisps about her face. Bud, my brother younger
than I a few years, thought it his mission in life to trail me, to
spy, and to report on me to Maw. Some things Bud would tell
but not many. Only things on me. Bud said I told everything
I knew. Maw said it, too. Because of this, Bud never let me trek
over the hills with him.
He said, "She just can't keep from talking. She talks all
along the trace. If you talk, you don't get to know anything."
Old Marth leaned down close to Bud. "Blacksnakes are
best of friends. Come down to my house and I'll show you
Homer-snake."
I had seen Homer-snake many times. Bud had, too.
Homer had lived for years back of Old Marth's house in the
corner of the outside rock chimney. A hole was visible, where
for warmth Homer crawled in the winter.
I once asked Old Marth, "Did Homer-snake dig his hole by
himself?"
Old Marth replied, "I expect it is a once frog hole."
What Old Marth told Bud next was not news to Bud or to
me. We had both seen it a million times.
"Homer-snake likes milk to drink. I put out milk for him
in his saucer every day. Best of all he likes cream, which I don't
give him but ever once in a while. He might get too fat to go
in his hole." Old Marth laughed, then fiercelike advanced close
to Bud. "Don't you ever come to be tormenting blacksnakes.
I'll be wastin' my breath if you come to be like them rovin' Murray boys. Come to my house soon and get better acquainted
with my Homer-snake."
Old Marth wouldn't have liked what Bud was carrying
around in his pocket. I asked him what the small white rocks
were that looked like they were rolled in salt.
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"Blacksnake eggs. I found them under a rock up the ridge."
Old Marth was always asking me to go home with her to
spend the night. She never asked Bud. He tried to devil me
behind Old Marth's back.
"How would you like to turn down your bed covers and
there would be Old Homer all curled up warming your bed?"
Then I accused Bud of being jealous, and we got into one
of our many spats until Maw moved in, saying, "Old Marth just
don't like boys. She is suspecting on account of them Murray
boys."
Bud never was known to give up. He used to slink around
the house as I was leaving, and peep around the corner, and
hiss, "Don't sit down on Homer-snake."
Behind Old Marth's house and up a little rocky path was
her vegetable garden. To one side was her little barn where
she kept her cow, some hens, and a red rooster. The rooster
did not like Homer and gave him many a good flogging. He
raked Homer with his spurs until Homer fled from the barn,
leaving the rooster and hens alone.
Nevertheless, on the sly, Homer would steal into the barn
where he unhinged his jaws and swallowed whole one of the
hen's nice eggs. Then off he would sneak, toward the rocky
path, where he knocked and banged himself against the rocks
until the prongs on his ribs crushed the shell of the egg. Once
I saw Homer with a huge knot along his body, and I rushed to
Old Marth, alarmed.
Old Marth answered in a knowing way. "Most likely an
egg. Could be a mouse or a baby rabbit. Homer-snake is
having his dinner."
Once the Murray boys were out "rogueing"—knocking off
apples and stealing eggs. Homer was in the warm hen's nest
where the hen had just laid a nice egg. Homer liked the warmth
and was nestling down and warming himself before swallowing the egg, which was sort of an ordeal for him. A rude hand,
reaching into the nest, and pulling out Homer, let go quickly.
Even the Murray boys didn't like surprises like Homer.
"Homer is my protection," cackled Old Marth as the Mur-
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229
ray boys skirted her place, skulking about carrying an old sack
they put their loot into. Old Marth guessed that the Murray
boys were out to get Homer. Twice they were almost successful.
Homer loved to climb trees. There were young birds and
other delights. He played hide and seek up in the sycamore
tree down by the little springhouse. He climbed to the very
tiptop and out of his snake eyes viewed the world. I liked to
watch him hang like a string and swing in the sycamore tree.
On this particular day, Old Homer had left the sycamore
and was up in the tree that had the squirrel's nest. It had once
been a crow's nest, but the squirrels had taken over for the summer. In the winter they had a fine home in a hole just below
the crow's nest.
Homer liked young squirrels almost as much as young rabbits.
The Murray boys almost got Homer that time. They
spotted him up in the tree that had the squirrel's nest. Climbing a tree was nothing to the Murray boys. They could climb
to the top of any tree in the Hollow. Homer-snake was in a
predicament. The leanest of the Murrays was coming right on
up the tree with no problem. Homer couldn't see Old Marth
anywhere. It would be too late in a minute. A rough hand
would be reaching for him.
There were some small limbs, too small to hold the weight
of a boy, and farther on, still smaller limbs that just possibly
could hold up a snake. Out crawled Old Homer and with great
care coiled himself round and round the smallest ones.
The Murray boy was plain mad. The limb would not hold
up his weight. He ventured out as far as he could and leaned
out and down and stretched his arm toward Homer.
"Shake him loose. Shake hard."
Round and round the tree looking up, calling louder and
louder, went the rest of the boys until the red rooster brought
together his pack of hens and they all set to cackling, which
caused the hogs to trot around the pen, grunting. Just in time,
out of the house, like a whirlwind, came Old Marth. The Mur-
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ray boys knew to make themselves scarce and they hightailed
it, except the one caught up in the tree who tried to skin down
fast. Old Marth got hold of his hair and yanked him about, and
when he left, he left a piece of his shirt with Old Marth.
Laughter floated backwards as the Murray boys hightailed
it, putting distance between them and Old Marth's screeching.
"Rogues! Torments! Thieves!"
So Homer was saved this first time.
Another time, the Murray boys were watching Old Marth's
house and knew she was away. They were walking around
looking at the roots she had tied up to the rafters of her
porch. They had been down to the hogpen and down to
the springhouse and had drunk out of the gourd. They spied
Homer, who was coming from the garden. He barely got
halfway in his door when one of the Murrays got him by the
tail, straining and tugging to pull him out. What they did not
know was that no one, not anyone, can pull a snake out of his
hole, once he gets part way in. The snake swells up and spreads
his scales and each scale has a tiny muscle. The snake may be
pulled into two parts, but he will never be moved. The Murray
boys did not give up easy as they pulled and tugged.
"Pull harder. Yank him outa there.
Homer was about to come apart when he felt footsteps coming along on the ground. Old Marth, home early, came upon
the scene and chased off the Murrays with a tongue-lashing
they would remember. Homer-snake was saved the second
time, but there was to be a third.
In the late summer, Homer got a new skin. He molted. He
had a bad case of lassitude. Then his whole body was itching
so he could not rest. His lips began to split and his eyes turned
milky. He made trip after trip up into the garden, ate a big
bunch of snails and bugs, and lazed back down over the rocky
path.
One day there was his old skin beside the path in the rocks.
Of course he knew all along what he was doing and just how
to do it. He rubbed and rubbed himself against the rocks until
his old skin loosened and he rolled it off wrong side out. Just
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231
like Bud shed his clothes.
Old Marth found the skin and tied it with several others to
the rafters of her porch. When the wind rattled them, they
scared me, but not Homer's enemies, the Murrays.
Old Marth said to Bud after Homer shed his skin, "I will
make you acquainted with the new Homer. Don't you like
him? Ain't he handsome? Like a new gun barrel, he is."
With his new skin, Homer was so shiny and new, I think
Bud almost liked him. Homer looked "spit shined," like Paw
said about his shoes from his old army days.
Homer got along real well with the cow. She ignored him
and never got ruffled if she came upon him suddenly. Homer
only had to watch her feet. She did not care where she stepped.
Four feet were a lot to watch and one day Homer got careless.
One of the cow's feet came down hard on about three inches
of Homer's tail. When Homer looked back, the end of his tail
was broken off and sticking out of the mud in the cow's track.
His beautiful tail. So for the rest of his life he went about trailing his blunted tail, and after a while he didn't seem to miss it.
Bud said, "I can always tell if it is Homer trailing through
the sands and dust. Among the squiggles you can see where
his old stepped-on tail went."
Down in the springhouse Old Homer guarded the milk
crocks. He would curl around a crock like giving it a good hugging. Old Marth had to keep the lids weighted down with
heavy rocks so Homer wouldn't knock the covers off and get
in the milk.
Looking back, behind the springhouse, was a swath of
daisies with bunches of red clover marked here and there,
winding all the way to the top of the ridge. This swath was
Homer-snake's special place. He liked to lie and rest and cool
off among the daisies. He played all the way to the top of the
ridge, got tired and slept, had lunch along the way, slithered
down when he chose, spending the whole of a summer's day
to arrive back home in the cool of the evening. The daisies gave
Homer-snake a nice feeling.
The Murray boys were Homer's end. This was the third
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encounter.
"All things have an end." Maw said later.
Maw sent me down to Old Marth's place to swap some
quilt pieces. Going to her house was all right if I could locate
Homer. Sitting on Homer or having him swing down from a
rafter and touch me on the shoulder never got any less upsetting. But something bad was waiting for us all that day at Old
Marth's place.
Homer was fat and lazy and full of cream.
"I'll put in a spoon of jelly for you, Homer." Old Marth put
the jelly in Homer-snakes's saucer and went on her way. She
was going over the hill to visit and take a sample of the jelly.
Homer loved the jelly. Then I know he began feeling lonely. Loneliness led to carelessness. He failed to notice that
everything was too quiet. The birds were quiet like the Murray boys were in the vicinity. The chickens were quiet like a
hawk was circling. Homer decided to slip past the rooster and
go into the barn to rest.
The Murray boys were out "funning" all day over the hills.
They were stirring up bees' nests beside the trace and getting
people stung. They were running the cows so they wouldn't
let their milk down. The were riding the steers and tormenting the bull.
They saw Old Marth going over the ridge and grinned at
each other and jammed down their old hats over their ears and
hitched up their britches. Preparing themselves. Preparing to
steal eggs out of the hens' nests, they went into the barn. Bud
saw it all and told Maw.
Maw said to me, "There is such a thing as keeping your
mouth shut."
Bud was watching the Murray boys that day. He had
trailed them and watched from the far edge of the woods on
the top of the hiH. Bud was always watching. I saw him in the
plum grove. He was no partner in what happened.
The Murray boys went into the barn with their everlasting
sack, stayed a few minutes, rushed out toward the hogpen,
pitched the sack, and whatever was in it, over to the hogs. Then
�LOU CRABTREE
233
they laughed and shouted and hightailed it.
I saw it. Bud saw it. I ran to tell Maw.
"They threw the sack and Homer in it into the hog pen. The
hogs will eat up Homer." I was running, screaming wild, and
blubbering.
I was so excited with telling the tale that I had not had time
to feel sorry for Homer. The hogpen was one place Homer
never fooled around. Even Homer knew that hogs ate up
blacksnakes.
Bud had come up. "How are you going to keep her from
blabbing?" Bud thought he was the world's best at keeping his
mouth shut. He gloried in keeping secrets.
I wanted to talk about what I saw, and I wanted to bring it
up ever afterwards and keep asking questions. There was so
much to wonder about.
"She will tell her guts," Bud said.
"Let Homer bide," was what Maw had said to me and
meant it. I could tell for her mouth was a straight line across.
Old Marth came home, missed Homer, and looked
everywhere. Bud and I stood around and watched her. Her
eyes were on the ground looking for some sign, trying to find
a trail.
I mooned around and was about sick seeing Old Marth
with her graying hair stringing and wisping about her face.
Until one day, Old Marth said, "If Homer were alive, he would
show up. I know when to give up hopes. I resign myself."
Determined not to let anything slip about Homer, for a
while, it helped to clap both hands over my mouth when questions began popping in my head. I didn't want ever to be the
first one to tell about Homer being eaten by the—I must not
say it now.
Maw kept saying, "Let it bide a while."
Old Marth came back to our house to churn. Her hair like
a cap was pinned up with long hairpins. Maw required neat
hair around the butter, for a hair found in the butter made a
bad tale up and down the Hollow.
I kept holding both hands over my mouth to keep from tell-
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Contemporary Authors Search for a Usable Past
ing until one day Old Marth noticed and said, "You are acting
funny." Turning to Maw, she said, "The child is sick. Goes
around all the time about to vommick holding her hands over
her mouth. Just might be she is wormy and needs a dose."
I wasn't sick. Maw knew it. Bud knew it.
Days went by, to a day when I went down for a look in the
hogpen. The hogs grunted, pointed their ears, and looked up
at me with their little pig eyes close together.
There under the slop trough I saw it. The proof I was not
seeking. I saw a piece of old sack. I screamed what the whole
world already knew. "They threw the sack and Homer in it
into the hogpen. The hogs ate up Old Homer." I leaned against
the pen and I retched until I spit up. I was really sick. The hogs
saw it. Bud did, too, for he was in the plum grove, spying as
usual. I started running, jumped some puddles, got tired, and
came to stop where some daisies covered with dust were beside the road.
I began feeling nice. The daisies were nice. Old Marth's
place behind me was nice. Up overhead the fleecy sheep
clouds stood stock still to become masses of daisies. Over to
the left was a patch of red-sky clover. Then the sheep clouds
moved together and formed a maze and across the sky was a
swath of daisies. Just like the swath Homer had traveled up
the trace to the top of the ridge. I was delighted and looked a
long while. I know I saw it. There placed in the maze of daisies
he loved so well was Homer-snake. He stood upright on the
end of his blunt tail and looking over the daisies, he laughed
at me.
I laughed and went home.
Maw's kitchen was nice with smells of sassafras tea,
spicewood, gingerroot, milk cheeseing, and cold mint water
fresh from the spring.
Bud came in the door, reporting on me. "Maw, I saw her.
She has been down to Old Marth's hogpen."
"Whatever for, child?"
Maw didn't expect an answer, and I had already turned my
back on Bud. I felt something new in my life. The day was
�LOU CRABTREE
235
coming soon when I could handle Bud. Maw refers to it as
patience. Patience was something Bud did not have. Bud hung
around, waiting on me to start talking and telling everything.
I sat until Bud gave up and left, then I told Maw, "I saw Old
Homer-snake among the daisies in the sky. He stood up on his
blunt tail and laughed at me."
Maw left her dough-making with flour up to her elbows,
she took my head in both hands. "Precious. You saw what you
hoped for, for Homer. Homer-snake is all right. You are all
right. Find your little pan. You can come help me make up
this bread."
Homer-Snake
1. Two conflicts are evident in this story, Old Marth's conflict
with the Murray boys and Bud's conflict with his sister.
Discuss the resolution of these conflicts at the end of the
story.
2. What factual knowledge about black snakes do you gain
as you read "Homer-Snake"?
3. Describe the three attempts the Murray boys made to
capture Homer.
4.
At the end of the story, how does the young girl join Old
Marth to show her affection for Homer-Snake?
5. Are you satisfied with the ending of the story? How might
you have changed the ending if you had written it?
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ELIOT WIGGINTON (1942- )
A lichen which glows in the woods of Southern Appalachia
on dark nights, Foxfire is also the name given to the publications
of Eliot Wigginton and his students in Rabun Gap, Georgia.
Wigginton and his students learn and record the heritage of the
Appalachian region.
After graduating from Cornell University in 1966, with an
A.B. in English and an M.A.T., the idealistic Wigginton began
to teach students, who were more interested in pranks than in
English.
One day in desperation, he walked into the class and asked,
"How would you like to throw away the text and start a
magazine?" This began Foxfire, a magazine which now has subscribers in all fifty states and a dozen foreign countries. Nine
books by the same name record the heritage of the Appalachian
region.
Wigginton's students turned to collecting hunting tales and
ghost stories and recording folkways such as how to plant by
the signs, kill hogs, make soap, build log cabins, and gather
medicinal plants like ginseng.
Ginseng, which grows wild in the mountains, is known for
its healing powers. Because the roots bring a high price, it
provides a cash crop for mountain people who know where
they can find a patch of "sang."
One of Wigginton's students, Marie MeUinger, published
�ELIOT WIGGINTON
237
the following piece of research on the gathering of this native
plant.
Ginseng
From the Himalayas to the Blue Ridge, and for as long a
time as distance, ginseng has been a favored medicine. The
American ginseng (Panax quinquefolium) is very similar to its
Asiatic relative. It has a stiff stalk holding two leaves, each leaf
five-divided like fingers on a hand, and vaguely resembling
those of the horse chestnut. A small umbel of insignificant yellow-green flowers is followed by red berries. It takes two years
to come up from seed, and if a plant has been injured, it might
not send up a stalk until the following year. It is slow-growing
and long-lived if left alone. The aromatic roots are the part used
for medicine, although occasionally tea has been made from the
leaves.
It was once found in rich bottom lands from Canada to
Florida. William Gillespie wrote, "It is most common in beech
woods." Another writer said, "It grows mainly in well-drained
upland hardwoods, mixed stands of maple, basswood, butternut, and rock elm, or on the shady side of deep gullies where
there is a transition in timber and vegetation mixes." William
Bartram, traveling near Keowee, South Carolina, wrote, "It appears plentifully on the north exposure of the hill, growing out
of the rich, mellow, humid earth, amongst the stones or fragments of rocks." Associated plants have been listed as maidenhair fern (Adiantum), baneberry (Actaea), spikenard (Aralia
mcemosa), blue cohosh (Caulophyllum), yellow ladyslipper
(Cypripedium), and the "little brother of the ginseng," the
goldenseal (Hydrastis canadensis).
Our native ginseng first came to the attention of Europeans
when Father Joseph Lafitau, who had been a missionary in
China, recognized the similar American plant growing near a
Mohawk village in Canada. He set up ovens and had the
Mohawks gather and cure ginseng for the Chinese market. By
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Contemporary Authors Search for a Usable Past
1717, it was being bought from as far away as Green Bay, Wisconsin, by the Fox Indians, and shipped to Hongkong via
France. In 1784, the Empress of China sailed for Macao with a
load of ginseng to exchange for tea, ginger, silk, and camphor.
Also in 1784, George Washington wrote, "In passing through
the mountains, I met a number of persons and pack horses
going over the mountain with ginseng.1' In 1793, Andre'
Michaux wrote that ginseng was the only product of Kentucky
that could be transported overland to Philadelphia.
By 1798, John Drayton of South Carolina said, "It is so much
sought after by the Cherokees for trade it is by no means as
plentiful as it used to be in this state." Ginseng gathering had
begun to be a way of life for many pioneers. A man could go
"sang hunting" and return with a fortune; or in those perilous
times, might never return at all.
The early colonists not only gathered ginseng for sale, but
used it in tea to encourage the appetite or strengthen the digestion, especially of elderly persons or puny children. Ginseng
plus black cherry and y eUo wroot made a potent tonic, especially with the addition of some home made whiskey. An early
herbal suggested gathering ginseng root and steeping it with
chamomile flowers for fainting females.
Colonel Byrd, in his History of the Dividing Line, wrote, "To
help cure fatigue, I used to chew a root of ginseng as I walked
along. This kept up my spirits. It gives an uncommon warmth
and vigor to the blood. It cheers the heart of a man that has a
bad wife, and makes him look down with great composure
upon the crosses of the world. It will make old age amiable by
rendering it lively, cheerful, and good humored." Many early
settlers dug ginseng root for their own use and never thought
of selling it. By 1800, several patent medicines on the market
featured "seng," or "sang-tone." Dr. McMasters of Michigan
wrote, "Ginseng is a mild, non-poisonous plant, well adapted
to domestic as well as professional uses. In this respect, it may
be classed with such herbs as boneset, oxbalm, rhubarb, and
dandelion. The medical qualities are known to be a mild tonic,
stimulant, nervine, and stomachic. It is especially a remedy for
�ELIOT WIGGINTON
239
ills incident to old age."
With some domestic sale, as well as a continuing foreign
market, "sanging" became a business in the rich deciduous
forests of the American heartland, and on the slopes of the
Catskills, the Poconos, the Alleghenies, and the Appalachians.
It was inevitable that some would try to cash in on such a
profitable and easy crop by cultivating it. Thus there was a
craze for ginseng gardens from 1889 through 1905, with centers
in Amberg, Wisconsin; and Chardon, Ohio. Later New York
state and then Michigan became the centers of ginseng production. Ginseng was planted in beds shaded by lath slats, or
under wire covered by fast growing annual vines. But growers
found it took seven years to produce roots large enough to
market, and then the roots lacked the quality of those gathered
in the wild. Garden plants were subject to a variety of wilts,
blights, and rots, and a whole garden could be decimated in a
week. But even though they were a gamble, ginseng gardens
continued to appeal to many who wished to make an easy fortune.
However, the most money continued to be in gathering
wild ginseng. Around 1922, someone wrote, "Grandma B. took
out the back seat of her Model T and filled it with ginseng and
sold the load for $1,100. They dried the roots on shelves behind the stove." As ginseng disappeared in more settled parts
of the country, sang hunting in the Appalachians continued.
Maurice Brooks wrote that it was one of the few crops that
could be sold for cash with which to pay taxes or buy a new
gun or hound dog. The sang hunter would go off into the
mountains or woodlands with his special sang-hoe made of
rigid steel with a narrow blade. The average-sized wild roots
weighed up to six ounces when dug, and an expert sanger
could grub out two pounds in a day. As they dried, usually
from the cabin rafters, it took five pounds of fresh root for each
pound of cured or marketable root.
The conservative sanger only dug roots in the fall of the
year and carefully replanted the seeds, or the rhizome extension called a "quill," or "bud." To keep ginseng from being com-
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Contemporary Authors Search for a Usable Past
pletely killed out in an area, some sangers would carry seeds
and plant them in other suitable locales. There were, however,
those greedy individuals who gathered sang at any time of the
year, and did not hesitate to rob a neighbor's patch. Sang
hunters would try to find out where their competitors had success, and in turn would keep their own finds a secret. By 1913,
Horace Kephart, in Our Southern Highlands, wrote that ginseng
had been exterminated in all but the wildest regions.
After the War in Korea ruined most Oriental ginseng lands,
the sale of ginseng roots reached a new peak, the price rising
to $35.00 a pound for wild roots. Sangers scoured the country
for roots, and dealers made and lost fortunes on ginseng sales.
The price is still high, and while some ginseng is being brought
to dealers from Illinois, Missouri, West Virginia, and Kentucky,
the bulk now comes from North Carolina, Tennessee, and
Georgia....
Buck Carver claims that there are lots of places back in the
woods where people have set out berries, and then either
moved away or forgotten about them. They're there now for
anyone to find. "Lord, there's patches of it planted back in
them woods that people have planted in unsuspecting places
[and never gone back to].
"Nearly everyone hunts on north ground in dark coves,
you know, and lots of times a feller plants it back, he'll plant it
on south ground. That's how come it's in Laney Cove there on
Kelly's Creek.
"In 1937, we was making whiskey up there at the east end
of them cliffs in what was called 'Stillhouse Cove/ and I come
down there one day to see about the beer and see how near
ready to run it was, and I dug several roots and got a good
pocket of berries, and I went right through the Gap—Stillhouse
Cove Gap—between Kelly's Creek and Mud Creek and down
in the head of Laney Cove there—some good dark rich earth
there, and walnuts growing in that earth too. So I crawled off
in down below the road and reached up and transplanted them
roots that I dug up and planted out that bunch of berries. And
�ELIOT WIGGINTON
241
I checked on it pretty good there for several years, and it was
coming along fine. And then I forgot it.
"About twelve years ago, I was making liquor over on
Kelly's Creek and stumbled onto the durn stuff walking out
the road one day. And I thought, 'Well, good God Almighty,
what in the world are you a'doing here?' Big old stalk, you
know. Big ball of red berries. And another step, another big
one or two. And,'Oh, yeah. Heck, yeah. I remember now. I
planted you here!'
"So I dug a root or two—I didn't try to dig it for market
[but] I ought to have—and I forgot it again then.
"About three or four years ago, one of my wife's son-inlaws said something about that patch of sang over there—did
I know it was there. I says, 'I ought to know its there. I planted
the durn stuff. And I went over there that fall to dig some of it
and put in my garden here, and some feller had been in there
just ahead of us and he'd dug all the big pretty sang they was
there that he could find. And there'd be the tops down on the
ground, and big balls of berries. He'd never planted the durn
berries back.
"Well, sir, that made me so durn mad I couldn't hardly see.
I gathered every durn berry, and went to digging the little sttif f
then. Dug every durn thing I could find and brought it on over
here and transplanted it in the garden.
"But now it don't all come up every year. I went back over
there for two or three falls and found more. You can't get it all.
I don't care how much—that Raven Rock Mountain there has
been sanged to death as far back as I can remember. When I
was eight years old, I went to digging sang on that mountain,
and I've dug it off and on ever since, and they's still some there
that ain't been found. I went up there this faU for a little while
one day and found several roots and brought them and the berries in here and planted them in that garden."
"The biggest one I ever found," said Lawton Brooks, "was
a five-prong bunch. Had the biggest root on it that I ever saw
on one. [The plant] was at least up to my waist. I was
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Contemporary Authors Search for a Usable Past
a'standing, and I didn't know too much about it then. My
wife's brother, he knows it, and he was letting me help him
look for some. And he was digging it. He gave me a top to go
by, and I was a'looking at the top and then a'looking to see if I
could see anything like it. There ain't nothing else like it if you
ever get used to it. Now I can find it. I can spot it just
anywhere. Anyway, I was standing there, and there was a big
old wad of berries as big as my fist there, a'sticking right up by
my side, and I commenced hollering for him, and he come up
there and said that was the biggest bunch he ever seen. So he
dug it for me. I let him get it out. He was afeared I'd break it.
So he dug it for me and I took it down there to the store, and
that old man gave me a dollar and a half for it. Now that one
root would bring a man ten or fifteen dollars because it's about
sixty-five dollars a pound this year. It's higher than it's been
a'being.
"Now as good a patch as ever I got into was that one that I
found over in North Carolina. I got about forty-eight dollars
worth that I dug and I wasn't over two hours. That's as good
a patch of wild as ever I found in one place, and I didn't cover
no territory. I didn't dig any further than from here to that filling station out yonder [about a hundred yards]. I just went
backwards and forwards across the holler for a little piece, and
I went up next to where the cliff was, and then I looked back
down and I'd missed some and I went up, found some, and I
went back down, and I come out. There might have been more
below than there was above, but I ain't been back. But hadn't
a'been nobody there in years digging no sang there. They'd
a'been sure—they couldn't a kept from digging a whole lot in
there. And I ain't been back. That's the reason I been wanting
to go back so bad now. If I could get back in that place over
there now and take my time and spend a couple of days over
there, I could get a pile of that blasted stuff 'cause I know some
places over there—them old hollers I used to hunt in when I
was an old boy and lived there—I hunted in there all the time.
I know where them old hollers is. I could get in there and I could
find some ginseng.
�ELIOT WIGGINTON
243
"I like to hunt it, myself. It's interesting. You get to hunting for it, it's interesting, boys. You just take a liking to it. Same
way by bee hunting. I like to bee hunt. I ain't got no use for
them when I find them, but I just like to find the bee trees. I
know where four or five bee trees is now. But I wouldn't be
stung for all of them. I'm afraid of them cussed things. They
run me crazy!
"But that sang's turning yellow right now. The berries are
ripe right now on it. I ain't felt like it or I'd be going. Right
now's the best time. Yes, sir. The berries are red as they can be.
There's people in the woods today somewhereV nother hunting it like the devil right now, I'll bet you. I've talked to several
said they've been out. They go and camp out—stay a week at
a time back in the woods and just do nothing but get up every
morning and start again. Hunt a new territory every time. But
I can't climb the mountains like I used to or I'd be right out there
with them. I get out of breath too quick. But if I had the air, I'd
be right out there with them, climbing around them rough
places."
If ginseng is getting scarcer in the mountains, and it seems
to be, it still hasn't diminished the number of people who hunt
for it. They all have their stories—and their dreams. As Wallace Moore said, "One day I dug a big haverpoke full out of each
of my beds and then didn't dig at all. Boy, that's a pretty sight
to see where it's out like that. Or run into it. Walk up and see
big wads of berries just scattered all over the side of the hill and
in the holler. Well, I reckon it's about every sang hunter's
dream—everybody that's ever dug the sang or fools around
with it any—is always a'looking for a patch where he can dig
maybe two, three hours, three, four hours, or a half a day in one
patch. Everybody you see: 'Boy, if I could just find a patch
where I could dig a half a day, I'd be all right!'
"But them patches are scattered."
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Ginseng
1. What medicinal qualities does ginseng have?
2. Why has the price of ginseng risen?
3. Explain how a new patch of ginseng is started.
4. The natural resources of Appalachia are its wealth. What
are the most important natural resources in your area?
�BERNARD STALLARD
245
BERNARD STALLARD (1921-1986)
Bernard Stallard taught in high schools and colleges in
Kentucky and Florida and then spent several years as a social
worker. At age 16 he published a poem about the Appalachians. While at Lincoln Memorial University, he was the
first winner of the Ross Carter Memorial Award given for creative writing. His work also appeared in Reveille, an anthology
published by Barnes and Noble. In 1978 Stallard was elected
a fellow by The International Academy of Poets, Cambridge,
England.
In addition to publishing articles and poetry in various periodicals, Stallard published a book of two hundred sonnets
entitled Appalachian Summer. The collection was praised by
Jesse Stuart, Kentucky's Poet Laureate. In 1977 Stallard wrote
an outdoor drama, Cumberland Gap, and presented it to Lincoln
Memorial University. The drama is as yet unproduced, but it
inspired a verse narrative The Witch of Cumberland Gap.
Sensitively homespun, Stallard's work has a simplicity native to the rugged life it describes. "The Writing Spider"
describes one of hundreds of old superstitions.
�246
Contemporary Authors Search for a Usable Past
The Writing Spider
The spider had hung out his wicked snare
Up in a corner, near the cellar door,
And my small brother told me to beware,
That dreadful evil might be well in store:
"Don't ever let that spider see your teeth,
"Cause if you do," he cautioned anxiously,
"Within a week or so you'll have a wreath
Laid on your coffin that says R.I.P.!
That spider is a writing spider there
And, on his web, he'll write out all your name.
So, you just smile at him if you don't care
And you'll just die, and I won't be to blame!"
Long following that warning, darkly stressed,
I passed the cellar with my lips compressed.
Writing Spider
1. What superstition related to spiders do you find in this
poem?
2. What does R.I.P. mean?
3 What does the poem suggest about the power of
superstition and the impressionablility of a child?
�EDCABBELL
247
EDWARD CABBELL (1946- )
Writing poetry is just one of many interests of Ed Cabbell.
This native of the West Virginia coalfields has been a pioneer
in studying the experience of blacks in the Appalachian region.
After graduation from Concord College in West Virginia,
Cabbell became the first black to receive an advanced degree
in Appalachian studies at Appalachian State University. His
master's thesis Blacks in Appalachia was published in 1985 by
the University of Kentucky, co-edited by Cabbell and William
H. Turner. He created the John Henry Memorial Foundation,
which focuses interest on the contributions of blacks to the life
of the region.
This poem reflects an old man's condensed memories of
life in the mountains, a world that is now lost to him.
Appalachia: An Old Man's Dream Deferred
As I ride the mountain curves
That make one mile ten
And my going greets my coming
I reminisce my past days
In the mountains of Appalachia.
I recall my five day weeks
�248
Contemporary Authors Search for a Usable Past
Among the diamonds—
That glisten and reflect
The sweat of my brow
And make me proud
Of my aches and pains
And silicosis and black lung
And John L. Lewis and the pension.
I recall my buddies
And slate falls and explosions
And union dues and company doctors
And script money and company stores
And friendly coal camp houses
Where smoke spirals from chimneys
And meets the tipple dust
Causing an excess that returns upon us,
my wife and kids and other families,
Causing us to cuss and fuss
and scrub with lye soap
In zinc tubs filled with hydrant water
Boiled in the big tea kettle on the cook stove
That stands near the kitchen cabinet and breakfast set.
I recall the Saturday night balls
Or fights and brawls
And women and liquor and cards
And fish fries and barbeques
And wiener roasts and excursions
And ball games—
All kinds of Saturday fun
That ends in Sunday School and Church
And occasional revivals
And preachers and deacons
And brothers and sisters
And prayers and collection plates
And rallies and homecomings.
I recall the bare beauty
of stripped mountains
That belch black diamonds
�EDCABBELL
And choke as we crawl inside
To retrieve what is left
Leaving a gully that fills
With leeched water
For children to swim and drown every summer.
I recall the shanties
And the houses of bosses
And homes of superintendents
And spring rains, and fall winds
And winter snows and summer sunshines
That bring new faces to the hills every year
And Christmas and Easter
And the Fourth of July
And fishing and hunting seasons
And walks in the mountains
And P.T. A. meetings and lodge meetings
And trips to the county seat
And funerals and birthdays
And other memories that practically
Bring to me tears.
But as I ride the curves of my homeland
I must view my dreams
For she is empty and dried and dismal
And her misery hangs heavy in the air of her discontent
I reach out to touch her but find her vanished—
An old man's dream deferred.
249
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Contemporary Authors Search for a Usable Past
Appalachia: An Old Man's Dream Deferred
1. What was the speaker's occupation?
2. The poet paints certain scenes of his life, calls up certain
memories, simply by making lists of things. What are some
of the memories "listed" in the poem?
3. What feelings are expressed in the last six lines?
4. Do you think the poet is expressing overly romantic or
sentimental attitudes in his remembrances of the
Appalachia of the past? Why or why not?
�JIM WAYNE MILLER
251
JIM WAYNE MILLER (1936- )
A native of western North Carolina, Jim Wayne Miller
earned his undergraduate degree at Berea College in Kentucky.
He continued his studies at Vanderbilt and received his Ph.D.
in both German and American literature in 1965. While at
Vanderbilt, Miller studied under Fugitive poet Donald Davidson.
At present, Dr. Miller is a professor of German language
and literature at Western Kentucky University. His stature and
reputation as a poet have grown steadily since his first volume
of poetry, Copperhead Cane, was published in 1964. His other
collections are Dialogue With A Dead Man, The Mountains Have
Come Closer, Vein of Words, and Nostalgia for 70. He received the
Thomas Wolfe Award in 1985 for The Mountains Have Come
Closer.
�252 Contemporary Authors Search for a Usable Past
Beginning, Ending
Once he said his earliest recollection
was of waking on a cold winter morning
in their cabin on Newfound Creek and hearing his father
picking Tom Dooley on a banjo while
meat fried on the stove and his mother ground
morning coffee on the little mill.
That early recollection was of hunger—
for the fried meat and biscuit, and hunger too
for the old songs picked on a curly-walnut banjo.
A part of him never went back any further
than that morning of fried meat, coffee, and a ballad.
For in his darkest moods—the time a hailstorm
cut his burley tobacco to shreds in half
an hour—he'd go back to the music he'd given
up for months, take his guitar down,
walk out somewhere, and try
to sing and play the misery out of his soul.
When he worked in the woods timbering, or sawmilled,
plowed all day or worked at road construction,
his hands hard as shoe leather, he'd swear
he was no more than broad back and heavy arms
inside a sweat-soaked shirt. But when he sang
and played, sometimes he grew as light as air,
and now and then he thought he could remember
the Scottish border, the Ulster linen trade,
a county fair where drummers from the ships
signed up people for the colonies.
He could see something moving through the flesh
of generations, playing like light on always
moving water. He saw himself in the cheekbone
of his father. He looked out of his daughter's eyes,
glimpsed himself in the gait of his growing boys.
�JIM WAYNE MILLER
253
Once in September, puzzled by coming so wide
awake so long before day, he stepped out
into a morning soft on his face as spiderwebs,
full of a dream of some boy himself
waking to fried meat and biscuit, leaving home
in warm September darkness for a far-off school.
He started out thinking ridge-to-ridge,
thinking he lived nowhere but in his skin.
Thinking ocean-to-ocean now, he wasn't sure
where he began, where he would ever end.
Beginning, Ending
1. What effect does music have on the poet?
2. In the fifth stanza the poet talks of stepping out into the
morning soft as a spider web. What image does this bring
to mind?
3. Although the poet is not sure where he will begin and end,
the poem links him to beginning and ending generations.
Find evidence of this.
�254
Contemporary Authors Search for a Usable Past
JEFF DANIEL MARION (1940- )
In 1975, Jeff Daniel Marion founded The Small Farm, a little
magazine that featured poetry, criticism, and reviews by those
who shared Marion's sense of place. Only twelve issues were
published. The Small Farm and Marion's own works Out in the
Country, Back Home (1976) and Tight Lines (1981) have earned
him recognition as Appalachia's official Pastoral Poet. His
poetry offers keen observations and powerful imagery. It
paints memorable portraits of the land and people in his east
Tennessee home.
Marion earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees in
English at the University of Tennessee and has continued his
studies at the University of Southern Mississippi and the
University of Alabama. He is an associate professor at CarsonNewman College in Jefferson City, Tennessee, and editor and
publisher of Mill Springs Press in New Market, Tennessee.
�JEFF DANIEL MARION
Ebbing & Flowing Spring
Coming back you almost
expect to find the dipper
gourd hung there by the latch.
Matilda always kept it hidden
inside the white-washed shed,
now a springhouse of the cool
darkness & two rusting milk cans.
"Dip and drink," she'd say,
"It's best when the water is rising."
A coldness slowly cradled
in the mottled gourd.
Hourly some secret clock
spilled its time in water,
rising momentarily only
to ebb back into trickle.
You waited while
Matilda's stories flowed back,
seeds & seasons, names & signs,
almanac of all her days.
How her great-great grandfather
claimed this land, gift
of a Cherokee chief
who called it "spring of many risings."
Moons & years & generations
& now Matilda alone.
You listen.
It's a quiet beginning
but before you know it
the water's up & around you
flowing by.
You reach for the dipper
thaf s gone, then
remember to use your hands
as a cup for the cold
that aches & lingers.
255
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Contemporary Authors Search for a Usable Past
This is what you have come for.
Drink.
Ebbing & Flowing Spring
1. The image of water is found throughout this poem. Find
words that relate to water. The word drink is used twice.
Could it refer to drinking memories as well as water? What
are some of the memories the poet mentions?
2. How does the title "Ebbing & Flowing Spring" relate to the
main idea of the poem?
�FRED CHAPPELL 257
FRED CHAPPELL (1936- )
Fred Chappell has received praise, recognition, and critical
acclaim, especially since the prestigious BolUnger Prize for
Poetry was awarded to him in 1984 for his collection Midquest.
A graduate of Duke University, Chappell was born in Canton, North Carolina, to a family in the furniture business. He
is a prolific writer with poetry, short stories, novels, reviews,
and essays to his credit. His publications include his latest
novel I Am One of You Forever and most recent book of poetry
Source. Other titles by Chappell include Moments of Light
(short stories) and The World Between The Eyes and The Castle
Tsingal (poetry). He currently teaches at the University of
North Carolina at Greensboro.
My Grandmother Washes Her Vessels
In the white-washed medical-smelling milkhouse
She wrestled clanging steel; grumbled and trembled,
Hoisting the twenty-gallon cans to the ledge
Of the spring-run (six by three, a concrete grave
Of slow water). Before she toppled them in—
Dented armored soldiers booming in pain—
She stopped to rest, brushing a streak of damp
�258
Contemporary Authors Search for a Usable Past
Hair back, white as underbark. She sighed.
"I ain't strong enough no more to heft these things.
I could now and then wish for a man
Or two.. .Or maybe not. More trouble, likely,
Than what their rations will get them to do."
The August six-o'clock sunlight struck a wry
Oblong on the north wall. Yellow light entering
This bone-white milkhouse recharged itself white,
Seeped pristine into the dozen strainer cloths
Drying overhead.
"Don't you like men?"
Her hand hid the corner of her childlike grin
Where she'd dropped her upper plate and left a gap.
"Depends on the use you want them for," she said.
"Some things they're good at, some they oughtn't touch."
"Wasn't Grandaddy a good carpenter?"
She nodded absentminded. "He was fine.
Built churches, houses, barns in seven counties.
Built the old trout hatchery on Balsam...
Here. Give me a hand."
We lifted down
Gently a can and held it till it drowned.
Gushed out of its headless neck a musky clabber
Whitening water like a bedsheet ghost.
I thought, Here spills the soldier's spirit out;
If I could drink a sip I'd know excitements
He has known; travails, battles, tourneys,
A short life fluttering with pennants.
She grabbed
�FREDCHAPPELL
A frazzly long-handled brush and scrubbed his innards
Out. Dun flakes of dried milk floated up,
Streamed drainward. In his trachea water sucked
Obscenely, graying like a storm-sky.
"You never told me how you met."
She straightened,
Rubbed the base of her spine with a dripping hand.
"Can't recollect. Some things, you know, just seem
To go clear from your mind. Probably
He spotted me at prayer meeting, or it could
Have been a barn-raising. That was the way
We did things then. Not like now, with the men
All hours cavorting up and down in cars."
Again she smiled. I might have sworn she winked.
"But what do you remember?"
"Oh, lots of things.
About all an old woman is good for
Is remembering....But getting married to Frank
Wasn't the beginning of my life.
Fd taught school up Greasy Branch since I
Was seventeen. And I took the first census
Ever in Madison County. You can't see
It now, but there was a flock of young men come
Knocking on my door. If I'd a mind
I could have danced six nights of the week."
We tugged and cleaned can out, upended it
To dry on the worn oak ledge, and pushed the other
Belching in. Slowly it filled and sank.
"Of course, it wasn't hard to pick Frank out,
The straightest-standing man I ever saw.
259
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Contemporary Authors Search for a Usable Past
Had a waxed moustache and a chestnut mare.
Before I'd give my say I made him cut
That moustache off. I didn't relish kissing
A briar patch. He laughed when I said that,
Went home and shaved....It wasn't the picking and saying
That caused me ponder, though. Getting married—
In church—in front of people—for good and all:
It makes you pause. Here I was twenty-eight,
Strong and healthy, not one day sick since I
Was born. What cause would I have to be waiting
On a man?"
Suddenly she sat on the spring-run edge
And stared bewildered at empty air, murmuring.
"I never said this to a soul, I don't
Know why.. .1 told my papa, 'Please hitch me
The buggy Sunday noon. I can drive
Myself to my own wedding.' That's what I did,
I drove myself. A clear June day as cool
As April, and I came to where we used to ford
Laurel River a little above Coleman's mill,
And I stopped the horse and I thought and thought.
If I cross this river I won't turn back. I'll join
To that blue-eyed man as long as I've got breath.
There won't be nothing I can feel alone
About again. My heart came to my throat.
I suppose I must have wept. And then I heard
A yellowhammer in a willow tree
Just singing out, ringing like a dance-fiddle
Over the gurgly river-sound, just singing
To make the whole world hush to listen to him.
And then my tears stopped dropping down, and I touched
Nellie with the whip, and we crossed over."
�FREDCHAPPELL 261
My Grandmother Washes Her Vessels
1. Who is the person asking questions in this poem?
2. Personification is a figurative device in which human
qualities are given to something nonhuman. Find
examples of personification in the first few stanzas of this
poem.
3. Find evidence of the grandmother's self-reliance and
independent spirit.
4. In the grandmother's recollections she shows a hesitancy
towards getting married. Why is this so? Why does she
finally "cross the river"?
�262
Contemporary Authors Search for a Usable Past
MARILOU AWIAKTA (1936- )
Marilou Awiakta, a seventh-generation Appalachian with
Cherokee heritage, was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. At the
age of nine she moved to Oak Ridge but returned to Knoxville
to attend the University of Tennessee. After graduation, with
a degree in French and English, she worked as a teacher and
translator. Her articles, poetry, and fiction appear regularly in
national magazines and have won many state and regional
prizes, including the Jesse Hill Ford Award for Poetry in 1972.
�MARILOU AWIAKTA 263
Where Mountain and Atom Meet
Ancient haze lies on the mountain
smoke-blue, strange and still
a presence that eludes the mind and
moves through a deeper kind of knowing.
It is nature's breath and more—
an aura from the great I Am
that gathers to its own
spirits that have gone before.
Deep below the valley waters
eerie and hid from view
the atom splits without a sound
its only trace a fine blue glow
rising from the fissioned whole
and at its core
power that commands the will
quiet that strikes the soul,
"Be still and know.. .1 Am."
Where Mountain and Atom Meet
1. The phrase "I Am" is used twice in the poem. To what does
it refer in each stanza?
2. Compare and contrast the mountain and the atom. Can
you find similarities in two things so vastly different in
size?
�264
COMPOSITION TOPICS
1. Like the writers in this section who cast a backward glance
into their pasts, look back into your own life and select a
treasured or unforgettable memory. Write a composition
describing the experience in detail to show why it was
important to you. You may want to include this paper in
your family scrapbook.
2. Write a composition about the characters in the literary
selections that you have read who search for their pasts.
Explain what they find in their pasts that helps them
understand themselves.
ACTIVITIES
The chapters you now add to your book will tell about customs
and traditions in your family.
If your family sings, collect lyrics to their songs. List any family members who play instruments and the name of the instrument. Make this the music history of your family. Illustrate
with photographs.
Families are sometimes known for their good cooks. Collect
your favorite recipes from the cooks in your family and record
them here.
Families also celebrate together. Select two family holidays
and write about them answering the following questions:
1. What is the holiday celebration?
2. Who attends? Name them.
3. Where do you celebrate?
�265
4. What do you eat and drink?
5. What do you do?
6. Describe any special decoration.
7. If the celebration has changed during your lifetime,
describe the change and what caused it. For example,
when you were younger you may have cut down a
Christmas tree on your grandfather's farm. Now that your
grandfather is no longer living or now that you live in the
city, you may buy an artificial one which you use each year.
�This page intentionally left blank
�PART II
The Present
�This page intentionally left blank
�269
CHAPTER 4
How America
Came to the Mountains
The remainder of this book will focus on the present. We
will examine some contemporary writings that reflect the
concerns of the Appalachian community and its writers
today.
The Twentieth Century has brought tremendous change
to the region. Educational reform, an expanded highway system, better health care, and a higher standard of living have
improved the lives of most people in the mountains. Various
governmental and private institutions have provided funds
and expertise for these visible improvements. Chapter Four
directs attention to the impact these institutions have had on
Appalachian life and to the reaction of some writers to this
change.
The title for this chapter comes from a poem by Jim
Wayne Miller in The Mountains Have Come Closer. He explains
how shocking it was when mainstream America roared into
the mountains bringing manufactured goods, bulldozers,
�270
highways, fancy cars, singing commercials, and designer
jeans. He uses satire to point out how mountain life has
seemed to change quickly. Actually, the winds of change
had been blowing for some time.
Perhaps the most significant agent of change in the region
has been the Tennessee Valley Authority. This governmental
agency came to the Tennessee Valley to build a series of
dams, control flooding, make the Tennessee River navigable
for most of its six hundred miles, manufacture nitrates for explosives and fertilizer, reforest marginal land, conserve soil,
provide for agricultural and industrial development, and
supply hydroelectric power.
Primarily, TVA opened the way for the industrialization
of the South. With cheap electricity available, northern factories began to move to the South and to employ local
people. People accustomed to subsistence farming, barter,
and a single cash crop began to earn regular incomes. Specifically, TVA led to the establishment of Oak Ridge as the home
of the Manhattan Project and the atom bomb. These actions
have affected practically every person in the region.
The Appalachian Regional Commission, another
governmental organization, has also had an impact on Appalachia. Acting as a regional advocate in the Congress, the
ARC has administered millions of federal dollars for highways, water and sewer services, vocational training, and
schools in Appalachia.
One important non-governmental institution, the Highlander Research Center in New Market, Tennessee, is discussed in this chapter. It represents another kind of force
that has influenced modern life in Appalachia. This is the
force unleashed in the individual and community when a
desire for change leads to action.
Leadership training at the Highlander Folk School gave
some Appalachian people the skills to think and analyze and
the courage to act. Myles Horton, its founder, and other
leaders have trained many working-class adults to take
responsibility for their lives and circumstances.
�ALANCHEUSE
ALAN CHEUSE (1940-
271
)
Alan Cheuse was born in New Jersey and has been a writerin-residence at the University of Tennessee, the University of
the South, and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He
is also on the summer faculty at Bennington College in Vermont.
Cheuse, who received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in
comparative literature, has published one novel which is based
on the life of American journalist John Reed. The stories and
articles of Cheuse, including the one presented here, have been
published in numerous periodicals and literary magazines. He
also reviews books for the National Public Radio program AH
Things Considered.
This piece, written in celebration of the 50th anniversary of
the Tennessee Valley Authority, describes how a federally
crafted program built a network of dams which brought light
to a dark valley of Appalachia.
Tripping The Lights Fantastic
It is near the end of a Sunday in spring, and Fve driven up
here into the foothills of the Cumberlands to watch a small river
valley fill up with night. Evening comes earlier in the tailwaters of the Norris Dam than it does to the city of Knoxville,
�272 How America Came to the Mountains
say, thirty miles south, but already the street lamps have
flashed on there, anticipating the darkness this little valley already knows quite well. Here you have only to glance
upstream at the large blackened wall of cement that straddles
the valley and then look down again directly and you'll feel as
though you've lost minutes, not seconds, of fleeting light. My
eyes flit back and forth in search of fishermen, back and forth,
back and forth. There's one. There's another, his slicker dark
against waters already nearly blending with the color of the
dam, the bleak wall with its striations of white where fog tears
off from big cottony bunches above the rim and slips down its
face.
A light drizzle sifts onto the watcher and the waters, the
fishermen and the trees, lovely straight stands of pine and walnut, darkening leaves, needles, bark. Blackness brims up now
from the river bed as though sky and water had become inverted and the sun had slipped away beyond the nether shore
and rolled along behind the rocks and trees.
The fishermen have drowned in darkness, even the river
has drowned, and the space between where I stand and what I
remember of the other shore becomes an unbroken stretch of
obscurity. The fog has disappeared, and I am surrounded by
darkness. A city boy born and bred, I find it amazing that
people could spend half their lives in such blackness as this.
The wind quiets down. I can hear at last the faint hum of
the power station and remember that there is, in fact, light
abundant for the valley dwellers now. Fifty years ago this
month the region began to come out of the dark. After long
discussions with forester-conservationist Gifford Pinchot, for
whom a river was a single unit from its tributaries until it
emptied into the sea, after an immersion in the progressive
vision of the senator from the Great Plains, George W. Morris
of Nebraska, and aided by delegates from the 40,910-squaremile watershed of the Tennessee River, President Franklin D.
Roosevelt in the spring of 1933 urged Congress to create the
Tennessee Valley Authority.
In fact, though no plaque marks the place, Roosevelt stood
�ALANCHEUSE
273
on this same bank of the upper Clinch River in the autumn of
1932, having, at Morris' suggestion, stopped here on a drive up
to Washington from his retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia, just
after he won the presidential election. Here he looked upon
the waters and said, "Let there be dams," and there was and
still is light, light abundant, light overflowing, flooding the
Tennessee Valley as only the river once did. And he returned,
accompanied by Eleanor Roosevelt, to witness the construction
of the dam named after Norris, several years later. He may
have noticed that his wife, against all warnings, took a ride in
the cable car strung between the two bluffs that was the simple
laborer's way of hauling himself to the upper stories of the
newly rising dam....
In 1929 Major General Lytle Brown, as head of the Corps
of Engineers, produced a 732-page survey of the Tennessee
Valley entitled Tennessee River and Its Tributaries. After that,
advocates of a development plan for the region that would integrate navigation, flood control, hydroelectric power production, soil conservation, fertilizer production, and forestry came
armed with all the basic information they needed to launch the
project. With the election of Roosevelt, whose mandate was to
improve the depressed social and economic conditions of the
staggering nation, they finally had the political power they
needed. Before Christmas of 1932, Roosevelt made his
stopover at Cove's Creek on the Clinch River, one of the main
tributaries of the Tennessee. He was convinced that the United
States was ripe for development that tied together industry and
agriculture and flood prevention and was persuaded that the
Tennessee watershed, rich in potential but miserably underdeveloped, would be the best place to institute a model of such
planning.
The poor, ill-clad, ill-housed, ill-fed tenant farmer population of Tennessee knew little of such ventures. Waking by
lamplight; farming with crude implements and methods not
only outmoded but destructive; living on a diet that treated
them as badly as they treated the soil; suffering primitive
sanitary conditions; because of their lack of electricity, of
�274 How America Came to the Mountains
phonographs and radios or both, estranged from the
mainstream of American society; badly educated; shivering in
winter; sweltering in summer; attacked by parasites; plagued
by malaria—this was the plight of the famous men (and
women) James Agee asked us to praise, the "some there be
which have no memorial," as he put it in his epochal book about
tenant farmer life in the South.
The landowners were not much better off, enjoying the certainties of the primitive Baptist religion handed down over
generations and filling their relative isolation with traditional
music, song, and dance, but paying for their independence and
cultural solitude by enduring without assistance rain, flood,
drought, erosion, and pestilence that seemed sometimes as
fierce as any out of biblical times....
The water was rising. And so was the first of the TVA dams.
And more than two dozen more dams would rise before the
TVA had completed its network of flood control and
hydroelectric production sites. Two dozen dams, including the
majestic 480-foot Fontana Dam in the wild woods of the Great
Smoky Mountains just east of the Tennessee-North Carolina
border—massive Fontana, hidden in the wilderness like some
ruin out of Toltec or Mayan civilization. The names of the rivers
that bear these dams like modern bracelets on the arms of uncivilized beauties—the Powell, the Holston, the Nolichucky,
the French Broad, the Little Tennessee, the Hiwassee—the
names of the dams themselves that grew upon these tributaries
and then along the course of the Tennessee itself westward to
Paducah the Watauga, Douglas, Cherokee, Fort Loudoun,
Calderwood, Cheoah, Santeelah, Hiwassee, Chatuge, Blue
Ridge, Ocoee, and Chickamauga, Watts Bar, Guntersville,
Wheeler, Wilson, and others,—these names make up a litany
half Indian, half Blue Grass. What is it about a high dam that,
unlike even the tallest of skyscrapers, makes a person wonder
about the prowess of modern architecture and engineering?
Perhaps because a skyscraper stops nothing but air and a dam
holds back the possibility of floods of biblical proportion, be-
�ALANCHEUSE
275
cause a dam can generate power to brighten entire valleys
where once only lamplight held back dark.
Tripping the Lights Fantastic
1. In what ways other than in the production of electricity did
TVA benefit the areas it supplied?
2. What promise had Roosevelt made to the people before his
election to the presidency? Did his support of TVA help
carry out this promise?
�No. 6
ALANCHEUSE
276
�VICTOR DEPTA
277
VICTOR M.DEPTA (1939- )
Victor Depta, associate professor of English at the University of Tennessee at Martin, is a native of West Virginia. He
received a B.A. degree from Marshall University in his home
state before earning his M. A. degree from San Francisco State
College and his Ph.D. from Ohio University.
After nearly twenty-five years away from Appalachia and
after schooling in and out of the region, he claims to be a
"proletarian hillbilly." Besides poems in numerous magazines,
he also has two books of poetry, The Creek and The House.
This poem "TVA" looks back and suggests that the past
now lies buried under the flood waters created by that agency.
�278
How America Came to the Mountains
TVA
Do you know, I said to Charlene, in Tarpon Springs aunt
Ruby and uncle Lucke are grocery bags? Death eats out
of them and litters them on the shore. They sit there all
day knowing they're retired. Really.
If my face weren't a lunch bag I could tell them that they
ought to come home no matter if their children do say
How wonderful mommy and daddy are sitting down
here in Florida like hydropathic mummies.
Maybe I could put a hand over their mouths and eyes and
tell them I remember their warming a pillow in front of
the fireplace for me and giving me a bed, tell them I still
need them. I mean what am I going to do about getting
married. I need some advice.
But maybe they know something I don't, maybe they're
sick of it, may be nothing real is worth coming home to.
By the time they got here everything would already be
buried, probably under a water skier.
TVA
1. Is this poem happy or gloomy. Why?
2. The poet uses metaphors to describe Aunt Ruby, Uncle
Lucke, and the speaker in the poem. Explain the
metaphors.
�MARILOU AWIAKTA
279
MARILOUAWIAKTA(1936- )
Marilou Awiakta, a seventh-generation Appalachian with
Cherokee heritage, was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. At the
age of nine she moved to Oak Ridge but returned to Knoxville
to attend the University of Tennessee. After graduation, with
a degree in French and English, she worked as a teacher and
translator. Her articles, poetry, and fiction appear in Ms. and
Southern Exposure magazines. She has won many state and
regional prizes, including the Jesse Hill Ford Award for Poetry
in 1972. The United States Information Agency chose two of
her books for its 1986 Global Tour of American Writers.
This poem from Abiding Appalachia: Where Mountain and
Atom Meet focuses on the change in the city of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, as the "atomic city" developed out of a rural landscape.
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Genesis
Settlers sowed their seed.
Then their sons took the plow and in their turn grew old.
And the mountains abided, steeped in mist.
But in the deep was a quickening of light, a freshening
of wind...
And in 1942, as fall leaves embered down toward winter,
New ground was turned near Black Oak Ridge.
The natives pricked their ears.
These descendants of old pioneers
Lifted their heads to scent the wind—
A frontier was a borning.
Many had to pack up hearth and home and go.
But others joined the energy that flowed toward Black Oak
Ridge
as to a great magnetic power:
Thousands of people streamed in.
Bulldozers scraped and moved the earth.
Factories rose in valleys like Bear Creek
and houses in droves sprang up among the trees
and strung out in the lees of ridges.
A great city soon lay concealed among the hills.
Why it had come no one knew.
But its energy was a strong and constant hum,
a new vibration, changing rhythms everywhere...
It charged the air in Knoxville, where we lived
and when I saw my parents lift their heads,
I lifted my head too, for even at seven
I knew something was stirring in our blood,
something that for years had drawn the family along frontiers
from Virginia to West Virginia, on to Kentucky and Tennessee.
And now, a few miles away, we had a new frontier.
Daddy went first, in '43—leaving at dawn,
coming home at dark
and saying nothing of his work except,
"It's at Y-12, in Bear Creek Valley."
�M ARILOU AWIAKTA
281
The mystery deepened.
The hum grew stronger.
And I longed to go.
Oak Ridge had a magic sound—
They said bulldozers could take down a hill before your eyes
and houses sized by alphabet came precut
and boxed, like blocks,
so builders could put up hundreds at a time.
And they made walks of boards and streets of dirt
(mud, if it rained)
and a chain-link fence around it all to keep the secret.
But the woods sounded best to me.
My mind went to them right away...
to wade in creeks and rest in cool deep shadows,
watching light sift through the trees
and hoping Little Deer might come.
In the Smokies I'd often felt him near
and I knew he'd roam the foothills too.
Woods were best. And if the frontier grew too strange
my mountains would abide unchanged,
old and wise and comforting.
So I kept listening to the hum, and longing...
Mother said we'd go someday, in the fullness of time
And when I was nine the fullness came,
exploding in a mushroom cloud that shook the earth.
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Genesis
1. In the phrase "a frontier a-borning," to what does frontier
refer? This word is used several times in the poem. Does
the meaning change any with each use? Explain.
2. Referring to the great city Oak Ridge, the poet writes, "But
its energy was a strong and constant hum, a new vibration
changing rhythms everywhere.11 Discuss the ways that
rhythms everywhere have changed since we split the atom.
3. In the midst of aU the change, what remains constant
according to the poet? Do you agree? Is there really
anything that remains constant?
�JOHNEHLE
283
JOHN EHLE (1925 - )
Born in Asheville, North Carolina, and educated at the
University of North Carolina, John Ehle has been an assistant
professor in the Communications Center of his alma mater and
a visiting professor at New York University. He has served as
a special assistant to the governor of North Carolina and as a
board member of the Governor's School and the Creative Arts
Foundation in his native state.
The author of both novels and biographies, he is also the
author of twenty-six plays in an NBC series American Adventure, broadcast by Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, and
the Armed Forces Network.
The following excerpt from his novel The Road describes
Weatherby Wright, Chief Engineer of the North Carolina Railroad Company, who is committed to extending the tracks over
Sow Mountain. The story gives us insight into the dangers for
those who first built roads through rough mountain terrain.
From The Road
The winter, which had started early this year, became
warm in mid-December, the official start of winter itself. The
crevices lost the pools of snow they had protected, and the
earth released much of the water it had held and became soggy
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How America Came to the Mountains
and treacherous to men working the fills and tunnel. A few
small flowers began to bloom near the office at Henry Station.
Weatherby, on the second Friday in December, had hoped
to awaken early. He wanted to go down to Henry Station with
Cumberland and talk with an official from Raleigh who was
coming in on the train, but he got delayed at the tunnel with
one thing and another; then just as the two of them were ready
to leave, word came from Babcock Station that the east fill on
Long Bridge had started to creep. Weatherby told Cumberland
to go ahead to Henry, that he would detour by way of Babcock
and study that situation, and join him later.
He had gone about a mile or a mile and a half into the woods
when a mountain boy came running after him. "They had a
wounded man happen," he called as he approached. "Up at the
tunnels they blasted a man."
"Not Moses?"
"No. I don't know just who, but they want you."
Weatherby found a dry rock and sat down. He put his elbows on his knees and leaned forward, frowning at the dripping, drooling earth. The mountain boy crouched nearby,
staring at him quizzically.
"You put your shirt on backwards this morning, didn't you,
boy?" Weatherby said kindly.
"It was dark when I come to wash and dress."
He saw three men down on the mountain a ways, walking
along with a mule.
The boy said,"What do you aim to do?"
"I don't know yet," Weatherby said. "I have several critical
things to do all at the same time." He took out his pipe and filled
it. "Was the man bad hurt?"
"His back was busted."
"Is the doctor there?"
"No, sir, he's not found yet."
"What do they think I can do for him?"
The boy scrouged up his face. "Whenever anything happens, they allus send for you. The hurt man asked for you, too."
"Well, I'm glad he did. Did the other men stop work?"
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"Yes, sir, while Esau mashed the holes at the heading."
"What are those three men doing down there, do you
know?"
"That's them telegraph men aworking."
"They were working near the Gap yesterday. They have
wire all over this mountain, and for what effect?"
"Yes, sir," the boy said. He crouched there, content to be
near Weatherby, for he liked him and was honored to be with
him. They sat there for a while, Weatherby smoking his pipe.
"Well, see here, boy," he said. "We have one fill creeping,
and one wounded man, and one Raleigh official, each at a different station. Tell you what, you go on back to the tunnel and
tell Babcock to handle the situation there and to keep the men
at work."
"Yes, sir."
Td better go see about this fill. We could lose Long
Bridge."
The boy left, and Weatherby went on down the trail.
As he approached a spot high over Mud Cut, his foot
slipped and he fell. He grabbed a laurel trunk, but his hand
failed to hold onto it, and he fell into a ten-foot ravine. It wasn't
a dangerous fall, but he knew even as he landed that he had injured himself.
He lay there murmuring, exasperated with his poor fortune. He moved his right hand. It wasn't broken. He tried the
other hand. That one was all right, too. He tried his right foot.
He could move it. He tried his left foot. He couldn't move it
at all.
He propped himself up on his elbows and saw with relief
that there was no blood on his pants or on the ground. He
looked around for pieces of wood that he might make leg
splints from, and pulled himself across the ground toward a
clump of laurel. He felt around under the laurel bushes, but
found nothing usable there.
Of course, they would find him, he knew that. Those
mountain boys were certain to find him. "Hey, you," he called
suddenly. "Hey, up there," he called. Those three telegraph
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men might still be about somewhere. He cupped his hands to
his mouth and shouted at the top of his voice. HHey! Hey!
Music man, come down here!11
He called many times, for well over an hour, before he
began to admit to himself that nobody had sent out a search
party to find him, that no one at the camp knew he was even
lost. And they might not know for a day or so.
He looked down at his broken leg. There was blood there
now, staining the snow.
He had matches in his pocket, but there were no dry twigs,
so he was in for a cold night of it, he supposed, and he might
as well do what he could to make the most of it. If he tried to
walk, he would only rupture his leg all the more.
He began dragging himself to the edge of the ledge. Sometimes the mountain held pleasant surprises, as well as unpleasant ones. He pulled himself along, letting the left leg
dangle behind him. He came to the edge of the ravine and saw
below him a further drop of perhaps ten feet to another rock
ledge; below that was yet another drop of ten feet to a place
where the mountain's shoulder rolled more gradually
downward.
He took hold of a laurel trunk and leaned over the edge of
the ledge as far as he could. It appeared that there was a cave
under there, or some indentation which would at least help
protect him from the weather.
There was no way to get down there, except that one birch
sapling might bend far enough to lower him to it. The
maneuver was risky, but he did need to find shelter. He took
hold of the sapling and began to inch out onto it. The sapling
bent evenly as he lent his weight to it. He moved out a hand
at a time.
He dropped, landing on his good leg and falling forward,
cushioning the blow. He lay there, breathing deeply.
He looked behind him and saw the cave. At once he
crawled toward it, inching his way along, his hands almost
frozen by the snow. He could see beyond the dark mouth of
the cave a dry spot where he could lie. The cave went quite a
�JOHNEHLE
287
way into the ground beyond its narrow opening, and there was
no beast inside, not that he could see. Everything was
hospitable.
He pulled himself through the opening onto the dry floor
and crept farther into the cave before he flopped on his belly
and lay there listening to his heart and to his own breathing.
The rock felt warm after the hours of lying on the wet ground.
It was all right; he would be safe here until they found him.
The gang foremen at Babcock Station hadn't waited for
Weatherby. When they saw that the embankment was still
creeping, they put all their gangs to work throwing up a rock
wall to hold it, and sent an emergency message to each of the
other two stations, asking for convicts to help out. The messages left the impression that Weatherby was requesting the
men, so each camp sent a gang of men under guard. About 250
men in all were put to work.
Everybody was worried about the Long Bridge, of course,
and nobody had time to wonder where Weatherby was.
During the day the telegraph men walked their line and
that night they began testing their signal. To everyone's
surprise at the Tunnel Station, especially the director of the
Western North Carolina Telegraph Company, the signal
worked very well. When the clerk tapped the key, there did
come a response. He tapped the signal for Babcock Station and
was answered immediately; he tapped the signal for Henry
Station and was answered, though somewhat less clearly.
"Send a message to Weatherby at Babcock," Babcock suggested.
The message was tapped out slowly by the clerk, who was
no better at telegraphy than he needed to be, and who was surrounded by talking spectators, all of them excited.
In response came a few random noises, then the steady beat
of the machine. The clerk followed it all as best he could.
"Weatherby's not there," he said.
"Ask them how Long Bridge is," one of the men said.
The clerk began tapping out that question, but was interrupted by the clacking keys. The clerk wrote something out,
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then studied over what he had written. "Says it's not creeping," he said. "I don't know what that means."
ft
l know what it means/1 Babcock said. "Ask him where
Weatherbyis."
The clerk prepared to do so, but others of the group were
more concerned about the bridge and wanted more information about that, so the clerk tapped out questions they
originated, and Babcock retreated from the stuffy room and
stood in the yard, confident that at any moment Weatherby
would appear.
A guard came out of the office. "They say they're getting
tired at the bridge."
"Are they going to be able to hold it?" Babcock said.
"They're going to build the wall through the night."
The guard swaggered toward the flophouse. There was
quiet in the camp, except for the sound of water falling on the
mountain. A wolf howled, then another. The pack was roaming tonight. The hungry pack was no doubt following every
track that promised food, every footprint, every drop of blood
on the ground.
Where was Weatherby? Babcock wondered. There was no
need to worry about him, because he never needed concern
from others; of all men, he was the most self-sufficient. Babcock didn't mean to worry about him, but he couldn't help
wondering about not being able to locate him.
Men began pouring out of the office building. "The damn
contraption broke," they said. Babcock went inside and
watched the clerk fiddling with the instrument. Plover was
helpless and despondent. He had known a few minutes of
high exultation while the telegraph worked; he knew correspondingly low dejection now that it did not. "It's only the
warm weather that bothers it," he said. "It's unseasonable to
be so warm in December."
"You might check the line between here and Babcock. I'll
walk part way with you," Babcock said.
"I'll wait till morning."
"Can you get Henry Station?" Babcock asked the clerk.
�JOHNEHLE
289
'The line goes first to Babcock, so if that's out, there's no way
to go down the mountain. Something's wrong between here
and Babcock.1'
"Maybe the wolves are eating it," Babcock said.
"You work your tail off," Plover said, "and you keep having
troubles along the way."
Abruptly the telegraph line began to crackle, and Plover
jumped up in glee. "Ay, God, it works, it works agin!"
It was a message for Weatherby.
The clerk replied that Weatherby was not at the Tunnel Station. A second message began. "Where is he?" That was all it
said before the signal stopped and the line went dead again.
Perhaps some misadventure had befallen Weatherby, but
the very thought made Babcock feel inadequate. It was inconsiderate to think that Weatherby would need help at all. If
Weatherby were ever to need help, Babcock thought, he would
plan the occasion so carefully that the help would be on its way
before he needed it.
The idea struck him as being funny and he had to laugh,
and when a guard asked him what was the matter, he said, "I
was only thinking something might have happened to
Weatherby," which he realized didn't explain his laughter at
an well.
He sat down at Cumberland's desk and began to fidget
with the inkwell. A mountain boy came to the door with a cup
of coffee. "Come and set," Babock said.
The boy did so, and Babcock said, "In this soggy mush, you
think it's too late to trail a man that went out of here this midmorning?"
"Might be."
"I think it might be, too."
He could send out a search party, but it was a mark against
a man to be lost, or to have others say he was lost.
"Where's Mr. Weatherby at tonight?" the boy asked.
"I don't know yet," Babcock said. He didn't want to take
charge, that was it. He didn't want the responsibility falling
on him. He wanted to do what he was told to do; that was all
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he could confidently control, could manuever through. He
was not a man of new actions, but a repeater of old ones. He
was making a road, which was innovative, but he was not himself an innovator, and he just didn't know what to do.
Cumberland got back to the Tunnel Station early next
morning. He had been down at Henry, he said, waiting for
Weatherby. When he found out that Weatherby wasn't at the
Tunnel Station and had never reached Babcock, either, he immediately called in the mountain boys who stayed there, about
fourteen of them, and told them Weatherby was missing. "Can
you find him?" he asked.
"We'll find him," one of them said simply.
"We'll find him, if he's out there," one boy said.
Weatherby had slept fitfully, his dreams filled with throbbing and troubled with the touch of a hand which kept moving
over his injured leg. At one time in his delirium he had caught
the hand and pushed it away, and for a time there had been
nothing touching him at all.
He lay on his belly on the floor, his body aching from the
rock bed, and from the cold, and from the wound, and from
his fears, which were more acute now than before, He had
never before considered his own death, but he knew the mountain world well enough to know he was caught in one of its
conspiracies. Just as a spiderweb traps an insect or a laurel slick
traps a wanderer, there were nets and traps for the mountain
man, too.
In his mind was the thought, cyclically recurring, that the
mountain knew he was there and had planned all this. He was
himself a maker of plans, and he could recognize a plan made
by another; he could identify facets of the plan that had fallen
into place, and he supposed other facets would fall into place,
that the plan was not fully revealed yet. He knew this was not
one of the uncomplicated sort of plans that Babcock would
make, or the privately oriented plan Moses would make, or the
adventure-conscious plan Esau would make; this was an im-
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personal, intricate, complete plan, founded on a natural sense
of balance and justice. It was more like a plan he would make.
Lie still, he told himself, and save your strength. Lie still.
If you struggle, youll only be the silly insect in the web.
He saw the first sunlight filter into the cave. His teeth were
chattering, and he suffered painful chills and streaks of fire in
his body, but he lay still.
All night he had heard the hollow tone of the wolf howls,
which had become closer and closer until they were nearby,
even at the cave's entrance. Why had the wolves not come into
the cave? he wondered. Wolves knew the mountain, every
cranny of it. What did they know about the cave that had kept
them out of it?
He concentrated on himself and asked if he should continue to lie on his belly or if he should try to turn onto his back
or side. It was difficult through the pangs of pain to keep his
mind on any one subject; an idea seemed to him to be slippery,
like the hand he had grasped in the night. If he were to turn
onto his back, he could see the entrance of the cave, and maybe,
conceivably, there would be somebody pass that way. There
was small likelihood of this, but it was a hope, anyway.
He took hold of his injured leg and moved it. A fierce pain
went through him. He moved it again, turned it ever so slightly, watching the leg, trying to see where it was broken and how
best to hold it. He turned it again, until he was lying on his
back. His eyes were tightly closed now, and he let the pain
course through him until at last the pain was only a throb. He
realized there were tears on his face.
A man crying, he thought.
"You have my leg, don't you, woman?" he said to the mountain. "You have my leg in your jaw."
No, he thought, she has me, all of me in her open mouth,
and she will eat me alive if she can.
Since Mud Cut she had waited so quietly, he thought, ignoring the work on bridges, tunnels, cuts, embankments,
camps; then with one single move she crippled it all.
The light grew brighter. It was another clear day. He
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How America Came to the Mountains
looked up at the ceiling of the cave and saw the light as it
vibrated and was shadowed by the moving branches near the
opening.
How strangely they move, he thought, not quite like
shadows of branches at all.
He glanced toward the cave opening and saw the snakes,
moving as if in rhythm to a tune. They were crawling on the
rock entryway, and it was their shadows he had seen.
His gaze trailed along the ceiling and walls of the cave; here
and there in the walls he saw other snakes, not moving now,
merely lying asleep. They were the color of the rocks, and he
could scarcely make them out. They were denned-in rattlers,
lying in this cranny and that one, here and there, lying on the
rocks all around, responding to the temperature changes
around them.
He wanted to cry out, but he didn't dare utter a sound. If
he was in the mouth of the mountain, he thought, then the
tongue of the mouth was awakening now. The sun was rising
and more and more light and warmth would come into this
place; the snakes would awaken, the membrane of the walls
would awaken, the threads of the web would awaken.
He lay there helpless and watched as the light increased,
saw the membrane of the walls moving, first slowly as the light
began filtering inside, then more actively.
He felt no pain in his leg now. His mind was clear. Nothing complicated the one idea he had at this time, the snakes and
the necessity of survival. Even if he could move quickly, the
snakes would strike him many times before he could reach the
narrow lips of the cave opening.
Death would take him when the mountain decided, he
thought grimly, when she was hungry for him. He couldn't
even hope for mercy. There was no way to discuss anything
with her or negotiate any compromise. What could he say to
the walls of the mouth that would devour him?
Mildred, he thought. Please God, keep her away from even
knowing of this. Anna, the thought; what if she were to find
me? She would crawl through that narrow opening to me, and
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293
only then, looking back at the sunlight, would she see the
snakes on the walls. Too late. Too late.
He saw her coming. "No," he told her. "Go away. Go
away. Anna, go away."
Suddenly she was gone, and he realized she hadn't been
there at all.
He saw a hand on the rock just outside the opening.
"Mildred," he said, rising to his elbows, aware that the snakes
were moving more vigorously, now that he was talking. "Go
away, Mildred."
The hand on the stone was not a hand at aU.
He lay back, gasping.
He saw Mildred in the stone ceiling of the cave, coming
toward him, walking in a white dress down a dark road.
The mountain boys didn't work as a team. It was simply
that now and then one or two of them would go out with a dog.
They walked into the woods, and the woods seemed to absorb
them. Soon after they had left the Tunnel Station, Cumberland
would lose sight of them, then would notice a movement near
a rock and realize a boy was there, standing, looking, listening,
sensing. The boy would go on a ways, always appearing to be
unconcerned, unhurried. He was asking more than he was
saying; he was wondering more than he was deciding; he was
waiting to be accepted into the natural way of things. When
he was part of the way things were, the mountain would perhaps reveal to him the secrets it held.
Even though the mountain boys didn't go out together, by
mid-afternoon five of them were crouching silently before the
opening of the same cave. Their dogs were quiet, too. There
was no sound, for the boys didn't talk to each other. They
watched the entrance of the cave and listened to the man inside, who was talking. They didn't listen to what he said particularly. He was talking sometimes to his wife, at other times
to other people. He was talking only in his delirium, they realized.
The boys didn't call for help. There was no need here for
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more people. Better for the guards and convicts, and others of
unfeeling natures, to stay away now. Such men had their
methods, which were to blast and dig. Those ways wouldn't
do here. This wasn't a challenge of power, nor of mind, but of
temperament. It required that one first know the feeling of
what he was dealing with.
The boys could see the snakes. There was no way into the
cave except to crawl by them. The opening of the cave was less
than four feet high and four feet wide. The cave itself widened
into a room, but not a large room, and even that was lined with
snakes.
A sixth mountain boy arrived and, without a word,
crouched nearby and waited.
The man inside the cave began to call. They could make
out what he said. "Help," he said, over and over. Probably he
didn't know they were there. It was as well he didn't know for
he might do something suddenly, might try to force the trap,
which would only make it close on him all the more.
One boy—his name was Dozen, for he had been the twelfth
child in his family—crept closer to the opening of the cave. He
began to sway, so that his shadow moved against the floor and
walls of the cave. Later he began to hum to himself. He was
humming a hymn, as if to keep himself company.
The man inside the cave grew quiet. Maybe he saw the
shadow or heard the hymn; maybe it simply penetrated his
confusion and he was trying to determine what it was.
Dozen, swaying, humming, moved close to the mouth of
the cave. Another boy crept close, too, and quietly, ever so
quietly, began to sway and to hum the same tune. The music
was soft and very slow.
A third boy began to whistle the tune, then the other began
humming or whistling. Sometimes a boy would stop for a
while, then he would start again. Nobody gave directions; they
did as they felt like doing, all of them watching the mouth of
the cave.
Not a sound inside the cave.
Crouching, Dozen moved to the very mouth of the cave.
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He swayed slowly and hummed more loudly, and as if in reply
the snakes began to move, those near the cave entrance first,
then the snakes farther back, swaying gently as they clung to
the walls and ceiling of the cave, until all the snakes were
moving, the walls were swaying to the movement of the boy.
Dozen crawled into the mouth of the cave, humming, the
boys behind him swaying and humming and whistling gently, watching the mouth of the cave. Somebody far off in the
woods shouted, but the boys didn't answer and not even one
dog moved, as Dozen moved farther into the cave, humming.
Dozen touched Weatherby's foot. He moved forward until
he was lying beside him. He waited until Weatherby saw him.
Weatherby started to speak, but Dozen shook his head slightly, ever so slightly. Weatherby was trembling all over and his
teeth were chattering, and Dozen motioned toward the
entrance to the cave. He took Weatherby's hand and arm and
began to turn him in the cave. His body contracted in pain, so
Dozen waited until he saw the blood on the floor, then moved
first the injured leg, then moved Weatherby around so that his
head was closer to the entrance of the cave.
Dozen was on all fours now and was close to the top of the
cave; the snakes were moving back and forth, brushing against
him. He dragged Weatherby toward the entrance of the cave.
He could see the mountain boys outside crouching, swaying,
humming, and from far off he heard the bothersome noise of
a man shouting. That could be the disaster to all this. More
quickly he pulled the body toward the entrance of the cave,
where the snakes were swaying across the entry way.
He reached the entry way and crept through, leaving the
body just inside; he crept free of the cave and fell forward on
his face on the ground and lay there, breathing deeply, gasping. Another boy reached past the snakes, grasped
Weatherby's hand, and began to pull his shoulders through the
hole in the rock. When Weatherby's head was outside the cave,
his delirious eyes stared blankly at them. There was no sudden movement even yet, no abrupt sound, except of the
stranger shouting as he came toward them through the woods,
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too close, too close. Hush, they thought; what sort of fool was
it that shouted in the woods?
Weatherby's waist was through, the snakes weaved over
his body. Slowly the boys pulled his legs through; they pulled
him out onto the rock and two other mountain boys crept close
to the entryway of the cave and hummed the tune, swaying
more and more slowly, growing quieter, until finally the
snakes stopped weaving on the walls and were still.
Dozen rose from the ground. "His leg is broke, is it?" he
said.
"Splint two rifles," a boy said.
"That man that's shouting, go tell him to shut his damn
mouth," Dozen said.
A boy left to find the man.
Weatherby dazedly looked up at them.
"Is he going to be crazy?" a boy asked.
"Likely to be," Dozen said.
"You shouldn't a gone in there, Dozen."
Dozen grinned. It was so, he knew.
"He don't appear to see us," a boy said. "When he comes
to, he'll be as mean as old man Bentz was when he spent the
night with snakes. He never got over it."
"Maybe, maybe," Dozen said.
The man who had been shouting was the guard Blackie,
and he came to where they were and began to give them instructions. He said to make a litter. They said nothing to him,
but they finished the splinting of the leg, then one of the boys
picked Weatherby up by his sound leg and one of his arms and
draped him over his own shoulders. He moved past Blackie
and walked up the sloshy path past where the dogs were.
"I said make a litter," Blackie said.
The boys went on up the path, ignoring him.
The sun set beyond the mountain. The slope where the
cave was shadowed early. There was no movement inside
now, except that a snake crawled to the warm place on the rock
where the man had been and coiled there.
The wolves began to howl. Their lonely sound came into
�JOHNEHLE
297
the cave; the echo filled the cave as they came closer to the
place. One wolf moved to the mouth of the cave.
There was a growl, then a yapping fierce challenge from
the doorway, and a snake struck. The wolf backed away,
showing his teeth, snarling.
The wolf turned and went back up the path by which he
had come and disappeared quickly and silently. He had seen
that the man was gone.
The Road
1. Why did it take so long for the road crew to discover that
Weatherby was missing?
2. In fiction you learn about characters through the author's
description. You can also understand characters through
what they do and what others say about them. Using any
of the above methods, find out what you can about
Weatherby.
3. Explain the mountain boys' decision not to get help with
the dangerous situation.
4. Personification is the attribution of human characteristics
to inanimate objects. Find an example of personification of
the mountain in this story.
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How America Came to the Mountains
MYLES MORTON (1905- )
The following interview appeared in Sojourners, April, 1986.
Many years ago Horton recognized that nothing will change in
Appalachia "until we change—until we throw off dependence
and act for ourselves."
With Appalachian roots that go as far back as the Watauga
Settlement, Horton grew up aware of the contradiction of
Appalachia's richness and its poverty. This awareness led him
to see the need for empowering the powerless in Appalachia.
Consequently, in 1932 in the mountains west of Chattanooga,
Horton founded the Highlander Folk School on the principle
that poor, working-class adults could learn to change their lives.
In the years since then, his primary aim at Highlander was to
teach people how to think and how to analyze. Such teaching,
begun in the days before unions were commonplace, produced
early union leaders. In the 1950s Horton turned the emphasis
of his workshops to civil rights.
Because of Highlander's devotion to change, a governor of
Georgia called it a "cancerous growth spreading throughout the
entire South." The state of Tennessee closed it down, confiscated
its property, and sold it at auction. The Ku Klux Klan beat up
its staff and burned the buildings. Highlander is still controversial to some.
Nevertheless, Highlander, now located near Knoxville,
Tennessee, has survived to celebrate its 50th anniversary and
�MYLES MORTON
299
still follows Morton's philosophy: "We believe in people keeping a lot of their old customs and adding new ones."
Building Democracy in the Mountains
SOJOURNERS: In 1932 you started what was then called the Highlander Folk School What was the dream for it?
MYLES MORTON: We were interested in building a
democratic society and were going to use education as one of
the means to changing society. We were openly out to change
society and have what we called a second American revolution
that would be an economic democracy as well as a political
democracy. The purpose of Highlander has always been the
same: to try to contribute toward a genuine democratic society
through radical social, economic, political, and cultural change
in this country.
One of the things that we felt was very important was to
have a new type of labor movement, because at that time the
American labor movement was at a very low ebb. We advocated that there should be a democratic, industrial-type union,
and we hoped to get people in the mountains interested in
unions and cooperatives and things of that kind as one of the
means of building a democratic society. So that was a specific
statement of purpose that more or less outlined the program of
the school.
What do you mean when you talk about education? I'm not sure it's
what people usually associate with that word.
Several years ago I was speaking at an alternative school
conference. One of the people explained that Highlander was
not a school in the sense of a college or any other kind of school
because we didn't have classes, we didn't have credits, we
didn't have this, that, and the other thing, and that we built on
people's experiences instead of teaching them things they
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How America Came to the Mountains
needed to know. And that's true. Highlander is not a school.
But it is educational in the traditional meaning of the word
"educate," which is to draw out instead of to pour in.
We think people become educated by analyzing their experience and learning from other people's experience, rather
than saying there's a certain body of knowledge that we need
to give them.
The philosophy of Highlander fits in well with the notion of a gospel
that is good news to the poor and gives liberty to the captives.
You're absolutely right. We decided not to try to deal with
all of society. We tried to carve out a segment of society to deal
with that we thought was the most important—the poor, the
working people, and the minorities.
If you say religion is to be judged by the way it treats the
poor, then Highlander would qualify as religious. But we do
that primarily out of an analysis of society. We want to bring
about a fundamental change in society, and we think it has to
come from the bottom up—it can't come from the top down.
Anything that's given to people can be taken away. So we try
to help people struggle to gain their own freedom.
One of the things that people always say about Highlander is that back
in the '30s, '40s, '50s and even into the '60s, it was one of the few
places in the South where black and white people could get together as
equals and get to know each other in a new way.
Well, there was a Catholic school down in Mobile, Alabama,
that quietly, off the record so to speak, had some black and
white people. They tried to keep it kind of quiet, for good
reasons. They would have been run out of town if they hadn't.
Then there were other places where people would quietly get
together. But Highlander was the place where people knew
you could openly have social equality, and they knew it because
Highlander brought down the wrath of the opposition. And
since we were the only place that was attacked at that time for
�MYLES MORTON
301
doing it, we were practically the only place that was known.
That opened up the opportunity for us to work with black
people and was well worth all the harassment and trouble.
Now all this was taking place before the civil rights movement. It wasn't framed as a civil rights issue because we put it
all together on the basis of having a strong union, a democratic
union, a union that could stand up and fight the bosses and get
some benefits. And we said, "It doesn't matter whether you like
it or not. You've got to take the women in. You've got to get
old and young together. You've got to get everybody working
together in a democratic set-up, or you won't have any
strength." That was the angle we used. So the groundwork was
laid, and although we weren't dealing with civil rights on a
daily basis, a lot of black people and white people whom we
worked with later became leaders of the civil rights movement.
How did what started as an economic struggle during the Depression
evolve into a civil rights movement?
We finally came to the conclusion that we couldn't go any
further in terms of economic, political, or cultural changes until
we dealt head-on with this business of racism. We'd get so far,
and then racism would be used against us. So in the early 1950s,
around 1952 or '53—before the Supreme Court decision on
Brown vs. Board of Education—we decided that we were going
to have to consciously concentrate on dealing with the public
aspects of segregation.
That's when we came to the policy of saying to black people:
"OK, we'll work with you. You decide what to do, and we'll be
supportive. We think that's the most important single thing we
can do now, because we can't move on peace, we can't move
on economic issues, we can't move on social life or anything
else, until we crack that." Then we started trying to pull together
people who would talk about racism, both white and black, and
the basis for this was our old trade union people.
You see, to the labor people we added black people who,
for economic reasons, were freed of influence from whites—
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How America Came to the Mountains
preachers from black churches, beauticians, morticians, and
other business people who only worked with other black
people. A few people in education were involved, along with
private people, black and white, who were more independent.
But the basis for this was the labor people.
I understand that one of the first things to come from that work was
the citizenship schools. How did that come about?
I guess that's what you'd call one of the Highlander success
stories. Our policy has always been not to go out and do anything anywhere unless we have students who start something
and then ask us to come and help. The citizenship school
program is a typical example of that.
A fellow named Esau Jenkins had come to a workshop at
Highlander, and he was trying to get people registered to vote
in Johns Island, South Carolina, when he asked if we could help.
After doing some real analyzing and thinking about the situation, we came up with a very simple idea that the black people
there called the citizenship school. It was what most people
would caU a literacy school.
The law required blacks to read a part of the U.S. Constitution before they could register, and so it ruled out illiterates. If
you had a certain amount of property or wealth, and you were
white, you didn't have to be able to read to vote. But if you were
black, you did. So our program was really a way to help people
get to be citizens. That's why they called it citizenship school.
Out of that program grew a lot of leadership for the civil
rights movement. Some people credit the citizenship school
program for being one of the bases of the civil rights movement.
It was simply black people teaching black people in a system of
adult education based on what's called popular education now,
especially in Latin America. It was based on the fact that if you
know just a little bit more than the people you're teaching, you
are closer to them and you can help them. You don't need to
have expertise to do it, but you have to respect the people you're
dealing with.
�MYLES MORTON
303
That program spread, and later on Martin Luther King, Jr.
asked me if I would work out an educational program for SCLC
(Southern Christian Leadership Conference), which didn't
have an educational program. After spending a month or so
thinking about it and visiting some of their programs, I came to
the conclusion that the citizenship school program was ideal for
them. They accepted the program, and that became the official
program of SCLC. It became a big program, but it started out
in the back of a little co-op which we'd helped set up.
Was it during the period of involvement with the civil rights movement that Highlander really faced enormous persecution?
If you're not facing some kind of resistance from the people
in power, then you must be a traitor to your cause. So you can
be sure that if you're accepted by people who are struggling,
then you're going to be harassed by people who want to keep
the status quo. So in a way it's a measure of your involvement.
What form did that harassment take for you?
Well, I've had ribs broken and my skull fractured. I've still
got a crack in it. I had teeth knocked out, collarbone broken,
arms slashed, but all of it short of death. Now, I had to go to
jail like everybody else, but that was no problem—you got a little rest. So on a personal level you had to take punishment.
One thing a lot of white people don't understand is that we
have a certain advantage in the fact that we are white. They'd
beat me senseless. But they'd kill a black person. They didn't
quite dare kill me. That would have been embarrassing. In fact
there were instructions in writing by the FBI to the officers in
Mississippi when I was there not to kill me. There weren't any
such instructions not to kill black people.
As far as Highlander itself was concerned, they tried every
way in the world to harass us. They tried to have vigilantes
come and run us off and try to burn the place, but our neighbors protected us. Then they had a state investigation to try to
�304
How America Came to the Mountains
put us out of business, and that didn't work. Senator James
Eastland's Internal Security Subcommittee came, but that
didn't work. Finally they raided the school and set up a case
over a two-year period during which they bribed local people
to testify; but even after all that, most of them got mixed up and
said the wrong things. They finally found a technical way of
getting us by charging us with selling liquor without a license
for having a cooler of beer with a collection cup beside it.
The one thing we pleaded guilty to was the one thing they
were concerned about—running an integrated place. We very
proudly said we'd been doing that for years and were going to
continue to do it. And it was that issue that got us in trouble.
And you were raising a family during the worst of those times?
Yeah, I was raising two kids. My wife died when my kids
were 10 and 12. All their childhood lives, they lived in this
period of harassment during which I had to send them to a
neighbor's house when we'd be attacked. And they used to
hear all this hate stuff on television and radio and from
preachers and read about it in the paper. So they grew up
knowing all about that, and they'd just kind of bear with it.
My daughter was going to a local school, and the teacher
would say, "Comrade Charis, will you read?" And then the
teachers would say, "Well, you better get back out there with
those little nigger kids you live with." So the kids didn't have
an easy time, but it was more than made up for by their growing up knowing wonderful people. They knew Rosa Parks just
like family.
That's important because, as you said, when you take certain stands
about how you're going to live your life, you can expect the things
you experienced at Highlander. People may not fear that for themselves, but they fear that for their families.
I was asked at one of the state investigations of Highlander
if I felt like I had some obligations to live a more normal life and
�MYLES MORTON
305
assume my responsibility as a parent for my children. I was
also asked what kind of heritage did I think I was leaving them.
I said I thought I was leaving them the best heritage that I could.
I thought it was important to leave them a heritage that they
wouldn't be ashamed of. I thought that was much more important than playing Little League baseball with them or doing
some of the things that the investigators thought were part of a
parent's duty.
So I don't feel that you neglect your kids when you do something that they can be proud of. I'm happier now that my kids
are not ashamed of Highlander, not ashamed of me, and not
sorry about their own lives, than I would be if I'd left them conventional sorts of memories and money and things of that sort.
And they're better off.
One thing that is pretty unique about Highlander over the whole span
of the last 54 years is the role of culture, especially music, in the education and agitation work that's been done here.
Even before Highlander started, I was making notes on
some ideas that I'd like to see incorporated into it. One of them
was the use of culture, music, and drama as a way of saying
things that you can't say otherwise. You can say things in music
and in dance and drama and poetry that are not exactly the rational step-by-step sort of things. I always conceived of that
being important.
"We Shall Overcome" was just one of the many songs that
were brought to Highlander. It came from Charleston, South
Carolina, where the American Tobacco workers were on strike.
Like a lot of people, they made up songs based on their hymns.
And they brought to Highlander a pretty rough-hewn song
they'd made up. With my wife Zilphia's encouragement, that
song grew. It had something to it that people just kept singing
it. When Martin Luther King, Jr. heard it, he said, "This has got
to be the hymn of the civil rights movement." Zilphia collected
such songs and put out music books that spread all over the
South and were used during the civil rights movement and the
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How America Came to the Mountains
labor period.
There's a story that one of the verses for "We Shall Overcome " came
into being much later at Highlander.
There was a black Baptist church youth choir from
Montgomery, Alabama, and Septima Clark, a black woman on
our staff, had made arrangements for them to come up. While
they were eating and looking at a film, there was a raid.
People came in with guns and demanded that they put on
the lights. But nobody would put on the lights. The people had
flashlights and showed their guns and kept demanding that
they turn the movie off and put on the lights. No one knew
whether they were vigilantes or the law. It turned out that they
were deputies and people who'd been deputized for this raid.
Soon the kids started singing "We Shall Overcome," and they
added that verse "We are not afraid." And Septima said it just
infuriated those people, the whites, to have these black kids
sing, "We are not afraid."
I have only one musical credit in the world. I can't play or
sing, but as we were making up verses for songs, like we always
do, I had a feeling that there was a lot of uncritical thinking
going on about some of the hard issues of civil rights. I was
trying to think up a verse that would say that we have to keep
searching for the truth and not just assume that we have it.
So I finally said, "I haven't been able to figure out any line
that fits this idea, but maybe somebody else can help. It's the
search for truth that will make us free, not the struggle." So they
immediately started singing, "The truth will make us free," and
I said, "No, no, that's not what I mean," but it was too late. From
that night on, "the truth will make us free" has been a part of
that song. And that's the only contribution from my musical
career.
You said there was a shift at Highlander from working primarily on
labor issues to working more on racial and civil rights issues. But
then here was another shift when the Highlander Center again became
very much identified with Appalachia.
�MYLES MORTON
307
Well, first of all, we started out working in Appalachia, and
worked here for the first four or five years, and that established
the idea that we were Appalachia-based. And then in the '60s,
after working on racism and civil rights issues, we switched and
started back to working on Appalachia, as part of the Poor
People's Campaign.
One of the reasons we concentrated on Appalachia was we
thought there was a possibility of building that alliance among
all the groups of poor people. If we were going to be part of
that coalition, we would do it as part of Appalachia.
About four years ago, we decided we'd gone as far as we
should go in working on Appalachia, and we announced that
we would open up the workshops to folks in the Deep South
again.
In the South we're working on some basic civil rights issues
through cultural programs, voter registration, and our work
with the Federation of Southern Co-ops in Alabama. Here in
Appalachia, the women's movement is important right now.
Women are beginning to make demands and make some headway, and women miners are getting organized. A lot of that
work is connected with people at Highlander.
You said that at Highlander fundamental social change is the objective and that at different times Highlander may work on toxic wastes
or union rights or civil rights. How does your work on the specific issues, some of which you may win and others you may lose, relate to
the larger objective?
I think there are two things involved. One is that what
results in a revolution is a culmination of a lot of things that
have their fruition at a certain time. But the revolution is being
built all along.
What you do is build little cells of decency, little cells of
democracy, little experiences of people making decisions for
themselves, little philosophical discussions about civil rights
and human rights. All of those get built into what's going to
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How America Came to the Mountains
happen later on.
So you're really building for the revolution when you do
something to develop local leadership. You get some satisfaction out of seeing steps as you go along, even though you don't
get all the way.
Then, if you're around long enough, you see things like the
industrial union movement, the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, and other movements that seem to get something done. So you know people can do things. A lot of people
today have never seen anything succeed.
I've seen things succeed. I know people can do things. I've
seen the complete labor movement restructured; I've seen the
civil rights movement. I know people can make changes.
They're not making them now, but they're building things. The
time is not being wasted. But it's not being fully occupied
either.
The purpose of Highlander is not to solve problems but to
use problems and crises as the basis for educating people about
a democratic society. To make them want more, and make
them understand they can do more.
I think you need to challenge people. I think you stretch
them as far as you can. I think you have expectations that you
share with them and you give them help.
I feel very strongly that people have the capacity to go further. You've got to deal with people's self-interest, some say.
Well, I agree with that, but their interests are much broader than
most people think. Their personal interest includes a willingness to struggle, a love for their country, a love for humanity.
Those are personal interests too. It isn't just feeding your belly
and getting some clothes on and getting a little security. Those
are personal interests, they're valid and they're important. But
these other things are personal interests too. And you can challenge people, you can build with people on those things. And
if you don't, it seems to me you're minimizing the humanity of
people.
�MYLES MORTON
309
Building Democracy in the Mountains
1. What are the fundamental goals of Highlander Folk School?
2. How does Horton believe that people learn?
3. What were the citizenship schools, and how did they
demonstrate Horton's philosophy?
�310
COMPOSITION TOPICS
1. In your library read about the Tennessee Valley Authority
or the atomic bomb and decide what aspects of it will make
a good report. After you have narrowed your topic, write
a paper using at least three resources on your topic.
2. The pieces in the chapter you have read show America coming to the mountains. Is this progress? Write an essay
defending your opinion.
ACTIVITIES
It is likely that your parents and grandparents have experienced
empowering changes in their lives. Interview these family
members to find out about such changes, write about these
changes in narrative form, and include them in your book.
Ask about the time the parent or grandparent first got electricity
in his house. Be sure to ask how he felt about it.
Ask about changing from farming to working in a factory or a
store. Be sure to include feelings about the change.
Find out about the first woman in your family who worked outside the home. Include family reactions and the woman's reaction to her work.
Ask about the first automobile in the family. If possible, include an illustration of it.
Find out about the first labor-saving devices: washing
machine, sewing machine, vacuum cleaner, power lawn
mower, tractor, refrigerator, etc.
�311
Contrast your school with your grandparents' and parents'
schools.
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�313
CHAPTER 5
Moving Mountains:
The Struggle of the Coal Industry
Many people, both inside and outside the Appalachian
region, have a negative view of the coal industry. This is
easy to understand. In the early days of the industry, no attempts to protect miners existed. No one had ever heard of
environmental protection. Consequently, the only news
from the coal industry was the bad news of explosions and
cave-ins that killed many men. Photographs of abandoned
stripmines that scarred the land and polluted the streams accompanied the news.
People soon noticed also that despite this abundant
natural resource and its profitability, the region and its
people remained dismally poor. The standard of living in
the coal-producing sections of Appalachia was among the
lowest in the nation. The highways, schools, and health care
facilities were substandard. All the money from coal was
going somewhere else. But finally as Myles Horton, a writer
in Part n, had hoped, the power of the people—and truth
and fairness—brought change.
�314
Edwin Hoffman's article in this chapter details some of
the long struggle that led to changes in the laws. Labor
unions, political activists, some lawmakers and community
leaders in coal mining areas worked together toward a common goal. Stringent health and safety regulations now exist
for mine operation, and the government spends a large sum
of money to help enforce these laws. After 1977 the federal
government has required that coal operators restore mined
land to its original contour. This means that the used land
has to be reclaimed and made productive.
The coal industry has become more responsible in recent
years, but it is still struggling. Its efforts to improve working
conditions and reduce accidents and illness among miners
have achieved respectable success. Nevertheless coal mining
is still one of the most dangerous occupations in the United
States. Competition from foreign coal has hurt the industry
and caused loss of sales and jobs. Some small coal companies
have responded to this economic difficulty by avoiding their
obligations to workers, the land, and the community.
All in all, the coal industry has made tremendous strides
in the past twenty years. Many of the larger companies are
now spending much money to educate the public about the
industry's efforts to improve itself. Coal Appreciation Week,
children's poster contests on safety, a public schools program
featuring coal company engineers and tours of active and
reclaimed mines are new to the coal fields. They are
designed to show the industry's contribution to life in the
region.
�DON WEST
315
DON WEST (1907- )
A mountaineer and native of Georgia, Don West has been
a minister, teacher, labor organizer, and poet. His first book of
poems, Clods of Southern Earth, has sold more copies than any
other book of poetry in America except for Walt Whitman's
Leaves of Grass.
In 1964, West founded the Appalachian Southern Folklore
Center in Pipestem, West Virginia, which helps local people
understand their cultural heritage.
His poem "Harlan Portraits" says beauty is a stranger in the
coal camps.
Harlan Portraits
I've seen the beauty in Harlan,
In the trailing arbutus,
The dogfennel and pennyroyal
In the fence corners,
The forest dressed
In a foliage of
Rattleweed and ditney.
I've seen beauty when
Gray winter strokes his beard
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Moving Mountains: Struggle of the Coal Industry
With boy-white fingers,
And trees are skeletons
Of summer's glory...
But beauty
Never visits the coal diggers.
They live in the coal camps—
Dirty shanties,
Stinking privies,
Grunting pigs,
And slop buckets...
Gaunt-eyed women
With dull hopeless faces
Cook soggy wheat biscuits.
Tall gaunt men
Eat soggy bread
And fat meat,
Gulp down black coffee,
Work all day—
Digging, digging,
Everlastingly digging.
Grime and dirt
And digging
In their dreams they dig
And smell unpleasant
Odors.
For beauty
Is a stranger
To the coal camps...
�DON WEST
317
Harlan Portraits
1. A metaphor is a direct comparison between two unlike
things. Find the metaphors in the first stanza of the poem.
2. Why is beauty a stranger to the coal camps? Is it possible
for any place to be completely devoid of beauty as the poet
suggests?
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Moving Mountains: Struggle of the Coal Industry
Nine Pound Hammer
This is a Kentucky coal-mining song long associated with
Merle Travis. The Monroe Brothers version is used as an
"answer-back," with the tenor echoing each line and singing
along on the last.
It's a long way to Harlan and a long way to Hazard
Just to get a little booze, just to get a little booze.
Oh, the nine pound hammer killed John Henry
Ain't gonna kill me, ain't gonna kill me.
There ain't one hammer down in this tunnel
That can ring like mine, that can ring like mine.
Rings like silver, shines like gold
Rings like silver, shines like gold.
Buddy when I'm gone, won't you make my tombstone
Out of number nine coal, out of number nine coal.
I'm going on the mountain, just to see my baby
And I ain't coming back, no I ain't coming back.
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Moving Mountains: Straggle of the Coal Industry
Nine Pound Hammer
1. Find evidence in the song of the speaker's attitude toward
his work. What does the reference to size suggest?
2. This song contains an allusion to a popular ballad you have
previously read. Locate the allusion and explain it.
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Moving Mountains: Struggle of the Coal Industry
HARRY M.CAUDILL (1922- )
Except for time spent in the military service and at the
University of Kentucky where he earned his law degree, Harry
M. Caudill has lived his entire life in Whitesburg, Kentucky.
Although he has published several books and articles, his
first book, Night Comes to the Cumberlands: A Biography of a
Depressed Area, has received the most attention. Published in
1963, this description of his native region helped establish
legislation which has poured millions of dollars into the Appalachian "poverty pockets" Caudill described.
This short story "The Mountain, the Miner and the Lord"
from a book by the same name introduces us to Sam Hawkins,
a black miner working to give his daughter the education he
never had.
The Mountain, the Miner and the Lord
Sam Hawkins was enormous and coal black, with immense
chest and shoulders and broad, work-thickened hands. When
he told me this story he was about seventy-five, and time and
arthritis had slowed him to an uncertain shuffle. But his eyes
were still wonderfully alert, and in their dark depths there
glowed immeasurable woe and much wisdom.
It was late November in the bleak depression year of 1932
�HARRY CAUDILL
321
in the coal town of Fleming, Kentucky. The leaves had long
since fallen from the few scrub beeches and oaks on the dark
hills, and now gray, gloomy clouds hung near their rocky
crests. Cold rain beat relentlessly against the tarpaper roofs
and weatherboarded walls of scores of identical houses, and a
pall of smoke, grime, and grit from the chimneys blanketed the
narrow streets and sidewalks. Elsewhere a few well-to-do
people had begun to think of Christmas, but in Fleming—and
in countless other Appalachian mining communities—people
only thought of survival.
The industrial crisis that had closed mills and factories had
brought most mines to a complete shutdown and the others to
a two- or three-day work week. Tens of thousands of miners
were without jobs. Currency had disappeared as if recalled to
the mints, and company scrip—redeemable only at company
commissaries—was the medium of exchange. All the banks in
the county (and most of those in adjoining counties as well)
had folded, taking with them the savings of miners, merchants,
and coal operators. The fear that lay in the valleys was more
suffocating than the smoke-laden fog.
Sam Hawkins was forty-eight and had one child, Margaret.
The girl was nineteen, big-boned and strapping like her father.
Sam's wife had died in July after an appendectomy. The doctors in the shabby, hopelessly overcrowded little company
hospital had done all they could for her, but in those days
before antibiotics there was little chance to save her. Sam was
with her at the end and, numb with grief and loss, he had ridden with her body in a company hearse driven by a company
undertaker to a company graveyard.
Sadie's last words to Sam had been desperate: "Sam,
honey, Margaret won't ever git to go to college! She'll be pore
and helpless as we is!"
But Sam had not despaired. In the face of incredible odds
he had sent his "little girl" off to Kentucky State College for
Negroes at Frankfort when the fall term began in September.
When she kissed him good-bye and climbed aboard a train, she
carried all her possessions in a cardboard box. Wrapped in a
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Moving Mountains: Struggle of the Coal Industry
handkerchief in her cheap little purse were fifteen one-dollar
bills which Sam had gotten from an accommodating white
politician in the county seat. For them Sam had exchanged fifteen dollars in scrip and three days of farm labor.
When Sam and Sadie had come up from Selma, Alabama,
to the booming Kentucky coalfield they expected to find a little happiness for themselves. In the coal towns blacks were
"damn niggers," and occasional lynchings kept black coal diggers cowed and quiescent. But life was far better, even so, than
any they had known in Alabama. As long as the boom lasted
they ate well and had enough clothes, and the company house
was warm, dry, and neatly painted. Their daughter was a
delight to both of them and they had vowed to educate her.
She would go to college and would some day teach school. She
would know how to do things they had never dreamed of for
themselves—she would read and write. They nurtured a
dream to "make somebody" out of their daughter, to see her
and their grandchildren slip beyond the cruel oppression of
poverty, insecurity, and endless toil.
Some things were encouraging in this respect. When the
coal corporations constructed new towns in Letcher County
they had built houses, stores, streets, hospitals, water systems,
and schoolhouses—for white children. Several years passed
before classrooms were opened for black children, and then
only grade schools were provided, but it was a beginning.
In that time and place a high school education was a luxury
many communities could not afford to provide. In the struggle to build secondary schools the black children and their
parents were forgotten and a stern state law prevented integrated classrooms. As Margaret made her way up through
Fleming Colored Graded School her parents watched her
progress with a pleasure that was tempered by a growing
anxiety. Unless a high school could be built soon, their
daughter's education would terminate abruptly in her fourteenth year. Sam commenced working on this problem and,
as he phrased it, "The Lord blessed me, he shorely did!"
One summer day Sam rode a train fifteen miles down the
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323
river to Whitesburg, the shabby little county seat, and, hat in
hand, he entered the office of the county attorney. He believed
the official's condescension covered a kindly heart and told
him his worries. He asked the lawyer to draft a petition to the
fiscal court and board of education. The instrument, as pecked out by the attorney on an ancient Underwood, "humbly and
respectfully" requested the building of a high school for
"colored students" who had "completed the course of studies
required for an eighth grade diploma." Sam left the crumbling
brick courthouse apprehensive at the thought of the immense
task he had undertaken.
In the next few weeks he collected the signatures of
Negroes—or more generally their marks, for few could write.
Then, when virtually all blacks in Fleming and other nearby
towns had marked the paper, he submitted it to white miners,
housewives, merchants, and company officials. Most signed,
with sly winks and nods to their fellows, though not a few
refused because they did not believe in "educating niggers."
Some said bluntly that taxes for white schools were burdensome enough without the extra expense of "nigger schools."
But the list of scrawls and X's grew steadily longer.
One day Sam and a black preacher enlisted the aid of
another white official, a one-armed former coal miner, and laid
their tattered document before the eight tobacco-chewing justices of the peace who made up the fiscal court. Two members
insulted them for their pains, but others were more sympathetic. A year and a half later, the county board of education, the fiscal court, and the school officials for the
independent district in the town of Jenkins reached an agreement: a high school would be built in Jenkins and administered as a part of the town's system, but the county would
contribute annually to its support. Black children from both
school districts would attend it.
When the news came, Sam and Sadie felt a glow of pleasure
greater than either would ever know again. Sam believed the
Lord had done it and said so to all who mentioned his achievement. But before the first stone was laid in the building's foun-
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Moving Mountains: Struggle of the Coal Industry
dation Margaret had brought home her grade school diploma.
She would have to repeat her last year's work while the carpenters built her high school and administrators struggled to
find, somewhere, a black faculty. It was a foregone conclusion
that whites would not teach in such an institution.
Fifteen hundred blacks celebrated the opening of their new
citadel of learning with a barbecue and home-brewed beer.
The preachers prayed long and fervent prayers of thanksgiving. Sam was lauded as the man "who had a vision,11 and the
white school men patted him on his back and congratulated
him. That was on a spring day in 1928 when the world was
rosy. Margaret got her high school diploma four years later
after the sky had fallen, when most men's hopes were as cold
as the slate that towered in vast heaps above the coal camps.
She read the ornately inscribed certificate to her beaming
mother exactly one month before the white undertaker
screwed down the pine coffinlid above Sadie's face.
Now as he trudged along the rain-drenched street in the
last light of the dying day Sam sagged beneath a new burden.
As he turned and mounted the three wooden steps to his door
he carried the only food he possessed: a wedge of cheese and
a five-cent box of soda crackers. The fire in the grate had
dimmed to a mere handful of glowing coals that responded
slowly when he knocked out the ashes and added lumps of
fresh fuel.
He drew a letter from his pocket and stared at the lines that
ran boldly across the white sheet. Sam could not tell one letter
from another, but Amos Bryant, the postmaster, had read the
brief note to him, and the disconsolate man still remembered
every word. There was no escaping them nor what they portended for his child and for his own worth as a man:
Dear Papa,
I miss you and Mama more than I can ever say. Both of you
were always so good to me.
My school work is very good and my grades are fine. I really like school a lot.
�HARRY CAUDILL
325
It looks like I will have to quit school, though, in a few days.
My money is all gone and the little work I get is just enough to
buy food. Unless you can manage to send me ten dollars I will
have to come back home. It will break my heart but I know it
will hurt you far more. Maybe that would be best after all,
though, because then I could be of some comfort to you in these
sad times.
Your loving daughter,
Margaret
Sam's only money lay on the mantlepiece—fifteen cents in
the brass scrip of Elk Horn Coal. It was Thursday night and
no work for his section of the mine was posted on the board by
the payroll window before Monday. A miner was paid on a
piece-work basis—thirty-one cents per ton for drilling, blasting, and loading the coal into cars. The company hired a man
to undercut the coal at the face, and the miner did the rest. The
miner provided his own tools and smithing and the carbide for
his lamp. He had to pay the company for the explosives he
used. If he was lucky he would net two dollars in eight to ten
hours—two dollars in scrip. And if he didn't like the terms he
could bring out his tools and starve. Since there was no alternative, the men hung on to the awful jobs, and miners and company together had settled down into abject ruin. Ten dollars
was a fortune wholly beyond Sam's reach. He could not borrow, because there was no one with money to lend, and if someone possessed a bit of cash, would he be so improvident as to
lend it to a penniless black coal miner? Sam groaned in despair.
The droning rain sluiced against the windows and wooden
walls. The wind whirled soot down the chimney and howled
about the eaves. Suddenly a new sound emerged from the turbulent night as heavy feet walked across the porch. Knuckles
rapped against the door and when Sam, glad to have any
visitor, yelled, "Come in," the door swung back to admit a blueuniformed company policeman.
The spectacle of the officer, his raincoat dripping puddles
on the pine floor, sent a new wave of dread along Sam's spine.
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Moving Mountains: Struggle of the Coal Industry
He had violated no statutes, but a few days earlier he had
talked to a representative of the United Mine Workers of
America about the possibility of organizing a local. Company
spies were everywhere and such "ingratitude" was cause
enough to evict an offending miner from company property.
And where could a man go on such a night as this?
The policeman looked about the room with its simple furniture, the framed snapshot of Sadie, and the crochet work with
which she had tried to bring some beauty to the graceless place.
He licked his lips and stared at Sam with pale, uncertain eyes.
"Sam," he said, "the superintendent asked me to stop and
tell you that he has a chance for you to make some real money.
Yes, some real good money! One of the sections has mined out
too much coal and a big pillar is taking weight. The men in that
section are afraid of a general roof fall, so they won't go into
the place. The super says you are the best coal loader in the
camp, and you can work all night if you want to. The weight
is pushing the coal out from the pillar, and you won't have to
do a thing but shovel. A man can load an awful lot of coal between now and daylight." He paused, then added, "The engineers say they are pretty sure the top will hold for another
twenty-four hours or longer and, anyway, an experienced
miner like you, Sam, can generally tell when the fall is coming
in time to get out to a safe place."
To the policeman's amazement the black giant rolled his
eyes heavenward and with utter sincerity murmured, "Thank
ye, Lord!"
Sam put on his work clothes—long cotton underwear,
faded bib overalls, blue denim shirt and jacket, knee-high rubber boots, and a soft miner's cap with a carbide lamp attached
to the front. He pumped a half gallon of fresh water into the
bottom section of his aluminum dinner bucket and dropped
the bit of cheese and handful of crackers onto the food tray.
A few moments later he reached the office of the mine superintendent. The superintendent leaned back in a creaking
oak swivel chair and explained how a foreman had permitted
a little too much coal to be removed in Section 4-B Right. "A
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327
squeeze is coming, Sam, and the whole territory is going to be
lost in a day or two. There is a lot of fine Elkhorn No. 3 there,
and if we don't get it tonight we never will, because the whole
mountain is going to set down on it." He cleared his throat.
"The track is laid up to the face of the coal. It will squeeze out
as fast as you can load it and push it away. We can set all the
cars for you that you can possibly load. There is no night shift,
but we will leave the fan running, and there is no reason why
you can't work all night in there by yourself."
He toyed with a paper clip and tapped Section 4-B Right
on the mine map that lay before him. "We will pay you thirtyone cents a ton and that is straight pay. No deductions for anything. You'll not need to do any blasting and the only tool
you'll need is a shovel. There is a man-car waiting at the drift
mouth to take you to the face."
Sam left the warm room and strode through the icy drizzle
a hundred and fifty yards to the drift mouth—a huge, arched
hole framed with concrete where steel rails reflected the glaring rays of a battery of electric bulbs as they curved into the
black shaft. As Sam approached the opening, water rushed in
torrents down the denuded slopes, and the tortured mountain,
hard-pressed from within and without, loomed immense and
terrifying. Just inside the tunnel Sam climbed into an empty
car and slouched low against the wooden side. Propelled by
an electric locomotive the car hurtled along the heading. Every
six feet black locust timbers held up a sawed eight-by-eight
white oak "collar" to secure the roof. Two miles from the portal the little train slowed and turned sharply to the right, then
sped along for a couple of minutes longer. After another turn
to the right it whined to a halt and Sam straightened up to look
along the shaft of light from the locomotive that poked like a
yellow finger into the darkness.
Where the track turned off into the working place, a long
line of empty cars waited on their rusty steel wheels, each loading about 4,000 pounds when filled and "rounded over." From
them the rails stretched to the face of the "pillar," a huge rectangle of glittering coal forty feet wide and at least eight feet
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Moving Mountains: Struggle of the Coal Industry
thick. The seam rose from the smooth slate floor straight up
and seven feet to the sandstone roof. About its base lay a twofoot ruffle of loose coal, and as Sam filled his lamp with a fresh
charge of carbide and turned up the flame to its utmost the roof
creaked and groaned and new lumps pushed outward onto the
floor. Here and there small slabs of slate had splintered upward out of the floor under pressure from the descending shaft
of coal. He lifted out his dinner bucket and set it and his pick
against the "rib" or wall a dozen yards back. He put his shovel
in an "empty" and pushed the car to a spot within easy shoveling distance. Then the motorman said, "So long, Sam, and
good luck," and sent the locomotive careening down the track.>
Sam set three white props before he began shoveling, driving hickory cap wedges across the top of each of the eight-inch
timbers until it was tightly seated. Ten times as much oak
would not protect him from the sandstone ledge that sagged
above his head, but the props would serve as barometers by
which he could gauge the mounting pressure. As the coal pillar yielded, the oak would splinter and shred, crying in protest
until it broke.
He picked up the shovel and with a fervent "Be with me,
Lord" pushed it along the slate until the broad scoop was filled,
then lifted it and dropped sixteen pounds of Elk Horn No. 3
coal onto the wooden bottom of the car. The clatter sent echoes
reverberating along the dark shafts and brought a faint
whisper of the original sound back to him a few seconds later.
Rhythmically, steadily, the shovel rose and fell, the black heap
rising moment by moment until it lay glittering and uniform
along the entire length of the seven-foot car. Despite the cool
clamminess of the air the ventilation fan pushed in to him,
Sam's forehead beaded with sweat and when he dropped the
shovel to push the loaded car onto the side track he laid aside
his jacket. He pulled a brass disk from his pocket and hung it
on the "check horn" at the front of the car. The "check" was
marked with his number, 67, and would tell the weighman at
the tipple that Sam Hawkins had loaded the coal. The
workmen had no "check-weighman" at the scale house and
�HARRY CAUDILL
329
Sam could only pray for honest weights. He put his shoulder
against another empty and brought it to the face. When he
picked up the shovel, the coal he had carried away had already
been replaced by new lumps from the breaking face.
For hours the shovel ascended and descended, interrupted
only by forays for new cars. After a while Sam lost all track of
the number he had loaded. Sometimes he put fresh carbide in
his lamp or paused for a drink of water from his bucket. He
commenced work at a quarter past eight, and four and a half
hours later his pocket watch told him it was time to eat the
cheese and crackers. The morsels were gone in a half-dozen
bites, and after resting his arms and back for a few minutes, he
returned to the coal. This was no night for ease. The words of
his girl's letter as brought to him by the droning voice of the
postmaster sounded endlessly in his ears, restoring strength to
arms that began to ache with fatigue. Once as he pushed an
empty into position he wiped the sweat from his face with a
gritty hand and murmured, "We goin' to do it, Sadie! We goin'
to do it after all!"
A little after five Sam heard the rattle of the man-trip in the
main tunnel, followed by the lights and voices of approaching
miners. The day's work in 4-C Right was about to begin, and
Sam, after laying the last lump on another car, straightened his
back and leaned against his shovel. His legs, arms, and
shoulders throbbed with great weariness, and his belly
rumbled with hunger. His water bucket was empty and his
sweat-soaked clothing clung to his gritty flesh. As he stared at
the bobbing lamps he trembled and his head sagged against
his chest, but the presence of other creatures after the loneliness of the night was wonderfully welcome. Words of greeting gathered in his throat but died unspoken. Suddenly the
lights stopped as the men gazed thunderstruck with
astonishment at him and his long line of loaded cars. A
derisive laugh came from a lanky white man in front as he
squatted on his haunches sixty feet away at the entrance to the
short tunnel that led to Sam's doomed pillar.
"You crazy nigger," he called, "don't you know you're goin'
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Moving Mountains: Struggle of the Coal Industry
to git mashed flat as a bean bug in there? The reg'lar shift quit
that whole place yisterd'y and the comp'ny pulled out all its
equipment!" Laughter rich with scorn tittered along the line of
lights. Then as the men shuffled away over the uneven floor
one of them muttered, "Man alive, that nigger shore does love
to load coal!"
When they were gone Sam looked for the hundredth time
at the props. Long ago the bark had loosened and long splinters
stood out from the wood. He laid a palm against one of them
and felt it vibrate like a tightened banjo string. Suddenly with
a low hum a long filament the thickness of a match detached itself from the surface and hung by splinters from roof to floor.
A bushel of coal rolled out to his shoe and a slate shard reared
up like a tiny soldier out of the tortured floor. "It's time to quit,"
Sam muttered as he carried his dinner pail, jacket, and shovel
into the safety of the tunnel. He leaned his shoulders against
the "coal rib" for a brief rest before walking to the main tunnel
for a ride to the outside.
But Sam's work-stiffened joints were not soon to enjoy the
rest they had earned. As he whispered a good southern-style
prayer of gratitude that the perilous night was safely past, a new
light approached and the voice of Henry Johnson, a mine
foreman, inquired solicitously, "Is that you, Sam? I sure am
glad to see you safe and sound." He whistled with incredulity,
"God damn! Did you load all these cars by yourself?"
Sam emitted a hoarse croak. "Well, me and the Lord
together," he replied. "He held up the top."
The foreman counted the cars, seventeen of them, and then
came back to stand before the miner. After a moment of reflection he walked down to the end of the track where Sam had
toiled the night away. He held his lamp in his hand to inspect
the props and pecked with a pick handle against the roof. It
sounded solid, but grains of sand from the "working" top
dusted downward against his upturned face. He whistled
again, this time reflectively.
"Sam," he opined, "you did all right for yourself last night.
You made some money and I know you need it. You're a good
�HARRY CAUDILL
331
worker and you don't scare easy. This top is coming, no doubt
about it, but not for a while, in my opinion." He put a chew of
tobacco between his teeth, chewed, and spat out ambeer. Then
in confidential tones, "Sam, what about another shift? If you
feel up to it, I can send your dinner bucket out to the commissary and get it filled and have some more empties shoved in
here and you can shovel all day. The superintendent sure will
appreciate it if you decide to do it, but after all, you know the
danger and you must use your own best judgment about it."
Sam drew in a long breath and let it out slowly. He thought
of his weariness, of the shredding timbers, and of the popping
sandstone. Then he thought of Sadie and Margaret, and rose
to his feet. "Git me some grub and some empty cars," he said,
as he picked up his shovel.
The day passed with infinite slowness. The clerk at the
commissary who packed his dinner bucket was generous, but
Sam did not linger long over his food. Yearning for some hot
coffee, he washed his meal down with a long draught of fresh
water. He prudently saved back half the food for "dinner time"
about eleven. If all went well—and the top held—he should
see daylight again by four o'clock that afternoon.
The food brought a flow of new strength, and for a couple
of hours the shovel worked at its old tempo. But gradually the
muscular arms and legs turned clumsy and heavy. The pain
of weariness advanced in him until it gripped like a gray
blanket from crown to toe. As the hours dragged by, a longing for sleep crept into every nerve and sinew, and the cars
filled at an ever slower rate. He struggled to stay alert to the
danger above his head—the danger that relentlessly reduced
the props to columns of splinters and sent cupfuls of sand sluicing across the undiminished heap of coal at his feet.
When he heard the miners returning from 4-C Right, he laid
his shovel on top of the last car and strained with all his remaining strength to sent it along the tracks. As it gathered momentum a red haze swam before his eyes and he staggered to keep
up as the car rolled down the tunnel. Forty yards away he put
on his jacket and drank the last of his water. He sat down and
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Moving Mountains: Straggle of the Coal Industry
pushed his back against a coal car. "I'll rest jist a minute or two
before headin' for the outside,1 f he thought as he closed his eyes.
Sam dozed but his sleep was ended by a roar of cataclysmic proportions, an ocean of rending, crashing sound that
hurled him down the tunnel like a puppet. The thick layer of
sandstone had broken in the mined-out area behind the pillar
and, crushing the pillar like a squeezed plum, sent a giant wave
of coal rolling before it. From floor to roof the shaft filled with
the tumbling lumps. Behind an impenetrable cloud gritty dust
the avalanche finally halted twenty feet inside the tunnel, while
the fall echoed and reechoed like dying thunder to the farthest
corners of the mine.
When he left the man-trip and walked around the path to
the bathhouse he blinked at the sun which was clipping the top
of a western ridge. After twenty hours in the recesses of 4-B
Right, the pale glinting rays brought tears to his reddened eyes.
When soap and water had washed away the dirt and sweat
and eased some of the misery from his flesh, he put on clean
garments and went to the commissary. The babble of voices in
the showers and later at the food counters came to him as if
from a great distance and he scarcely heard the friendly raillery of the miners. Sam was too tired to think of anything but
sleep tonight and the mailing of a money order to his girl
tomorrow.
He carried home a small bag of groceries and sat by the fire
for a long time with a cup of hot coffee in his hand. The heat
soothed him and as he relaxed he felt better than he had for
months. He fried potatoes and bacon for his supper and "at the
edge of dark" went to bed. As he pulled up the patchwork quilt
Sadie had made especially to cover his huge frame he murmured again, as he had the night before, "Thank ye, Lord!"
When the payroll window opened the next morning Sam
was there to claim his wages. The paymaster called the scale
house to check the weights of the cars and as he talked he made
penciled notes on a pad. When he left the phone, he went into
the commissary to determine how much Sam owed the company store. He came back and smiled at Sam through the steel
�HARRY CAUDILL
333
latticework. "Sam, you're in good shape. A few more breaks
like night before last and you could afford to quit." He extended the note pad so the miner could see the totally unintelligible markings and, with the point of his pencil moving down
the column, continued, "You loaded twenty-eight cars, averaging a little over two tons each, for a total of fifty-eight and a
quarter tons. That comes to $18.06. But you owe the store a little and that will have to be deducted." He named a few trifling
purchases, including $.23 for Sam's lunch on the day before.
"Your store debt is $3.98, and that leaves you a balance due of
$14.08."
Sam let out his breath with deep satisfaction. That was
more money than he had possessed in many months and Margaret was saved, for the moment at least. But suddenly his eyes
widened with chagrin as the paymaster's hand deposited his
earnings on the worn board—a fistful of brass scrip.
His strength drained away and a groan escaped him. "Ah
no, no sir, not scrip! Not this time! The policeman say 'real
money/and this time scrip won't do. Itjistwon'tdo!" And he
pushed the brass tokens back through the window. "If I don't
git real U.S. money my little girl will jist have to quit school and
I can't stand that, no sir!" and Sam, who had not quailed before
the sinking mountain, now sobbed aloud.
The paymaster frowned. "You know we've got no money
to pay out wages," he snapped. "Scrip is the best the company
can do." Then he softened and added, "I'm sorry, Sam. I really am."
Sam stood in the pale autumn sunlight stunned and helpless, his tongue following his broad lips. But before utter ruin
enveloped him, he was rescued—at least after a fashion.
Another white man, "Mr. Tom" Haymond, the general
manager, strode out of his office and approached the window.
He asked the paymaster what the trouble was and listened to
his explanation and to Sam's renewed plea for cash. He
reflected for a long moment, his eyes going from the scrip to
Sam's face and back again to the brass tokens. At last he
nodded toward the door and said, "Let him in." Sam followed
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Moving Mountains: Struggle of the Coal Industry
the "big boss" into his office and took the chair Haymond indicated. They stared at one another in silence for a moment.
"Sam/1 the executive began, "the company is grateful to you
for what you did, but the company is practically broke, and
that is the truth." He looked at the ceiling. "We have no money
for anything except the most urgent mortgage debts. But I
know you love that girl and I honor you for it." Another pause
ensued. "I'll tell you what we'll do, if it's agreeable to you. If
you can see your way clear to discount your wages from $14.08
in scrip to $11.00 in cash I'll pay it out of the little that's left in
our emergency fund."
Sam sprang up and grasped the big boss's hand in
wholehearted confirmation of the deal. Haymond turned the
dials on the door of a safe and drew out of a slender envelope
two greenbacks—a ten and a one. A few moments later Amos
Bryant sold Sam a money order in the sum of ten dollars payable to Miss Margaret Hawkins. The postmaster sold him a
stamped envelope for five cents and addressed it as Sam
directed. When the envelope with its precious contents fell
into the mail slot Sam walked out with sixty-five cents in his
pocket.
The day warmed and was sunny and pleasant. Sam felt
good again, and hopeful. And for a time things improved
generally and he was almost happy.
A little more work became available and, with the passing
months and the coming of the New Deal, wages rose somewhat. The miners organized a local union and working conditions improved. Sam was able to send Margaret money from
time to time and the girl found a job that provided a little cash
in addition to her food. Haymond and the superintendent
favored Sam with extra work now and then. Both congratulated him when Margaret came home with her bachelor's degree in the spring of 1936.
She stayed with her father for a year and taught English at
the black high school. Then night crashed down as black as
coal dust. In the summer of 1937 she was stricken with meningitis and died in the same hospital where Sadie had told Sam
�HARRY CAUDILL
335
good-bye.
Sam did not die with his daughter, nor did he wholly survive her death. He came and went and worked, a figure of immense dignity and integrity, a staunch figure in his church. But
he lived the rest of his days with a grief he could not shed, and
the old flame of aspiration was never rekindled.
With the years the thick seam of coal in the ridges about
Fleming played out, as did Sam and a whole generation of
miners. More than a decade has passed since he was buried in
the little cemetery next to Sadie and Margaret, and the ancient
coal-camp house where he lived so many lonely years now
stands silent and empty. The desegregation decision of the
Supreme Court closed the doors of the school he worked to
build, and vandals reduced it to a shattered wreck. Sam had
put little white markers at the graves of his wife and daughter
but no one ever got around to marking his own. Perhaps a coal
shovel thrust in the earth like a bayoneted rifle over the bones
of a fallen hero would be appropriate for such a man.
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Moving Mountains: Straggle of the Coal Industry
The Mountain, the Miner, and the Lord
1. What were the chief difficulties which Sam had to
overcome to achieve his goal of educating Margaret?
2. What is scrip? Why did Sam react so angrily to being paid
in scrip? Why was the company short of cash?
3. At the end of the story, Sam is referred to as a fallen hero.
Did his community recognize him as a hero? Does he fit
the traditional concept of a hero? Why or why not?
4. Find the following words in the story. Write the sentence
containing each word. Define it from context. Look it up
in the dictionary to see if your definition is correct. Write
a sentence of your own using each word.
accommodating
apprehensive
cataclysmic
condescension
incredulity
fiscal
integrity
ornately
quiescent
solicitous
�RON SHORT
337
RON SHORT (1945- )
Singer, actor, and playwright, Ron Short has encouraged
deeper understanding and improvement of the quality of life
in his native southwest Virginia.
A graduate of Clinch Valley College in Wise, Virginia,
Short has devoted himself to public service, first as an
employee of the Appalachian Regional Commission, later in
community health programs, with the Federal Agency on
Aging, and as administrator of the Highlander Research Center. At present, he is a creative director for Roadside Theatre.
June Appal has recorded his songs in an album Cities of
Gold. The Roadside Theatre production Pretty Polly is
based on his story. He sings and acts in his plays South of
the Mountain and Leaving Egypt, Roadside productions that
have toured America and Europe for the last 15 years.
This excerpt from South of the Mountain lets us listen to
a mountain family talk about change. Eb, Mabel, and Thad
enjoy their Chrysler, but they watch other progress and question its value.
From South of the Mountain (Song: "Wedding Bell Waltz")
11
Thad and Mabel"
Mabel:
Mommy didn't much want me to get married.
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Moving Mountains: Struggle of the Coal Industry
Said I was too young, but I thank mostly she jist
didn't want me to leave home, I wuz a big help to
her. But, the first minute I laid eyes on Thad, I
knowed he wuz gonna be the man I married.
Eb:
When Thad and Mabel first got married they didn't
have nothin'. They lived with us, me and Ma and
Pa. By that time all my brothers and sisters wuz
married, wouldn't nobody home except me. But
there ain't no way two families can live under the
same roof. I don't care how good you git along, it
ain't the natural thang to do. But he didn't have
no job and no money. He wuz twenty and she
wuz fifteen and they didn't know nothin.
Mabel:
I wuz a Dutton fore I got married....
Eb:
Her Daddy wuz from over round Skeetrock. He
wouldn't from around the South of the Mountain.
Mabel:
I wuz born in a coal camp over in Kentucky.
Mommy's first husband died in the war, W.W.I, he
didn't die in battle, he died of diptheria in Georgia
somewhere. Mommy married Daddy and then
they moved into Pike County, Kentucky, and
Daddy went to work in the coal mines. Lotta
people wuz going to work in the coal mines. That
coal camp wuz jist about the most exciting place in
the whole world, but Daddy couldn't stand it, and
that last man that got killed in the mines my
Daddy rode out with the body and that's the last
time he ever went in. He said there had to be a better way to make a living, so we packed our few
thangs in a sled and come back over the mountains.
Thad:
Atter we got married, I tried to find work. Worked
on the N.Y.A. and W.P.A. fer a little while but
them jobs didn't last long.
�RON SHORT
339
Mabel:
I uz twelve year old when Daddy died. Mommy already had a job cause Daddy had been sick all
summer before he died. Now, it was hard fer a
woman to get a job. It wuz some kind of relief
program. She made 94 cents a day sewing clothes
fer people on welfare and you know, her a widow
with six youngins she couldn't git one stitch of
them clothes fer her own family. But my people
wuz proud people, I guess is what you'd call it,
cause we never let on if we didn't have something
or nother and that wuz alright cause nobody
knowed nothing about it. I didn't know till I
started school, that ever' body didn't live like we
did. There wuz very few that wuz different, but
them that were wuz cruel. I don't know how you
can have a dozen youngins and ten of em are pore
and two ain't but them two can make the other ten
feel bad. What I thought was the best eating in the
world was an egg and a piece of corn bread fer
lunch, but you know I'd go up in the hills behind
the school and hide and eat that cornbread cause
they'd make fun of you fer eating cornbread and
not branging biscuits. But, to me, that was the best
eatin' ever wuz. That was better than anythang I
coulda took to school. Hit wouldn't bother me a
bit in the world now, but it did then.
Thad:
I shunned the coal mines as long as I could. I always
kinda dreaded gettin started in 'em. I jist didn't
like the idea of goin underground. I guess I'd been
walkin round on top of it too long. But, thaf s all
the work there wuz around, ceptin farming and I
knowed where that would get you.
Mabel:
In the coal camp they was houses on each side of the
holler and the houses wuz connected.
Thad:
One great big row of houses on one side
Mabel:
and one great big row of houses on the other,
�340
Moving Mountains: Struggle of the Coal Industry
Thad:
all under one roof.
Mabel:
There wuz no seperation between the buildings,
Thad:
jist walls.
Eb:
It saved the coal company money by not having to
have walls and a roof fer each house.
Jist one big long house.
Thad:
One side wuz called the Titanic
Mabel:
and one wuz called Noah's Ark.
Thad:
Right down at the end of all them houses wuz a big
company store.
Mabel:
There wouldn't no hospital but they wuz a doctor's
office.
Thad:
All furnished by the company,
Eb:
but they got ever cent of it back. Cause they
wouldn't let you git ahead.
Thad:
The coal company furnished the housing, electricity,
they had the commissary for the food, but they
took it out a yore pay,
Eb:
and they paid you so little hit wouldn't much more
than a labor camp.
Mabel:
You talk about a raggedy, black bunch a youngins
from fightin' through that coal camp from one end
to the other in the coal dust in the summertime
and all the mud in the wintertime. From hand to
mouth, they jist lived.
Thad:
They'd go to the store each day and buy what they
�RON SHORT 341
could draw in scrip fer that day's work.
Mabel:
Then they'd go back the next day. They'd buy a
pound a soup beans and cook 'em
Thad:
and go the next day
Mabel:
cause the man had to work the next day fer to get
some more scrip.
Eb:
I've heerd people say they'd rather do anythang
than hoe corn
Thad&
Mabel:
So that's what they done.
Eb:
It wuz hard to tell when they wuz working and
when they wouldn't.
Mabel:
But people follered it and lived with it right on up.
Thad:
Up to that time, in the mountains people had never
been that close to where people wuz a makin'
some money.
Eb:
They wouldn't but one man that I remember
everbody kinda talked about as having any money
and that wuz old man Henry Whitt. He had got
shell shocked in the Army, during Worlds War
One, I reckon, and he drawed a pension. Seemed
to me like it wuz about thirty dollars a month and
that wuz total disability. But Henry kept a bull.
Wouldn't many people had enuff money where
they could afford to buy a bull, and when you took
your cow down there to Henry, I mean to his bull,
that'd cost you a dollar, that is if she got with calf,
otherwise it didn't cost you nothin'. But, they
wouldn't many people that had that kinda steady
income.
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Moving Mountains: Struggle of the Coal Industry
Mabel:
We started kinda fixing the house up, him with
regular income. Linoleum, curtains, a new couch,
thangs like that. He wuz making good money, but
it wuz hard work.
Thad:
They wuz somethin funny bout the whole thang right
there from the start, best I could figure. They
needed all this coal to generate all this power but I
have shot many a cut coal with a breast auger.
That wuz a drill where there was no power whatsoever. You cranked her by hand. You'd drill,
shoot and load your own coal for a dollar a car,
nothin' fer the rock and you handled as much rock
as coal. You didn't use nothin' but a pick and a
shovel, sweat and muscle.
Eb:
When Thad first started working in them mines
tole me he figgered he'd jist git a little money
ahead and git out, but he never did seem to git
money ahead.
Mabel:
Till we got the refrigerator you couldn't keep nothin'
fresh. We'd keep milk and butter in the root cellar
but in the summer it wouldn't keep long. You had
to can or pickle ever thang you raised. You
couldn't keep leftovers, you eat 'em or they wuz
fed to the animals. We'd never had ice. After we
got the refrigerator, we'd jist make ice water cause
it wuz so good. I made ice cream for the kids.
Used to you could buy this mix from the store and
make ice cream in the ice trays. That refrigerator
shore made thangs a lot easier.
Thad:
We used carbide lights then. It was a pretty rough go.
Eb:
Hits a wonder they hadn't been a lot more men
killed than there wuz. Said sometimes the roof
wuz so low you couldn't even take a drink settin
up.
�RON SHORT
343
Thad:
Lots a times you had to lay down on you side so
you could tilt yore head back. But that smoke
from the dynamite wuz worse, that stuff d make
you so sick.
Eb:
There wouldn't enough air in the mines to push it
out.
Thad:
Give you a headache to where lots of times you'd have
to come out jist fer the like of air. No dust control,
coal miners eat the dust. You couldn't see yore
hand before you or nothin' else with all that dust.
Eb:
I don't know why it didn't kill a feller in thirty days.
Mabel:
With a electric stove you can cook a meal in half
the time it takes on a woodstove. When we got
ours there was a special deal where you got a
electric mixer too. I always liked to bake and this
made it so much easier you wouldn't believe it.
They come out with cake mixes that most cases
was better than cakes baked from scratch. Canned
biscuits too. We didn' like 'em too much, but, I
bought 'em ever now and then.
Eb:
First car in our family, I reckon he bought it.
Thad:
It was a Chrysler, which jist about put us in the
pore house, deeper than we wuz. I give $75 fer it.
That wuz the most money I'd ever had.
Eb:
Hit wuz worth maybe 75 cents.
Thad:
Yeah, I'd been better off without that Chrysler.
Mabel:
I've seed him come in with his clothes froze stiff
on his body where he'd worked in them water
holes, got wet, then come outside. Then, when he
could git a ride, ride home in the back of a truck in
the middle of winter. I've seen him come in,
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Moving Mountains: Straggle of the Coal Industry
where I could have cried he looked so pitiful But
even still it was better than not having a job at all.
You had to make it one way or another. But I always vowed if ever there was anyway that I could
get him out of them mines that I was going to do it.
Thad:
Shore it wuz dangerous, everybody knowed that. I've
seen it fall and I've had it to fall around me. I wuz
loadin' one day and looked up and seen the shimmer on the top. I started to run and a big slab
come down and the coal car caught it. That wuz
all that kept it from ketching me. You constantly
lived with that It wuz jist a way of life. You
didn't question it. They wouldn't no other work
around. Tried not to thank that much about it.
You didn't run out asking fer help. A job wuz all
you asked fer.
I got ulcers though and never could git rid of 'em
long as I wuz in the mines. Kept a vomiting and
vomiting, couldn't eat nothin. Atter John L. and
the union come in we got medical benefits so went
over to see this doctor in Harlan. He took some Xrays and run a bunch a tests on me and he tole me,
"Go hunt you a job outta them mines. You git out
of 'em and stay out of 'em, if you want to live."
(SONG)
Eb:
I never did marry. Lived at home all my life. I
coulda married, I reckon, but never did. I stayed
here with Ma till she died. Seemed kinda funny
atter all them years, not having nobody to nag at
me, tell me what to do. I used to hide out in the
hayloft and read. I'd go off fer the barn like I's
going to work and come dinner she'd blow the
steer horn fer me to come home. I'd come to the
house and eat, then go back and read. Wouldn't
nothin fer me to do. We hadn't tended a big crop
in years. Even put the "bakker" lotment into soil
�RON SHORT
345
bank. Hell, if they pay me not to grow it, I won't.
Chickens and a garden's all we had, but she acted
like we's still raising crops and clearing new ground.
She knowed we wouldn't but she jist couldn't stop. I
don't reckon she couldn't remember not having somethin
to do. It ain't what you got, it's how much money it's
worth. Well I don't reckon I can live like that. I never
have and I ain't gonna start now.
The rest of 'em has gone off someplace or other.
I'm the only one left here, so I guess I can do what
I want to. I don't want to go back and I don't want
to go on neither. I guess I'm stuck in between.
Least ways, I know where I'm at.
(SONG)
Thad:
Ma and Eb set there on the creek and they didn't have
nothing but it never seemed to bother 'em fer one
minute. Atter Ma died Eb jist lived in his own
world. Me and my family moved off into a real
different world. I've thought about it and thought
about it, whether they could a done any better or
was jist willing to settle fer what they had.
Mabel:
They's a difference in needin' and wantin'. It's
harder to want thangs and not have 'em. If you've
never tasted steak you're not any poorer fer not
having it, but if you go out ever day and watch
these other people eating steak you're gonna begin
wandering atter while what it would be like to try
some yourself. Then when you begin to want stuff
like that and can't afford it, that is pore. When you have
to do without the thangs you want, then you are pore.
Thad:
But Ma and Eb wuz happy. I know that. They
wuz home. I never tried to live up to nobody
�346
Moving Mountains: Struggle of the Coal Industry
else's standards. I took what money I made and
tried to do what I thought was best for my family.
I got ahead a dime at a time. But I never thought
I'd have to leave my home. Whenever I had to go
off fer work, I never intended to stay. Of course
when I wuz a young man hit was a big adventure
but then it got to be a necessity of life. I reckon, it
wuz always temporary in my mind. There's some
people who has roots I reckon and there's some
people who don't. I never did want to live no place
else cept in the mountains. But I've come to believe
everbody needs a place to come home to. But I
don't know as you can always find home the way
you left it. It seems instead of coming back home
you carry a little more of it away with you each
time you leave, till finally they ain't nothing to
come home to no more. There's things we loose
and there's thangs we learn, living in the times we
all grow up in.
(SONG)
South of the Mountain
1. Mabel, Thad, and Eb describe many changes through
dialogue. What are some of the biggest changes taking
place? Have these changes improved the quality of their
lives?
2. Discuss Mabel's ideas about "needin' and wantin'" given at
the end of the selection. How do Mabel and Thad differ
from Ma and Eb in their "needin' and wantin"?
�GEORGE ELLA LYON
347
GEORGE ELLA LYON (1949 - )
George Ella Lyon was born and reared in Harlan, Kentucky. She earned her B.A. from Centre College and her Ph.D.
from Indiana University where her studies concentrated on
Virginia Wolfe.
Her poetry has appeared in various literary journals. She
has published one play, Braids, and a chapbook, Mountain. Her
first children's book, Father Time and the Day Boxes, was
published by Bradbury Press in 1985. She teaches at the
University of Kentucky.
This poem speaks out against the indignity of strip mining.
�348
Moving Mountains: Struggle of the Coal Industry
Stripped
I was humming "Mist on the Mountain"
and shelling peas
I was figuring board feet
I was carting off stones and quilting lettuce
and thinking about a baby growing ripe inside
I was voting
I was lifting pain
out by the roots,
the bread indoors
breathing beneath a thin towel,
when a D-10 came
and rolled me off the front porch.
Stripped
1. Does this poem depict the destructive nature of strip mining
in a realistic way? Explain.
2. Should the last two lines be interpreted literally or
figuratively?
3. Why do you think the poet devotes more of the poem to
what she was doing when the bulldozer came than she does
to what the bulldozer was doing?
�LEE HOWARD
349
LEE HOWARD (1952- )
Lee Howard is a narrative poet and short story writer from
eastern Kentucky. She earned both her B. A. and M. A. degrees
from George Washington University.
She has published in Southern Exposure, Mother Earth News,
and Laurel Review. A collection of narrative poems, The Last Unmined Vein, gives voice to the working people and evokes their
sense of place.
In the following poem the speaker tells why he won't sell
the mineral rights to his land.
�350
Moving Mountains: Struggle of the Coal Industry
The Last Unmined Vein
Now my daddy and me
we used to dig a little coal
out of that vein across the bottom
Just a pick and shovel
and what could be wheelbarrowed
out of there
was all that was took
and didn't hurt nothing
and kept a fire real good
and that's it
but that ain't what they got in mind
They wanting to make steel in Ohio,
turn on the lights in New York City
and heat houses in Detroit
Shoot—I don't know a soul
in the whole state of Michigan
but that ain't really it
It ain't my business what they do with it
but this farm and everything that's in it
is plenty my concern
The Last Unmined Vein
1. To whom does the pronoun they refer to in this poem?
2. What is the son's individual concern? Is this a selfish
concern? Explain
�7
LEE HOWARD
351
�352
Moving Mountains: Struggle of the Coal Industry
EDWIN HOFFMAN (1918- )
Born in New York and educated at City University and
Columbia, Edwin Hoffman has taught history in South
Carolina and West Virginia.
A contributor to history journals, he has also published
three books. In them he claims to present "narrated dramatic
episodes in which groups of Americans struggled for justice
and a better life...."
This chapter from Fighting Mountaineers chronicles the
resistance to strip-mining by residents of eastern Kentucky.
Strippers, No!
How citizens of the eastern Kentucky coal fields resisted the
depredations of the strip miners in the protest-filled sixties (1965).
An elderly woman in a little frame house at the head of Sassafras Creek heard the din of a big bulldozer as it bit into soil
nearby. The woman, Mrs. Bige Ritchie, hastened to her porch
and called out to the operator of the machine, "Don't go there.
There's a graveyard there." The man on the tractor climbed
down and went to look. He came back to assure Mrs. Ritchie
that he would not disturb the family plot. But then a second
man arrived, concerned about the delay. When told of the
�EDWIN HOFFMAN 353
graveyard ahead, he said, Til be damned if I won't take it
through there!" He climbed up to the seat of the bulldozer and
proceeded to tear up the little burial ground. Moments later, a
small coffin was turned up and shoved over the hillside. Mrs.
Ritchie watched the coffin of her infant son roll down the slope.
Strip mining had reached her land. She felt powerless in the
face of the power that the bulldozer represented. So did her fellow mountain people in 1960 in impoverished Knott County,
Kentucky.
Much of Appalachia was then the land of the rural poor.
The very name, Appalachia, had become a synonym for unrelenting poverty. Coal towns were dying, and the region was
becoming depopulated by a steady exodus to the industrial
cities of the Midwest. Those left behind in the hills and hollows of the more remote counties were largely a dispirited
people, despairing of effecting improvement in their lives.
Poorest of all Appalachians were those who lived in the
Cumberland Highlands of eastern Kentucky. Fewer than half
the families had an income of as much as three thousand dollars a year. Less than four percent had incomes of ten thousand
dollars or more. Unemployment was double the national
average, and almost one third of the people were receiving
public assistance. Mechanization of deep mining, the competition of strip mining, and the increased use of oil and natural
gas had greatly reduced the demand for coal miners. By the
sixties the United Mine Workers of America had lost most of
its Kentucky membership to unemployment and nonunion
mines. Agriculture no longer offered meaningful opportunities in the steeply sloped and often depleted lands of the
Cumberland Highlands. With "coal or dole" the normal
choices, and coal jobs so few, half the population of Knott and
surrounding counties had fled the worsening poverty. Most
of those left behind were the elderly and others least able or inclined to compete for the jobs in the auto, rubber, and steel industries to the north.
By 1964 Washington had "discovered" Appalachia and its
Kentucky highlands. President Johnson announced the "War
�354
Moving Mountains: Struggle of the Coal Industry
on Poverty11—community-action programs, VISTA workers,
and Appalachian Volunteers, food stamps, free school lunches,
jobless-father programs, retraining programs, and more. Unfortunately, the War on Poverty served only to create the illusion of solving problems; it generated no new industries or
new jobs in the region. People became increasingly dependent
on welfare programs and on the local politicians who controlled the doling out of the federal millions.
In addition to the badly sagging economy and the acute
poverty of the people, they had to contend with the voracious
monster that had risen in their midst—strip mining. Mountains that had made the people feel rich in beauty if not in income were assaulted with giant bulldozers, augers, power
shovels, and dynamite. Sometimes the ridge tops were
sheared off to reach the coal seams, with the "spoil" of dirt, rock,
and uprooted trees pushed over the mountainsides. Sometimes steep "highwalls" were cut on the slopes, creating cliffs
up to ninety feet high through which the augers drilled laterally into the exposed coal seams. The power shovels and the
huge coal trucks moved along the "bench," as the wide area
scraped out below the highwall was called, to load the coal and
carry it off the mountain face. This ravaging of the land was
accompanied by the constant blasts that loosened the coal, the
screech of steel against the embedded mineral, and the roar of
the powerful engines. When the mammoth trucks carried their
loads over the crumbled mountain roads, the reverberations
could be sensed in all the homes along the way, and were a
raucous reminder of the gouging of a once lovely environment.
Even when the last gashing and scarring were done, when the
strippers had torn away the last of the coal, the streams still ran
yellow and turgid with the acid outwash of the devastated
land, and each rain brought fresh mudslides to the valley
floors. The companies never called these activities strip mining. Their euphemism was "surface mining," and they spoke of
"developing" the land.
Ten thousand or more acres of eastern Kentucky highlands
were stripped away each year, with none of the wealth going
�EDWIN HOFFMAN
355
to those who lived upon the land. Many years before, the ancestors of these mountain folk had been persuaded to sign socalled broad-form deeds, by which they gave up mineral rights
on their land, usually for fifty cents per acre. These deeds gave
the new owners of the minerals in the subsoil freedom to
remove coal deposits even though the mining destroyed the
surface of the land. A1953 court decision stated that the owner
of the surface of the land need not be compensated for damages
to it since a ruling in favor of those living on the land would
cause undue hardship to the coal companies. A1960 decision
held that, as long as the surface property was not damaged
maliciously, the strip-mining companies could not be penalized even if boulders from their operations fell on homes below
the mined land. Nor did the law require any significant
reclamation of the stripped mountains, and most cuts were
made on slopes so steep that the token reclamation efforts were
usually washed away.
The companies laying waste to the land were usually subsidiaries of such supercorporations as United States Steel, Bethlehem Steel, Ford Motor, and International Harvester. But
even when the mining companies were Kentucky owned, they
based their mining practices not on the well-being of the region
but on the demand for cheap coal by the Tennessee Valley
Authority. The TVA, which had been created in New Deal
days to revive the economy and uplift the people of the vast
Tennessee River watershed principally by the generation of inexpensive hydroelectric power, was now producing more
power from coal than water. By the sixties most coal mined in
eastern Kentucky was bought by TVA. Its pricing policies
made deep mining far less profitable than strip mining, and it
showed little concern for the havoc this mining was doing to
the coalfields. Appalachia had long been a quasi-colony of the
wealthier parts of America, whose investors greatly profited
from the coal and timber of its mountainsides. Now, ironically, the biggest exploiter of the land and the people had become
the quasi-public Tennessee Valley Authority.
The acceleration of strip mining that came with exception-
�356
Moving Mountains: Struggle of the Coal Industry
ally large TVA contracts in 1965 ignited in the mountain people
resentment that had been smoldering for years. When the
bulldozers that were decapitating the whole ridge above Clear
Creek in Knott County reached the land of a marine serving in
Vietnam, his stepfather, the elderly carpenter and coffin maker
Dan Gibson, hastened to the top of Honey Gap to stop the strippers. He sat down before the machines with a loaded rifle
across his knee and told their drivers that they had no right to
strip a man's land while he was overseas fighting for his
country. They decided not to defy Dan Gibson and his .22caliber gun. The coal company then swore out a warrant
charging him with breach of the peace and threatening with a
deadly weapon. When a group of state and county police arrested him, he gave himself up peaceably. The next day the
bulldozers were confronted by a large group of mostly grayhaired men and women, some armed, who stood and sat at the
property line. Again the strippers were temporarily frustrated,
and the people of Clear Creek were encouraged to make further efforts to save their land.
In the Clear Creek district, there was a "community-action"
organization which had been recently formed to encourage
popular participation in the War on Poverty. Following the appearance of the bulldozers, the organization became the
nucleus of a people's war on strip mining. Some eighty worried and agitated landowners met at the Knott County courthouse in Hindman on June 1,1965, to plan resistance. They
heard reports that the coal companies were issuing rifles to
their machine operators and truck drivers to fight off the landowners. Noting that Dan Gibson and his neighbors had faced
the strippers with guns and that one woman had stopped strippers with a pistol while her husband was away on jury duty,
some mountaineers proposed resorting to armed resistance to
defend their property. Others urged that the group learn from
the civil rights movement and use such nonviolent tactics as
sit-ins and lie-ins to stop the ruination of their land. Perhaps,
they could get results if they sat in at the governor's mansion
in Frankfort or on the blue-grass lawns of the coal operators'
�EDWIN HOFFMAN
357
estates in central Kentucky. Upon noting that the state agencies and some professors at the University of Kentucky spoke
of planting elderberry bushes on the stripped, bare land, someone suggested sarcastically that the university could make
eastern Kentucky a second Garden of Eden by turning strippers loose and then covering all the hills with the bushes. Perhaps the devastation could be hidden beneath a coating of
elderberry jam.
A week later an even larger group of citizens, drawn from
Knott, Letcher, and Perry counties, met in Hindman. Most of
the one hundred and twenty-five participants were small landowners, and some were also teachers, merchants, farmers, or
coal miners. The inspirational leader of the group was the
patriarchal Dan Gibson. To shouts of approval he declared,
"We are dead certain not going to let them come on our land
and tear it up. We will do whatever it takes to stop the strip
miners.11 They agreed to found a new organization, the Appalachian Group to Save the Land and the People (AGSLP). A
Knott County high school teacher, Leroy Martin, was elected
chairman. Co-chairmen were high school principal Eldon
Davidson from Letcher County and Commonwealth Attorney
Tolbert Combs from Perry County.
At the early AGSLP meetings the sentiment for militant
protest was high. People who had never spoken at meetings
as well as those accustomed to public speaking rose to voice
their anger. The members heard from Mrs. Susan Ritchie of
Clear Creek how she and her family had been "just sitting here
watching for the hill to come off of us." In the middle of one
night they were forced to flee their home when they heard a
mud slide begin at the top of the nearby mountain where stripping had been done. Others at the meeting told of a one-armed
coal miner who came home from a training program of the War
on Poverty to find his home buried beneath a great landslide.
How could people expect to continue living in eastern Kentucky, speakers asked, if earth and debris might come down at
any moment and cover up the gardens, crop fields, lawns,
graveyards, and everything else?
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Moving Mountains: Struggle of the Coal Industry
Leroy Martin told why he had joined the movement and
was willing to lead it. "I am a schoolteacher. I got a loan and
remodeled my house, and now they are coming around back
of it and, as far as the laws are concerned at the present time,
we can't even collect damages. They can dump trees and rocks
down on us and push our house on into the creek, and the only
way we can collect damages in this state is to let the creek fill
up and the water get up and flood us. I live way up the hill
and I don't think I will ever be flooded." He charged that "they
have got all these laws set up for the operators against the man
who owns the land, and we don't have a chance, we don't have
a chance."
Eldon Davidson added that the land agents of the coal companies "are among the most hated men in eastern Kentucky.
They go ahead and buy the timber for a pittance and make
tremendous profit off of it because the people know they must
sell. They know it's going to be covered up if they don't sell.
Then they make it worse by bragging how they cheated these
poor people who sold their timber to them."
Most eloquent at the early meetings of the AGSLP was an
attorney, Harry Caudill. He already enjoyed a national reputation as the "mountain muckraker." His writings and speeches
decried strip mining and other ways in which his neighbors
were being exploited. To him the towering highwalls cut by
strip mining near his Letcher County home could be compared
to "monstrous yellow serpents" looping themselves around the
mountains. "We have to decide," he told his fellow members,
"to work for life or death. There is no longer any time to discuss, ponder, and confer. Eastern Kentucky has come down to
the moment in history when people are going to decide
whether to live in eastern Kentucky as free men or be driven
out of here as a bunch of dispossessed paupers." He went on
to say that the coal companies were "going to rip this country
apart and take all the wealth," and that his fellow mountaineers
were "being pauperized by a barbarous process that would not
be tolerated in any truly civilized corner of this globe."
The Appalachian Group to Save the Land and the People
�EDWIN HOFFMAN
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set itself five immediate goals. It would raise funds to enable
Homer Ritchie to sue a coal company whose stripping activities
had left his home covered with mud and trees when what
seemed like an entire mountainside had slid onto it a few days
before. It would also raise money to carry a suit to the Supreme
Court of the United States, if necessary, to test the validity of
the old broad-form deed. It would collect signatures on petitions to the governor requesting immediate enforcement of
strip-mining laws already on the books, and it would send petitions and telegrams to President Johnson asking for federal action. Finally, it would organize a big motorcade to the state
capital to seek relief from the governor and the legislature.
Attorney Caudill filed suit for Homer Ritchie in the Knott
County Circuit Court. He argued that the coal companies gave
up their right to harm and destroy surface improvements
without payment when over many years they had silently allowed the landowners to make improvements on the leased
lands. The equity of the surface owners was being violated
even if the law was not, he noted, and he asked the court to
declare the surface owners' lands off limits to the operators on
the ground that the broad-form deeds signed years ago should
not apply to strip and auger mining.
The coal operators were not idle in opposition. Prior to the
Ritchie suit they had succeeded in getting the Knott County
court to enjoin nineteen landowners from interfering with
operations which residents claimed were causing debris to
wash down upon their property. The restraining order was to
be enforced by the state police, and the operators won permission to arm employees as protection against irate landowners.
The operators also circulated rumors that the aroused citizens
were "radicals" and "communists." Lawyer Caudill was a special target of their disfavor. They accused him of being against
stripping for the money he would make as champion of the
cause. To this charge Caudill replied, "If I were after the
money, I would be on their side. That's where all the money
is." Friends warned him of threats against his life, but he continued to be outspoken.
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Moving Mountains: Straggle of the Coal Industry
Also candid and unsparing was a little weekly newspaper
in his home town, the Whitesburg Mountain Eagle. The coal industry saw it as a scandal sheet filled with lies, but most mountain people viewed it as a forthright paper that published news
and editorials most other newspapers feared to print. The
Mountain Eagle called the stripping crisis more important to the
state than the Vietnam war, and it labeled TVA "a disgrace to
the nation" in its "insane quest for cheap coal." An editorial on
June 10 quoted a middle-aged woman, who feared not only the
burial of her mountain home but the violence of the strippers.
"I pray to God every day," she said, "that my man will let them
take our land and our home and not try to stop them. I'm even
afraid for him to go to court." The strip-mine firms, she went
on, "have hired the worst gun thugs in Eastern Kentucky to
make us give them our land. They will help kill us if we don't.
What can we do? They've got the courts and the state police
and the killers on their side." The editorial then quoted another
mountain woman who spoke in the same vein. "The men in
this country are all scared to death. They know that if they do
anything our homes will be dynamited or they will be stopped
on the road some night and shot to death."
The mountain folk were apprehensive, but many were not
"scared to death" of resisting the strippers. When the Appalachian Group to Save the Land and the People held its
second meeting on June 16 in the gymnasium of Carr Creek
High School, one hundred and seventy men and women
showed up. They quickly decided to organize a protest
caravan of cars to the state capital. Harry Caudill announced
that he had spoken to Governor Edward Breathitt and had
secured his promise to meet with them. The meeting
proceeded to plan ways to get hundreds of concerned eastern
Kentuckians to Frankfort. AGSLP would canvass the hollows
of four counties for more people to join the "march." Trucks
with loudspeakers would go through the towns recruiting for
the motorcade. A special effort would be made to get local
politicians to join the march, in the expectation that the governor would be impressed and the charge of "communist" could
�EDWIN HOFFMAN
361
be most easily refuted. After the organizing got under way the
governor became fearful. He called Henry Caudill and said,
'Tm afraid these people will scare my girls. They are not used
to mountain people." Caudill assured him that the governor's
secretaries had nothing to fear from the demonstrators.
Early Tuesday morning, June 22, the caravan began the one
hundred and eighty-mile trip to Frankfort. The sign-bedecked old cars and beat-up trucks, cleaned up for the occasion, carried almost two hundred mountaineers. Some had never
before left the Cumberland Highlands. The protesters wore
the best clothes they had. Some of the men wore suits and ties,
and some women had on store-bought dresses. Other men
wore short-sleeved shirts with denim pants, or overalls, and
some women had on well-worn homemade dresses.
At the capital they picketed with spirit. They chanted
slogans and carried signs as they waited to see Governor
Breathitt. Dan Gibson's placard read, "ELDERBERRY
BUSHES! HOW STUPID CAN PEOPLE GET?" One poster
declared, "PEACEFUL, YES. COMPLACENT, NO! NO! NO!"
Another said "STRIPPING IS DESTRUCTION."
Despite his promise to see them, the governor put them off
with the excuse that he was too busy. When New York Times
reporter Ben Franklin persuaded him to see a delegation of the
mountain people, however, fourteen filed into his office. Half
were the politicians who had joined the movement, invariably
of the older generation since the younger officeholders would
not risk antagonizing the coal companies. The delegation included a county judge, two Commonwealth attorneys, and a
state senator. Also among the fourteen were Leroy Martin,
Eldon Davidson, Dan Gibson, and Harry Caudill. The group
presented the governor with a six-page letter asking him to act
promptly since the tempo of stripping was accelerating. "The
ruin of the whole region can be accomplished in another
decade unless it is stopped now," the letter warned. A special
session of the Commonwealth's legislature was declared to be
urgently needed to enact a law prohibiting strip mining on any
mountainous terrain where restoration of the soil could not be
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accomplished in a reasonable time. The law should stipulate
that stripping be permitted only upon the written permission
of the owner of the surface of the land.
Herman Ritchie, a self-taught TV repairman with the
words, "TROUBLESOME CREEK ELECTRONICS" displayed
in red letters on the back of his gritty work shirt, told the governor that his wife and two children "had to get out or be killed
when they started rolling rocks on the house, splitting the trees
up behind us on the slope—one rock rolled right up to the front
porch." William R. Smith, Knott County banker and candidate
for Congress, said that strip mining was going to wreck his
home and the county. Mud would congest the creeks and
cause flooding two or three times a year. Governor Breathitt
looked at Smith as if he and the whole delegation were grossly exaggerating, and other speakers seemed to be equally ineffective.
Then the group brought in Mrs. Bige Ritchie. The governor said, "Auntie, I want you to sit here at my desk and tell me
anything you want to say." The old woman told him how the
strip miners had come and dug up the family graveyard,
pitched the coffin of her child over the hill, and bulldozed the
coal out. She said she thought her heart would break when she
saw that little casket roll down the slope. The governor
changed his demeanor after hearing her, and became much
more concerned about the plight of the mountain people.
After meeting with the delegation, Governor Breathitt
spoke in the Health Department auditorium to all the protestors. He told them he was now deeply concerned about what
he had heard that day. He promised that the current law
would be effectively enforced, and a strong effort would be
made to get a better national or interstate policy to regulate
strip mining. Since his stand would depend on how well the
current law could be expected to work, he would have "a top
level, fact-finding group" from in and out of state government
"do an objective, hard, fact-finding job" to determine this. If
the study showed the present law to be inadequate, he would
recommend to the next legislature one that could do the job.
�EDWIN HOFFMAN
363
The only applause the unsmiling mountaineers gave him was
for his last statement.
When the governor finished speaking, his natural resources commissioner presided over a heated discussion between
the state's mining officials and the protesters. The commissioner was roundly booed when he claimed to have made efforts to regulate stripping in Knott County. Gurney Norman,
a Hazard newspaper reporter, rose to tell him, "I don't think
anyone has respect for what you are doing because they don't
have respect for the law as it stands." Norman asked repeatedly for information on specific law violations by strippers, but
got no direct replies. At day's end most mountaineers left
Frankfort angrier than when they had come, but Harry Caudill
was encouraged. "I think it is the first time that the state administration has heard the voice of the people," he told the
reporters covering the protest. "Up until today, they've heard
the voice of the coal operators and an occasional garden club
member and editorial writer. This is the beginning of a mass
voice of the people.11
Nor was the voice of the coal operators muted at that time.
While the governor was meeting with the victims of the strip
mining, a three-day symposium on "surface mining" had
begun in the nearby city of Lexington. This state-sponsored
meeting was attended largely by leaders of the strip-mining industry who spoke as if their activities were an unmixed blessing to the state. They professed to reclaim the land, with the
head of the Kentucky Oak Mining Company lashing out at
critics of its Knott County mining for taking "isolated cases of
irresponsibility" and making it appear that this was the pattern
of the industry. The Louisville Courier-Journal, the state's leading newspaper, described the gathering as "a defense meeting
of the stripping industry," a parade of speakers "allegedly concerned with conservation" who made strip mining sound "as
cute and pretty as an outing of nature lovers." Federal officials
at the symposium, the newspaper added, talked of stripping
and reclamation as though it were "a droll and delightful way
of planting trees." The state commissioner of natural resour-
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Moving Mountains: Struggle of the Coal Industry
ces also saw no evil. He claimed that the law was being strictly enforced. "If anyone knows of any violation of the law
anywhere, let him come forward,11 he urged. "We will take action at once and punish all offenders, big and small."
Perhaps most self-serving of all was Aubrey Wagner, chairman of the board of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the largest
consumer of coal in the world and the primary customer of the
coal operators at the meeting. "Strip mining, while it is going
on, looks like the devil," he admitted, "but what comes out of
it has done wonders for this area. If you look at what those
mountains were doing before this stripping, they were just
growing trees that were not being harvested." Now there are
hundreds of miles of haul roads and mountain cuts on the Kentucky landscape. They constituted a new resource, giving access for fire control and future recreational purposes. Wagner
added that stripping was the only way to get at much of
Kentucky's coal, that it was safer than deep mining, and it
could lower power costs to consumers. While he said not a
word about the devastation inflicted on mountain home
owners, he did say that TVA might require "scientific conservation practices" in the future, and he favored a federal stripmine law that would have other states do as much for
reclamation as Kentucky required.
At this industry-dominated symposium, the handful of
mountaineers who had come from the demonstration in
Frankfort were almost inundated by the tide of the industry
and government apologists. But the protesters had already influenced Edward Breathitt. When the governor spoke, he held
out the promise of reform. He would call upon the legislature
to outlaw strip mining, he said, "if erosion, flooding, and pollution are the inevitable consequences of such mining." He
warned the operators that, unless honest reclamation was
begun in a hurry, "an outraged public" would demand prohibition of the industry. "We don't intend," he cautioned, "to permit this industry or any other industry to destroy the beauty
of Kentucky's countryside or the usefulness of its earth for future generations."
�EDWIN HOFFMAN
365
A week later the mountain people realized another benefit
from their caravan to the capital when the governor paid a
surprise visit to some stripping operations in Knott and Perry
counties. He had never before seen the ravages of strip mining and was deeply moved. He talked to some affected landowners, picking homes at random. Mrs. Claudia Hall of Clear
Creek told him, "Everyone around here feels the same way as
we do. The people around here are getting touchy about it."
Frank Fugate, an old Regulator Baptist preacher, made it clear
to the governor just how "touchy" they could get if their homes
were jeopardized by the operators. "Whenever they came on
me," he said, "I put 'em off. We didn't want to go to violence,
but I knew we were ready for it."
At the end of his dusty tour, the governor announced that
he would act at once to relieve the problems of the landowners.
Fully convinced of the gravity of their problem, he would ask
the attorney general to intervene on the side of the mountaineers in the court case testing the broad-form deeds, and he
would be willing to go to the United States Supreme Court if
necessary to get a favorable ruling. He would also confer with
the TVA officials to persuade them to pay strip-mining
operators an additional twenty cents per ton for reclamation
efforts. He condemned the TVA for making high profits "at the
expense of ruined hillsides, poisoned streams, dead woodlands, devastated farms, breeding grounds for mosquitoes,
and eradicated wildlife." Concurring with the criticisms of
those who had demonstrated, he said, "I am not referring to the
present, half-hearted attempts to get fruit trees or elderberry
bushes or pine seedlings to grow in the thin, acid soil left at the
mining sites."
A week later Governor Breathitt came back for a second
visit to the coalfields. He was met at a road-building ceremony
in Isom in Letcher County by pickets from the Appalachian
Group to Save the Land and the People. They carried "SAVE
OUR LAND" signs so that he would know that the people
would not be satisfied with mere words of sympathy. The
Mountain Eagle observed that the downtrodden mountain
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Moving Mountains: Struggle of the Coal Industry
whites were learning something from the Blacks in the civil
rights movement—that you could expect nothing if you suffer
in silence. In late July the governor followed through on
another promise when the state asked the Knott County court
to prohibit strip or auger mining "where such operation results
in peril to members of the public, its streams, roads, and other
public property."
During the following months the movement continued its
protests and organizing. Money for a legal defense fund was
raised at meetings in run-down schools and churches, often
from the sale of honey, eggs, and cakes. One hundred Letcher
County residents formed a branch of AGSLP. Their president,
Lundy Adams, warned that he was a peaceful man, "but a man
can be pushed just so far." Some mountaineers may not have
been so peaceful. Dynamite blasts went off in the hills, blowing up mining machinery. One night a half million dollars'
worth of equipment was destroyed. On another night someone hid in the bushes and wounded the driver of a bulldozer
with a shotgun blast. It was never learned who committed
these acts of violence. The spokesmen for the operators implied that the protesters were to blame, while AGSLP said that
the explosions were set off by company personnel, using the
old dodge of blowing up worn-out machinery to collect the insurance on it.
Harry Caudill was especially active in behalf of the cause.
Speaking of one local stripper, the Virginia Coal and Iron Company, which Caudill said made higher profits in 1964 than any
other American company, he remarked, "We don't want to put
them out of business. We would like to civilize them." He
sharply contrasted such wealth with the poverty of the people.
Seven thousand people in Perry County, he noted, drew food
stamps. At the head of Lott's Creek, he pointed out, "hundreds
of thousands of dollars' worth of illegally large coal trucks
loaded with millions of dollars' worth of untaxed coal pass a
two hundred-dollar schoolhouse."
But it was neither Harry Caudill nor the leaders of the Appalachian group, but a gray-haired widow up a Clear Creek
�EDWIN HOFFMAN
367
hollow who became the best symbol and voice of the movement to resist the strip mining. When Mrs. OUie Combs—the
Widow Combs, as she came to be known throughout Kentucky
and even to readers of the New York Times—repeatedly halted
the stripping above her little cabin by lying down in front of a
big yellow bulldozer and was hauled off to jail for her resistance, the cause of the mountain folk became real to many
people who had been unmoved by the statistics and rhetoric
on the rape of the mountains.
The confrontation was a consequence of a partial victory
won by the protest movement in the fall of 1965. The state announced that somewhat stricter regulations would go into effect on December 18, regulations that would outlaw strip
mining on slopes steeper than 33 degrees. Operators hastened
to mine the steep slopes as much as possible before the deadline. The Caperton Coal Company's equipment began biting
into the ridge above the tiny home of Mrs. Combs and her family. An early member of AGSLP, she was sixty-one, very recently widowed, and living with five sons, who ranged in age from
thirteen to twenty-seven. The Combses' four-room wooden
cabin, with its typical old washing machine and wringer on the
porch, lay squeezed between a one-lane dirt road and a steep,
wooded hillside. That little house represented the family's life
savings, and Mrs. Combs was determined that no avalanche of
rocks, dirt, and trees would fall upon it. The coal company
promised her that they would only bulldoze out a road above
her to reach coal past her property, and it would compensate
her for any damages done to her property, but she had no faith
in a stripper's word.
It was late November when Mrs. Combs first heard the
throaty growl of a bulldozer on the ridge above her home. She
sat in her rocking chair before the sulfurous coal fire in her little fireplace, listening for the machine to come close to her land.
When it did, she put on her frayed jacket and well-worn heavy
shoes, picked up her walking stick, and set out for the ridge
top. There she lay down in front of the great blade of the
bulldozer and sharply told the driver that he had better not try
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to strip her land. He stopped the machine, and the company
quickly secured an injunction from the county court forbidding
interference with its operations. This did not faze Mrs. Combs.
She again lay down before the bulldozer. On two successive
days she was arrested, the second time with two of her sons.
At the time of her later arrest, Bill Strode, a photographer
from the Louisville Courier-Journal, followed her up the ridge to
photograph her defiance. He had an opportunity to witness
her exceptional courage. "I don't bother nobody,11 she told the
bulldozer operator, "but you come into our homes.11 After stopping the machine she built herself a fire of twigs so that she
might weather the elements as long as necessary while she
blocked the way. Soon Sheriff Oliver Hylton, a deputy, and
two state troopers arrived and ordered the widow and her sons
to leave.
"You promised me you wouldn't come back up here," the
sheriff said.
"No, I didn't," she replied.
She then turned to William "Buck" Caperton, the head of
the strip-mining company, who had joined them. "I told you
to get out and stay out."
"I've never been stopped yet," he told her.
"I've not either," was her sharp reply.
Caperton remarked that he was doing nothing "contrary to
the law."
"But it's contrary to me," Mrs. Combs retorted.
"Well, you can't please everybody," he said. "We are going
through."
"Just go off and leave us alone," Mrs. Combs said. "We live
hard."
After another hour, seeing that she would not budge,
Sheriff Hylton arrested her and her sons. With the sheriff
taking her by the legs and a state trooper holding her under the
arms, they carried her limp body down the slope to a police
car. It was then that the sheriff ordered the news photographer
to stop taking pictures. Strode refused. He was arrested on a
"John Doe" warrant for trespassing. The sheriff tried to seize
�EDWIN HOFFMAN
369
his camera. The two men struggled for it, the strap broke, and
Strode was able to beat the sheriff to the fallen camera and keep
it. A few moments later, he removed the film, put it into the
finger of his glove, and hid the glove inside his trousers. All
those arrested were taken to the county jail. The Combses were
soon let out on bail, and the charges were dropped against
Strode. A day later photographs and a vivid story told Kentuckians of the "Widow vs. Bulldozer" and asked "Has Mrs.
Combs Beaten Strip Miners?"
Back home on the morning following her most recent arrest, Mrs. Combs again heard the rumble of the bulldozer. She
trudged out to do battle again, with the newsman right behind
her. This time the coal company had armed guards on the
ridge, but she walked right past them to await the machine.
The guards threatened and cursed the photographer as he
snapped pictures, and then they threw rocks at him. The
bulldozer never came. Mrs. Combs left to go with her two sons
to the courthouse in Hazard to stand trial for contempt of court.
Outside the building William Sturgill, president of the coal
company that held a controlling interest in Caperton Coal,
declared that he was ready for a showdown. He would not be
deterred by barriers thrown up by protesting landowners, for
the company had the law on its side.
The Combses had a brief trial before the Knott County
Police Court. Mrs. Combs sat quietly on one side of the dimly
lit courtroom, serene, yet firm in her determination.
Had she done anything "violent" or "mean" while protesting, her lawyer asked.
"No sir," she replied. "I didn't even think of it."
"Have you ever been in trouble?" he asked.
Tve never been in trouble. Never been in jail." she said. "I
just want to live out my life in my hollow and be left alone. I
don't want to see my home ruined. It's all I got left."
The mine company's lawyer told the judge, "We don't want
to keep bringing in people for contempt. I don't know if these
people know what a restraining order is."
"There would be no trouble," the Combses' lawyer snapped
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back, "if you would take these nefarious machines off those
mountains and silently steal away.11
The judge found Mrs. Combs and her two sons guilty. He
imposed no fine on them but sentenced each to twenty hours
in jail. The Caperton attorney reminded the judge that this sentence would run into Thanksgiving Day and urged a two-day
delay. The Combses' lawyer added that Mrs. Combs had a
paralytic son back home. The judge was adamant. They
would go to jail immediately.
Widow Combs accepted confinement as serenely as she
had her trial. When Thanksgiving Day came, she and the other
inmates were served an early dinner of chicken and dumplings. When the Combses were released, their return home was
a joyous occasion. Some fifty friends and neighbors met them
at the head of the hollow. Mrs. Combs laughed and then she
cried. Neighbors brought food in pots and dishes for a second
Thanksgiving dinner. After eating she wrapped her head in a
brightly colored scarf and made her way up the ridge where
the stripping had been attempted. This was a symbolic journey. She would not have to fear rearrest, for the judge had ordered Caperton Coal to cease its activities on the slope above
her cabin.
On the following day Governor Breathitt told the press, "I
want the Widow Combs and all other Kentuckians whose
home and farms are threatened with destruction to know I am
on their side." He added, "I urge and expect all citizens of Kentucky to obey the law." The governor accused the operators of
"provoking and causing these disturbances" and urged them
to "desist from further insistence on their pound of flesh" until
the proper scope of the broad-form mineral-rights deeds was
decided in the courts. If the courts disagreed with his position
in support of the landowners, he would seek new legislation
protecting them from the strippers. Meanwhile, he appointed
a special counsel to plead the mountaineers' case, and he ordered the state police not to aid in the arrest of protesters unless he told them to do so. A day later he issued an emergency
order temporarily prohibiting almost all steep-slope mining.
�EDWIN HOFFMAN 371
Progress in resistance was also being made in the courts.
The suit of Leroy Martin, argued by Harry Caudill and a
government attorney, met with preliminary success. Instead
of throwing out the case, as had previously been the custom,
the Knott County circuit judge agreed to consider whether the
owner of the surface land continued to have rights despite their
having been signed away in broad-form deeds fifty or more
years ago. In the case of the Martin property, an illiterate mountaineer and his wife had signed away their rights with marks
of "X" in 1903. Strip mining, of course, was unheard of then,
and Caudill argued that it could not have been imagined that
huge machines would devastate the land. The operators' reply
to the suit was essentially that a contract had been agreed to,
and it was still binding.
On January 4, 1966, Governor Breathitt addressed the
opening session of the Kentucky General Assembly. He urged
the lawmakers to give top priority to the control of strip mining and to civil rights. The present mining law, he noted, was
ineffective in protecting the people and their land. Kentucky
should be "second to none" in its concern for the earth, just as
"Kentucky is second to no state in the richness of it.tf That same
day a bill to do what the governor proposed was introduced
into the legislature. It would eliminate the rugged contours left
by customary stripping practices and so lessen landslides and
scarring of the mountains. The bill called for terraced back fills
to be created in "bench-type" operations. Dirt and rock
removed was to be piled back on the bench instead of being
pushed over the mountainside. The state would be empowered to disapprove stripping where the operation was a
hazard to homes, schools, churches, cemeteries, commercial
buildings, public roads, streams, and lakes. Operators could
not deposit debris outside the mining area or place it where
erosion might move it outside the area.
Battle lines quickly formed. The coal companies attacked
the bill in costly newspaper and radio advertisements and were
evidently raising a large fund to defeat it. The anti-stripping
movement replied by charging that the coal and railroad com-
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panies were raising huge sums to influence the lawmakers. The
companies strongly denied the allegations of the protesters.
Implications that the companies were raising money for bribery
were called "the worst blow yet."
Despite the industries' money and influence, the anti-stripping forces prevailed. In an unusual move, Governor Breathitt
made a personal appearance on the floor of the lower house to
persuade the legislators to pass the bill. By January 27 it passed
both houses by overwhelming votes. The new law would take
effect in June. The coal operators moaned that it would put
them out of business.
A second anti-strip mining bill remained under consideration. This one proposed to amend the broad-form deeds to
make them inapplicable to strip mining. Mrs. Combs was one
of the witnesses who testified for the bill. As she sat on a folding chair with her hands on her lap and spoke movingly for the
change, she so impressed the legislators and the press that the
bill became known as the "Widow Combs bill." However, this
time the coal interest and their allies in the steel, railroad, chemical, and oil industries prevailed. The bill was tabled on March
2, and two attempts to revive it were unsuccessful.
Even though the "Widow Combs biU" failed to pass, the
newly enacted restrictions on strip-mining procedures appeared to be a significant victory for the Appalachian Group
to Save the Land and the People, and for the Bige Ritchies and
Ollie Combses who had taken on roles so uncommon for
mountain women. The test of a law is its enforcement,
however, and the 1966 law was simply not enforced in a manner that would end the raping of the mountains. Kentucky
soon got a new governor who lacked the zeal that Edward
Breathitt had acquired in the last months of his term of office.
The courts also disappointed mountain protesters. The circuit
court ruled in the Martin case that the broad-form deeds were
legal, that the strip mining could continue, and that the coal
companies must make fair payment for any damages done to
surface property. Both sides appealed the ruling. Briefs supporting the appeal of Leroy Martin were filed by the Sierra
�EDWIN HOFFMAN
373
Club and the Kentucky Civil Liberties Union, as well as by
AGSLP and the state of Kentucky. The Kentucky Court of Appeals was not persuaded. On June 21,1968, it sustained every
argument of the strippers. They were free to mine land without
the owner's consent, and they did not have to pay that owner
for any damages done to the surface of the land.
While the Martin case was going through the courts, some
mountaineers warred on the operators with guerrilla tactics.
In the summer of 1967 a $50,000 diesel-powered shovel of the
Kentucky Oak Mining Company, the defendant in Martin's
suit, was blown up one night at a Knott County strip mine.
Then $300,000 worth of machinery of the Tar Heel Coal Company was dynamited on Lost Creek. So many bullets were
fired at this operation that some company bulldozers were
equipped with armor plate. These violent protests may have
been the last, frustration-filled acts of the now dispirited mountaineers. For by 1967 there was an erosion of leadership. Leroy
Martin and Eldon Davidson left Knott County for better jobs.
Mrs. Combs changed her mind and let the coal company pay
her a small sum to strip her land. The Appalachian Group to
Save the Land and the People disbanded, and more and more
of the mountains were lost to the bulldozers, augers, and other
huge, noisy earthmovers. The recent ravages of the strip
miners could best be seen above the cabin of the Widow
Combs—now a raw hillside, an ugly highwall, and dirt spilled
down below it. Only Harry Caudill remained as a spokesman
for the cause, to chronicle the dying of the Cumberland Highlands and to keep alive the conservationist spirit.
Strippers, No!
1. Could you call the conflict between the mountaineers and
the strippers a struggle between right and wrong? Or did
both groups have legitimate reasons for what they were
doing?
�374
Moving Mountains: Struggle of the Coal Industry
2. When Governor Breathitt finally visited Knott County and
Perry County, what was his reaction to what he saw? What
were the results of his visit?
3. Of the protesters you have read about in this section, which
one impressed you most? Give reasons.
4.
Define the following terms as they are used in the context
of this selection: dole, high wall, broad-form deed, reclamation,
restraining order.
�RICHARD HAGUE
375
RICHARD HAGUE (1947- )
Poet Richard Hague, born and reared in Steubenville, Ohio,
now makes his home in Cincinnati. Educated at Xavier
University in Cincinnati, he received his B.S. and his M.A. in
English in 1972. He began teaching in 1969 at what is now Purcell Marion High School, where he is Chairman of the English
Department. He has taught at Edgecliff College and Xavier
University and was the 1984 Writer-in-Residence at the Kentucky Institute for Arts in Education at the University of Louisville.
Hague is the author of three collections of poetry: Crossings, A Week of Nights Down River, and Ripening, for which he
received the Co-Poet of the Year award by the Ohio Poetry Day
Association. He has served several times on the staff of the Appalachian Writers Workshop at the Hindman Settlement
School and in 1985 presented a poetry lecture series on public
access cable for the Arts and Humanities Resource Center in
Cincinnati.
The following poem from Ripening is one of many Hague
has written about his feelings about the coal mining life.
�376
Moving Mountains: Struggle of the Coal Industry
In the Woods Beyond the Coalfields
I have come here to forget
the red god of my fathers
and the furnace of his meaning.
But the breeze is westerly today,
hauls Ohio's sin here.
Far across these Seven Ranges
float smoke and coalspill,
which to this summers common wounds
upon the hillside, field,
and pond
apply no healing poultice.
The large, warm woman of the air
who once nursed blighted fox
and split-branched tree,
who once spilled health like splashed weeds
up and down these hollows,
hobbles now, hammered
in the darkness of old mines.
I will not find her here,
but I cannot go away.
In a dream that stalks me like my doom,
I fall through all the daylight
of these woods,
and stumble upstream toward the mine,
where the rotting bodies
of my fathers
slip like nightmares
from black slag.
�RICHARD HAGUE
377
In the Woods Beyond the Coalfields
1. What has the poet "come here to forget?"
2. Discuss the dream in the last stanza and its possible
interpretation.
�378
COMPOSITION TOPICS
1, Look around you for any personal injustice or controversial
public issue which you might protest. In a composition
state the problem; then give your point of view and defend
it with reasons.
2. The selections in this chapter show the effects of coal
mining on the people. Choose the selection which most
clearly illustrates the conflict. Make up a name and address
of a coal company and write a letter to its president. Clearly
state the conflict and suggest a solution that wiU consider
the needs of the people and the needs of the company.
ACTIVITIES
Add to your book an account of any member of your family
who felt injustice and did something about it.
Write the military history of the people on your family tree who
have served in the armed forces. Include the following:
1. Name, rank, serial number, and branch of service
2. Dates of service
3. Was it war time or peace time? Name the war.
4. To what states and countries did the service take your
family member?
5. What was his or her job in the service?
6. Was he or she in a major battle? Tell about it.
7. Illustrate with a photograph of the person in uniform.
�379
CHAPTER 6
The Change Hits Home:
The Challenge to Tradition
and Values
The same questions asked about the southern United
States may be asked of Appalachia. Is Appalachia extinct?
Have television, new industry, federal programs, emigration,
and immigration blended the region with the rest of
America? Is it now rich, industrialized, cosmopolitan, and,
consequently, indistinguishable in the American
mainstream? Or, as some scholars contend, has America become what Appalachia once was? A November 2,1986, New
York Times article quotes John Gaventa of the Highlander
Center as saying: "Instead of modernizing the mountaineer. .. we are now mountainizing the moderns. The
mainstream of America is joining us.11
The largely rural culture of Southern Appalachia has
now run head-on into the fast-paced, high-tech life of the
1980s. The old ways—the values, religious beliefs and practices, and the very pace of everyday life—are being chal-
�380
lenged. Older people remembering the Appalachia of earlier
times are keenly aware of this rapid change.
It can be argued that this pressure to change, this
homogenizing of America into one landscape of malls, fastfood restaurants and highways, is the impetus for most of
the writing in Appalachia today. All of the selections in this
second section are, finally, about change and how we cope
with it.
�JESSE STUART
381
JESSE STUART (19074984)
Jesse Stuart was born in W-Hollow, a farm near Riverton,
Kentucky, and attended a one-room country school which he
later used as the setting for some of his stories. He worked to
put himself through Lincoln Memorial University in Tennessee, where James Still and Don West were among his
classmates. He studied for one year at Vanderbilt University,
although he did not complete his master's degree. There he
wrote his autobiography, which he later published as Beyond
Dark Hills.
Stuart taught school, including stints at the American
University in Cairo, Egypt, and at the University of Nevada.
He also farmed, worked in industry, and served in the Navy.
During 1962 and 1963, he was the American specialist abroad
for the Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs.
Jesse Stuart received many honors and awards in all areas
of writing. He burst on the American literary scene in 1934
with Man With A Bull-Tongue Plow. His poetry, short stories,
and juvenile fiction were very popular and appeared frequently in magazines and literary journals. His short story collection Men of the Mountains won the Academy of Arts and
Sciences Award, and the novel Taps for Private Tussle received
the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Award in 1943.
The National Education Association selected The Thread
That Runs So True as the best book of 1949. Stuart also received
�382
The Change Hits Home
the Academy of American Poets Award in 1961. Kentucky
honored him with the designation of Poet Laureate in 1954.
"Split Cherry Tree" is about changes in education and how
education changes the lives of people.
Split Cherry Tree
"I don't mind staying after school," I says to Professor Herbert, "but I'd rather you'd whip me with a switch and let me
go home early. Pa will whip me anyway for getting home two
hours late."
"You are too big to whip," says Professor Herbert, "and I
have to punish you for climbing up in that cherry tree. You
boys knew better than that! The other five boys have paid their
dollar each. You have been the only one who has not helped
pay for the tree. Can't you borrow a dollar?"
"I can't," I says. "I'll have to take the punishment. I wish it
would be quicker punishment. I wouldn't mind."
Professor Herbert stood and looked at me. He was a big
man. He wore a gray suit of clothes. The suit matched his gray
hair.
"You don't know my father," I says to Professor Herbert.
"He might be called a little old-fashioned. He makes us mind
him until we're twenty-one years old. He believes if you spare
the rod you spoil the child. I'll never be able to make him understand about the cherry tree. I'm the first of my people to go
to high school."
"You must take the punishment," says Professor Herbert.
"You must stay two hours after school today and two hours
after school tomorrow. I am allowing you twenty-five cents an
hour. That is good money for a high school student. You can
sweep the schoolhouse floor, wash the blackboards, and clean
windows. I'll pay the dollar for you."
I couldn't ask Professor Herbert to loan me a dollar. He
never offered to loan it to me. I had to stay and help the janitor
and work out my fine at a quarter an hour.
�STUART
383
I thought as I swept the floor, "What will Pa do to me? What
lie can I tell him when I go home? Why did we ever climb that
cherry tree and break it down for anyway? Why did we run
crazy over the hills away from the crowd? Why did we do all
of this? Six of us climbed up in a little cherry tree after one little lizard! Why did the tree split and fall with us? It should
have been a stronger tree! Why did Eif Crabtree just happen
to be below us plowing and catch us in his cherry tree? Why
wasn't he a better man than to charge us six dollars for the
tree?11
It was six o'clock when I left the schoolhouse. I had six
miles to walk home. It would be after seven when I got home.
I had all my work to do when I got home. It took Pa and me
both to do the work. Seven cows to milk. Nineteen head of
cattle to feed, four mules, twenty-five hogs, firewood and
stovewood to cut, and water to draw from the well. He would
be doing it when I got home. He would be mad and wondering what was keeping me!
I hurried home. I would run under the dark, leafless trees.
I would walk fast uphill. I would run down the hill. The
ground was freezing. I had to hurry. I had to run. I reached
the long ridge that led to our cow pasture. I ran along this
ridge. The wind dried the sweat on my face. I ran across the
pasture to the house.
I threw down my books in the chipyard. I ran to the barn
to spread fodder on the ground for the cattle. I didn't take time
to change my clean school clothes for my old work clothes. I
ran out to the barn. I saw Pa spreading fodder on the ground
to the cattle. That was my job. I ran up to the fence. I says,
"Leave that for me, Pa. HI do it. I'm just a little late."
"I see you are," says Pa. He turned and looked at me. His
eyes danced fire. "What in th' world has kept you so? Why
ain't you been here to help me with this work? Make a
gentleman out'n one boy in th' family and this is what you get!
Send you to high school and you get too onery fer th' buzzards
to smell!"
I never said anything. I didn't want to tell why I was late
�384
The Change Hits Home
from school. Pa stopped scattering the bundles of fodder. He
looked at me. He says, "Why are you gettin' in here this time
o' night? You tell me or I'll take a hickory withe to you right
here on th' spot!"
I says, "I had to stay after school." I couldn't lie to Pa. He'd
go to school and find out why I had to stay. If I lied to him it
would be too bad for me.
"Why did you haf to stay atter school?" says Pa.
I says, "Our biology class went on a field trip today. Six of
us boys broke down a cherry tree. We had to give a dollar
apiece to pay for the tree. I didn't have the dollar. Professor
Herbert is making me work out my dollar. He gives me twenty-five cents an hour. I had to stay in this afternoon. I'll have
to stay in tomorrow afternoon!"
"Are you telling me th' truth?" says Pa.
"I'm telling you the truth," I says. "Go and see for yourself."
"That's jist what I'll do in th' morning, says Pa. "Jist whose
cherrytree did you break down?"
"Eif Crabtree's cherry tree!"
"What was you doin' clear out in Eif Crabtree's place?" says
Pa. "He lives four miles from th' county high school. Don't
they teach you no books at that high school? Do they jist let
you get out and gad over th' hillsides? If thaf s all they do I'll
keep you at home, Dave. I've got work here fer you to do!"
"Pa," I says, "spring is just getting here. We take a subject
in school where we have to have bugs, snakes, flowers, lizards,
frogs, and plants. It is biology. It was a pretty day today. We
went out to find a few of these. Six of us boys saw a lizard at
the same time sunning on a cherry tree. We all went up the tree
to get it. We broke the tree down. It split at the forks. Eif
Crabtree was plowing down below us. He ran up the hill and
got our names. The other boys gave their dollar apiece. I didn't
have mine. Professor Herbert put mine in for me. I have to
work it out at school."
"Poor man's son, huh," says Pa. "I'll attend to that myself
in th' mornin'. I'll take keer o' 'im. He ain't from this county
nohow. I'll go down there in th' mornin' and see 'im. Lettin'
�JESSE STUART
385
you leave your books and gallivant all over th' hills. What kind
of a school is it nohow! Didn't do that, my son, when I's a little shaver in school. All fared alike, too."
"Pa, please don't go down there," I says, "just let me have
fifty cents to pay the rest of my fine! I don't want you to go
down there! I don't want you to start anything with Professor
Herbert!"
"Ashamed of your old Pap are you, Dave," says Pa, "atter
th' way I've worked to raise you! Tryin' to send you to school
so you can make a better livin' than I've made.
"I'll straighten this thing out myself! I'll take keer o' Professor Herbert myself! He ain't got no right to keep you and let
the other boys off jist because they've got th' money! I'm a poor
man. A bullet will go in a professor same as it will any man.
It will go in a rich man same as it will a poor man. Now you
get into this work before I take one o' these withes and cut the
shirt off'n your back!"
I thought once I'd run through the woods above the barn
just as hard as I could go. I thought I'd leave high school and
home forever! Pa could not catch me! I'd get away! I couldn't
go back to school with him. He'd have a gun and maybe he'd
shoot Professor Herbert. It was hard to tell what he would do.
I could tell Pa that school had changed in the hills from the way
it was when he was a boy, but he wouldn't understand. I could
tell him we studied frogs, birds, snakes, lizards, flowers, insects. But Pa wouldn't understand. If I did run away from
home it wouldn't matter to Pa. He would see Professor Herbert anyway. He would think that high school and Professor
Herbert had run me away from home. There was no need to
run away. I'd just have to stay, finish foddering the cattle, and
go to school with Pa the next morning.
I would take a bundle of fodder, remove the hickory withe
band from around it, and scatter it on rocks, clumps of green
briers, and brush so the cattle wouldn't tramp it under their
feet. I would lean it up against the oak trees and the rocks in
the pasture just above our pigpen on the hill. The fodder was
cold and frosty where it had set out in the stacks. I would carry
�386
The Change Hits Home
bundles of the fodder from the stack until I had spread out a
bundle for each steer. Pa went to the barn to feed the mules
and throw corn in the pen to the hogs.
The moon shone bright in the cold March sky. I finished
my work by moonlight. Professor Herbert really didn't know
how much work I had to do at home. If he had known he
would not have kept me after school. He would have loaned
me a dollar to have paid my part on the cherry tree. He had
never lived in the hills. He didn't know the way the hill boys
had to work so that they could go to school. Now he was teaching in a county high school where all the boys who attended
were from hill farms.
After Fd finished doing my work I went to the house and
ate my supper. Pa and Mom had eaten. My supper was getting cold. I heard Pa and Mom talking in the front room. Pa
was telling Mom about me staying in after school.
"I had to do all th' milkin' tonight, chop th' wood myself.
It's too hard on me atter I've turned ground all day. I'm goin'
to take a day off tomorrow and see if I can't remedy things a
little. I'll go down to that high school tomorrow. I won't be a
very good scholar f er Professor Herbert nohow. He won't keep
me in atter school. I'll take a different kind of lesson down
there and make 'im acquainted with it"
"Now, Luster," says Mom, you jist stay away from there.
Don't cause a lot o' trouble. You can be jailed fer a trick like
that. You'll get th' Law atter you. You'll just go down there
and show off and plague your own boy Dave to death in front
o'allth' scholars!"
"Plague or no plague," says Pa, "he don't take into consideration what all I have to do here, does he? I'll show 'im it
ain't right to keep one boy in and let the rest go scot-free. My
boy is good as th' rest, ain't he? A bullet will make a hole in a
schoolteacher same as it will anybody else. He can't do me that
way and get by with it. I'll plug 'im first. I aim to go down
there bright and early in the mornin' and get all this straight!
I aim to see about bug larnin' and this runnin' all over God's
creation huntin' snakes, lizards, and frogs. Ransackin' th'
�JESSE STUART 387
country and goin' through cherry orchards and breakin' th'
trees down atter lizards! Old Eif Crabtree ought to a-poured
th' hot lead to 'em instead o' chargin' six dollars f er th' tree! He
ought to a-got old Herbert th' first one!"
I ate my supper. I slipped upstairs and lit the lamp. I tried
to forget the whole thing. I studied plane geometry. Then I
studied my biology lesson. I could hardly study for thinking
about Pa. "He'll go to school with me in the morning. He'll
take a gun for Professor Herbert! What will Professor Herbert
think of me! I'll tell him when Pa leaves that I couldn't help it.
But Pa might shoot him. I hate to go with Pa. Maybe he'll cool
off about it tonight and not go in the morning."
Pa got up at four o'clock. He built a fire in the stove. Then
he built a fire in the fireplace. He got Mom up to get breakfast.
Then he got me up to help feed and milk. By the time we had
our work done at the barn, Mom had breakfast ready for us.
We ate our breakfast. Daylight came and we could see the bare
oak trees covered white with frost. The hills were white with
frost. A cold wind was blowing. The sky was clear. The sun
would soon come out and melt the frost. The afternoon would
be warm with sunshine and the frozen ground would thaw.
There would be mud on the hills again. Muddy water would
then run down the little ditches on the hills.
"Now, Dave," says Pa, "let's get ready fer school. I aim to
go with you this mornin' and look into bug larnin', frog larnin',
lizard and snake larnin', and breakin' down cherry trees! I
don't like no sicha foolish way o' larnin' myself!"
Pa hadn't forgot. I'd have to take him to school with me.
He would take me to school with him. We were going early.
I was glad we were going early. If Pa pulled a gun on Professor Herbert there wouldn't be so many of my classmates there
to see him.
I knew that Pa wouldn't be at home in the high school. He
wore overalls, big boots, a blue shirt and a sheepskin coat, and
a slouched black hat gone to seed at the top. He put his gun in
its holster. We started trudging toward the high school across
the hill.
�388
The Change Hits Home
It was early when we got to the county high school. Professor Herbert had just got there. I just thought as we walked up
the steps into the schoolhouse, "Maybe Pa will find out Professor Herbert is a good man. He just doesn't know him. Just like
I felt toward the Lambert boys across the hill. I didn't like them
until I'd seen them and talked to them. After I went to school
with them and talked to them, I liked them and we were
friends. It's a lot in knowing the other fellow."
"You're th' Professor here, ain't you!" says Pa.
"Yes," says Professor Herbert, "and you are Dave's father."
"Yes," says Pa, pulling out his gun and laying it on the seat
in Professor Herbert's office. Professor Herbert's eyes got big
behind his black-rimmed glasses when he saw Pa's gun. Color
came into his pale cheeks.
"Jist a few things about this school I want to know," says
Pa. Tmtryin'to make a scholar out'n Dave. He's the only one
out'n eleven youngins I've sent to high school. Here he comes
in late and leaves me all the work to do! He said you's all out
bug huntin' yesterday and broke a cherry tree down. He had
to stay two hours atter school yesterday and work out money
to pay for that cherry tree! Is that right?"
"Wwwwy," says Professor Herbert," I guess it is."
He looked at Pa's gun.
"Well," says Pa, "this ain't no high school. It's a bug school,
a lizard school, a snake school! It ain't no school nohow!"
"Why did you bring that gun?" says Professor Herbert to
Pa.
"You see that little hole," says Pa as he picked up the long
blue forty-four and put his finger on the end of the barrel, "a
bullet can come out'n that hole that will kill a schoolteacher
same as it will any other man. It will kill a rich man same as a
poor man. It will kill a man. But atter I come in and saw you,
I kno w'd I wouldn't need it. This maul of mine could do you
up in a few minutes."
Pa stood there, big, hard, brown-skinned, and mighty, beside of Professor Herbert. I didn't know Pa was so much bigger and harder. I'd never seen Pa in a schoolhouse before. I'd
�JESSE STUART 389
seen Professor Herbert. He always looked big before to me.
He didn't look big standing beside of Pa.
"I was only doing my duty, Mr. Sexton/1 says Professor
Herbert, "and following the course of study the state provided
us with."
"Course o' study," says Pa, "what study, bug study? Varmint study? Takin' youngins to th' woods. Boys and girls all
out there together a-gallivantin' in the brush and kicking up
their heels and their poor old Ma's and Pa's at home a-slavin'
to keep 'em in school and give 'em a education! You know
that's dangerous, too, puttin' a lot o' boys and girls out together
like that!"
Students were coming into the schoolhouse now.
Professor Herbert says, "Close the door, Dave, so others
won't hear.
I walked over and closed the door. I was shaking like a leaf
in the wind. I thought Pa was going to hit Professor Herbert
every minute. He was doing all the talking. His face was getting red. The red color was coming through the brown,
weather-beaten skin on Pa's face.
"I was right with these students," says Professor Herbert.
"I know what they got into and what they didn't. I didn't send
one of the other teachers with them on this field trip. I went
myself. Yes, I took the boys and girls together. Why not?"
"It jist don't look good to me," says Pa, "a-takin' all this
swarm of youngins out to pillage th' whole deestrict.
Breaking' down cherry trees. Keeping' boys in atter school."
"What else could I have done with Dave, Mr. Sexton?" says
Professor Herbert. "The boys didn't have any business all
climbing that cherry tree after one lizard. One boy could have
gone up in the tree and got it. The farmer charged us six dollars. It was a little steep, I think, but we had it to pay. Must I
make five boys pay and let your boy off? He said he didn't
have the dollar and couldn't get it. So I put it in for him. I'm
letting him work it out. He's not working for me. He's working for the school!"
"I jist don't know what you could a-done with 'im," says
�390
The Change Hits Home
Pa, "only a-larruped 1m with a withe! That's what he needed!"
"He's too big to whip," says Professor Herbert, pointing at
me. "He's a man in size."
"He's not too big fer me to whip," says Pa. "They ain't too
big until they're over twenty-one! It jist didn't look fair to me!
Work one and let th' rest out because they got th' money. I
don't see what bugs has got to do with a high school! It don't
look good to me nohow!"
Pa picked up his gun and put it back in its holster. The red
color left Professor Herbert's face. He talked more to Pa. Pa
softened a little. It looked funny to see Pa in the high school
building. It was the first time he'd ever been there.
"We were not only hunting snakes, toads, flowers, butterflies, lizards," says Professor Herbert, "but, Mr. Sexton, I was
hunting dry timothy grass to put in an incubator and raise
some protozoa.'
"I don't know what that is," says Pa. "Th' incubator is th'
new-fangled way o' cheatin' th' hens and raisin' chickens. I
ain't so sure about th' breed o' chickens you mentioned."
"You've heard of germs, Mr. Sexton, haven't you?" says
Professor Herbert.
"Jist call me Luster, if you don't mind," says Pa, very casual
like.
"All right, Luster, you've heard of germs, haven't you?"
"Yes," says Pa, "but I don't believe in germs. I'm sixty-five
years old and I ain't seen one yet!"
"You can't see them with your naked eye," says Professor
Herbert. "Just keep that gun in the holster and stay with me in
the high school today. I have a few things I want to show you.
That scum on your teeth has germs in it."
"What," says Pa, "you mean to tell me I've got germs on my
teeth!"
"Yes," says Professor Herbert. "The same kind as we might
be able to find in a living black snake if we dissect it!"
"I don't mean to dispute your word," says Pa, "but I don't
believe it. I don't believe I have germs on my teeth!"
"Stay with me today and I'll show you. I want to take you
�JESSE STUART
391
through the school anyway! School has changed a lot in the
hills since you went to school. I don't guess we had high
schools in this county when you went to school!"
''No," says Pa, "jist readin', writin', and ciphering We didn't
have all this bug larnin', frog larnin', and findin' germs on your
teeth and in the middle o' black snakes! Th' world's changin'."
"It is," says Professor Herbert, "and we hope all for the better. Boys like your own there are going to help change it. He's
your boy. He knows all of what Fve told you. You stay with
me today."
Til shore stay with you," says Pa. "I want to see th' germs
off'n my teeth. I jist want to see a germ. I've never seen one in
my life. 'Seein' is believin',' Pap allus told me."
Pa walked out of the office with Professor Herbert. I just
hoped Professor Herbert didn't have Pa arrested for pulling
his gun. Pa's gun has always been a friend to him when he
goes to settle disputes.
The bell rang. School took up. I saw the students when
they marched in the schoolhouse look at Pa. They would grin
and punch each other. Pa just stood and watched them pass in
at the schoolhouse door. Two long lines marched in the house.
The boys and girls were clean and well dressed. Pa stood over
in the schoolyard under a leafless elm, in his sheepskin coat,
his big boots laced in front with buckskin, and his heavy socks
stuck above his boot tops. Pa's overalls legs were baggy and
wrinkled between his coat and boot tops. His blue work shirt
showed at the collar. His big black hat showed his graystreaked black hair. His face was hard and weather-tanned to
the color of a ripe fodder blade. His hands were big and
gnarled like the roots of the elm tree he stood beside.
When I went to my first class I saw Pa and Professor Herbert going around over the schoolhouse. I was in my geometry
class when Pa and Professor Herbert came in the room. We
were explaining our propositions on the blackboard. Professor Herbert and Pa just quietly came in and sat down for a
while. I heard Fred Wurts whisper to Glenn Armstrong, "Who
is that old man? Lord, he's a rough-looking scamp." Glenn
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The Change Hits Home
whispered back, ft l think he's Dave's Pap.11 The students in
geometry looked at Pa. They must have wondered what he
was doing in school. Before the class was over, Pa and Professor Herbert got up and went out. I saw them together down
on the playground. Professor Herbert was explaining to Pa. I
could see the prints of Pa's gun under his coat when he'd walk
around.
At noon in the high school cafeteria Pa and Professor Herbert sat together at the little table where Professor Herbert always ate by himself. They ate together. The students watched
the way Pa ate. He ate with his knife instead of his fork. A lot
of the students felt sorry for me after they found out he was my
father. They didn't have to feel sorry for me. I wasn't ashamed
of Pa after I found out he wasn't going to shoot Professor Herbert. I was glad they had made friends. I wasn't ashamed of
Pa. I wouldn't be as long as he behaved. He would find out
about the high school as I had found out about the Lambert
boys across the hill.
In the afternoon when we went to biology Pa was in the
class. He was sitting on one of the high stools beside the microscope. We went ahead with our work just as if Pa wasn't in the
class. I saw Pa take his knife and scrape tartar from one of his
teeth. Professor Herbert put it on the lens and adjusted the
microscope for Pa. He adjusted it and worked awhile. Then
he says: "Now Luster, look! Put your eye right down to the
light. Squint the other eye!"
Pa put his head down and did as Professor Herbert said.
"I see 'im,H says Pa. "Who'd a ever thought that? Right on a
body's teeth! Right in a body's mouth. You're right certain
they ain't fake to this, Professor Herbert?"
"No, Luster," says Professor Herbert. "It's there. That's the
germ. Germs live in a world we cannot see with the naked eye.
We must use the microscope. There are millions of them in our
bodies. Some are harmful. Others are helpful."
Pa holds his face down and looks through the microscope.
We stop and watch Pa. He sits upon the tall stool. His knees
are against the table. His legs are long. His coat slips up be-
�JESSE STUART
393
hind when he bends over. The handle of his gun shows. Professor Herbert pulls his coat down quickly.
"Oh, yes," says Pa. He gets up and pulls his coat down. Pa's
face gets a little red. He knows about his gun and he knows he
doesn't have any use for it in high school.
"We have a big black snake over here we caught yesterday,"
says Professor Herbert. "We'll chloroform him and dissect him
and show you he has germs in his body, too."
"Don't do it," says Pa. "'I believe you. I jist don't want to
see you kill the black snake. I never kill one. They are good
mousers and a lot o' help to us on the farm. I like black snakes.
I jist hate to see people kill 'em. I don't allow 'em killed on my
place."
The students looked at Pa. They seemed to like him better
after he said that. Pa with a gun in his pocket but a tender heart
beneath his ribs for snakes, but not for man! Pa won't whip a
mule at home. He won't whip his cattle.
"Man can defend hisself," says Pa, "but cattle and mules
can't. We have the drop on 'em. Ain't nothin' to a man that'll
beat a good pullin' mule. He ain't got th' right kind o' a heart!"
Professor Herbert took Pa through the laboratory. He
showed him the different kinds of work we were doing. He
showed him our equipment. They stood and talked while we
worked. Then they walked out together. They talked louder
when they got out in the hall.
When our biology class was over I walked out of the room.
It was our last class for the day. I would have to take my broom
and sweep two hours to finish paying for the split cherry tree.
I just wondered if Pa would want me to stay. He was standing
in the hallway watching the students march out. He looked lost
among us. He looked like a leaf turned brown on the tree
among the treetop filled with growing leaves.
I got my broom and started to sweep. Professor Herbert
walked up and says, "I'm going to let you do that some other
time. You can go home with your father. He is waiting out
there."
I laid my broom down, got my books, and went down the
�394
The Change Hits Home
steps.
Pa says, "Ain't you got two hours o' sweepin' yet to do?"
I says, "Professor Herbert said I could do it some other time.
He said for me to go home with you."
"No," says Pa. "You are goin' to do as he says. He's a good
man. School has changed from my day and time. I'm a dead
leaf, Dave. I'm behind. I don't belong here. If he'll let me I'll
get a broom and we'll both sweep one hour. That pays your
debt. I'll hep you pay it. I'll ast 'im and see if he won't let me
hep you."
"I'm going to cancel the debt," says Professor Herbert. "I
just wanted you to understand, Luster."
"I understand," says Pa, "and since I understand, he must
pay for his debt fer th' tree and I'm going to hep 'im."
"Don't do that," says Professor Herbert. "It's aU on me."
"We don't do things like that," says Pa, "we're just and
honest people. We don't want somethin' fer nothin'. Professor Herbert, you're wrong now and I'm right. You'll haf to listen to me. I've larned a lot from you. My boy must go on. Th'
world has left me. It changed while I've raised my family and
plowed th'hills. I'm a just and honest man. I don't skip debts.
I ain't larned 'em to do that. I ain't got much larnin' myself but
I do know right from wrong atter I see through a thing."
Professor Herbert went home. Pa and I stayed and swept
one hour. It looked funny to see Pa use a broom. He never
used one at home. Mom used the broom. Pa used the plow.
Pa did hard work. Pa says, "I can't sweep. Durned if I can.
Look at th' streaks o' dirt I leave on th' floor! Seems like no
work a-taH fer me. Brooms is too light 'r somethin'. I'll jist do
th' best I can, Dave. I've been wrong about th' school."
I says, "Did you know Professor Herbert can get a warrant
out for you for bringing your pistol to school and showing it
in his office! They can railroad6 you for that!"
"That's all made right," says Pa. "I've made that right.
Professor Herbert ain't goin' to take it to court. He likes me. I
like'im. We jist had to get together. He had the remedies. He
�JESSE STUART
395
showed me. You must go on to school. I am as strong a man
as ever come out'n th' hills fer my years and th' hard work I've
done. But I'm behind, Dave. I'm a little man. Your hands will
be softer than mine. Your clothes will be better. You'll allus
look cleaner than your old Pap. Jist remember, Dave, to pay
your debts and be honest. Jist be kind to animals and don't
bother th' snakes. Thaf s all I got agin th' school. Puttin' black
snakes to sleep and cuttin' 'em open."
It was late when we got home. Stars were in the sky. The
moon was up. The ground was frozen. Pa took his time going
home. I couldn't run like I did the night before. It was ten
o'clock before we got the work finished, our suppers eaten. Pa
sat before the fire and told Mom he was going to take her and
show her a germ sometime. Mom hadn't seen one either. Pa
told her about the high school and the fine man Professor Herbert was. He told Mom about the strange school across the hill
and how different it was from the school in their day and time.
Notes
'withe: a slender branch
maul: a heavy hammer used especially for driving wedges or piles;
here Pa means his hand.
pillage: to take or destroy property by open violence; to take unlawfully.
timothy grass: a fodder grass with long, cylindrical spikes.
5
protozoa: one-celled microscopic animals.
6
railroad: slang, to have someone imprisoned on false charges or
without a fair trial.
2
�396
The Change Hits Home
Split Cherry Tree
1. How do Pa and Professor Herbert differ in their method of
resolving conflict?
2. What is Dave's major worry in regard to his offense?
3. How does Pa's attitude toward Dave's punishment change
after Pa's visit to school?
4. What basic truths about people are revealed in this story?
�FRED CHAPPELL
397
FRED CHAPPELL (1936- )
Fred Chappell has received praise, recognition, and critical
acclaim, especially since the prestigious Bollinger Prize for
Poetry was awarded to him in 1984 for his collection Midcjuest.
A graduate of Duke University, Chappell was born in Canton, North Carolina, to a family in the furniture business. He
is a prolific writer with poetry, short stories, novels, reviews,
and essays to his credit. His publications include his latest
novel, I Am One of You Forever, and his most recent book of
poetry, Source. Other titles by Chappell include Moments of
Light (short stories), The World Between The Eyes, and The Castle
Tsingal (poetry). He currently teaches at the University of
North Carolina at Greensboro.
"Firewater" tells the story of a local historical celebration.
Firewater
Beneath the hairy hams hung from the hooks
Virgil Campbell talked in his grocery store:
"I just got back from the hundredth anniversary
Of Clay County. I have kinfolks that way,
They asked me out to see the spectacle.
�398
The Change Hits Home
The local politicians—just to give you
A notion—were calling themselves town fathers.
So then I know something's bound to happen.
If I had fathered a town I wouldn't brag
About Hayesville. I mean, there's a matter of pride.
"First off, the usual stuff. Speeches crammed
To the gullet with lies; sorghum-judging,
Jam-judging, cake-judging, quilt-judging; ribbons
Handed out to the grandmaws and the livestock.
And then the square dance contest. (I got to say
The Hiawassee Stompers can flat out clog some...)
I was rolling with it right along,
Had me a laugh and a sip or two ... J.T.,
They had them a beauty queen. That gal was healthy,
I'm here to tell you, and ought to season out
As comfortable as a split rail fence
And keep as many varmints off your ground...
Maybe my taste is running sophisticated,
I've lived too long in the wicked city of Pigeon Fork.
"The main attraction, besides the knife- and fist-fights,
Was the Clay County Hundredth Grand Parade,
Celebrating their most famous products.
—Now what's Clay County famous for?"
"Moonshine,"
My father said.
"And everybody knows it,
But who'd've thought they'd parade it on the street?
Damn if they didn't. They went up Standing Indian
And told Big Mama to build a model still
And put it on a wagon and ride with it.
Ten years they've been trying to prosecute
That woman for running shine, and out of the blue
They come up hat in hand to ask her sweetly
To waltz it down Main Street in broad daylight.
�FRED CHAPPELL 399
"And she said Yes. The notion had to tickle her
Once they got past her mean suspiciousness.
So there she was. I saw her. Swear to Jesus.
Sitting in a rocking chair on a wagon
By the cooker, and the copper worm
Strung down behind her, and smoke just boiling out
Pretty as you please. A cat would've by God laughed.
Big Mama weighs close onto three hundred pounds,
But the HayesviHe Beauty Queen didn't sit prouder.
She gave a special wave to the deputy sheriff.
Grinning grinning grinning like she'd stole
The courthouse weathervane. Rocking and grinning and
rocking.
"Behind her came the Briar Hill Bluegrass Band
On another wagon pulled by a one-eyed mule.
That's what I thought, the way he drew to the left.
But then he'd pull the other way; and began
To kind of hop and stagger. At last he gave a lurch
And lay down in the traces and went to sleep.
Somebody hollered out, 'That mule's drunk!'
Sure enough he was. Drunk as an owl,
Just from breathing the smoke that was pouring out
From Big Mama's model still. The music stopped.
"Because they'd caught her at last. After all those years...
But what are they going to do? They'd invite her;
They begged her to do her stuff, and so she did.
Here came the deputy. 'You're under arrest/
He said—but smiling so the crowd would think
It was part of the act. Big Mama's boys stood up—
Wearing phony beards, barefoot with beat-up hats,
Just like the hillbillies in the funny papers—
And threw down on the deputy three shotguns.
Whether they were loaded I don't know.
He didn't know. Except Big Mama's bunch
Nobody knew. Fire don't flame as red
�400
The Change Hits Home
As that man's face. He waved them along, smiling
Till his jaw hurt. It'll take a month to relax
That smile away. They drove on around the square,
Getting their money's worth, leaving behind
That passed-out mule for the deputy to have fun with.
And went on home, back to the rocks and laurels."
"Okay," my father said, "it's good to know
The eternal verities still hold their own,
That poverty and whiskey and scratch-ankle farming
Still prop the mountains up."
"But it ain't that way,"
The old man said. "Big Mama's quit running corn,
Except for home use. Ain't no profit in it,
With the price of sugar up and the appetite down.
Growing these Merry Widow cigarettes,
That's where they make their money."
"Kind of a shame,
Tradition dying away. The funny papers
Will come to be all anybody knows."
"It ain't that bad. I know one high-grade still
Still making. If you'd care to have a snort."
"Why not?" my father said. "Time keeps grumbling on.
Let's drink us a drink: here at the end of the world."
�FRED CHAPPELL
401
Firewater
1. This is a poem in the storytelling tradition. For what reason,
besides entertainment, does the poet tell the story about Big
Mama and the mule?
2. What does the father mean when he says, "it's good to
know the eternal verities still hold their own?11
3. What kind of changes is Chappell exploring here?
4. What images of Appalachian people are in the "funny
papers11? Name and discuss some cartoons, books, and
television shows that depict mountain people.
�402 The Change Hits Home
WILMA DYKEMAN (1920 -
)
Wilma Dykeman, born in Asheville, North Carolina, is the
wife of the late James R. Stokely, Jr., another distinguished Appalachian author included in this anthology. Together they
wrote three books, one of which is Neither Black nor White, a
winner of the Hillman Award for Best Book of the Year on
world peace, race relations, or civil liberties. She has also written two books with her son, Jim Stokely.
A graduate of Northwestern University, Dykeman has
been a Guggenheim Scholar and a senior fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her awards include the
Thomas Wolfe Memorial Trophy, the Tennessee Conservation
Writer of the Year Award, and a special award from the
Chicago Friends of American Writers.
She is a popular lecturer and workshop leader as well as a
regular columnist for the Knoxville News-Sentinel In 1980 she
was appointed Tennessee State Historian. Her credits include
fifteen books, numerous magazine articles, and book reviews.
The following excerpt from her novel Return the Innocent
Earth shows the Clayburn family's commitment to family, God,
law, and money.
�WILMADYKEMAN
403
From Return the Innocent Earth
The Clayburns believed.
They believed in the brick house. Home, foursquare
against the storms that swept down from the mountains in
summer, high and cool under the slow lingering burn of summer sun. Secured by deeds and taxes, paint and repairs and
sweat. Durable, permanent brick.
They believed in the white clapboard church. It sat on a
hill flanked by a cemetery on one side and a grove of poplars
on the other. In the cemetery time vanished. Tall, imposing
shafts of chiseled granite coexisted with crumbling homemade
headstones. Shallow letters gradually eroded under rain and
freeze and thaw and a green beard of moss. The stones
recorded death and spoke of life: "She Is Gone But Not Forgotten." "We Shall Meet On That Beautiful Shore.11 For all their certainty of heaven and simplicity of statement they revealed
anxious fears and sorrows. In the tangled weeds and vines
around the stones small chipmunks hid and insects ticked
noisily on autumn afternoons.
They believed in the concrete courthouse. At Churchill's
core, it filled a ragged square of trampled grass. Its windows
were blinded by years' accumulation of dust and grime and
smoke. Inside, the rooms were saturated with stale smells of
human bodies and old paper. On the once-varnished shelves
rested documents of boundaries, ownership, wedlock, inheritance, as well as murder, theft, and countless variations of
petty and monumental evil brought to judgment. The records,
written in long hard-backed ledgers, accumulated in piles as
thick as layers of sediment built up during the slow geologic
passage of time. Their glossy red spines, faded to match the
number of years they had lodged there, indicated the era of
each legal stratum. On the second floor stood the judge's bench
and jury's box and public seats and spittoons of the county
courtroom. On the top floor rested the county jail. The bars
across its windows gave the building a top-heavy appearance
of grandeur masked, of majesty hoodwinked.
�404 The Change Hits Home
They believed in the rock-veneered bank. Solidly it fronted
on Churchill's fickle main street which alternated between
such extremes as a suck of mud or a wallow of dust. The bank's
doors opened and shut more regularly than clockwork. The
men in high collars who sat behind its desks and stood behind
its counter-windows appeared as imperturbable as the fixed
countenances of G. Washington and A. Hamilton on the paper
they handled each day.
These were the boundaries of Clayburn belief, translated
into wood and solidified into mortar. Family. God. Law.
Money. And these translated into the big slippery words:
love, purpose, order, security.
I try to understand how the lightness of their faith was also
error, why it did not create for my children Lee and Ellie a
world less destructive and corrupt. Was their vision as limited
as mine is? Family as refuge. God as scorekeeper. Law as
vengeance. Money as life.
They believed in the words and in the institutions. And
from that belief they drew strength. I grew up surrounded by
this strength. It was as familiar as the drone of my family's
voice in the yard on a summer evening, as unselfconscious as
my Aunt Nettie Sue's anthems at Easter and Christmas, as unquestioned as the slightly tarnished badges of the county
sheriff, as tangible as safety deposit vaults. I could receive the
strength, but it was not my father's strength because I could
not also receive his belief. That is an anchor each one puts
down for himself.
Is there anyone who grew up in the mountains, the South,
America, as I knew them, who did not experience a crisis of
belief? Perhaps so. It is not easy to question in the midst of
total acceptance. It is not easy to strike through the thorn
bushes when the highway has been cleared and smoothed by
so many ahead.
By the time I was growing up, the Clayburns no longer
lived on the farm, no longer attended the little white church.
They had moved into Churchill and its First Baptist Church.
(Many of the factory workers attended the Second Baptist, a
�WILMADYKEMAN
405
frame structure on the opposite side of town. At the Open
Door Baptist Church, in what was called Jaybird, Delia and
most of the black population of Churchill worshiped. As for
the farm hands, they erected a Clayburn Primitive Baptist
Chapel on Grindstone Creek, six miles from town, where they
shouted and washed each other's feet and "came to glory." Farther away, near the head of the creek, nestled the one-room
Grindstone Hard Shell Baptist Tabernacle, where during long
summer services certain mountain men and women handled
copperheads and rattlesnakes to prove their trust in all-watchful Heavenly Father.) The Clayburns had joined with the
Montgomerys in enlarging the First Baptist building and
giving it the permanence of brick. (The Clayburns set great
store by brick—neat and orderly, without the unexpected
shapes and jagged edges of stone or the weathering and decay
of wood.) It was there I heard my first Bach, disguised as a
hymn, and my first poetry, disguised as Solomon's description
of the church as a bride. Church defined the boundaries of our
lives: culture and entertainment and therapy as well as
religion.
Above all, reality of the world's evil and possibility of
heaven's existence were etched deep in my consciousness
there. Week after week the stylus moved, biting deeper,
whether or not I listened, whether or not I accepted, simply
repeating until it buried the message within me.
How could I ever have told Teena, with her cool Episcopalianism, her midwestern practicality, what it was like to
be a small boy on Sunday morning in Churchill? How can I
ever convey it to Deborah, with her experience of the disciplined intellect and the raw horror? Yet if they do not understand this, they know nothing.
(Teena said to me, just after Lee was born, when I was ready
to leave Clayburn-Durant—then talked with Aunt Lottie and
considered the responsibility of having a son and being a son—
and stayed: "You Southern boys really are tied up in knots,
aren't you?" Teena smiled so that her words did not bite but
merely stung. "Carrying that burden of family and salvation
�406 The Change Hits Home
and God knows what else around with you, like a tortoise with
its precious shell—")
Sunday morning was Puritan in its outer sternness and
pagan in the abundance of its inner physical sensations: the
smell of starch and toilet water and oiled benches and fraying
hymnals, the throb of an organ swelling off-key on the bass
notes, the radiant mystery of stained glass, the whisper and
tinkle of the collection plates' passage through the congregation.
Above all, Sunday morning was the music—sad, sentimental, militant, tightening your throat and chest for all the loss or
glory of the work!—and it was the minister's voice, angry or
pleading, moving or awesome, cultivated or half-wild, but
onto something no one present could dismiss or disprove. We
might dislike, but we could not escape. Sunday was a day to
ponder on our immortal souls and feast on fried chicken.
"Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine, oh what a foretaste of
glory divine...."
Afterward the melting delicacy of golden corn pudding.
"Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war...."
The sweet rise and fall of the rhythm, the pulse-pounding
beat of the march, the primitive blood and beauty, the sincere,
solemn faces upturned briefly with all the hint of rapture they
would ever know: such memory—even in the boiler-room
pressure of today, even in this world which seems as far
removed as the Pre-Cambrian age or the time of the great fern
forests—mellows my attitudes, touches me to unaccustomed
pity for those who could believe so faithfully, as well as for
those who cannot believe at all.
There was another dimension to the belief. Revivals came
in mid-summer during seasons of parching drought or drenching flood, when the land, like the people, lay ready for either
renewal or rescue. Again, in my present world of young
George Hodges and instant answers from the machine, of
knowledgeable Bonita Fredericks and stylish conformities, of
inter-office memos and board meetings and daily decisions for
sixty-four plants and people ranging from Madison Avenue
�WILMADYKEMAN
407
admen selling Clayburn-Durant's image on t.v. screens to
Mexican wetbacks in the Rio Grande valley harvesting fruit for
our cam—in this world the residue of long-ago revivals seems
thoroughly submerged.
And yet—
One of those summer meetings brought my first personal
knowledge of my cousin Stull.
In mid-August that year the brown canvas tent spread
wide like a shallow, muddy pool in one of Alexander
Montgomery's empty fields at the edge of Churchill. Pungent
odor of the canvas mingled with the smell of fresh pine lumber from one of Colonel Wakel/s sawmills that was used to
build row after row of benches. Around the outer edges of the
tent, dry stalks of weeds and Queen Anne's lace and fading
purple thistles persisted like a stubble of beard. On the bare
plank platform in front of the banked seats stood a small home
organ and a lectern. This established the domain of Kincaid
and Truesdale, musician and evangelist of "world-wide fame."
For two weeks in the August heat they sang and shouted
and exhorted and pleaded and it seemed to me that the town
and everyone I knew was forever changed. Great-uncle Whit
Ransom, tears streaming down his florid face, took an oath to
give up strong drink for the rest of his natural life. Old Sledge
Hartwick, overcome by the spirit, vowed to the singing, watchful congregation that no matter how hot his blacksmith's shop
became or how heavy the hammer he would never use curse
words again, be damned if he would.
Memphis Gibson and two of her girls cried at the
mourner's bench and promised repentance of their carnal
ways. (I overheard Uncle Cal tell some men the following day
that he bet there were a raft of good male citizens hated to hear
that promise made, even for a little while. I wondered what he
meant.) And cautious Alexander Montgomery wrote a check
for one thousand dollars to launch the final love-offering for
Brother Truesdale.
Of all the moments or events which startled and stirred us
during those emotion-laden days, however, none equaled for
�408 The Change Hits Home
me the sight of my cousin Stull Clayburn walking to the front,
grasping the outstretched hand of Mooney C. Truesdale, committing his life to God and accepting the Holy Spirit.
That night at home in bed I tried to remember what the
Reverend Truesdale had said. Random sentences lodged in
my mind like driftwood scattered from the waves of warning,
threat, and strange angry love that had washed over the congregation before him.
Oh, let the wind blow, brother. Let the wind howl and the
rivers rise and a flood of lamb-purified blood descend into our
withered church-baked hearts
Some say: Brother Truesdale, I've got my own religion.
Yes, my brother, but do you have God's religion? Folks don't
like to hear the truth about their corruption and their devilment. But I'm not preaching folks' way. I'm preaching the
Lord's way. God be praised! That's the rocky trail I'vefollered
since that day I was ploughing in the hillside fields and the
Lord called on me to lay down the plough handles and take up
the sword for Him. "Lord," I said, "I may be a poor old worthless varmint, but if you're a-wanting me I'm all yours, bone and
shank and head and hand," and that's the way it's been and the
Lord has blessed me beyond all deserving.
Oh, you say, Brother Truesdale, I don't have time to work
for the Lord God Almighty. I've got to run my store and see
after my mill. I've got to tend my tobacco fields and feed my
white-face heifers. Oh dear brother, the mercy of the Lord God
be upon you. God hates a proud look. God hates an owner's
grasp. You're just a steward and tender of His earth. And if
you can't humble yourself you're headed for brimstone where
the fire is never quenched and the worm is never fed.
Your time here is short as a borrower's memory, no matter
how young you be. The days of the little babe at its mother's
teat are brief as candles. Too soon the hour of wrath will come
upon us like a rending storm. That's why I'm a-pleading with
you now, this breath; accept the Lord; be baptized in the flow.
I want to see an old-time sin-killing Holy-Ghost revival. I
�WILMADYKEMAN
409
came here on fire with the Lord and Fm not a cinder yet. Well
burn out the proud flesh in our secret hearts.
Let the agnostics and the atheists, the haughty doubters,
have their little day on earth. The gathering of the believers and
the faithful, the saved and the chosen, will be in heaven. It will
come for eternity. It's the gift of God; you have only to reach
out with your own pitiful little mortal hand and accept—
tonight, now, this minute.
You may never live to return back to this old tent tomorrow
night. You're making your eternal choice—for heaven or hell.
Don't O, brother or sister, don't disinherit yourself forever
from the love of God.
I did not want hell.
Was I a haughty doubter? I did not mean to be.
I wanted love. I wanted to be the faithful and the chosen. I
wanted eternity. And heaven.
Yet I sat on the plank bench with my feet anchored in sawdust and I could not move.
Then I saw Stull. Stull walking down the aisle, a serious
young man (and I still a child), wearing a watch fob like my
father. He was sweating lightly so that his face and forehead
shone in the flickering light. His shoes squeaked slightly with
every other step but no one heard or paid attention in the midst
of the rapturous singing.
There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Emmanuel's veins,
And sinners plunged beneath that flood
Lose all their guilty stains
Lose all their guilty stains
The vision of a fountain flowing with the warm sticky scarlet of fresh blood made me shudder.
Stull looked straight ahead. The congregation stirred as
everyone craned to see him. All of the adult Clayburns and
most of the children above infancy, including my brother
�410 The Change Hits Home
Monty, had professed faith and joined the church long since.
At that moment, only Stull and I did not belong, only we had
not washed away our guilty stains, and it appeared that very
soon I would be the only one left in that wretched condition.
StulTs father and mother sat on the seats just in front of
ours, and when my mother leaned forward and patted them
on the shoulder they turned to smile radiantly. I saw tears glistening in Aunt Nora's eyes. If my mother had been crying I
would not have been surprised, for she laughed and cried easily. Aunt Nora, however, was another matter. She did not yield
often to any display of her inner feelings. Her tears, brimming
like iridescent bubbles ready to break, confirmed for me the
solemnity and importance of the moment.
I looked back at Stull. Preacher Truesdale had stepped
down from the platform onto the grass and sawdust, laid a long
shirt-sleeved arm around Stull's shoulders. He held up his
other hand for a pause in the music. His shirt was wet, sticking to his skin, outlining the undershirt he wore.
His voice was hoarse and triumphant. "Our fine young
brother Stull Clayburn comes to God tonight. Let us all rejoice.
Oh, there will be gladness among the angels in heaven this
night."
I could feel the surrounding waves of emotion rolling over
me. I tried to see Stull again but he was kneeling now. Suddenly I felt my mother's hand in mine and a strong squeeze. I
looked up into her face. She was gazing at me with a question.
A hope. And a longing. My chest tightened with love for her.
But I could not go down the aisle. I could not join.
On the way home my mother spoke to my father but I knew
she was addressing me. "Little old Stull! I know how Nora
and Josh must feel tonight to know that he's accepted the Lord."
There was a short silence. My father spoke quietly, almost
to himself. "Stull has a good head on his shoulders. He's a
smart boy."
"That shows you," Mama nodded, "no one is smart enough
not to need the Lord's saving grace."
"Why don't you get saved, Jon?" Monty piped up from the
�WILMA DYKEM AN
411
seat beside me. He had been a loyal Baptist for two years already.
"Don't push Jon, Monty," Mama said. "He'll know when
he's ready. The Lord works in mysterious ways—" She
reached back and patted me on the knee. But I knew she was
glad that Monty had asked, had reminded me, had prodded.
Alone in bed with my guilt that night I wondered about the
awesome experience all of those around me had had, which I
had not yet known.
"There is a fountain filled with blood...."
The sound of old Number Seven, the midnight train from
Chicago to Charleston, came up to me from the tracks through
Churchill at the bottom of our hill. The engineer played a long
tattoo with his whistle. Mike O'Leary! He was famous from
the Great Lakes to the Atlantic seaboard for his spit-and-polish
engine, gleaming black with bright brass bell and hand-holds,
and the voice he gave to that resonant whistle.
"Whoo—oo—oo, whoo—oo—oo—oo, who...."
The clear lingering call, with each note falling pure and
separate as drops of rain, seemed a cry of such distilled loneliness, echoing from the valley into the hills, that it brought me
a sad, self-conscious comfort.
The next day I could hardly wait to see Stull.
My father had put Monty and me to work for the last two
summers in the Riverbend Farm fields picking tomatoes. I was
eight years old and Monty was ten and all the men told us that
since we didn't have so far to stoop our backs didn't ache the
same way theirs did from the picking. Maybe not. But during
the first days each season I didn't see how anyone's back could
ache more than mine. But then I learned how to give to the
bends, how to rest on one knee at an especially heavy vine. The
ground yielded hot and soft under our bare feet.
At noon Stull brought a fresh supply of water for the pickers.
As he drew up at the end of the field under the shallow
shade of a row of sycamore trees that grew along the riverbank,
I left my row without waiting for anyone to tell me to help with
�412 The Change Hits Home
the water-kegs and ran toward Stull. In his work clothes,
squinting against the midday glare, he didn't appear much different from the way he had every other morning that summer.
"I hope you get these kegs unloaded as quick as you can,"
he was saying to old Orvil Gosnell, the field foreman, as I came
up panting and breathless. "I've got to get home to dinner so I
can take Uncle Jonathan to Jackson City this afternoon."
I could tell by the way Orvil Gosnell spat a wad of tobacco
juice into the bushes that he didn't like the way Stull spoke. He
banged the kegs onto the ground.
"Stull, I want to ride back with you," I blurted out. The idea
had just come to me. Tve got to go home. I'm feeling sick to
my stomach."
My cousin looked at me. The expression on his face did not
change a fraction.
I turned to Orvil Gosnell. "My mother would want me to
come home. She always worries the worst way if our stomachs
are upset."
"That's true," the old man spat again, remembering I suppose all the paraphernalia of separate water jugs and dippers
and straw sunhats that my brother and I had brought to the
fields. "You go on home."
As Stull and I bounced away, I looked over at him. He did
not speak. For all I could tell, the miracle of the night before at
the Kincaid-Truesdale meeting might never occurred.
"I was at the revival last night," I said.
He did not look around. "That man can really talk."
I clutched at the door handle. It was hot from sitting in the
sun and I let loose quickly. "But you were saved," I said.
"That's right."
When he did not go on I tried to. "You professed your sins
and your faith and you accepted the Lord Jesus Christ."
He was looking at me now—back at the road and then at
me.
Was I breaking some unwritten code, committing some unforgivable breach? Was Stull's testimony, his act of faith,
beyond all explanation or statement or discussion? But the
�WILMA DYKEMAN
413
guilt throbbing through those hymns, the loneliness wailing
through Number Seven's whistle, remained inside me from the
night before, and I had to try to know; I had to know.
"Stull," I swallowed dry spit and began again. "Stuli, how
does it feel?"
His gray-blue eyes—the no-color of the hazy summer
sky—stared at me. "How does what feel?"
"The change. The change inside you. Knowing that you've
accepted God's love, and eternity and heaven—"
"You trying to make fun of me?" He was scowling.
I could feel the blood flushing my neck and face.
"Oh no, Stull. I just want to know how it is to believe—"
He stopped scowling. I saw that he was convinced of my
sincerity and, simultaneously, of my stupidity. I grew even
redder. I wanted to stay silent but I went on talking. "You and
I were the only ones in the family who hadn't made professions. I would—if I could," I went ahead lamely.
The car hit a ragged chughole and we bounced on the hard
narrow seats. Stull put in the clutch and shifted to second gear.
"That's what I wanted to ask you about this morning," I
made a last weak effort, "how it is —"
"How what is?"
I did not know what else to say.
We turned from the farm road onto the county highway. I
had begun to suspect that there were no chariots of glory to envelop our spirits, only cars that rattled on errands for our business.
"Mama and Daddy, they'd like it if I went down to Preacher
Truesdale,too—"
This time he answered me. "Why don't you go then?"
"I don't know." And that was a completely honest statement.
"It's the smartest thing," Stull said.
I looked out of the window at the dusty road straight ahead.
"You know you believe in God," he went on more easily.
"After all, even if He isn't there it hasn't done any harm."
I nodded. But I was not satisfied.
�414 The Change Hits Home
f!
So I say, might as well join on up. The church can do good
for you, too.11 He winked at me in a camaraderie we had never
shared before. We did not share it now.
I sat huddled on the seat with my hands beneath my legs,
legs weak as if from a long sickness. We were nearly home. At
our driveway Stull paused and I crawled out of the car. Before
he continued on to the adjoining driveway, his own, he leaned
out the window and said, "Don't think so much, kid. Go on
and join. It'll make you feel better. I'm glad I did.11 He didn't
often say "kid,11 a holdover from his college past. Any other
time but this I would have been flattered to have him address
me so.
When I told my mother I had come home from the tomato
fields because of an upset stomach, it was no longer a total untruth. Everything seemed upset at that moment. My mother's
reaction to any suggestion of sickness satisfied the sufferer totally. Her concern sufficed for the situation and made it easy
for everyone else to take a calm and reassuring outlook. My
mother's personal catalogue of illnesses permitted no minor
ailments. A runny nose heralded pneumonia; a single pain in
the region of the abdomen became a symptom of appendicitis.
Of my stomach disorder she gasped, "It's the season for—
for typhoid!" And her blue eyes widened in alarm as she
telephoned my father at his office. After talking with him she
grew calmer. She brought me baking soda in a glass of water
and put me to bed.
It felt strange to be in bed at midday. My mother had
drawn the shades against the noonday light and the room took
on a golden cavelike glow. From a sewing nook down the hall
came the clean smell of fresh smooth cloth. I knew that
Serena's daughter was ironing there. The familiar thought and
smell comforted me.
But I knew the code I had broken with Stull. Even then I
knew, although I could not have put it into words. We (especially we boys, we men) were not supposed to discuss the innerness of life. We were supposed to observe true division of
Sunday from Monday. We were splintered into a half-dozen
�WILMADYKEMAN
415
fragments and our maturity was measured not by trying to
make the parts into a whole but by juggling the pieces cleverly, separately, so that no one saw the empty spaces.
That night, the last night of the great revival, I stayed at
home. My mother brought me salted chicken broth in one of
her white Haviland consomme cups. The gold band around
its edge gave the broth a slightly metallic flavor as I sipped. I
swallowed its delicacy slowly. It reminded me of times when
my stomach really had been churning and this salty golden
juice had soothed and nourished me back to normal. Remembering made me sad, made me feel older in a way that I did not
want to feel.
From that August day forward I never discussed any but
matters temporal with Stull. And I remained acutely aware of
the embarrassment most Clayburns felt in confronting or discussing the creative, spiritual, moral, sexual, intangible forces
of their lives.
Yet those older ones—my grandmother, my father, my uncles—believed. And who am I to judge their belief? Shall I
judge them against their descendants, against my friends,
against all those lukewarm bodies who do not believe or disbelieve—who have only arrangements, conveniences,
patchworks for their lives?
When Teena died there were letters, condolences, murmured conversations. Those who knew us assumed that this
would be my trough of the wave, my time for asking why and
who and seeking some reconciliation between the master plan
and the daily drone. Lee and Ellie had their questions, too. But
I was arrogant, maybe even apathetic, not to say that they were
really my questions, also.
It was not Teena's death but Deborah's life that led me to
think less about Clayburn-Durant problems and more about
belief.
There is power, power, wonder-working power
In the precious blood of the Lamb.
�416 The Change Hits Home
Was the blood that drenched Deborah's life precious? My
memories and questions weave into nets. At this moment I
find less need to understand my cousin Stull's power than to
appreciate my father Jonathan's strength.
Return the Innocent Earth
1. Jon, the speaker in this selection, says that the Clayburns
believed in Family, God, Law, and Money. What concrete
examples are given which more specifically illustrate these
words?
2. What sensations does Jon associate with Sunday morning?
3. Discuss Jon's inner conflicts with regard to religion.
4. What lesson does Jon learn from his cousin Stull?
�WILMADYKEMAN
Mo. 8
417
�418
The Change Hits Home
JIM WAYNE MILLER (1936- )
A native of western North Carolina, Jim Wayne Miller
earned his undergraduate degree at Berea College in Kentucky.
He continued his studies at Vanderbilt University and received
his Ph.D. in both German and American literature in 1965.
While at Vanderbilt, Miller studied under Fugitive poet
Donald Davidson.
At present, Dr. Miller is a professor of German language
and literature at Western Kentucky University. His stature
and reputation as a poet have grown steadily since his first
volume of poetry, Copperhead Cane, was published in 1964. His
other collections are Dialogue With A Dead Man, The Mountains
Have Come Closer (for which he received the Thomas Wolfe
Literary Award in 1985), Vein of Words, and Nostalgia for 70.
'The Brier Losing Touch With His Traditions" is about a
craftsman who tries to please the public by being authentic.
But he also pleases himself by being himself.
The Brier Losing Touch With His Traditions
Once he was a chairmaker.
People up north discovered him.
They said he was "an authentic mountain craftsman."
�JIM WAYNE MILLER
People came and made pictures of him working,
wrote him up in the newspapers.
He got famous.
Got a lot of orders for his chairs.
When he moved up to Cincinnati
so he could be closer to his market
(besides, a lot of his people lived there now)
he found out he was a Brier.
And when his customers found out
he was using an electric lathe and power drill
just to keep up with all the orders,
they said he was losing touch with his traditions.
His orders fell off something awful.
He figured it had been a bad mistake
to let the magazine people take those pictures
of him with his power tools, clean-shaven,
wearing a flowered sport shirt and drip-dry pants.
So he moved back down to east Kentucky.
Had himself a brochure printed up
with a picture of him using his hand lathe,
bearded, barefoot, in faded overalls.
Then when folks would come from the magazines,
he'd get rid of them before suppertime
so he could put on his shoes, his flowered sport shirt
and double-knit pants, and open a can of beer
and watch the six-thirty news on tv
out of New York and Washington.
He had to have some time to be himself.
419
�420
The Change Hits Home
The Brier Losing Touch With His Traditions
1. What does the term "authentic mountain craftsman"
suggest in this poem?
2. Discuss the irony in the chairmaker's attempt to please his
customers.
3. Has the Brier lost touch with his traditions, as the title
implies?
�KATHERINE STRIPLING BYER
421
KATHRYN STRIPLING BYER (1944 - )
Kathryn Stripling Byer of Cullowhee, North Carolina,
received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the University of
North Carolina at Greensboro where she studied with Fred
Chappell. Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines,
journals, and anthologies. Her first book of poetry, The Girl In
the Midst of the Harvest, which opens with the poem reprinted
here, was published by Texas Tech Press as part of the Associated Writing Programs competition.
Among flyer's honors are the Academy of American Poets
Prize in 1968, the Anne Sexton Poetry Prize for 1978, and a
North Carolina Artist's Fellowship for 1986.
Wide Open, These Gates
Going down the road feeling good, I snap
my fingers. Hear, Hear! At an auction my father
bid sixty-five dollars for a fat Hampshire pig
just by rubbing his nose. When my grandfather
scattered his seed to the four corners, corn stood up
tall as his hat brim. My grandmother's sheets
flapped like bells on the line. Crabbed youth,
crab apple, crepe myrtle, I mumble
�422
The Change Hits Home
as I shuffle downhill, my crabbed youth
behind me like gnats singing. I've come a long way
from what's been described as a mean and starved
corner of backwoods America. That has a ring
to it. Rhythm, like my grandmother's hands
in the bread dough. Her food made the boards creak,
my grandfather mellow. He had a wild temper
when he was a young man. Most folks talk too much,
he'd say, aiming slow spit at a dung beetle.
He never mumbled. Sometimes he talked nonsense
to roosters and fierce setting hens. My nonsense coos
like a dove. Goodbye swallowtails cruising
the pigpen. Goodbye apple dumplings. Goodbye
little turkeys my grandmother fed with her fingers.
Big Belle was a nanny goat. Holler "Halloo"
after sundown and all the cows come home. Some words
are gates swinging wide open, and I walk on through
one more summer that like this road's going
down easy. The gnats sing, and I'm going
to sing. One of these days I'll be gone.
Wide Open, These Gates
1.
Characterize the grandmother and grandfather in the
poem. Although there is little real information, how do
you imagine them?
2. The first line is a play on a song title "Coin' down that road
feelin' bad." Find words and images that have to do with
singing and music.
3. The last stanza has several goodbyes in it. To what is the
poet really saying farewell? Does she seem sad about it?
4. Why do you think the poet chose to begin a collection with
this poem?
�423
COMPOSITION TOPICS
1. Compare/contrast city life and country life.
2. Write a narrative about someone you know who has gone
far away to work or to go to school. Describe their
experience—their feelings, problems, what they learned.
3. Write an essay about your dreams and plans.
ACTIVITIES
The chapter you now add to your book will tell more about
your family. Families frequently have heirlooms, prized possessions which they pass on from one generation to the next.
An heirloom may be a watch, a gun, furniture, or the old iron
skillet your grandmother used. Write about two of these heirlooms. Give the history and description of each and include
photographs or drawings.
Families also have important documents such as land grants,
wills, and marriage licenses. Photocopy a family document to
include in this chapter of your family scrapbook.
�This page intentionally left blank
�425
CHAPTER 7
Appalachian Emigration:
Looking for Work,
Longing for Home
During and after World War II there was a tremendous
exodus from the Appalachian region to the industrial centers
of the North. Significant numbers of mountain people
moved to such cities as Dayton, Ohio; Chicago, Illinois; and
Detroit, Michigan. They left looking for work and a better
life.
At that time the Appalachian region could offer only lowpaying jobs in coal mining, lumbering, or farming. The factories of the North promised good money, better schools, and
excitement. Still, many were disappointed with life far away
from friends and family. They found themselves in a strange
world, sometimes even cruel, where people made fun of their
ways and their talk. People in these cities labeled them as
"Briers," "Sams" (Southern Appalachian Mountaineers), and
"Hillbillies."
Harriette Arnow/s novel The Dollmaker, which has been
�426
made into a television movie starring Jane Fonda, is the most
famous treatment of Appalachian emigration. As the central
character Gertie Nevels moves from the mountains to the industrial North and struggles to achieve her place there, she
symbolizes the pioneer spirit of former times. Yet Gertie, in
spite of her will to survive, becomes a victim. She is caught
up in a force over which she has no control: the lure of industry. As a resident of a housing slum in Detroit, she becomes a displaced person in a foreign land where she dreams
of her Kentucky hills.
In the 1960s when more opportunities opened up in Appalachia and the population in the mountains began to grow,
this emigration began reversing. New highways, water systems, and industrial parks had opened the region to more
businesses. Manufacturers and retailers gave people more
diversified opportunities to live and work in the area.
There is another, more compelling reason for the reversal
in this trend. People in Appalachia have always felt a strong
tie to their families. They want the whole clan in one place.
They also feel a strong attachment to the land. The selections
in Chapter 7 are about leaving and coming home. The pull of
kinship and the longing for mountain sights are powerful
motifs for these writers.
�ROBERT MORGAN
427
ROBERT MORGAN (1944- )
Robert Morgan was born in Henderson, North Carolina,
and grew up near Zirconia on a farm which had been in his
family since 1840.
After studying science and math at the University of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, he switched to English and graduated
with honors in writing. While working on his MFA at UNCGreensboro, he was influenced by Fred Chappell, who is also
included in this anthology.
Since 1965 he has published over three hundred poems in
journals and popular magazines. In addition, he has published
six collections of poetry—Zirconia Poems, The Voice in the
Crosshairs, Red Owl, Land Diving, Groundwork, and Trunk &
Thicket, The National Endowment for the Arts has awarded
him two fellowships.
Although Robert Morgan has taught creative writing at
Salem College and is now at Cornell University, he has also
painted houses and worked at odd jobs to support his family.
This poem concerns a boy's dream of leaving the hard life
of the farm to find an easier one.
�428
Appalachian Emigration
Bean Money
Back from the market late with a watermelon
and his bib-pocket full of cash
my father shoved a fist of back-pay
for the summer at me, the yield from
digging holes and tying strings,
lugging hampers in the rain with heat rash,
stings and blisters. In my room I'd sit
with dirty feet and sweat-ripe skin
on the sheets and unwad the damp bills
to press in stacks like pages of a ledger
of the hot days, the green and gray ink
more lasting than sunburn or calluses,
and telling of my labor with a one-eye
lit pyramid. I collated
and banded the leaves in bundles
and counted out the coins like next year's
seeds into the old tobacco pouch.
That consecrated metal was an abstract
drawn off the soil and sweat and
cast into a jewelry of value.
I meant those struck emblems to act
as compact fuel, like nuclear pellets,
to power my long excursion out of the sun
and beyond the ridges, and put
them all in a paper box above the closet
door to trade later; the young summers
become signs to be translated
again into paper, ink and paper,
in the cool timeless leisure I saw
while washing my feet on the back steps
and spitting melon seeds
into the cricket-haunted dark.
�ROBERT MORGAN
429
Bean Money
1. Why does the boy consider his summer wages "consecrated
metal" that are "cast into a jewelry of value"?
2. What does the boy plan to do with his money?
3. What valuable lessons can a young person learn from
earning and saving his own money?
�ROBERT MORGAN
No. 9
430
�BOBBIE ANN MASON
BOBBIE ANN MASON (1941 -
431
)
Bobbie Ann Mason, who grew up near Paducah, Kentucky,
writes about characters and settings that are no longer rural yet
are not suburban. She captures transition, both the old and
new mingling.
She is the author of Nabokov's Garden, The Girl Sleuth, and
Shiloh, a collection of short stories.
This story, first published in The New Yorker before being
included in Shiloh, depicts Nancy Cleveland living the life of a
modern, middle-class woman in Philadelphia. She feels a
strong identity with the women of her family back home.
Although she leaves her childhood home in Kentucky to
go to school and afterwards to live in the Northeast, she returns
when her aging Granny must go to a nursing home. Family
photographs which tie her to past generations lure her home.
Nancy Culpepper
When Nancy received her parents' letter saying they were
moving her grandmother to a nursing home, she said to her
husband, "I really should go help them out. And I've got to
save Granny's photographs. They might get lost." Jack did not
try to discourage her, and she left for Kentucky soon after the
letter came.
�432
Appalachian Emigration
Nancy has been vaguely wanting to move to Kentucky, and
she has persuaded Jack to think about relocating his photography business. They live in the country, near a small town an
hour's drive from Philadelphia. Their son, Robert, who is
eight, has fits when they talk about moving. He does not want
to leave his room or his playmates. Once, he asked, "What
about our chickens?"
"They have chickens in Kentucky," Nancy explained.
"Don't worry. We're not going yet."
Later he asked, "But what about the fish in the pond?"
"I don't know," said Nancy. "I guess we'll have to rent a UHaul."
When Nancy arrives at her parents' farm in western Kentucky, her mother says, "Your daddy and me's both got inner
ear and nerves. And we couldn't lift Granny, or anything, if
we had to all of a sudden."
"The flu settled in my ears," Daddy says, cocking his head
at an angle.
"Mine's still popping," says Mother.
In a few days they plan to move Granny, and they will
return to their own house, which they have been renting out.
For nine years, they have lived next door, in Granny's house,
in order to care for her. There Mother has had to cook on an
ancient gas range, with her mother-in-law hovering over her,
supervising. Granny used only lye soap on dishes, and it was
five years before Nancy's mother defied her and bought some
Joy. By then, Granny was confined to her bed, crippled with
arthritis. Now she is ninety-three.
"You didn't have to come back," Daddy says to Nancy at
the dinner table. "We could manage."
"I want to help you move," Nancy says. "And I want to
make sure Granny's pictures don't get lost. Nobody cares
about them but me, and I'm afraid someone will throw them
away."
Nancy wants to find out if Granny has a picture of a greatgreat-aunt named Nancy Culpepper. No one in the family
seems to know anything about her, but Nancy is excited by the
�BOBBIE ANN MASON
433
thought of an ancestor with the same name as hers. Since she
found out about her, Nancy has been going by her maiden
name, but she has given up trying to explain this to her mother,
who persists in addressing letters to "Mr. and Mrs. Jack
Cleveland."
"There's some pictures hid behind Granny's closet wall,"
Daddy tells Nancy. "When we hooked up the coal-oil stove
through the fireplace a few years ago, they got walled in."
"That's ridiculous! Why would you do that?"
"They were in the way." He stands up and puts on his cap,
preparing to go out to feed his calves.
"Will Granny care if I tear the wall down?" Nancy asks,
joking.
Daddy laughs, acting as though he understood, but Nancy
knows he is pretending. He seems tired, and his billed cap
looks absurdly small perched on his head.
When Nancy and Jack were married, years ago, in Massachusetts, Nancy did not want her parents to come to the wedding. She urged them not to make the long trip. "It's no big
deal," she told them on the telephone. "It'll last ten minutes.
We're not even going on a honeymoon right away, because we
both have exams Monday."
Nancy was in graduate school, and Jack was finishing his
B.A. For almost a year they had been renting a large old house
on a lake. The house had a field-rock fireplace with a heartshaped stone centered above the mantel. Jack, who was studying design, thought the heart was tasteless, and he covered it
with a Peter Max poster.
At the ceremony, Jack's dog, Grover, was present, and instead of organ music, a stereo played Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts
Club Band. It was 1967. Nancy was astonished by the
minister's white robe and his beard and by the fact that he
chain-smoked. The preachers she remembered from
childhood would have called him a heathen, she thought.
Most of the wedding pictures, taken by a friend of Jack's,
turned out to be trick photography—blurred faces and double
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exposures.
The party afterward lasted all night. Jack blew up two
hundred balloons and kept the fire going. They drank too
much wine-and-TUp punch. Guests went in and out, popping
balloons with cigarettes, taking walks by the lake. Everyone
was looking for the northern lights, which were supposed to
be visible that evening. Holding on to Jack, Nancy searched
the murky sky, feeling that the two of them were lone travelers
on the edge of some outer-space adventure. At the same time,
she kept thinking of her parents at home, probably watching
Gunsmoke.
"I saw them once," Jack said. "They were fantastic."
"What was it like?"
"Shower curtains."
"Really? That's amazing."
"Luminescent shower curtains."
Tm shivering," Nancy said. The sky was blank.
"Let's go in. It's too cloudy anyway. Someday we'll see
them. I promise."
Someone had taken down the poster above the fireplace
and put up the picture of Sgt. Pepper—the cutout that came
with the album. Sgt. Pepper overlooked the room like a stern
father.
"What's the matter?" a man asked Nancy. He was Dr.
Doyle, her American History 1861-1865 professor. "This is
your wedding. Loosen up." He burst a balloon and Nancy
jumped.
When someone offered her a joint, she refused, then
wondered why. The house was filled with strangers, and the
Beatles album played over and over. Jack and Nancy danced,
hugging each other in a slow two-step that was all wrong for
the music. They drifted past the wedding presents, lined up
on a table Jack had fashioned from a door—hand-dipped
candles, a silver roach clip, Joy of Cooking, signed pottery in nonfunctional shapes. Nancy wondered what her parents had
eaten for supper. Possibly fried steak, two kinds of peas, biscuits, blackberry pie. The music shifted and the songs merged
�BOBBIE ANN MASON
435
together; Jack and Nancy kept dancing.
"There aren't any stopping places," Nancy said. She was
crying. "Songs used to have stopping places in between."
"Let's just keep on dancing," Jack said.
Nancy was thinking of the blackberry bushes at the farm
in Kentucky, which spread so wildly they had to be burned
down every few years. They grew on the banks of the creek,
which in summer shrank to still, small occasional pools. After
a while Nancy realized that Jack was talking to her. He was
explaining how he could predict exactly when the last, dying
chord on the album was about to end.
"Listen," he said. ''There. Right there."
Nancy's parents had met Jack a few months before the wedding, during spring break, when Jack and Nancy stopped in
Kentucky on their way to Denver to see an old friend of Jack's.
The visit involved some elaborate lies about their sleeping arrangements on the trip.
At the supper table, Mother and Daddy passed bowls of
food self-consciously. The table was set with some napkins left
over from Christmas. The vegetables were soaked in bacon
grease, and Jack took small helpings. Nancy sat rigidly, watching every movement, like a cat stationed near a bird feeder.
Mother had gathered poke, because it was spring, and she said
to Jack, "I bet you don't eat poke salet up there."
"It's weeds," said Nancy.
"I've never heard of it," Jack said. He hesitated, then took
a small serving.
"It's poison if it gets too big," Daddy said. He turned to
Nancy's mother. "I think you picked this too big. You're going
to poison us all."
"He's teasing," Nancy said.
"The berries is what's poison," said Mother, laughing.
"Wouldn't that be something? They'll say up there I tried to
poison your boyfriend the minute I met him!"
Everyone laughed. Jack's face was red. He was wearing
an embroidered shirt. Nancy watched him trim the fat from
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Appalachian Emigration
his ham as precisely as if he were using an X-Acto knife on mat
board.
"How's Granny?" Nancy asked. Her grandmother was
then living alone in her own house.
"Tolerable well," said Daddy.
"We'll go to see her," Jack said. "Nancy told me all about
her."
"She cooks her egg in her oats to keep from washing an
extry dish," Mother said.
Nancy played with her food. She was looking at the pink
dining room wall and the plastic flowers in the window. On
the afternoon Jack and Nancy first met, he took her to a junk
shop, where he bought a stained-glass window for his
bathroom. Nancy would never have thought of going to a junk
shop. It would not have occurred to her to put a stained-glass
window in a bathroom.
"What do you aim to be when you graduate?" Daddy asked
Jack abruptly, staring at him. Jack's hair looked oddly like an
Irish setter's ears, Nancy thought suddenly.
"Won't you have to go in the army?" Mother asked.
"Ill apply for an assistantship if my grades are good
enough," Jack said. "Anything to avoid the draft."
Nancy's father was leaning into his plate, as though he
were concentrating deeply on each bite.
He makes good grades," Nancy said.
"Nancy always made all A's," Daddy said to Jack.
"We gave her a dollar for ever' one," said Mother. "She kept
us broke."
"In graduate school they don't give A's," said Nancy. "They
just give S's and U's."
Jack wadded up his napkin. Then Mother served fried pies
with white sauce. "Nancy always loved these better than anything," she said.
After supper, Nancy showed Jack the farm. As they
walked through the fields, Nancy felt that he was seeing peaceful landscapes—arrangements of picturesque cows, an old red
barn. She had never thought of the place this way before; it
�BOBBIE ANN MASON
437
reminded her of prints in a dime store.
While her mother washes the dishes, Nancy takes Granny's
dinner to her, and sits in a rocking chair while Granny eats in
bed. The food is on an old TV-dinner tray. The compartments
hold chicken and dressing, mashed potatoes, field peas, green
beans, and vinegar slaw. The servings are tiny—six green
beans, a spoonful of peas.
Granny's teeth no longer fit, and she has to bite sideways,
like a cat. She wears the lower teeth only during meals, but she
will not get new ones. She says it would be wasteful to be
buried with a new three-hundred-dollar set of teeth. In between bites, Granny guzzles iced tea from a Kentucky Lakes
mug. "That slaw don't have enough sugar in it," she says. "It
makes my mouth draw up." She smacks her lips.
Nancy says, "I've heard the food is really good at the Orchard Acres Rest Home."
Granny does not reply for a moment. She is working on a
chicken gristle, which causes her teeth to clatter. Then she says,
"I ain't going nowhere."
"Mother and Daddy are moving back into their house. You
don't want to stay here by yourself, do you?" Nancy's voice
sounds hollow to her.
"I'll be all right. I can do for myself."
When Granny swallows, it sounds like water spilling from
a bucket into a cistern. After Nancy's parents moved in, they
covered Granny's old cistern, but Nancy still remembers drawing the bucket up from below. The chains made a sound like
crying.
Granny pushes her food with a piece of bread, cleaning her
tray. "I can do a little cooking," she says. "I can sweep."
"Try this boiled custard, Granny. I made it just for you.
Just the way you used to make it."
"It ain't yaller enough," says Granny, tasting the custard.
"Store-bought eggs."
When she finishes, she removes her lower teeth and sloshes
them in a plastic tumbler on the bedside table. Nancy looks
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away. On the wall are Nancy's high school graduation
photograph and a picture of Jesus. Nancy looks sassy; her
graduation hat resembles a tilted lid. Jesus has a halo, set at
about the same angle.
Now Nancy ventures a question about the pictures hidden
behind the closet wall. At first Granny is puzzled. Then she
seems to remember.
M
They/re behind the stovepipe," she says. Grimacing with
pain, she stretches her legs out slowly, and then, holding her
head, she sinks back into her pillows and draws the quilt over
her shoulders. "Ill look for them one of these days—when I am
able."
Jack photographs weeds twigs,pond reflections,silhouettes of Robert against the sun with his arms flung out like a
scarecrow's. Sometimes he works in the evenings in his studio
at home, drinking tequila sunrises and composing bizarre still
lifes with light bulbs, wine bottles, Tinker Toys, Lucite cubes.
He makes arrangements of gourds look like breasts.
On the day Nancy tried to explain to Jack about her need to
save Granny's pictures, a hailstorm interrupted her. It was the
only hailstorm she had ever seen in the North, and she had forgotten all about them. Granny always said a hailstorm meant
that God was cleaning out his icebox. Nancy stood against a
white Masonite wall mounted with a new series of photographs
and looked out the window at tulips being smashed. The ice
pellets littered the ground like shattered glass. Then, as suddenly as it had arrived, the hailstorm was over.
"Pictures didn't use to be so common," Nancy said. Jack's
trash can was stuffed with rejected prints, and Robert's face was
crumpled on top. "I want to keep Granny's pictures as
reminders."
"If you think that will solve anything," said Jack, squinting
at a negative he was holding against the light.
"I want to see if she has one of Nancy Culpepper."
"That's you."
"There was another one. She was a great-great-aunt or
�BOBBIE ANN MASON
439
"There was another one. She was a great-great-aunt or
something, on my daddy's side. She had the same name as
mine."
"There's another one of you?" Jacksaid with mock disbelief.
Tm a reincarnation," she said, playing along.
"There's nobody else like you. You're one of a kind."
Nancy turned away and stared deliberately at Jack's pictures, which were held up by clear-headed pushpins, like
translucent eyes dotting the wall. She examined them one by
one, moving methodically down the row—stumps, puffballs,
tree roots, close-ups of cat feet.
Nancy first learned about her ancestor on a summer Sunday a few years before, when she took her grandmother to visit
the Culpepper graveyard, beside an oak grove off the Paducah
highway. The old oaks had spread their limbs until they
shaded the entire cemetery, and the tombstones poked through
weeds like freak mushrooms. Nancy wandered among the
graves, while Granny stayed beside her husband's gravestone.
It had her own name on it too, with a blank space for the date.
Nancy told Jack afterward that when she saw the stone
marked "NANCY CULPEPPER, 1833-1905," she did a double
take. "It was like time-lapse photography," she said. "I mean,
I was standing there looking into the past and the future at the
same time. It was weird."
"She wasn't kin to me, but she lived down the road," Granny explained to Nancy. "She was your granddaddy's aunt."
"Did she look like me?" Nancy asked.
"I don't know. She was real old." Granny touched the
stone, puzzled. "I can't figure why she wasn't buried with her
husband's people," she said.
On Saturday, Nancy helps her parents move some of their
furniture to the house next door. It is only a short walk, but
when the truck is loaded they all ride in it, Nancy sitting between her parents. The truck's muffler sounds like thunder,
and they drive without speaking. Daddy backs up to the porch.
The paint on the house is peeling, and the latch of the storm
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Appalachian Emigration
door is broken. Daddy pulls at the door impatiently, saying,
H
I sure wish I could burn down these old houses and retire to
Arizona.11 For as long as Nancy can remember, her father has
been sending away for literature on Arizona.
Her mother says, "We'll never go anywhere. We've got our
dress tail on a bedpost."
"What does that mean?" asks Nancy, in surprise.
"Use to, if a storm was coming, people would put a bedpost
on a child's dress tail, to keep him from blowing away. In other
words, we're tied down."
"That's funny. I never heard of that."
"I guess you think we're just ignorant." Mother says. "The
way we talk."
"No, I don't."
Daddy props the door open, and Nancy helps him ease a
mattress over the threshold. Mother apologizes for not being
able to lift anything.
'Tin in your way," she says, stepping off the porch into a
dead canna bed.
Nancy stacks boxes in her old room. It seems smaller than
she remembered, and the tenants have scarred the woodwork.
Mentally, she refurnishes the room—the bed by the window,
the desk opposite. The first time Jack came to Kentucky he slept
here, while Nancy slept on the couch in the living room. Now
Nancy recalls the next day, as they headed west, with Jack accusing her of being dishonest, foolishly trying to protect her
parents. "You let them think you're such a goody-goody, the
ideal daughter," he said. "I bet you wouldn't tell them if you
made less than an A."
Nancy's father comes in and runs his hand across the ceiling, gathering up strings of dust. Tugging at a loose piece of
door facing, he says to Nancy, "Never trust renters. They won't
take care of a place."
"What will you do with Granny's house?"
"Nothing. Not as long as she's living."
"Will you rent it out then?"
"No. I won't go through that again." He removes his cap
�BOBBIE ANN MASON
441
and smooths his hair, then puts the cap back on. Leaning
against the wall, he talks about the high cost of the nursing
home. "I never thought it would come to this," he says. "I
wouldn't do it if there was any other way."
"You don't have any choice,11 says Nancy.
"The government will pay you to break up your family," he
says. "If I get like your granny, I want you just to take me out
in the woods and shoot me."
"She told me she wasn't going," Nancy says.
"They've got a big recreation room for the ones that can get
around," Daddy says. "They've even got disco dancing."
When Daddy laughs, his voice catches, and he has to clear
his throat Nancy laughs with him. "I can just see Granny disco
dancing. Are you sure you want me to shoot you? That place
sounds like fun."
They go outside, where Nancy's mother is cleaning out a
patch of weed-choked perennials. "I planted these iris the year
we moved," she says.
"They're pretty," says Nancy. "I haven't seen that color up
North."
Mother stands up and shakes her foot awake. "I sure hope
y'all can move down here," she says. "If s a shame you have to
be so far away. Robert grows so fast I don't know him."
"We might someday. I don't know if we can."
"Looks like Jack could make good money if he set up a
studio in town. Nowadays people want fancy pictures."
"Even the school pictures cost a fortune," Daddy says.
"Jack wants to free-lance for publications," says Nancy.
"And there aren't any here. There's not even a camera shop
within fifty miles."
"But people want pictures," Mother says. "They've gone
back to decorating living rooms with family pictures. In antique frames."
Daddy smokes a cigarette on the porch, while Nancy circles
the house. A beetle has infested the oak trees, causing clusters
of leaves to turn brown. Nancy stands on the concrete lid of
an old cistern and watches crows fly across a cornfield. In the
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Appalachian Emigration
distance a series of towers slings power lines across a flat sea
of soybeans. Her mother is talking about Granny. Nancy
thinks of Granny on the telephone, the day of her wedding, innocently asking, "What are you going to cook for your wedding breakfast?" Later, seized with laughter, Nancy told Jack
what Granny had said.
"I almost said to her, 'We usually don't eat breakfast, we
sleep so late!/H
Jack was busy blowing up balloons. When he didn't laugh,
Nancy said, "Isn't that hilarious? She's really out of the
nineteenth century."
"You don't have to make me breakfast," said Jack.
"In her time, it meant something really big," Nancy said
helplessly. "Don't you see?"
Now Nancy's mother is saying, "The way she has to have
that milk of magnesia every night, when I know good and well
she don't need it. She thinks she can't live without it."
"What's wrong with her?" asks Nancy.
"She thinks she's got a knot in her bowels. But ain't nothing wrong with her but that head-swimming and arthritis."
Mother jerks a long morning glory vine out of the marigolds.
"Hardening of the arteries is what makes her head swim," she
says.
"We better get back and see about her," Daddy says, but he
does not get up immediately. The crows are racing above the
power lines.
Later, Nancy spreads a Texaco map of the United States out
on Granny's quilt. "I want to show you where I live," she says.
"Philadelphia's nearly a thousand miles from here."
"Reach me my specs," says Granny, as she struggles to sit
up. "How did you get here?"
"Flew. Daddy picked me up at the airport in Paducah."
"Did you come by the bypass or through town?"
"The bypass," says Nancy. Nancy shows her where Pennsylvania is on the map. "I flew from Philadelphia to Louisville to Paducah. There's California. That's where Robert was
born."
�BOBBIE ANN MASON
443
"I haven't seen a geography since I was twenty years old,"
Granny says. She studies the map, running her fingers over it
as though she were caressing fine material. "Law, I didn't
know where Floridy was. It's way down there."
Tve been to Florida," Nancy says.
Granny lies back, holding her head as if it were a delicate
china bowl. In a moment she says, "Tell your mamma to thaw
me up some of them strawberries I picked."
"When were you out picking strawberries, Granny?"
"They're in the freezer of my refrigerator. Back in the back.
In a little milk carton." Granny removes her glasses and waves
them in the air.
"Larry was going to come and play with me, but he couldn't
come," Robert says to Nancy on the telephone that evening.
"He had a stomachache."
"That's too bad. What did you do today?"
"We went to Taco Bell and then we went to the woods so
Daddy could take pictures of Indian pipes."
"What are those?"
"I don't know. Daddy knows."
"We didn't find any," Jack says on the extension. "I think
it's the wrong time of year. How's Kentucky?"
Nancy tells Jack about helping her parents move. "My bed
is gone, so tonight I'll have to sleep on a couch in the hallway,"
she says. "It's really dreary here in this old house. Everything
looks so bare."
"How's your grandmother?"
"The same. She's dead set against that rest home, but what
can they do?"
"Do you still want to move down there?" Jack asks.
"I don't know."
"I know how we could take the chickens to Kentucky," says
Robert in an excited burst.
"How?"
"We could give them sleeping pills and then put them in
the trunk so they'd be quiet."
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Appalachian Emigration
'That sounds gruesome,11 Jack says.
Nancy tells Robert not to think about moving. There is
static on the line. Nancy has trouble hearing Jack. "We're your
family too," he is saying.
"I didn't mean to abandon you," she says.
"Have you seen the pictures yet?"
"No. Fm working up to that."
"Nancy Culpepper, the original?"
"You bet," says Nancy, a little too quickly. She hears Robert
hang up. "Is Robert O.K.?" she asks through the static.
"Oh, sure."
"He doesn't think I moved without him?"
"He'll be all right."
"He didn't tell me good-bye."
"Don't worry," says Jack.
"She's been after me about those strawberries till I could
wring her neck," says Mother as she and Nancy are getting
ready for bed. "She's talking about some strawberries she put
up in nineteen seventy-one. I've told her and told her that she
eat them strawberries back then, but won't nothing do but for
her to have them strawberries."
"Give her some others," Nancy says.
"She'd know the difference. She don't miss a thing when
it comes to what's hers. But sometimes she's just as liable to
forget her name."
Mother is trembling, and then she is crying. Nancy pats
her mother's hair, which is gray and wiry and sticks out in
sprigs. Wiping her eyes, Mother says, "All the kinfolks will
talk. 'Look what they done to her, poor helpless thing/ It'll
probably kill her, to move her to that place."
"When you move back home you can get all your antiques
out of the barn," Nancy says. "You'll be in your own house
again. Won't that be nice?"
Mother doesn't answer. She takes some sheets and quilts
from a closet and hands them to Nancy. "That couch lays
good," she says.
�BOBBIE ANN MASON
445
When Nancy wakes up, the covers are on the floor, and for
a moment she does not remember where she is. Her digital
watch says 2:43. Then it tells the date. In the darkness she has
no sense of distance, and it seems to her that the red numerals
could be the size of a billboard, only seen from far away.
Jack has told her that this kind of insomnia is a sign of
depression, while the other kind—inability to fall asleep at bedtime—is a sign of anxiety. Nancy always thought he had it
backward, but now she thinks he may be right. A flicker of distant sheet lightning exposes the bleak walls with the suddenness of a flashbulb. The angles of the hall seem unfamiliar, and
the narrow couch makes Nancy feel small and alone. When
Jack and Robert come to Kentucky with her, they all sleep in the
living room, and in the early morning Nancy's parents pass
through to get to the bathroom. "We're just one big happy family,ft Daddy announces, to disguise his embarrassment when he
awakens them. Now, for some reason, Nancy recalls Jack's
strange still lifes, and she thinks of the black irises and the
polished skulls of cattle suspended in the skies of O'Keeffe
paintings. The irises are like thunderheads. The night they
were married, Nancy and Jack collapsed into bed, falling asleep
immediately, their heads swirling. The party was still going on,
and friends from New York were staying over. Nancy woke up
the next day saying her new name, and feeling that once again,
in another way, she had betrayed her parents. "The one time
they really thought they knew what I was doing, they didn't at
all," she told Jack, who was barely awake. The visitors had gone
out for the Sunday newspapers, and they brought back doughnuts. They had doughnuts and wine for breakfast. Someone
made coffee later.
In the morning, a slow rain blackens the fallen oak branches
in the yard. In Granny's room the curtains are gray with
shadows. Nancy places an old photograph album in Granny's
lap. Silently, Granny turns pages of blank-faced babies in long
white dresses like wedding gowns. Nancy's father is a boy in
a sailor suit. Men and women in pictures the color of cafe' au
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Appalachian Emigration
kit stand around picnic tables. The immense trees in these settings are shaggy and dark. Granny cannot find Nancy Culpepper in the album. Quickly, she flips past a picture of her
husband. Then she almost giggles as she points to a girl.
"That's me."
"I wouldn't have recognized you, Granny."
"Why, it looks just like me." Granny strokes the picture, as
though she were trying to feel the dress. "That was my favorite
dress," she says. "It was brown poplin, with grosgrain ribbon
and self-covered buttons. Thirty-two of them. And all those
tucks. It took me three weeks to work up that dress."
Nancy points to the pictures one by one, asking Granny to
identify them. Granny does not notice Nancy writing the
names in a notebook. Aunt Sass, Uncle Joe, Dove and Pear Culpepper, Hortense Culpepper.
"Hort Culpepper went to Texas," says Granny. "She had
TB."
"Tell me about that," Nancy urges her.
"There wasn't anything to tell. She got homesick for her
mammy's cooking." Granny closes the album and falls back
against her pillows, saying, "All those people are gone."
While Granny sleeps, Nancy gets a flashlight and opens the
closet. The inside is crammed with the accumulation of
decades—yellowed newspapers, boxes of greeting cards, bags
of string, and worn-out stockings. Granny's best dress, a blue
bonded knit she has hardly worn, is in plastic wrapping. Nancy
pushes the clothing aside and examines the wall. To her right,
a metal pipe runs vertically through the closet. Backing up
against the dresses, Nancy shines the light on the corner and
discovers a large framed picture wedged behind the pipe. By
tugging at the frame, she is able to work it gradually through
the narrow space between the wall and the pipe. In the picture
a man and woman, whose features are sharp and clear, are sitting expectantly on a brocaded love seat. Nancy imagines that
this is a wedding portrait.
In the living room, a TV evangelist is urging viewers to call
him, toll free. Mother turns the TV off when Nancy appears
�BOBBIE ANN MASON
447
with the picture, and Daddy stands up and helps her hold it
near a window.
"I think that's Uncle John!" he says excitedly. "He was my
favorite uncle."
"They're none of my people," says Mother, studying the
picture through her bifocals.
"He died when I was little, but I think that's him," says
Daddy. "Him and Aunt Lucy Culpepper."
"Who was she?" Nancy asks.
"Uncle John's wife."
"I figured that," says Nancy impatiently. "But who was
she?"
"I don't know." He is still looking at the picture, running
his fingers over the man's face.
Back in Granny's room, Nancy pulls the string that turns
on the ceiling light, so that Granny can examine the picture.
Granny shakes her head slowly. "I never saw them folks before
in all my life."
Mother comes in with a dish of strawberries.
"Did I pick these?" Granny asks.
"No. You eat yours about ten years ago," Mother says.
Granny puts in her teeth and eats the strawberries in slurps,
missing her mouth twice. "Let me see them people again," she
says, waving her spoon. Her teeth make the sound of a baby
rattle.
"Nancy Hollins," says Granny. "She was a Culpepper."
"That's Nancy Culpepper?" cries Nancy.
"That's not Nancy Culpepper," Mother says. "That
woman's got a rat in her hair. They wasn't in style back when
Nancy Culpepper was alive."
Granny's face is flushed and she is breathing heavily. "She
was a real little-bitty old thing," she says in a high, squeaky
voice. "She never would talk. Everybody thought she was
curious. Plumb curious."
"Are you sure it's her?" Nancy says.
"If I'm not mistaken."
"She don't remember," Mother says to Nancy. "Her mind
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Appalachian Emigration
gets confused."
Granny removes her teeth and lies back, her bones grinding. Her chest heaves with exhaustion. Nancy sits down in the
rocking chair, and as she rocks back and forth she searches the
photograph, exploring the features of the young woman, who
is wearing an embroidered white dress, and the young man, in
a curly beard that starts below his chin, framing his face like a
ruffle. The woman looks frightened—of the camera perhaps—
but nevertheless her deep-set eyes sparkle like shards of glass.
This young woman would be glad to dance to "Lucy in the Sky
with Diamonds" on her wedding day, Nancy thinks. The man
seems bewildered, as if he did not know what to expect, marrying a woman who has her eyes fixed on something so far
away.
Nancy Culpepper
1. Both Nancy and her husband, a photographer, have an
interest in pictures. Why, then, does Nancy have to explain
her need to save Granny's pictures? Why does she have
this need?
2. This story contrasts Nancy's present life with that of the
past. How are they different?
3. How did Nancy react when she saw the stone marked
"Nancy Culpepper, 1833-1905"?
4. This story does not have the usual conflict which is present
in many short stories; instead it subordinates conflict to
revelation of character. What do you learn about Nancy
Culpepper?
�JIM WAYNE MILLER
449
JIM WAYNE MILLER (1936- )
A native of western North Carolina, Jim Wayne Miller
earned his undergraduate degree at Berea College in Kentucky.
He continued his studies at Vanderbilt and received his Ph.D
in both German and American literature in 1965. While at
Vanderbilt, Miller studied under Fugitive poet Donald Davidson.
At present, Dr. Miller is a professor of German language
and literature at Western Kentucky University. His stature
and reputation as a poet have grown steadily since his first
volume of poetry, Copperhead Cane, was published in 1964. His
other collections are Dialogue With A Dead Man, The Mountains
Have Come Closer, Vein of Words, and Nostalgia for 70. He
received the Thomas Wolfe Award in 1985 for The Mountains
Have Come Closer.
"Turn Your Radio On" is about a kind of homesickness
common to those who emigrated to northern cities.
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Appalachian Emigration
Turn Your Radio On
I
He couldn't hear his own thoughts in the city that never slept.
Like a voice on a far-off radio station, his thoughts rose
and fell in a storm of static. The city's rush and roar
even poured through his dreams, boiling up like a waterfall.
Asleep or waking, he tried to keep a sense of direction south.
Lying awake in the smoky carbon darkness of northern
nights
facing east, he kept a knowledge, like a book under his pillow,
that the mountains lay to his right, beyond the mills and
warehouses.
But sometimes he'd come awake in darkness and find the
room
had turned in the slow current of his sleep. He would not rest
again until he'd righted the room, and sleep was drifting
away from the waterfall's roar toward the quietness of mountains.
But he never drifted home before he woke. He felt so stilled
inside, a breathing silence. It was as if his thoughts had been
a friend, a buddy who went everywhere with him. Now he
turned and found that old companion hadn't followed him
here.
n
Sometimes he'd sit for hours looking through a shoebox
of family photographs: his grandfather leading a pair of
Walker foxhounds; the old man atop a boulder in the Bearwallow
holding his squirrel gun like a walking stick, or on the porch
�JIM WAYNE MILLER
451
with his grandmother, both of them sitting in split-bottom
chairs.
Weathered and home-made like the chairs they sat in, and like
the house
and barn, so comfortably in place, they looked like one
another.
Something about the way they sat spoke to him through his
own thoughts
all the way from the mountains, like a powerful transmitter:
this place
belongs to us, their faces said, and we belong to it.
When it's time, we come out on this porch and take our ease,
and talk, as naturally as treefrogs in the poplars sing toward
dark.
Turn Your Radio On
1. The poet compares the sound of the city to a waterfall. Is
this a valid comparison? Explain.
2. Discuss the line in the fourth stanza "It was as if his thoughts
had been a friend...."
3
In what way are the mountains like a powerful transmitter
to someone who lives in the city?
4. Have you ever been separated from your home and family
like the person in the poem? What did you miss most
during this separation?
�452 Appalachian Emigration
BORDEN DEAL (1922-1984)
Born in northeastern Mississippi, Borden Deal spent his
youth working in a circus, on a showboat, and in the Civilian
Conservation Corps. Following Navy service, he earned a B. A.
from the University of Alabama.
He was a correspondent for Associated Films and a radio
copywriter before becoming a full-time writer in 1955. He won
a Guggenhiem Fellowship in 1957. His short stories are anthologized in Best American Short Stones of 1949 and 1962 and
in several textbooks. More than 100 of his short stories have
appeared in popular and literary magazines. Translated into
more than twenty languages, his stories have been adapted for
film, stage, and radio. He also published fourteen novels, some
under the pseudonym Lee Borden.
"Antaeus" was a Greek god whose strength came from
keeping his feet solidly on the earth. This is a story about T.J.,
a southern farm boy removed to a northern industrial city, who
comes to realize that he must leave the city and find a place
where he can dig his toes into the soil.
Antaeus
This was during the wartime, when lots of people were
coming North for jobs in factories and war industries, when
�BORDEN DEAL
453
people moved around a lot more than they do now, and sometimes kids were thrown into new groups and new lives that
were completely different from anything they had ever known
before. I remember this one kid, T.J. his name was, from somewhere down South, whose family moved into our building
during that time. They'd come North with everything they
owned piled into the back seat of an old-model sedan that you
wouldn't expect could make the trip, with T.J. and his three
younger sisters riding shakingly on top of the load of junk.
Our building was just like all the others there with families
crowded into a few rooms, and I guess there were twenty-five
or thirty kids about my age in that one building. Of course,
there were a few of us who formed a gang and ran together all
the time after school, and I was the one who brought T.J. in and
started the whole thing.
The building right next door to us was a factory where they
made walking dolls. It was a low building with a flat, tarred
roof that had a parapet all around it about head-high, and we'd
found out a long time before that no one, not even the
watchman, paid any attention to the roof because it was higher
than any of the other buildings around. So my gang used the
roof as a headquarters. We could get up there by crossing over
to the fire escape from our own roof on a plank and then going
on up. It was a secret place for us, where nobody else could go
without our permission.
I remember the day I first took T.J. up there to meet the
gang. He was a stocky, robust kid with a shock of white hair,
nothing sissy about him except his voice; he talked in this slow,
gentle voice like you never heard before. He talked different
from any of us and you noticed it right away. But I liked him
anyway, so I told him to come on up.
We climbed up over the parapet and dropped down on the
roof. The rest of the gang were already there.
"Hi," I said. I jerked my thumb at T.J. "He just moved into
the building yesterday."
He just stood there, not scared or anything, just looking,
like the first time you see somebody you're not sure you're
�454 Appalachian Emigration
going to like.
"Hi," Blackie said. "Where are you from?"
"Marion County," T.J. said.
We laughed. "Marion County?" I said. "Where's that?"
He looked at me for a moment like I was a stranger, too.
"It's in Alabama," he said, like I ought to know where it was.
"What's your name?" Charley said.
"T.J.,11 he said, looking back at him. He had pale blue eyes
that looked washed-out, but he looked directly at Charley,
waiting for his reaction. He'll be all right, I thought. No sissy
in him, except that voice. Who ever talked like that?
"T.J.," Blackie said. "That's just initials. What's your real
name? Nobody in the world has just initials.11
"I do," he said. "And they're T.J. That's all the name I got."
His voice was resolute with the knowledge of his Tightness,
and for a moment no one had anything to say. T.J. looked
around at the rooftop and down at the black tar under his feet.
"Down yonder where I come from," he said, "we played out in
the woods. Don't you-all have no woods around here?"
"Naw," Blackie said. "There's a park a few blocks over, but
it's full of kids and cops and old women. You can't do a thing."
T.J. kept looking at the tar under his feet. "You mean you
ain't got no fields to raise nothing in?—no watermelons or
nothing?"
"Naw," I said scornfully. "What do you want to grow something for? The folks can buy everything they need at the store."
He looked at me again with that strange unknowing look.
"In Marion County," he said, "I had my own acre of cotton and
my own acre of corn. It was mine to plant and make ever' year."
He sounded like it was something to be proud of, and in
some obscure way it made the rest of us angry. Blackie said,
"Who'd want to have their own acre of cotton and corn? That's
just work. What can you do with an acre of cotton and corn?"
T.J. looked at him. "Well, you get part of the bale of fen your
acre," he said seriously. "And I fed my acre of corn to my calf."
We didn't really know what he was talking about, so we
were more puzzled than angry; otherwise, I guess, we'd have
�BORDENDEAL
455
chased him off the roof and wouldn't let him be a part of our
gang. But he was strange and different, and we were all attracted by his stolid sense of lightness and belonging, maybe
by the strange softness of his voice contrasting our own tones
of speech into harshness.
He moved his foot against the black tar. "We could make
our own field right here," he said softly, thoughtfully. "Come
spring we could raise us what we want to—watermelons and
garden truck and no telling what all."
"You'd have to be a good farmer to make these tar roofs
grow any watermelons," I said. We all laughed.
But T.J. looked serious. "We could haul us some dirt up
here," he said. "And spread it out even and water it, and before
you know it, we'd have us a crop in here." He looked at us intently. "Wouldn't that be fun?"
They wouldn't let us," Blackie said quickly.
"I thought you said this was you-all's roof," T.J. said to me.
"That you-all could do anything you wanted to up here."
"They've never bothered us," I said. I felt the idea beginning to catch fire in me. It was a big idea, and it took a while
for it to sink in; but the more I thought about it, the better I liked
it. "Say," I said to the gang. "He might have something there.
Just make us a regular roof garden, with flowers and grass and
trees and everything. And all ours, too," I said. "We wouldn't
let anybody up here except the ones we wanted to."
"It'd take a while to grow trees," T.J. said quickly, but we
weren't paying any attention to him. They were all talking
about it suddenly, all excited with the idea after I'd put it in a
way they could catch hold of it. Only rich people had roof gardens, we knew, and the idea of our own private domain excited
them.
"We could bring it up in sacks and boxes," Blackie said.
"We'd have to do it while the folks weren't paying any attention to us, for we'd have to come up to the roof of our building
and then cross over with it."
"Where could we get the dirt?" somebody said worriedly.
"Out of those vacant lots over close to school," Blackie said.
�456 Appalachian Emigration
"Nobody'd notice if we scraped it up."
I slapped TJ. on the shoulder. "Man, you had a wonderful
idea," I said, and everybody grinned at him, remembering that
he had started it. "Our own private roof garden."
He grinned back. "It'll be ourn," he said. "All ourn." Then
he looked thoughtful again. "Maybe I can lay my hands on
some cotton seed, too. You think we could raise us some cotton?"
We'd started big projects before at one time or another, like
any gang of kids, but they'd always petered out for lack of organization and direction. But this one didn't; somehow or
other T.J. kept it going all though the winter months. He kept
talking about the watermelons and cotton we'd raise, come
spring, and when even that wouldn't work, he'd switch around
to my idea of flowers and grass and trees, though he was always honest enough to add that it'd take a while to get any
trees started. He always had it on his mind and he'd mention
it in school, getting them lined up to carry dirt that afternoon,
saying in a casual way that he reckoned a few more weeks
ought to see the job through.
Our little area of private earth grew slowly. TJ. was smart
enough to start in one corner of the building, heaping up the
carried earth two or three feet thick so that we had an immediate result to look at, to contemplate with awe. Some of
the evenings T.J. alone was carrying earth up to the building,
the rest of the gang distracted by other enterprises or interests,
but T.J. kept plugging along on his own, and eventually we'd
all come back to him again and then our own little acre would
grow more rapidly.
He was careful about the kind of dirt he'd let us carry up
there, and more than once dumped a sandy load over the
parapet into the areaway below because it wasn't good
enough. He found out the kinds of earth in all the vacant lots
for blocks around. He'd pick it up and feel it and smell it,
frozen though it was sometimes, and then he'd say it was good
growing soil or it wasn't worth anything, and we'd have to go
�BORDENDEAL
457
on to somewhere else.
Thinking about it now, I don't see how he kept us at it. It
was hard work, lugging paper sacks and boxes of dirt all the
way up the stairs of our own building, keeping out of the way
of the grownups so they wouldn't catch on to what we were
doing. They probably wouldn't have cared, for they didn't pay
much attention to us, but we wanted to keep it a secret anyway.
Then we had to go through the trap door to our roof, teeter over
a plank to the fire escape, then climb two or three stories to the
parapet and drop them down onto the roof. All that for a small
pile of earth that sometimes didn't seem worth the effort. But
T.J. kept the vision bright within us, his words shrewd and calculated toward the fulfillment of his dream; and he worked
harder than any of us. He seemed driven toward a goal that
we couldn't see, a particular point in time that would be
definitely marked by signs and wonders that only he could see.
The laborious earth just lay there during the cold months,
inert and lifeless, the clods lumpy and cold under our feet when
we walked over it. But one day it rained, and afterwards there
was a softness in the air, and the earth was live and giving again
with moisture and warmth.
That evening T.J. smelled the air, his nostrils dilating with
the odor of the earth under his feet. "It's spring," he said, and
there was a gladness rising in his voice that filled us all with
the same feeling. HIt's mighty late for it, but it's spring. I'd just
about decided it wasn't never gonna get here at all."
We were all sniffing at the air, too, trying to smell it the way
that T.J. did, and I can still remember the sweet odor of earth
under our feet. It was the first time in my life that spring and
spring earth had meant anything to me. I looked at T.J. then,
knowing in a faint way the hunger within him through the toilsome winter months, knowing the dream that lay behind his
plan. He was a new Antaeus preparing his own bed of
strength.
"Planting time," he said. "We'll have to find some seed."
"What do we do?" Blackie said. "How do we do it?"
"First we'll have to break up the clods," T.J. said. "That
�458 Appalachian Emigration
won't be hard to do. Then we plant the seeds, and after a while
they come up. Then you got a crop." He frowned. "But you
ain't got it raised yet. You got to tend it and hoe it and take
care of it, and all the time it's growing and growing, while
you're awake and while you're asleep. Then you lay it by when
it's growed and let ripen, and then you got you a crop."
"There's those wholesale seed houses over on Sixth," I said.
"We could probably swipe some grass seed over there."
T.J. looked at the earth. "You-all seem mighty set on raising some grass," he said. "I ain't never put no effort into that.
I spent all my life trying not to raise grass."
"But it's pretty," Blackie said. "We could play on it and take
sunbaths on it. Like having our own lawn. Lots of people got
lawns."
"Well," T.J. said. He looked at the rest of us, hesitant for the
first time. He kept on looking at us for a moment. "I did have
it in mind to raise some corn and vegetables. But we'll plant
grass."
He was smart. He know where to give in. And I don't suppose it made any difference to him, really. He just wanted to
grow something, even if it was grass.
"Of course," he said, "I do think we ought to plant a row of
watermelons. They'd be mighty nice to eat while we was alaying on that grass."
We all laughed. "All right," I said. "We'll plant us a row of
watermelons."
Things went very quickly then. Perhaps half the roof was
covered with earth, the half that wasn't broken by ventilators,
and we swiped pocketfuls of grass seed from the open bins in
the wholesale seed house, mingling among the buyers on
Saturdays and during the school lunch hour. T.J. showed us
how to prepare the earth, breaking up the clods and smoothing it and sowing the grass seed. It looked rich and black now
with moisture, receiving of the seed, and it seemed that the
grass sprang up overnight, pale green in the early spring.
We couldn't keep from looking at it, unable to believe that
we had created this delicate growth. We looked at T.J. with un-
�BORDENDEAL
459
derstanding now, knowing the fulfillment of the plan he had
carried along within his mind. We had worked without full understanding of the task, but he had known all the time.
We found that we couldn't walk or play on the delicate
blades, as we had expected to, but we didn't mind. It was
enough just to look at it, to realize that it was the work of our
own hands, and each evening the whole gang was there, trying
to measure the growth that had been achieved that day.
One time a foot was placed on the plot of ground, one time
only, Blackie stepping onto it with sudden bravado. Then he
looked at the crushed blades and there was shame in his face.
He did not do it again. This was his grass, too, and not to be
desecrated. No one said anything, for it was not necessary.
T.J. had reserved a small section for watermelons, and he
was still trying to find some seed for it. The wholesale house
didn't have any watermelon seeds, and we didn't know where
we could lay our hands on them. T.J. shaped the earth into
mounds, ready to receive them, three mounds lying in a
straight line along the edge of the grass plot.
We had just about decided that we'd have to buy the seeds
if we were to get them. It was a violation of our principles, but
we were anxious to get the watermelons started. Somewhere
or other, T.J. got his hands on a seed catalog and brought it one
evening to our roof garden.
"We can order them now," he said, showing us the catalog.
"Look!"
We all crowded around, looking at the fat, green watermelons pictured in full color on the pages. Some of them were
split open, showing the red, tempting meat, making our
mouths water.
"Now we got to scrape up some seed money," T.J. said,
looking at us. "I got a quarter. How much you-all got?"
We made up a couple of dollars among us and T.J. nodded
his head. "Thaf 11 be more than enough. Now we got to decide
what kind to get. I think them Kleckley Sweets. What do youall think?"
He was going into esoteric matters beyond our reach. We
�460 Appalachian Emigration
hadn't even known there were different kinds of watermelons.
So we just nodded our heads and agreed that yes, we thought
the Kleckley Sweets too.
Til order them tonight," T.J. said. "We ought to have them
in a few days."
"What are you boys doing up here?" an adult voice said behind us.
It startled us, for no one had ever come up here before in
all the time we had been using the roof of the factory. We
jerked around and saw three men standing near the trap door
at the other end of the roof. They weren't policemen or night
watchmen, but three men in plump business suits, looking at
us. They walked toward us.
"What are you boys doing up here?" the one in the middle
said again.
We stood still, guilt heavy among us, levied by the tone of
voice, and looked at the three strangers.
The men stared at the grass flourishing behind us. "What's
this?" the man said. "How did this get up here?"
"Sure is growing good, ain't it?" T.J. said conversationally.
"We planted it."
The men kept looking at the grass as if they didn't believe
it. It was a thick carpet over the earth now, a patch of deep
greenness startling in the sterile industrial surroundings.
"Yes, sir," T.J. said proudly. "We toted that earth up here
and planted that grass." He fluttered the seed catalog. "And
we're just fixing to plant us some watermelon."
The man looked at him then, his eyes strange and faraway.
"What do you mean, putting this on the roof of my building?"
he said. "Do you want to go to jail?"
T.J. looked shaken. The rest of us were silent, frightened
by the authority of his voice. We had grown up aware of adult
authority, of policemen and night watchmen and teachers, and
this man sounded like all the others. But it was a new thing to
T.J.
"Well, you wasn't using the roof," T.J. said. He paused a
moment and added shrewdly, "So we just thought to pretty it
�BORDENDEAL
461
up a little bit."
"And sag it so Fd have to rebuild it," the man said sharply.
He started turning away, saying to another man beside him,
"See that all that junk is shoveled off by tomorrow."
"Yes, sir," the man said.
T.J. started forward. "You can't do that," he said. "We toted
it up here, and it's our earth. We planted it and raised it and
toted it up here."
The man stared at him coldly. "But it's my building," he
said. "It's to be shoveled off tomorrow."
"It's our earth," T.J. said desperately. "You ain't got no
right!"
The men walked on without listening and descended clumsily through the trapdoor. T.J. stood looking after them, his
body tense with anger, until they had disappeared. They
wouldn't even argue with him, wouldn't let him defend his
earth-rights.
He turned to us. "We won't let 'em do it," he said fiercely.
"We'll stay up here all day tomorrow and the day after that,
and we won't let 'em do it."
We just looked at him. We knew there was no stopping it.
He saw it in our faces, and his face wavered for a moment
before he gripped it into determination. "They ain't got no
right," he said. "It's our earth. It's our land. Can't nobody
touch a man's own land."
We kept looking at him, listening to the words but knowing that it was no use. The adult world had descended on us
even in our richest dream, and we knew there was no calculating the adult world, no fighting it, no winning against it.
We started moving slowly toward the parapet and the fire
escape, avoiding a last look at the green beauty of the earth that
T.J. had planted for us, had planted deeply in our minds as well
as in our experience. We filed slowly over the edge and down
the steps to the plank, T.J. coming last, and all of us could feel
the weight of his grief behind us.
"Wait a minute," he said suddenly, his voice harsh with the
effort of calling.
�462 Appalachian Emigration
We stopped and turned, held by the tone of his voice, and
looked up at him standing above us on the fire escape.
H
We can't stop them?11 he said, looking down at us, his face
strange in the dusky light. "There ain't no way to stop 'em?"
"No/11 Blackie said with finality. "They own the building."
We stood still for a moment, looking up at T.J., caught into
inaction by the decision working in his face. He stared back at
us, and his face was pale and mean in the poor light, with a
bald nakedness in his skin like cripples have sometimes.
"They ain't gonna touch my earth," he said fiercely. "They
ain't gonna lay a hand on it! Come on."
He turned around and started up the fire escape again, almost running against the effort of climbing. We followed more
slowly, not knowing what he intended. By the time we reached
him, he had seized a board and thrust it into the soil, scooping
it up and flinging it over the parapet into the areaway below.
He straightened and looked at us.
"They can't touch it," he said. "I won't let 'em lay a dirty
hand on it!"
We saw it then. He stooped to his labor again and we followed, the gusts of his anger moving in frenzied labor among
us as we scattered along the edge of earth, scooping it and
throwing it over the parapet, destroying with anger the growth
we had nurtured with such tender care. The soil carried so
laboriously upward to the light and the sun cascaded swiftly
into the dark areaway, the green blades of grass crumpled and
twisted in the falling.
It took less time than you would think; the task of destruction is infinitely easier than that of creation. We stopped at the
end, leaving only a scattering of loose soil, and when it was
finally over, a stillness stood among the group and over the factory building. We looked down at the bare sterility of black
tar, felt the harsh texture of it under the soles of our shoes, and
the anger had gone out of us, leaving only a sore aching in our
minds like overstretched muscles.
T.J. stood for a moment, his breathing slowing from anger
and effort, caught into the same contemplation of destruction
�BORDENDEAL
463
as all of us. He stooped slowly, finally, and picked up a lonely blade of grass left trampled under our feet and put it between
his teeth, tasting it, sucking the greeness out of it into his
mouth. Then he started walking toward the fire escape,
moving before any of us were ready to move, and disappeared
over the edge.
We followed him, but he was already halfway down to the
ground, going on past the board where we crossed over, climbing down into the areaway. We saw the last section swing
down with his weight, and then he stood on the concrete below
us, looking at the small pile of anonymous earth scattered by
our throwing. Then he walked across the place where we
could see him and disappeared toward the street without
glancing back, without looking up to see us watching him.
They did not find him for two weeks.
Then the Nashville police caught him just outside the
Nashville freight yards. He was walking along the railroad
track, still heading South, still heading home.
As for us, who had no remembered home to call us, none
of us ever again climbed the escapeway to the roof.
Antaeus
1. What is the major conflict in this story?
2. What qualities did TJ. have that enabled him to have his
way with the boys?
3. How did the boys get the grass seed they needed? The
watermelon seed?
4. In Greek mythology Hercules wrestled the giant Antaeus,
son of earth. If the giant touched the earth, he was
invincible; therefore, Hercules had to strangle him in the
air. In what ways is TJ. like Antaeus?
�464 Appalachian Emigration
No. 10
�JO CARSON
465
JO CARSON (1946- )
Jo Carson, a lifelong resident of Johnson City, Tennessee,
brings voices from her region to life in her poetry and plays. A
graduate of East Tennessee State University, she is associated
with the Road Company, a small theatre group based in
Johnson City as both a writer and as an actress.
She is a visiting commentator on National Public Radio's
program All Things Considered, and performs many of her
"People Pieces" for audiences all across America.
�466
Appalachian Emigration
People Pieces: My Brother Estes
My brother Estes
and his cousin Ray
left here for California
the minute the two of them together
had enough money to buy a car.
They were leaving the god-forsaken mountains.
They were gonna' make some money,
gonna' find them California wives.
Well, they did,
both of them.
I gotta' admit
they done right well.
But I got a phone call from Estes
just two days ago.
He's pushing into his fifties now
and you know,
he wants to bring his California wife
and come back home.
All this time, he's called me
his hick sister,
but I knew my chance was coming
cause the mountains speak the loudest
to a person in his middle age
and no matter where he is
or what he's done,
he begins to think of them as home.
You know what I told Estes?
I told him to come on back and try it,
but not to get his hopes too high
cause he don't talk right anymore.
�JO CARSON
467
Brother Estes
1. Brother Estes' sister observes that Estes does not talk right
any more. What other changes might you expect to find in
someone who has left Appalachia and moved to California?
2. Why does Estes want to return to the mountains?
3. Discuss the poet's statement that "the mountains speak
loudest to a person in middle age."
�468
Appalachian Emigration
GURNEY NORMAN (1937- )
Gurney Norman's first novel, Divine Rights' Trip, was
originally published in The ]Nhole Earth Catalog, a Californiabased publication which he helped edit. The novel tells the
story of a young man in the Sixties searching for himself and
some inner peace, which he finds only on returning to his home
in Kentucky.
The novel, no doubt, portrays some of Norman's own life.
A native of eastern Kentucky, he graduated from the University of Kentucky before going off to Stanford University in
California to study with the great short story writer Frank
O'Connor. His credits include an oral narrative recorded for
June Appal records and a short story collection Kinfolks. Norman currently teaches creative writing at the University of
Kentucky and conducts summer workshops around the
region.
One of the major consciousness-raisers in his native region,
Gurney Norman has consistently urged other Appalachian
authors to write what they know best. He was instrumental in
the formation of the Southern Appalachian Writer's Cooperative.
"A Correspondence" is told in letters exchanged between a
mountain woman and her brother.
�GURNEY NORMAN
469
A Correspondence from Kinfolks
Dear Brother Luther,
I know you will be surprised to hear from me it's been so
long. How I found you was yet living and where, was Wilgus
Collier is from there, who came to rent my upstairs apartment,
a nice young traveling man. He says he grew up within a mile
of where your daughter lives in Knott County, that his aunt is
her neighbor and for you to tell her hello. I call it the Lord's
miracle that He sent Wilgus Collier to my house a messenger
of the only good news I have had in many years. I pray to Him
this will reach you and that you will answer and we will be in
touch with one another again.
So it's been many years since we were all at home together
hasn't it dear Brother? I often think of those old days and wish
I was back at home with my loved ones instead of sitting in this
lonesome place by myself. Did you know I lived in Phoenix?
I have lived here eleven years. My husband Troy bought this
house with two apartments and one other with three apartments and moved us here in 1954 when he retired and for my
asthma. Then the next year he died of heart trouble and
Blight's disease so I have a mighty load to carry by myself.
Troy had a boy and girl by his first marriage but they have forgot their old stepmother, and I never had children of my own
as you perhaps know. It is lonesome in Phoenix and I breathe
with difficulty, and my tenants are the only ones I see and they
are not always friendly except Wilgus Collier, a nice young
traveling man who the Lord sent to me and put me in touch
with you again and oh I hope how soon we can be together
again dear Brother, like we were so many years ago when we
lived on Cowan Creek. Join me in thanks to God and write
soon.
Your loving sister,
Mrs. Drucilla Cornett Toliver
Sweet Sister,
Could not believe your letter at first. I thought it was
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Appalachian Emigration
another trick to torment me. I read it, read it again, then had
daughter Cleo read it to me to be sure it was true. A big
surprise, to think for years I have a sister living after all.
Yes, many years have gone under the bridge since we were
all at home together and so happy. Now everything is down
to a final proposition it appears like. I have the gout and
cataracts. My wife Naomi died two years ago. My younguns
are scattered here and yon, except daughter Blanche who died
and son Romulus who lost his mind. I live first with one then
the other, but mostly daughter Cleo, the others don't want me
much. Bad business to be amongst ungrateful children.
Arizona. A mighty fine place I hear. Your man done good
by you to leave you so well off. I seen Goldwater on television
one night, speaking right from Phoenix. He strikes me as a
scoundrel but it showed pictures of Arizona country, the desert
and the sunset on some mountains so peaceful and quiet, it sure
looked like where I want to be. And I hope how soon we can
be together sweet sister, to keep each other company in these
terrible times.
Your brother Luther Cornett,
Age 79 how old are you by now?
Dear Brother,
I am 72. I have asthma and atherites, bursitis and awful
high blood pressure. My fingers hurts now to write this letter
and I hope you will be able to read it.
But you have a nice hand write, Brother. You always was
a good scholar at Little Engle School. I remember walking to
school with you boys, and the way it set back against the
hillside, the front end of it on stilts high enough to play under,
and the way the willows and the sycamores leaned out over
Engle Creek, and wading the creek and the Big Rock we played
on that had mint growing around it. I remember an Easter egg
hunt at the school. And the fight you had with Enoch
Singleton. I know I have forgot a lot of old times but I do
remember that school very well and hope to see it when I get
back to dear Kentucky.
�GURNEY NORMAN
471
Which should not be too long now. My houses are not
fancy but they are buying up property right and left here and
I have buyers galore to pick from. But I want to get a good
price so we can afford ourselves a nice place together somewhere there in Knott County. Do you hear of any places for
sale in the Carr Fork section? Who owns the old homeplace
now? Maybe we could buy it back and live there again and be
like we used to be so many years ago.
I look forward to meeting your Cleo and all your
grandchildren. You are so lucky to have grandchildren. I
never did even have children but I guess I told you that. Until
I learned you were yet living I cried myself to sleep every night
with only Jesus for my comfort. But now he has sent me you,
and soon we will be re-united in His love, sweet Brother.
In His Holy Name,
Drucilla Toliver
Sweet Sister,
So much racket going on here I can't hardly think what to
write. It is this way all the time in this house, no peace and
quiet. Cleo won't control her younguns. They all promised me
my own room before I moved in, but then never give me one,
it was all a lure and a trap. I turn the television up full blast to
drown them out. After a while you don't hear a loud television
but it is still a poor substitute for true quiet like you all must
have out west.
The '27 flood got Engle School.
A flood can come and get the rest of this place for all I care.
Kentucky is all tore up and gone, Sister. Soon they'll flood CanFork and that whole section, including the old homeplace, the
government's doing it. You are fortunate to have your property. I used to have property on Hardburly Mountain, two
hundred acres, with a good stand of white pine plus a well,
dwelling house, barn and good-sized garden. But the strip
miners got it all. I lawed the sons of bitches but couldn't do no
good. So here I am stuck at Cleo's house, crowded up, no
privacy, she can't cook, younguns gone wild, not enough heat,
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Appalachian Emigration
and they read my mail before I get it. (You be careful what you
say!) Count your blessings in Arizona, sister, none in Kentucky
to count. And keep your property, I'll be out there before long
to help you run it and well get along good for ever more.
Your loving brother,
Luther
Dear Brother,
You would not like Arizona. It is not green and cool here
like Kentucky, and Phoenix is difficult of living. I can't tell you
too much about Phoenix except that Carson Avenue is a terrible place. I've only seen the downtown part once, in 1956
when the Presbyterians took me down and back one day for a
good deed, but it wasn't much then and I doubt that it's any
better now.
I want to pick blackberries again, and gather chestnuts and
see the laurel when it blooms. I never see anything on Carson
Avenue except the motorcycle gang go by. Taxes are awful and
the heat and when you call the water company it takes a month
to come, and you can't see television because of this sarcastic
neighbor Mr. Ortiz who pranks with the electricity.
So I'll be home in a month or two, soon as I settle up my
business. You look for us a place to buy. Get it in the country,
pick us out a cove off one of those cool hollows and have laurel
on it if you can. It would be good to live close to Carr Creek or
Troublesome, or maybe even over on North Fork River. I'm
not much of a fisherman you always were and I can cook fish.
It would be handy if we could buy us a good house already
built. But if you feel up to it, and some of your children would
help, I'd like to buy a hillside with good timber on it and we
could have us a house built out of our own wood, to suit us,
and cheaper too. Wouldn't that be something? I'd like to be
on the road to see people go by, nice Kentucky neighbors and
kinfoiks. Last Sunday I was sitting on my porch and a motorcycle man yelled an ugly thing at me and upset me terrible.
And I didn't exactly admire you using bad language in
your last letter, Brother. That indicates you might not be saved,
�GURNEY NORMAN
473
but I pray you are, but if you aren't tell me the truth about it.
Sister Drucilla
Drucilla,
Don't come to Kentucky. I tell you this is a terrible place.
The union has pulled out. No work anywhere. They're gouging the hillsides down, stripping and auguring. Ledford
Pope's house got totally carried off by a mudslide. The streams
are fouled, not a fish this side of Buckhorn Lake, not even any
water to speak of except at flood time when there's more than
anybody wants. The young folks have mostly moved to Ohio
and Indiana to work, and them that's left have no respect for
old people, they'd never help us build a house even if we had
something to build it out of. Kentucky's timber has been gone
since you have. Coal trucks make more racket than motorcycles, and there's no air fit to breathe for the slate dumps burning. Sure no place for asthma sufferers.
I've seen the pictures of Arizona, and read about it. It
sounds like all the old folks in the country are retiring out there
but me. Damn such business as that, I'm on my way soon as I
can accumulate the trainfare. If you've got some extra to send
me for expenses I'd be grateful to you, and make it up to you
once I got there. I'll rent two apartments from you myself, I
want me some room to stretch in. And don't worry about getting downtown. Me and you will take right off the first thing
and see all the sights and visit all the retired people in Phoenix
and go to shows and ride buses and sit around the swimming
pools drinking ice tea.
Sorry for the bad words. Yes, I'm saved. I was a terrible
rip-roarer most of my life, but 12 years ago I seen the light and
give up all bad habits except cussing. I'm ready to give that up
too but see no way to go about it till I get somewhere where
there ain't so much to cuss about.
Your brother, Luther
Brother,
I'm not going to live in Arizona. That's all there is to it.
�474
Appalachian Emigration
You don't understand how it is here. Why do you not want
me to come home? Are you making up all those bad tales on
Kentucky, just to keep me from coming? I don't understand
your attitude. A man that would cuss his sister would lie to
her too, and the Bible admonishes against oaths and lies. I
don't want to boss you but I'll not be bossed myself, and I absolutely will not stay in Arizona.
Drucilla Toliver
Sister,
You say you don't understand my attitude. Well I don't
understand a sister that would have two fancy houses and yet
turn out a suffering brother to suffer at the hands of mean
children and a bad location. You talk like such a Christian. I
say do unto others as you want them to do unto you and you're
the one with two houses. I didn't cuss you. And I just wonder
who is lying to who, for I have seen the pictures of Arizona and
read of everybody moving there to retire and be happy. It
sounds like you're all out there together plotting to keep me
out. Well you won't get away with it and I have one question
to ask: have you been getting secret letters from Cleo on the
side? It wouldn't surprise me.
Luther Cornett
Brother,
I still refuse to stay in Arizona, in spite of your insults, and
I suggest you read The Beatitudes.
Drucilla Cornett Toliver
Sister,
You and Cleo think you can lure and trap me into staying
in Kentucky but you are wrong.
Luther Cornett
Luther,
You have turned out strange is all I can say, unmindful of
�GURNEY NORMAN
475
the needs of others, and if you continue to curse me we
might as well forget the whole business.
Drucilla Cornett Toliver
Drucilla,
I have not cussed you but I am about to get around to it.
And Cleo and Emmit and Polly and Sarah and R.C. and Little
Charles too if they all don't hush their racket. If you don't agree
to my coming there then you are right, we might as well forget
the whole thing for I absolutely refuse to stay in such a goddamn hell-hole as this.
Luther Cornett
Dear Luther,
Satan moves your tongue and I won't listen, or agree to stay
here another week.
Drucilla Toliver
Dear Drucilla,
Then we just as well forget the whole thing.
Mr. Luther O. Cornett
Luther,
Suit yourself.
Mrs. Drucilla Toliver
A Correspondence
1. What does Drucilla remember and love about life in Knott
County?
2. What is the reality of living in Knott County for Luther?
3.
There is an old saying, "The grass is greener on the other
side of the fence." Explain this saying as it relates to Luther
and Drucilla.
�476
Appalachian Emigration
ROBERT PENN WARREN (1905- )
Born in Guthrie, Kentucky, Robert Penn Warren graduated
in 1925 from Vanderbilt University, where he was a member
of the Fugitive group of poets. He was strongly influenced by
his professors, John Crowe Ransom and Donald Davidson.
His studies continued at the University of California, at Yale,
and at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.
Critic, novelist, short story writer, poet, editor, biographer,
and dramatist, he is the only writer ever to receive the Pulitzer
Prize for both fiction (All the King's Men, 1946) and poetry
(Promises, 1957). He is one of the founders of Southern Review,
co-author of several college literature textbooks, and a former
professor of English and drama.
Probably best known for his eight novels, Robert Penn
Warren, now in his eighties and living in Connecticut, continues to write and receive high honors. In 1985, he was named
by Congress as the nation's first Poet Laureate. The title of Poet
Laureate is a British tradition dating back hundreds of years.
Although the American appointment is much shorter than the
British, which is for a lifetime, the purpose is the same: to acknowledge the importance of the poet in a civilized society.
Everyone agrees that Robert Penn Warren is the natural choice
for this first-time prestigious honor.
�ROBERT PENN WARREN 477
Sitting on Farm Lawn on Sunday Afternoon
The old, the young—they sit.
And the baby on its blanket
Blows a crystalline
Bubble to float, then burst
Into air's nothingness.
Under the maples they sit,
As the limpid year uncoils
With a motion like motionlessness,
While only a few maple leaves
Are crisping toward yellow
And not too much rust yet
Streaks the far blades of corn.
The big white bulldog dozes
In a patch of private shade.
The afternoon muses onward,
Past work, past week, past season,
Past all the years gone by,
And delicate feminine fingers,
Deft and ivory-white,
And fingers steely, or knobbed
In the gnarl of arthritis, conspire
To untangle the snarl of years
Which are their past, and the past
Of kin who in dark now hide,
�478
Appalachian Emigration
Yet sometimes seem to stare forth
With critical, loving gaze,
Or deeper in darkness weep
At wisdom they learned too late.
Is all wisdom learned too late?
The baby laUs to itself,
For it does not yet know all
The tales and contortions of Time.
Nor do I, who sit here alone,
In another place, and hour.
Sitting On Farm Lawn on Sunday Afternoon
1. What event might have inspired this poem?
2. Discuss the line "Is all wisdom learned too late?"
3. Why does the gathering of several generations of family
make us think about change? about time?
�LISAALTHER
479
LISA ALTHER (1944- )
Born to a surgeon and a former English teacher in
Kingsport, Tennessee, an industrial city in the heart of Appalachia, Lisa Alther best knows Appalachia caught between
the old ways and the new ways of Middle America, both of
which she satirizes.
Educated at Wellesley College, she was an editorial assistant at Atheneum Publishers before Knopf published her first
novel Kinflicks in 1976. Since then, she has published two other
novels and continues to contribute articles and stories to national magazines.
This excerpt from Kinflicks concerns the protagonist's
search for identity. She returns to the cabin of her grandfather,
remembering his words and trying to understand her life and
the forces that have shaped her.
From Kinflicks
She tooted the horn gently in the old tattoo her family had
always used to indicate to the Cloyds that it was Babcocks
going past to the cabin, not vandals and thieves. She drove on
for another mile down the ever-narrowing dirt track through
a woods of oak and sycamore and sassafras, redbud, poplar,
and dogwood—a woods so different in composition from that
�480
Appalachian Emigration
behind Ira's house in Vermont, with its birch and ash and sugar
maples, its dozen varieties of evergreen.
Stopping in front of the aluminum gate, she got out and unlocked the chain and drove the Jeep through. She descended
the hill into the kudzu-lined bowl which housed the cabin and
the pond. The cabin, built of chinked logs and covered by a
dull green tin roof, had a patchwork history of occupation. It
had been built around 1800 by the original settler of the farm—
one of the motley breed of horse thieves and adventurers and
deserters who had crossed the Blue Ridge Mountains, fleeing
the civilized coastal regions of Virginia and North Carolina for
the mountainous backwoods of Kentucky and Tennessee and
southwest Virginia. By the time her grandfather, Mr. Zed,
eluded his destiny as a coal miner and bought the farm, the
cabin had been deserted for decades. Mr. Zed rebuilt the cabin
and lived there with his wife and his small daughter, Ginny's
mother, while his pseudo-antebellum mansion was under construction. When Ginny's mother and father were first married,
they lived in the cabin. Ginny herself had been born there.
Shortly after Jim's birth, her grandparents had traded her
parents the mansion for the cabin. After her grandmother's
death, Mr. Zed had spent the rest of his life in virtual seclusion
at the cabin, trying to figure out how to undo what he had spent
his lifetime doing—founding Hullsport and establishing the
factory.
Hence the kudzu. The kudzu vines served a double purpose: First, they held up the red clay sides of the bowl, which
were always threatening to collapse into the pond; and secondly, they were an experiment with far-reaching implications in
the deranged mind of the aging Mr. Zed. Kudzu was being
highly touted at the time by the agricultural extension agents
as the wonder vine of the century. Not only did its tenacious
roots fix nitrogen in depleted soils; not only did the highprotein foliage make nutritious cattle fodder, but the plant
spread so voraciously that only a few starter plants were required to take over an entire hillside.
It was to explore this promise that Ginny's grandfather, his
�LISAALTHER
481
scramble of long white hair whipping in the breeze, had carefully placed plants all around the bowl. In no time at all, every
object in sight had been swallowed up—bushes, rocks, trees,
fences, an old tobacco shed, rusted equipment parts. The vines
were six feet deep in spots. Her grandfather had spent most of
his twilight years, when his peers were engaged in shuffleboard tournaments at Sun City, Arizona, hacking away with
a machete as the kudzu threatened to engulf his front lawn.
But he hacked without malice, because he saw kudzu as his
secret weapon. He would plant it, under cover of the night, at
selected spots around the factory and the town. The vines
would silently take hold and begin their stealthy spread. Before
Hullsporters were even aware of their existence, the grasping
tendrils would choke out all life in the Model City. The site
would be returned to Nature.
Word got around town to humor the old man as he crept
around furtively planting, and scowling at the smokestacks
and holding tanks, and shaking his fist at the encroaching superhighways and shopping malls and housing developments.
"Senile," they would say, shaking their heads sadly. "Mr. Zed's
done gone mental."
To Ginny, when she would walk up to visit him, he would
shake his wild crop of tangled hair and say plaintively, "I never
should of left Sow Gap, honey. I was a miner's son. I had no
bidness tryin to be nothin else. Lord God, I done made a mess.
Virginia, honey, don't you never try to be what you ain't."
"But what am I?" she'd ask him, reviewing her history of
being born in a farm cabin in Virginia with a rural southern
mother and an industrialist father from Boston, and with
refugees from the coal mines for grandparents; growing up in
a fake antebellum mansion in a factory town in the New South
with a dairy farm out her back door; being christened "Virginia" by her mother in a burst of geographic chauvinism, and
"Babcock" by her father, which name emblazoned the walls of
a hall at Harvard. Being a human melting pot, to what one
god—social or economic or geographic—was she to direct her
scattered allegiances? How she had envied her friends at
�482
Appalachian Emigration
public meetings who could stand up and belt out a belligerent
version of "Dixie"; on such occasions Ginny herself had sometimes remained seated, sometimes stood but not sung, sometimes sung halfheartedly.
Ginny had decided to put the issue of scattered allegiances
behind her and start out fresh when she left Hullsport for Boston. And what had she done since? She'd married a Yankee
businessman whose parents were Vermont farmers; she'd
taken a hippy army deserter as a lover, if that was the right term
for Hawk's relationship to her; she'd been living a surburban
life in a small town in Vermont. Given her chance at transcendence, she'd merely re-created the muddle of loyalties she'd
left Hullsport to escape.
She got out of the Jeep, lugging her pack and some
groceries, and stumbled over dark green kudzu vines all the
way to the cabin. The vines had taken over the stone steps and
were partway up the log sides of the cabin. Someone hadn't
been performing Mr. Zed's former duties with the machete.
Stepping firmly on the vines that covered the steps, Ginny
wrenched open the front door, walked in, and began opening
shutters.
There were veils of cobwebs in the corners and a layer of
dust over all horizontal surfaces. Otherwise, the place was
relatively neat and inhabitable. She threw the switch on the
fuse box, and the various motors in the cabin—the pump, the
refrigerator, the hot water heater—started humming on cue.
After putting away the groceries in the small kitchen, cheery
with its red gingham curtains and hooked rugs, she took a mop
and knocked down the spiderwebs and dusted the dark wideplank floors.
The last time she'd been here, a few months before her
grandfather's death, her cousin Raymond had arrived for a
visit. Raymond was tall and painfully thin with black bags
under his eyes and hollows under his cheekbones. His coloring was almost albino, like a crayfish from an underground
stream. He talked very little, mostly sat hunched over wheezing. Black lung from the mines, her grandfather explained
�USAALTHER
483
later.
"I'll tell you the truth, Raymond," Mr. Zed said, shaking his
bushy white head angrily, "I declare, I rue the day I left Sow
Gap!"
"You're plumb crazy iffen you do," Raymond gasped.
"Sow Gap like to have killed me. Can't do nothin no more cept
sit around tryin to breathe."
"Hullsport is worse than them mines ever was," Mr. Zed
insisted. "The air's ever bit as foul, and you can't fish the Crockett no more."
"Hit beats the hell out of them slag heaps up at Sow Gap. I
bet you done forgot what hit's like in the pits, Zed. When the
pumps don't work and you're stoopin over in a four-foot crawl
space with water to your knees hot-wirin a 440 cable with maskin tape?"
"You know what that damn fool Yankee son-in-law of mine
is makin at that factory, Raymond? Bombs, that's what. Roof
falls is nothin compared to that. It's these Yankee Episcopalians—hell/ they're gonna kill us all."
Ginny had returned to Miss Head in Boston the next week
more intent than ever on a career as a scholar, so that she need
have nothing more to do with either slag heaps or holding
tanks. But then she had met Eddie Holzer.
Ginny took her grandfather's machete from over the huge
stone fireplace. She went outside and hacked away at the
kudzu, tearing it one vine at a time off the cabin and severing
it at ground level with a rhythmic sweep of her arm, like Ira's
practice golf swings. Gradually she chopped a no-man's land
of several feet around the cabin. She was imagining as she
swung what it would feel like to live in a rain forest in the
Amazon Basin: If your perseverance flagged even briefly, you
would disappear in the encroaching undergrowth. Soon she
was splattered with pale green kudzu blood. The summer sun
was hot; it hung midway between its noon position and the rim
of the red clay bowl on the far side of the pond. It would set
that evening behind the very spot on the ridge where Mr. Zed
was buried, his headstone now swallowed up by the kudzu.
�484
Appalachian Emigration
Ginny walked down to the pond, stepping carefully through
the tangled vines, whose relatives she had just executed. A
layer of chartreuse scum covered at least a third of the pond
surface. She threw off her peasant dress, unlaced her boots,
and walked into the water, sinking up to her ankles in the
squish on the pond bottom. Farther out, scum clinging to her
pubic hair, she lowered herself into the water and began a stately breast stroke, sweeping scum out of her path as she went.
Kinflicks
1. Discuss Mr. Zed's statement "don't you never try to be what
you ain't.11
2. Why is Ginny confused about herself?
3. What does Ginny's chopping of the kudzu vine symbolize?
What does her swim in the pond symbolize?
�485
COMPOSITION TOPICS
1. Write a theme contrasting city and country life. Do you
think the different lifestyles are reflected in the people?
2. Write an essay about your dreams and plans for the future.
Do you plan to remain in the area where you now live, or
do you intend to move away?
ACTIVITIES
People follow jobs. Consequently, in the 1940s and 1950s
many people moved away from Appalachia. Then twenty or
thirty years later, as job opportunities in the Appalachian
region increased, many returned. Because many new people
without Appalachian roots think this is a good place to live,
they also have moved to the Appalachian region. (See next
page.)
�486
On this map of the United States mark places your parents
have lived because of their parents' jobs or their own jobs.
Mark places your mother has lived with an M and where your
father has lived with an F. Write your name on places where
you have lived.
�487
CHAPTER 8
Roots and Wings; The Sense of Place
in Appalachian Writing
When Alex Haley published Roots, his family's history,
the American public reacted enthusiastically. Millions of
copies of the book were sold, and a television mini-series
based on the book drew the largest viewing audience on
record. Suddenly, as everyone tried to find out about his
own roots, genealogy, the study of one's ancestry, became
the rage. But the search for roots has long been a
predominant theme in Appalachian literature.
All of us want to belong somewhere. We need to feel connected to each other, to the community, and to our surroundings. The fast pace of modern life disorients and isolates us
from other people, even from our own families. Modern
transportation with interstate highways, airplanes, cars, buses,
and trains is a mixed blessing. It could be argued that our constant mobility is responsible for our sense of separation from
each other and from our communities.
Throughout this book, we have seen Appalachian
writers explore their personal histories. Their ties with a
�488
place and its people help them to define who they are.
At the heart of this sense of place lies love of the land.
Responsibility and concern for the land are primary themes
in the selections in this chapter.
�WENDELL BERRY
489
WENDELL BERRY (1934 - )
Wendell Berry of Port Royal, Kentucky, is a teacher, writer,
and farmer. He currently teaches English at his alma mater,
the University of Kentucky. But farming and writing about
farming are his primary occupations.
In his study of American culture and agriculture, The Unsettling of America (1977), Berry speaks eloquently of the state
of the farm in America today and offers his vision of what
might be done to foster responsible stewardship of the nation's
land and resources. One of the nation's finest essayists, he
gathered his published pieces in Recollected Essays (1981).
Wendell Berry's major contribution to the Appalachian
literature is his verse. He has published many books of poetry
including Farming: A Handbook, The Country of Marriage, The
Broken Ground, and Openings.
�490
The Sense of Place in Appalachian Writing
The Strangers
The voices of travelers on the hill road
at dusk, calling down to me:
"Where are we? Where
does this road go?"
They have followed the ways
by which the country is forgot.
For them, places have changed
into their names, and vanished.
The names rustle in the foliage
by the roadside, furtive
as sparrows. My mind shifts
for whereabouts. Have I found them
in a country they have lost?
Are they lost in a country
I have found? How can they
learn where they are from me,
who have found myself here
after an expense of history
and labor six generations long?
How will they understand my speech
that holds this to be its place
and is conversant with its trees
and stones. We are lost
to each other. I think of changes
that have come without vision
or skill, a new world made
by the collision of particles.
Their blanched faces peer
from their height, waiting
an answer I know too well to speak.
I speak the words they do not know.
I stand Hke an Indian
before the alien ships.
�WENDELL BERRY
491
The Strangers
1. What are some of the changes mentioned in the poem?
2. Explain the comparison of the poet facing the strangers to
an Indian standing before alien ships.
�492
The Sense of Place in Appalachian Writing
HERMAN HASCAL GILES (1922- )
With a high school diploma earned in Big Stone Gap, Virginia, his birthplace, Herman Giles began his journalistic career
as a sports writer for The Kingsport Times.
He wrote, edited, managed and published newspapers in
Nashville and Louisville before retiring in 1980 as president and
publisher of The Bristol Newspapers. He now devotes his time
to writing fiction.
He has published over two hundred short stories and
novels in popular magazines. One novel, Kansas Trail, has also
been published in England and Norway.
Man of the Land
The wagon with its muddy wheels and unpainted frame
creaked toward the scattered buildings of Boone Gap, the lazy
high-hipped mule choosing the road without signal from the
massive, black-haired man or the faded little woman who sat
at his side on the wagon seat.
Mirtle Castle raised her pointed chin from the cup of her
hand and looked at the man beside her. "Fight, fight, fight!" she
scorned, angry because they were here. "That's all you're good
for, Mort. And us with rich land goin' to waste."
Mort Castle chewed his corncob pipe to the corner of his
�HERMAN HASCAL GILES
493
wide mouth and answered around the stem, "Tonight we'll
have twenty-thiry dollars, dependin' on who I can find that's
got faith in Rob Scalf whuppin, me."
Mirtie let the conversation end in that way. She hoped Rob
Scalf would whale the daylights out of him.
When they reached Jake Neel's General Store, Mort drew
back on the reins, threw down the foot brake, and he and Mirtie climbed from the wagon.
"I can whup anything that walks, crawls, or flies," Mort
Castle boasted to the loungers around the store. "And if you
want to make yourself a few extra pennies, bet on me against
Rob Scalf tonight."
While Mort looked around the faces to find one who denied
his claim so he could place his bet, Mirtie slipped into the store.
"Howdy-do, Mirtie," Jake Neel greeted, peering intently
from under his horn-rimmed spectacles. "Are you a-wantin'
to buy somethin'?"
Mirtie pushed her shawl down around her shoulders and
let her hair spill light into the dingy gloom of the store. "I reckon not, Jake."
Jake casually said, "You could buy lots of things with the
money your land would bring."
"I could that, Jake." she replied. "I could get all the dishes
you got, and some new furniture."
"You could even buy that house across the street there."
Mirtie's eyes drank in the neatness of white clapboards and
green palings. There was grass in the yard and evergreens at
each corner of the building. "It's a nice house,11 she said.
"And it's for sale," Jake beamed. "Now if you'd set a
reasonable price on your farm, I know a feller who'd take it."
"That feller's name is Jake Neel," Mirtie laughed. "We've
argued about this before, time and again, Jake. But this time
I'm sayin' maybe I'll sell."
"It's awful growed up," Jake said cautiously. "Feller can't
walk over it for briars and locust sprouts."
From that approach Jake started making offers, and Mirtie
shook her head at the first few ventures on Jake's sliding scale.
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"Give me a week to think it over, Jake," she concluded at
last. "That ain't what I come for. Mort's fightin' Rob Scalf
tonight and I want to bet you Rob will whip him." Mirtie said
it all in one breath as if she wanted to rush through a task distasteful to her.
Jake hid his surprise. Without looking at her, he mused
thoughtfully: "One day somebody's goin' to break Mort's
neck."
"Sometimes," Mirtie replied, "I wish they would. I could
maybe cure him from a broke neck, but I ain't ever saw a man
with Mort's trouble cured."
"Mort has got a lot of wrong idees," Jake agreed solemnly.
"I recollect when he was a young man and strong as an ox. All
he ever talked about was fightin' John L. Sullivan and them
fellers. 'Cause he never got to do that, Mort decided he
wouldn't do nothin'. Mort is a man of the land and a man of
the land has got to take his livin' from it. It's a shame with all
that boundry your pa left you goin' to waste, too."
"Do you think Rob Scalf can whup him?" Mirtie asked as a
reminder of her bet.
Jake went around the counter. "I'll bet you ten against five
Mort whups Rob."
Mirtie dumped the contents of her carpet bag on the
counter. There were only four dollars and seventy-three cents
when she counted the small change, but Jake let the bet stand
as it was.
Mort Castle's bouts had become as regular as a Saturday
bath in Boone Gap, so everything was in order when Mirtie arrived at the big beech tree back of the town hall. Old men with
beards, mothers with babies in their arms, and boys too young
to be in the army formed a restless circle.
Squire Bell wood, official refree, limped toward Mirtie with
a bundle of rags. His spindly legs were so cramped from
rheumatism that he could do little but stand aside and wait for
somebody to fall and then declare the man left standing the
winner.
"Thought you'd never get here, Mirtie," Squire Bellwood
�HERMAN HASC AL GILES
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wheezed. "Mort's mighty anxious to git started, but he won't
let nobody wrap Rob's hands but you. I already got Mort's
hands kivered."
Mirtie knew a few scraps of gingham left over from making
dresses was little protection for a man's hands. Mort wouldn't
fight without it, though. He said all fighters did it that way.
"You're a fine lookin' boy in that uniform, Rob," Mirtie said.
"The army put some meat on your bones."
"Thanks, Mrs. Castle," Rob Scalf grinned. "I allow your old
man's hankerin' to take a little meat off my bones."
Mirtie finished with one of Rob's hands and started on the
other. "How long you home for, Rob?" she asked.
"Ten days. Then I reckon I'll be crossin' over."
Mirtie said, "If you see my boys Fred and Jack, tell 'em
howdy."
"I'll tell 'em I whupped their old man," Rob called after her
as she moved away.
Squire Bellwood hobbled forward, and motioned to Mort
and Rob. They met in the center of the improved ring and
shook hands.
"Rob," Squire Bellwood asked loudly, "have you any dislike for this man you're goin' to fight?"
Rob Scalf said, "No."
"Mort Castle, have you any dislike for Rob?"
Mort shook his head that he had none.
"As the law of this here town, I say it's a fair and legal fight
all for fun," Squire Bellwood declared. "If either of you git kilt,
it ain't nobody's fault. Now, light into it!"
Ten minutes later, Mort Castle was still trying to hit Rob
Scalf. The tall, lithe soldier was no longer the clumsy farmer's
boy who'd always walked like a plow and a team of horses
were in front of him. He smashed Mort's nose, blackened his
eyes, and cut his lips.
Mort made that last desperate charge which had carried
down many mountain fighters. But Rob lifted a fist from his
knee and flattened it on Mort's chin, and Mort went down and
lay quiet.
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It was sundown by the time Mort and Mirtie drove out of
Boone Gap. Mort had his pipe clenched tightly between his
teeth, staring morosely at the mule's hoofs.
"You bet against me," Mort said presently.
"Yes," Mirtie replied softly. "I knowed if you lost we
wouldn't have much to eat on until one of the boys sent us some
money. I'd rather save their money for them."
"A woman ought to stand by her man."
At their door, Mort halted the wagon and let Mirtie out. He
drove on and stabled the mule. When he came back he didn't
say anything.
Next day, still silent, he took his rifle and went into the
woods, brooding.
Mirtie was glad to see Enoch Redsoe, the mailman, pushing
his way through the dry sedge below the house. Mirtie did not
fear bad news from her boys; she'd know when something happened to Fred and Jack. Something faster than mails would tell
her — something she could feel inside herself. Enoch handed
Mirtie a thin, small envelope. The letter was the kind that came
from overseas.
The news in Fred's letter was so good she wanted to keep
it to herself for awhile. "Ma, I've rode a plane over enemy
country forty-five times. When I make fifty trips I can come
home. I ought to be there in a few months or so..."
Mirtie was still sitting by the window when Mort came
home. He started to walk by her like she wasn't there.
"Fred's comin' home," Mirtie said quietly.
Mort stopped in his tracks, one big hobnailed shoe reaching for another step. For a moment he stood there, then he
walked to the corner and put his rifle down.
Without turning around he said: "Is — is Fred all right, Mirtie?"
"He ain't shot up none," Mirtie answered. She handed Mort
the letter and he came close to the lamp on the window sill and
read it standing up.
Afterwards, Mort sat in his hickory-bottom rocking chair
near the fireplace and lit his pipe. Mirtie knew he missed his
boys, though he usually tried to act like he didn't know they
�HERMAN H ASC AL GILES
497
were gone. "Fred's goin' to be hurt when he gets home," Mirtie broke the stillness. "He's goin' to be hurt deep."
Mort replied proudly, "Fred can take care of hisself. He's
a fightin' man. His pa's a fightin' man."
"His pa's a coward," Mirtie exclaimed, a touch of color
rising in her cheeks. "When we was married you was aimin'
to clear this land and make it a good farm. Once you started
it, but one of them carnivals came to town and you spent the
week fightin' in a show with a carnival man."
"I made thirty dollars," Mort defended stubbornly.
"It's easy to win fights if that's your callin'," Mirtie affirmed.
"It takes an honest-to-goodness man to whup the land. The
land whupped you, Mort. That's why I'm selling it."
Mort took his pipe from his mouth and stared at her.
"Sellin' it!" he roared. "So Jake Neel has finally talked you into
it!"
Mirtie's eyes flashed as she swung her gaze to Mort's ruddy
face. "I'm doin' it for Fred and Jack. They say they're buildin'
a new world. They are changin' for the better. I'm going to
take the money I git from this place and buy 'em a nice house
in Boone Gap!"
Little knots of muscle bunched along the rim of Mort's jaw
and he ground his pipe stem between his teeth. It seemed an
eternity before he spoke again.
"Mirtie," he said at last, a gentleness in his voice which
reminded her of his youth, "Don't sell this land!"
"It's no good to us, Mort."
Mirtie moved hurriedly away from the window and into
the bedroom. Before she went to sleep, she saw Mort walk over
to the window to stare out at the dark hills.
Later, a rosy glow against the window startled Mirtie
awake. Still in her nightgown and barefooted, she rushed to
the window and looked out on a raging field of fire.
Spiny locust sprouts down past the hollow road were being
gulped away by the hungry blaze. The sedge brush below the
house was already gone. In its place was a field of black stubble which left a smell pleasant to Mirtie's nose.
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At the far edge of the field she saw Mort's husky figure. He
had the mule hitched to the bull-tongue plow which her father
had stored in the smoke-house before he died. Mort had the
check lines looped behind his neck so he could use both hands
on the plow handles. Furrows of fresh, gray earth were being
made by his plow and Mirtie could hear his deep booming
voice above the crackle of the flames around him.
Mirtie slipped into her clothes and ran into the field. She
crept around to the left where Mort couldn't see her. She could
hear what he was saying now.
"Fire to a farmer is like steel knucks to a fighter," Mort
roared at the straining mule. "This here land ain't for sale."
Mort yelled. "Time spring gits here, corn will be a-sproutin' in
the field. We are a f ightin' family, mule. I can whup anything
that walks, flies or crawls. And by Godfrey, I can whup the
land!"
Man of the Land
1.
After the fight, Mort tells Mirtie that a woman ought to
stand by her man. Has she failed to do this? Explain.
2. Mirtie appears to be blessed with woman's intuition. Find
evidence of this.
3.
Mort is a man who loves to fight. How does Mirtie turn
this love to a better advantage?
4. What prompts Mort to go out and "whup the land?"
�No. 11
HERMAN HASC AL GILES
499
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JUDY ODOM (1942- )
Judy Odom grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, and lives
in Johnson City, Tennessee, where she teaches English at
Science Hill High School. She earned her B. A. degree from Birmingham Southern College; she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa
there. She received her M.A. degree from Emory University.
During the summer of 1983 she participated in the Bennington College Writing Program in Vermont. In 1985 she
received a Stokely Fellowship at the University of Tennessee.
Her publications include short stories in Crescent Review,
Homewords, Now and Then, and Mountain Laurel Her short
stories won the 1986 and 1987 Sherwood Anderson Awards.
The Killing Jar
When you first become a father, you feel so strong. I've got
a son myself. I know. Matt's fourteen now; it won't be long
till he's a man. He gets embarrassed if I talk about it, but I can
still remember how he looked the minute he was born. I was
Nancy's labor coach; I went through the delivery with her. I
did my best to ease her through the pain.
I cried, you know. I couldn't help it. If you'd been there,
you'd understand. Matthew looked so little and so fragile. I
could've crushed his bones to powder between my index
�JUDYODOM
501
finger and my thumb. But helpless as he was, the first real
breath he drew, he used it for a roaring challenge to the world.
You should've seen him kick his legs and wave his arms
around—like he could take life on and whip it there and then.
I knew he had defeats ahead of him, and troubles; no father can
protect his son from those. But I swore I'd try to see that Matthew held on to his fighting spirit. I promised myself I'd train
him up a champion, win or lose.
The best I could, I've kept that promise, although God
knows it's been hard sometimes. It can get so complicated,
raising children. Other parents, they don't warn you. They
just sit back and grin and wait for you to find out on your own.
I don't mean baby problems like the times they cry all night
because they're teething or they've got the colic. Times like
that can leave you worthless as a burnt-out light bulb for a little while, but they don't overload the power circuits in your
soul. To get through teething or the colic, all you need's endurance. You walk the baby and you hold him warm against
your stomach, and you use the simple medicines the doctor
gives you for that simple kind of pain. Later on, the remedies
don't come so easy. Later on, you have to watch him hurting
and admit you don't know what the hell to do.
Just like last fall, when Matt first started high school. The
kind of thing that happened then—that's what I mean. Ever
since he was a little kid, he's lived for basketball. He played in
the City Park and Recreation League from fourth grade on. So
when he got to high school, naturally, he went out for the Bteam. That's what they call the freshman-sophomore squad.
Well, it's a big school, and there's lots of competition.. Matt
didn't make the team.
The only thing he'd say to me was, "I don't want to talk
about it" I tried to put my arm around his shoulders, but he
dodged me and went charging upstairs to his room and shut
the door. All I could do was stand there thinking how I'd like
to wring that B-team coach's neck and then slam dunk his head.
'Course, you know I didn't do it. Nancy calmed me down.
"It's Matt's problem. It's not yours," she said. "He'll handle it
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The Sense of Place in Appalachian Writing
okay."
And she was right. He handled it. He handled it just fine.
They needed a student manager for the varsity, and Matt
decided he'd take on the job. He helped out all season during
practice, and sometimes he worked the Scoreboard at the
games. He got to travel with the team. "It's not as good as playing, Dad," he told me. "But I'm picking up some pointers from
Coach Proctor and the guys. I'll try out again when I'm a
sophomore. Coach says he bets I make it in another year."
Matt sure learned grace and style from somewhere. I wish
I could take credit for it, but I can't. He figured out a way to
lose and still come out a winner, and he did it on his own. I
think he knows I would've tried to help him if he'd asked me.
I hope he understands how proud I am he found the right
direction all alone. He's still too young to notice that his independence makes me feel a little sad and lonesome. I don't mind
the sadness, though; it's natural. It's a natural thing.
Every bullet needs a rifle to propel it toward its target;
every rocket has to have its launching pad. If a father serves
his proper function, he's bound to end up getting left behind.
I had to read this poem once in high school. I don't remember who it was that wrote it, and I don't remember what it's
called. But this poet, he compared two lovers to a compass—
the kind of compass that you draw with in geometry. He said
the woman was the fixed foot; she stays steady in the center
and helps the man to keep his circle true.
English never was my favorite subject, but that damn poem
hit me hard. I'd just started dating Nancy, and I realized we
could be like that if we stayed together. Even then, I knew I
could depend on Nancy to anchor me and hold my circle firm.
I see now it's the same with sons and fathers. A father has
to do that same thing for his son. He has to stay in one place,
hardly moving, while his son goes out to form a brand new
circle and create his own design.
A compass doesn't work unless its halves are joined
together, but they have to stretch out separate from each other,
too. Unless the son's allowed to reach his proper distance from
�JUDYODOM
503
the father, he can't accomplish anything.
That's why I should've let the boy alone about that business with the bug collection. Usually, I don't interfere in school
work; that's a rule. Matt's a smart kid. Maybe too smart. I
guess he takes that after Nancy. He gets his blonde hair and
his stubbornness from me.
He likes history and English best, though learning anything
comes easy for him. He wants to be a TV newsman like Dan
Rather is—at least, that's what he's saying now. I don't discourage him. I know it's good to have your dreams. Soon as
he meets a girl and wants to start a famiiy, he'll turn practical.
I did. 'Most everybody does.
Sometimes I wonder if he reads too much. He's reading
every minute he's awake, if he's not playing basketball. All
that reading—that's what makes him ask so many questions.
He worries about stuff that shouldn't matter to a boy his age—
the kind of stuff nobody can do anything about. These days,
it's children over there in Ethiopia. Last month, it was the
Nazis and the way they slaughtered Jews. Matthew sees a
wrong, he wants to right it. There's a lot about this life he
doesn't understand.
Relax and have yourself a good time, boy, I want to tell him.
Don't fret away your heat and brightness because you can't
bring summer to a frozen world.
To tell the truth, I wouldn't change him, though. That ferocious energy he's got—it's like the lightning. You tremble at
the power of it, and you fear the danger, but you can't help
thinking that it's beautiful. You wish it could last longer than
it does.
The minute he walked in that afternoon, I knew he was all
fired up over something. He didn't even say hello or ask what
I was doing home. He threw his books down on the kitchen
counter, then he grabbed an apple and a glass of milk and
headed for his room.
It was Friday, and I guess I had spring fever. On my way
to work that morning, I'd noticed the forsythia in Mrs. Martin's
yard next door. The sight of all those little yellow flowers made
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The Sense of Place in Appalachian Writing
me restless for some reason. The branches curved so graceful,
they made me think of how the line arcs out from my new casting rod. I closed up the body shop at noon and came on home.
We own this piece of land on Bear Claw Mountain. It's
nothing fancy, just a rundown cabin and five acres by the lake.
My daddy bought it in the forties for the taxes; he left it to me
when he died five years ago. I thought we'd drive up there and
stay the weekend. Nancy said she'd skip her gourmet cooking
class on Saturday and come along. We had the car all packed.
Then Matt came in, about as cheerful as a winter rain.
I told Nancy he could pick some other day to hide out in
his room and stare at shadows. I wanted us to sit together in
the sunshine and smell the wind and maybe hook a trout. He'd
feel better once he saw the new grass sprouting and the new
leaves shining red on all the maple trees.
So, I went upstairs to get him. I knocked, but when he
didn't answer, I opened his door and walked on in. He was
slouched down in his big chair, listening to his Walkman.
That's why he didn't hear me knocking—he had those headphones on. His eyes were closed and he was tapping out the
rhythm of the music on the chair arm. It must've been a real
fast song.
For a minute, I stood looking at him. I was so close, he
musf ve felt that I was there. "Hey, buddy." I touched him on
the shoulder. "Let's go fishing."
He slipped off the headphones. I could hear the music. It
sounded far away and strange, but still it was familiar. A few
more seconds, and I might have recognized the tune.
"What?" he asked me. He punched a button and the music
stopped. "What did you say?"
"Let's go fishing," I repeated. "I thought we'd go up to Bear
Claw. Spend the night, you know. Maybe stay through Sunday if the fishing's good."
"Okay. Sure." He shrugged his shoulders like he didn't
care one way or the other, but I saw the beginning of a smile.
"Maybe I can catch some bugs up there. We have to do this bug
collection for biology," he said. "I don't like it, but I guess I have
�JUDYODOM
505
to do it if I want to keep an A. Maybe I'll punch holes in the jar
lids. If I do that, the bugs won't die." The smile was getting bigger; it was spreading to his eyes.
"Good. That's fine," I told him, thinking everything was
settled. "Well, get the lead out, boy," I grinned. "Your mother's
waiting. Put some clothes in your backpack and get your butt
out to the car."
He stood up like a spring uncoiling. Six more months, and
hell be taller than I am.
Nobody talked much on the drive to Bear Claw. Nancy—
she's a quiet woman; she likes looking out the window at the
trees and fields and houses rushing by. Matt just sprawled
across the back seat and plugged into his Walkman. Glancing
at him in the rearview mirror, I could almost see the music
wrap itself around him like a blanket—or a cocoon. Before
long, though, the highway got so twisted and so narrow, I
couldn't look at anything except the road.
At least he didn't take his Walkman fishing. He put it on
the kitchen table in the cabin while he rummaged through the
cabinets for some empty jars. He found a couple and he
brought those with us, but he left the Walkman there. Maybe
he remembered from the last trip. Spring or winter—any
season—the mountain wraps you in a music of its own.
We didn't catch a single fish that evening. We didn't try.
Matt hadn't even brought his rod and reel down to the lake.
We just sat there quiet and watched the daylight fade. Once, I
pointed out a dragonfly. Matt nodded, but he didn't make a
move to chase it. I didn't press him to.
There wasn't any wind to speak of, not enough to ruffle up
the water. You could see the sky and clouds and trees reflected
in the lake. Tossing in a hook and sinker would've been like
throwing rocks straight at a mirror. I half believed the lake
would shatter into pieces if I did. All afternoon, my casting rod
stayed propped against a tree stump, next to Matt's two empty
jars.
Before the sun was hardly down, we saw the first star shining. By then, the pines across the lake had blurred into a wall
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The Sense of Place in Appalachian Writing
of dark blue shadows, so we collected all our gear and climbed
back up the hill.
Nights turn chilly on the mountain, even in the springtime.
I was glad to have my family warm inside the cabin, with the
smell of coffee brewing and supper cooking on the stove.
The next morning, Matt and I were at the lake again by
seven. Mist was rising off the water, and the dew soaked
through my tennis shoes. Within an hour, I had hooked three
trout and one fine catfish, and Matt had captured half a dozen
bugs. He brought them to me for inspection; I could barely see
them for the grass and twigs he'd stuffed inside the jar.
"What's that for?" I asked him, but I knew already.
"Food," he said. "They have to eat. They need some food."
He set the jar down slow and careful on the ground between
us and locked his hands around his knees.
Somewhere behind us in the woods, a bird was singing. I
wish I could've told Matt what it was. My daddy knew the call
of every wild thing on the mountain; he'd have named that bird
by listening to its song. He tried to teach me, but I never
bothered learning. It didn't seem important at the time. I picked the jar up off the grass and held it balanced in my palm.
"That's a pretty one right there." I pointed at a little pale
green insect that was darting back and forth inside the jar and
slamming up against the glass. It had a narrow, rod-shaped
body and long, transparent wings. Flying free, it would've
been real graceful; it would've danced across the air.
"You giving these guys one last meal before the execution?"
I asked, knowing that it was a cruel thing to say. "You have to
kill them, don't you? Pin them on a board and write their scientific names and everything?" I set the jar back on the ground.
Matt wouldn't look at me. I didn't blame him. He pulled
up a wad of grass and flung it scattering against the wind.
"Yeah," he nodded finally. "That's right. I have to kill them.
Mrs. Burke said use a killing jar."
"A killing jar?" I repeated it like some fool kid who's got a
lesson he can't quite understand.. "What the hell's a killing jar?"
"You put your insects in an air-tight jar," Matt said. "No
�JUDYODOM
507
holes in the lid. You soak a cotton ball in polish remover—like
Mom puts on her fingernails, you know?'1 He didn't wait for
me to answer; he went right on explaining. He wasn't even
talking to me, really. He just had to get it said. "And then you
drop the cotton in the jar and screw the lid on. That's it," he
said. "That's what you do. She says it only takes a second. The
poison's quick. There's poison in the fumes. It's painless—so
Mrs. Burke says." Matthew's voice rasped like a file on metal.
"I'm not sure I can do it, Daddy. I don't think I can."
"Why not?" I was losing patience with him. Nobody normal—boy or man—would give one holy damn about a bug.
"They don't last but a season anyway," I argued. "If they don't
get snapped up by a bird or some old bullfrog, they freeze to
death the first cold spell." I flicked my wrist and watched the
motion ripple through my fishing rod. The line hummed out
across the water and splashed into the patch of sunlight I was
aiming for.
Matt had his lower lip poked out that stubborn way he does
sometimes. "I know that," he growled. "I know they don't live
long. They're not supposed to. I mean—you know—it's the
food chain. A bird kills insects 'cause he needs the food. Then
something bigger comes along—a cat or something—and he
eats the bird. That's all right. It's sort of neat, you know?"
"Matt, if they're dead, they're dead," I tried to reason with
him. "Whoever kills them—you or some damn bird—it
doesn't—"
"I don't like killing for no reason," he insisted. "It's a bad
thing, Daddy. Animals don't do it. I won't either. I don't care
if I fail biology." He grabbed the jar and held it tight in both his
hands. Before I had the time to say another word, he opened
it and turned it upside down. Quick as lightning, every bug
he had was gone.
The little green one leaped straight up, it seemed like. I
watched it dancing till the sun got in my eyes.
"I don't understand you, boy," I said and reeled my line in.
I didn't feel like fishing any more. "Your school work—that's
the most important thing there is. A good grade's worth 50,000
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The Sense of Place in Appalachian Writing
bugs."
Matt wouldn't answer. He jumped to his feet and stalked
off by himself. I figured he'd come back when he got hungry,
so I didn't try to stop him. I stared out at the water and let him
walk away.
About noon, I started for the cabin. Sure enough, I met him
halfway up the hill. He said he'd walked the shore full circle.
That must be close to seven miles.
He told me about a water snake he'd seen, and a mother
rabbit with two babies. We didn't mention bugs again.
Matt helped me clean the fish like always. I was surprised
he did. Nancy fried the trout in cornmeal, and we put the catfish in the freezer for another day. We use every fish I catch.
My daddy taught me that much, anyhow.
After we finished eating, Matt and Nancy decided they'd
hike to the top of Bear Claw. At the summit, there's a meadow,
and it's beautiful in spring—wild flowers growing everywhere
and long grass rippling in the wind. Any place you look,
there's other mountains. You're standing at the center of a
magic circle, protected by a solid ring of dark blue flames.
If I had the cash, I'd buy that land tomorrow and build
myself a house up there.
I told Matt and Nancy to go on without me, that I'd rather
take a nap than make the climb. Nancy raised her eyebrows—
she knows how I am about that meadow—but she didn't question me. She just hustled Matt on out the door.
I stood on the back porch till the pine trees closed around
them. Matt was whistling; I could hear him for a long time after
they were out of sight.
With my family gone, the cabin felt too empty. I tried to
sleep, but couldn't, so I strolled down to the lake again. Matt's
empty jars were lying in the grass right where he'd left them.
I stretched out on the ground and propped my chin up in my
hands. Then I saw the ladybug in front of my left elbow. She
was balanced on a grass blade like a diver on a diving board.
"'Ladybug, ladybug,/ Fly away home.'" Whispering to her
like a kid, I sat up slowly and felt around until my right hand
�JUDYODOM
509
touched a jar. Her wings didn't even flutter; she didn't pay me
any mind. "'Your house is on fire/ Your children all gone/111
finished up the rhyme and waited, but she didn't move.
"Well," I said a little louder, "you've had your warning,
ladybug." I flicked the grass blade with my finger and sent her
diving into glass.
That whole long afternoon, I roamed the lake shore like a
big game hunter, using one jar for a trap and the other for a
cage. I collected two big shiny dark green beetles and a
dragonfly, several ants of different sizes and one fat black and
yellow bumblebee. The catch that made me proudest took a
lot of skill and quickness. In the stream that feeds into the lake,
I came across a bunch of Jesus bugs. Daddy used to call them
that because they walk on water. I know it's sacrilegious, but
I've never heard them called by any other name. Well, they
skim along so fast, it's hard to trap one. You think you've got
it in your jar, but then you blink one time and zip! It's gone.
Finally, I had to wade out in the stream up to my knees.
Mountain water's liquid ice in springtime. I squished back
to the cabin and changed into dry socks and pants and shoes.
I put on a heavy sweater, too. Then I dragged a rocking chair
out on the front porch, so I could sit in comfort and watch the
sun go down.
I was feeling warm again, and happy 'cause I'd solved
Matt's problem. Thanks to me, my boy could satisfy his conscience and his teacher both. Soon as he and Nancy came back
from the meadow, I'd explain. Matt and I could work together.
We'd do this project as a team. Smiling to myself, I rocked a
little faster in my rocking chair.
I'd tell him that I'd trap the bugs he needed. I would
operate the killing jar. Once the bugs were dead, it shouldn't
bother Matt to classify them. He could pin each carcass to the
board and label each one with its fancy scientific name.
When Matt was eight years old, we won the Cub Scout
Racer Derby. We built a model racing car out of a block of
wood they gave us and a regulation set of wheels. I still
remember how we cheered and how Matt hugged me when
�510
The Sense of Place in Appalachian Writing
our car rolled in first across the finish line.
These days, there's not much left that we can build
together. Matt's at the age when young men start to do their
building on their own. Every boy has got to make himself a
place that he can live in. My daddy had to watch me do it, and
it's my turn now to watch my son. I have to stand aside and
see the walls get higher, and hope to find a door somewhere
thaf s open to me every now and then.
I looked at my watch, but it was hard to read the numbers.
Where the hell had Matt and Nancy got to, anyway? They both
knew better than to try and feel their way down Bear Claw in
the dark.
The sky had turned soft purple like it does clear evenings
after sundown, just before the light's completely gone. All the
birds had settled for the night and stopped their singing. Every
leaf and branch and blade of grass was resting, absolutely still.
The land stretched out around me, hushed and waiting. I realized I had stopped rocking; I was waiting, too.
Then I heard Matt's whistle, and footsteps padding down
the slope.
"Ben? Hey, Ben—where are you?" It was Nancy calling. I
went inside to build a fire.
Matt didn't act real pleased about my plan when I explained it to him after supper. He just frowned and shrugged
and said he guessed it was okay. Until bedtime, he sat by the
fire and read some book he'd brought along and listened to his
Walkman. He didn't say another word except good night.
Next day, I didn't fish—I hunted. Matt had said he needed
thirty different bugs. By two o'clock, I'd captured thirty-five
and filled three empty jars. Nancy found a praying mantis on
the back door screen. We gave him a fourth jar to himself. I
didn't know but what he fed on other insects, and I didn't want
to see my day's work disappear.
We didn't have the right equipment with us at the cabin;
we'd have to make the killing jar when we got back to town. I
decided that I'd do it fast—that very night—and get it over
with. By three o'clock, we'd packed the car and started home.
�JUDYODOM
511
Matt had the four jars lined up on the seat beside him. I told
him to be sure and grab them if I had to stop or swerve real
sudden. You never know what's going to happen on that narrow mountain road.
Stores are open here in town from one till six on Sunday,
so I went by K-Mart. Matt stayed in the car with Nancy; he said
anything I bought would do. I picked out two small cork bulletin boards for him to mount the insects on. Then I found a
pack of little self-stick labels and a plastic box of pins. Matt
would have to get some books on classifying insects from the
library at school.
At home, we set the jars on the kitchen counter until we
could unload the car. I put the K-Mart sack down on the table
and told Matt he could carry in his backpack and the suitcase
while I brought in the cooler and the box of food we hadn't
used. Sharing out the work that way, it didn't take us long.
Nancy found the cotton balls and the polish remover for
me, and an empty jar with no holes in the lid. I thought she
looked a little bit uneasy when she brought them in. And sure
enough, she didn't like it either. "Ben, you can't do that in
here," she said. "Not in my kitchen." Her face was turning red.
I said okay and hugged her. Then I took everything into
the den.
The praying mantis can go first, I thought, 'cause he's so
big and ugly. Being careful not to give him space enough to
make a jump for freedom, I transferred him into the killing jar.
I soaked some cotton with the polish remover. The alcohol
evaporating made my fingers cold. I loosened the top of the
jar and raised it just a little to push the cotton in.
Mrs. Burke sure spoke the truth when she told Matt it
wouldn't take a minute. I forced myself to be a man and watch,
and it was over in a breath or two. But that was long enough
to show me Mrs. Burke had lied about one thing. She'd said
the killing jar was painless. Well, it wasn't. In those few
seconds, I saw agony.
Dear Lord, I thought. Matt was right. I should've listened
to him. This is killing for no reason. A good grade's nothing
�512
The Sense of Place in Appalachian Writing
but a letter on a piece of paper. It's not worth one creature's
suffering.
H
Matt!ft I yelled real loud. "Come on in here and help me,
boy."
He's a good kid, used to doing what his daddy tells him,
even if he disagrees. Sooner than I had expected, he was standing in the door. "Come on, son," I grinned. "Let's take these
jars out in the yard." He raised his eyebrows at me just like
Nancy, but he did what I said.
Outside, we knelt down in the grass together. "I killed your
praying mantis, son," I said. Tm sorry."
Matt looked at me like I was crazy. He still didn't understand. I laughed and shook his arm the way I do some mornings when he won't wake up for school. "Well, get the lead out,
boy," I told him. "We can't turn these guys loose until you open
up the jars."
"Thanks, Daddy. Thanks a lot," he said. Smiling as bright
as sunrise, he offered me a jar. And, quicker than it takes to tell
it, we released our prisoners in the grass.
We walked back to the house together and we climbed the
porch steps side by side. Then Matt stopped and held the
screen door open for me. I looked at him and smiled; he gave
a little bow.
"Thank you, Matthew." I said it formal, like it was some
kind of password. He nodded once and let me walk on in.
The Killing Jar
1. This story is told from the father's point of view. What
attitudes and emotions might have been revealed if the son
had told the story?
2. The father feels pride in his son. Find evidence of this in
the story.
3. What does the father do to establish a bond of
�JUDYODOM
513
understanding with his son? What prompts the father to
do what he does?
4. Explain the following statement: "If a father serves his
proper function, he is bound to end up getting left behind."
5. What other title might be appropriate for this story?
�514
The Sense of Place in Appalachian Writing
RITA QUILLEN (1954- )
Rita Quillen, a fifth-generation Appalachian, has lived her
entire life in Hiltons, Virginia.
She attended Mountain Empire Community College before
earning a B.S. and an M. A. in English from East Tennessee State
University. Her master's thesis examined four other Appalachian poets included in this anthology—Jeff Daniel
Marion, Fred Chappell, Robert Morgan, and Jim Wayne Miller.
She also completed a bibliography of Appalachian poets which
was published in The Appalachian Journal. A chapbook of her
poetry, October Dusk, has been published by Seven Buffaloes
Press.
"The Good Life" is a bittersweet look at life on the farm. Although it is a trying life, lacking in some modern comforts, the
speaker decides that leaving would be impossible. The last line
"I cannot leave; I cannot go away" is a line from James Still's
poem "Heritage," echoing his sentiment of an attachment to a
place that is too powerful to overcome.
�RTTAQUILLEN 515
The Good Life (for Fred Chappell)
Tobacco teepees stand desolate
after the massacre.
Weary sunflowers look like women
in yellow bonnets
nodding in the last hot dose
of August sun.
Across the field
my husband works
with bare back and arms
splitting and stacking
oak and hickory,
building a fort
against the winter
he already hears in the trees.
This sad but noble scene is not the whole story.
The horse cut his leg
on a John Deere mowing machine.
The bull died with a fever
caught on the road.
Tomatoes rot in piles;
weeds choke the roses.
This trip is not all that divine.
My shadow is not my partner in the row.
It has a more modern mind,
longing for dishwashers
garbage disposal
sidewalks
for Bandolino shoes.
�516
The Sense of Place in Appalachian Writing
But the daydreams will pass like the summer.
Five generations of headstones,
protecting their interests,
huddle silently
in the field by the big oak.
They do not have to speak.
I already know:
I cannot leave; I cannot go away.
The Good Life
1. What does "the good life" mean to you?
2. Explain the line "My shadow is not my partner in the row."
3. Locate the metaphors and the similes in the poem, and
comment on their aptness for the context.
4. What reason does the poet give for her inability to leave the
land? Do you understand this reason?
�JAMES STILL
517
JAMES STILL (1906 - )
James Still, who was born in Double Creek, Alabama, has
been called "the psalmist of the mountains." A 1929 graduate
of Lincoln Memorial University, Still earned an M.A. at
Vanderbilt University in 1930. He has lived since 1939 in an
old log house on Dead Mare Branch near the Hindman Settlement School in Kentucky. Before devoting himself to writing
fuU time, Mr. Still was the librarian at the settlement school,
and he also taught for ten years at Morehead State University.
He has published poetry, short stories, books for children,
and novels. His short stories have been anthologized in such
collections as the Best American Short Stones and the 0. Henry
Memorial Prize Stories. Mr. Still is also a frequent comentator
on National Public Radio.
When James Still turned 80 on July 16,1980, the Hindman
Settlement School threw a party to honor the man and his work.
Several hundred people gathered from all over the country to
pay tribute to one of the Appalachian region's finest authors.
"Heritage" expresses a great love for the mountains and an
unbreakable bond with them.
�518
The Sense of Place in Appalachian Writing
Heritage
I shall not leave these prisoning hills
Though they topple their barren heads to level earth
And the forests slide uprooted out of the sky.
Though the waters of Troublesome, of Trace Fork,
Of Sand Lick rise in a single body to glean the
valleys,
To drown lush pennyroyal, to unravel rail fences;
Though the sun-ball breaks the ridges into dust
And burns its strength into the blistered rock
I cannot leave. I cannot go away.
Being of these hills, being one with the fox
Stealing into the shadows, one with the new-born
foal,
The lumbering ox drawing green beech logs to mill,
One with the destined feet of man climbing and
descending,
And one with death rising to bloom again, I
cannot go.
Being of these hills, I cannot pass beyond.
Heritage
1. Most people desire to leave something which imprisons
them. The speaker in this poem says he cannot leave. Do
you understand his reason? Explain.
2. Describe the poet's feelings of oneness with nature.
�519
COMPOSITION TOPICS
1.
Think of a time in your life when you have witnessed or
experienced an incident that showed commitment to an
idea, a person, or a place as the selections in this chapter
do. Write a narrative about the incident. You may use your
imagination to improve or embellish the story.
2. As the poets in this chapter have done, describe in poetry
or prose a place you love. Use sensory imagery to make
the description vivid.
ACTIVITIES
In a few years you will leave your parents and begin you own
home.
When you have your own home, what are some family traditions that you want to continue?
What are some family values that you also want to make a part
of your home?
When you begin your home, what will you leave behind?
Your book now contains your family in the past and as it has
changed through the years. Because you represent your
family's continuity, you are the major character in your book.
End your book with your autobiography. Be sure to include:
1. Birth date and place
2. Name and reason your parents selected your name
3. Parents'names
4. Names of brothers and sisters
�520
5. Schools attended
6. Places lived and reason you lived there
7. Person or persons who have influenced you
8. Memorable experiences including your earliest memory
9. Important friendships
10. Jobs you've had
11. Plans for the future
�This page intentionally left blank
�This page intentionally left blank
�ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
523
Acknowledgments
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
James Agee. From A Death in the Family, pp. 214-227, by James Agee.
Copyright © 1957 by the James Agee Trust. Copyright renewed © 1985 by
Mia Agee. Reprinted by permission of Grosset & Dunlap, Inc.
LisaAlther. From Kinflicks. Copyright © 1975 by Lisa Alther. Reprinted by
permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Clarence Ashley. "Ballad of Claude Allen," written and sung by Clarence
Ashley on Folkways Records FA/2355 NYC.
Wendell Berry. 'The Strangers" from The Country Of Marriage. Copyright©
1972 by Wendell Berry. Reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Brace,
Jovanovich, Inc.
Kathryn Stripling Byer. "Wide Open, These Gates" from The Girl in the Midst
of Harvest. Copyright © 1986. Reprinted by permission of Texas Tech
University Press.
Edward Cabbell. "Appalachia: An Old Man's Dream Deferred" from Now
and Then, Vol. 3, No. 1, Winter, 1986. East Tennessee State University.
Reprinted by permission of the author and Now and Then.
Jo Carson. "People Pieces: My Brother Estes" from The Appalachian Journal,
1983. Copyright © 1983 Appalachian Journal. Reprinted by permission of the
publisher.
A. P. Carter. "Single Girl, Married Girl." Copyright © 1927 by Peer International Corporation. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
�524
Acknowledgements
Harry Caudill. 'The Mountain, the Miner, and the Lord." Copyright © 1980
by the University Press of Kentucky. Reprinted by permission of the
publisher.
Fred Chappell. "Firewater" from Midquest. Reprinted by permission of
Louisiana State University Press. "My Grandmother Washes Her Vessels"
from River, Copyright © 1975. Reprinted by permission of Louisiana State
University Press.
Richard Chase. "Cat 'n Mouse" from The Jack Tales, by Richard Chase,
Copyright © 1943 and Copyright renewed © 1971 by Richard Chase.
Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.
Alan Cheuse. 'Tripping the Lights Fantastic" from the Boston Globe Magazine
May 29,1983. Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
Lou V. Crabtree. "Homer Snake" from Sweet Hollow, Copyright © 1984.
Reprinted by permission of Lousiana State University Press.
Borden Deal. "Antaeus" Copyright © 1961 by Southern Methodist University Press. Used by permission of the Borden Deal Family.
Victor Depta. "TVA" from Laurel Review, Vol. 15, Winter, 1981, p. 52. Used
by permission of West Virginia Wesleyan College.
Wilma Dykeman. "Chapter 5, pp. 151-162" from Return The Innocent Earth.
Copyright © 1973 by Wilma Dykeman. Reprinted by permission of Holt,
Rinehart, and Winston, Publishers.
John Ehle. "Chapter 13, pp. 173-186" from The Road. Copyright © 1967 by
John Ehle. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc.
Herman Hascal Giles. "Man of the Land" from The Watauga Review, Vol. 2,
No. 1,1968. Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
Richard Hague. "In the Woods Beyond the Coalfields" from Ripening.
Reprinted by permission of the Ohio State University Press, copyright ©
1984.
Mildred Haun. Prom The Hawk's Done Gone. Copyright © 1968 by Mildred
Haun. Reprinted by permission of Vanderbilt University Press.
Edwin Hoffman. "Strippers, No!" from The Fighting Mountaineers.
Copyright © 1979 by Edwin D. Hoffman. Reprinted by permission of
Houghton Mifflin Company.
Myles Horton. Interview with Sojourners. Reprinted by permission of
Sojourners, Box 29272, Washington, D.C. 20017
Lee Howard. 'The Last Unmined Vein" from The Unmined Vein. Copyright
© 1980 by Lee Howard and Anemone Press. Reprinted by permission of
author and publisher.
Horace Kephart. Condensed with permission of Macmillan Publishing Company from Our Southern Highlanders by Horace Kephart. Copyright © 1922
�ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
525
by Macmillan Publishing Company, renewed 1950 by Laura M. Kephart.
George Ella Lyon. "Stripped" from Appalachian Journal. Copyright © 1981.
Reprinted by permission of the author and the Appalachian Journal.
Jeff Daniel Marion. "Ebbing and Flowing Spring." Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
Alice Marriott. 'Tsali of the Cherokees" by Norah Roper as told to Alice Marriott from American Indian Mythology by Alice Marriott and Carol K. Rachlin.
Copyright © 1968 by Alice Marriott and Carol K. Rachlin. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row Publishers, Inc.
Bobbie Ann Mason. "Nancy Culpepper" (pp. 179-195) from Shiloh and Other
Stories. Appeared originally in New Yorker. Copyright © 1982 by Bobbie Ann
Mason. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row Publishers, Inc.
Jim Wayne Miller. "The Brier Losing Touch With His Traditions" and 'Turn
Your Radio On" from The Mountains Have Come Closer. Copyright © 1980 by
Appalachian Consortium Press. "Beginning, Ending" from The Small Farm,
Vol. 11 and 12. All reprinted by kind permission of the author.
Robert Morgan. "Bean Money" from Groundwork. Reprinted by permission
of Gnomon Press, copyright © 1979.
Gurney Norman. "A Correspondence" from Kinfolks, The Wilgus Stories.
Copyright © 1977 by Gurney Norman. Reprinted by permission of Gnomon
Press.
Judy Odom. 'The Killing Jar." Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
Rita Quillen. 'The Good Life." Copyright © 1984 Appalachian Journal. All
rights reserved. Reprinted by kind permission of the author and Appalachian
Journal.
Jean Ritchie. From Singing Family of the Cumberlands by Jean Ritchie. Geordie Music Publishing Company. 7A Locust Ave., Port Washington, NY
11050.
Ron Short. From South of the Mountain, Act II. Copyright © 1985 Roadside
Theater / Appalshop. Reprinted by kind permission of the author and Roadside Theater.
Lee Smith. "Saint Paul" from Cakewalk. Copyright © 1981 by Lee Smith.
Reprinted by permission of The Putnam Publishing Group.
Bernard Stallard. "The Writing Spider" from Appalachian Summer.
Copyright © 1967. Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
James Still. "Heritage," Copyright © by James Still, and excerpt from River
of Earth.Copyright © University Press of Kentucky. Reprinted by kind permission of the author.
James Stokely. "Molly Mooneyham" from The Small Farm, Vol. 7-8, 1978.
�526
Acknowledgements
East Tennessee Printing Company. Reprinted by kind permission of Wilma
Dykeman Stokely and the publisher.
Jesse Stuart. From Daughter of the Legend and "Split Cherry Tree." Reprinted
by permission of the Jesse Stuart Foundation.
Marilou Bonham Thompson. "Genesis" and "Where Mountain and Atom
Meet" from Abiding Appalachia, Where Mountain and Atom Meet. Copyright
© 1980 by Marilou Bonham Thompson. Reprinted by permission of St.
Luke's Press.
Merle Travis. "Nine Pound Hammer." Copyright © 1947 by American
Music, Inc. Copyright renewed and assigned to Unichappell Music, Inc., and
Elvis Presley Music. All rights administered by Unichappell Music, Inc. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
Robert Penn Warren. "Sitting on a Farm Lawn on a Sunday Afternoon" from
Rumors Verified: Poems 1979-1980. Reprinted by permission of Random
House, Inc., and Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.
Don West. "Harlan Portraits" from In a Land of Plenty. Reprinted by kind
permission of the author.
Eliot Wigginton, ed. From Foxfire 3. Copyright © 1973,1974 by The Foxfire
Fund, Inc. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Cratis Williams. "Dialect and Speech." Used by permission of the Center for
Appalachian Studies at Appalachian State University, Boone, NC.
Thomas Wolfe. "Part IV: The Brother" (pp. 29-38) from The Hills Beyond.
Copyright © 1935, 1936, 1937, 1939, and 1941 by Maxwell Perkins as executor. Reprinted by permission of Harper & Row Publishers, Inc.
�BIBLIOGRAPHY
527
Suggested Bibliography
AUDIOVISUAL MATERIALS
Agee. Academy A ward nominee documentary on life of James Agee. 16mm
aud videotape. James Agee Film Project Library, Box 315, Franklin Lakes, NJ
07417.
Appalachian Writers. 30 min. films on Fred Chappell, Jeff Daniel Marion, Jim
Wayne Miller, James Still. Children's Museum of Oak Ridge, Regional Appalachian Center, Education Division, 461 West Outer Drive, Oak Ridge, TN
37830.
Cassette tape: James Goode." Coalmining Families" Coalmining in the Cumberland, Feb. 1984. Children's Museum of Oak Ridge, Regional Appalachian
Center, Education Division, 461 West Outer Drive, Oak Ridge, TN 37830.
The Electric Valley (portrait of TVA) on videotape or 16mm. James Agee Film
Project Library, Box 315, Franklin Lakes, NJ 07417.
I Have A Place. Poetry of Jim Wayne Miller. 28 min. videocassette. Western
Kentucky University, Media Resources Center, Bowling Green, KY 42101.
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arnow, Harriette. The Dollmaker. Macmillan Publishing Company, 1954.
Arnow, Harriette. Seedtime on the Cumberland, 1960. Lexington; Reprinted
by the University Press of Kentucky, 1983.
Blair, Walter. Native American Humor. Scranton, PA: Chandler Publishing
Co., 1960.
�528
Bibliography
Burton, Thomas. Some Ballad Folks. Boone, NC: Appalachian Consortium
Press, 1978.
Carawan, Guy and Candy. Voices from the Mountains: Life and Struggk in the
Appalachian South. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1982.
Caudill, Harry. Night Comes to the Cumberknds. Boston: Little, Brown, and
Co., Inc., 1962.
Egerton,John. Generations: An American Family. Lexington: University Press
of Kentucky, 1983.
Eller, Ronald. Miners, Millhands, and Mountaineers: Industrialization of the Appalachian South, 1880-1930. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982.
Fox, John, Jr. The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come.
Dunlap,l931.
New York: Grosset &
Fox, John, Jr. The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. 1908. Lexington: Reprinted by
the University Press of Kentucky, 1984.
Gaventa, John. Power and Powerkssness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian Valley. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1980.
Goode, James B. Poets of Darkness. Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1981.
Green, Archie. Only a Miner: Studies in Recorded Coal-Mining Songs. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1972.
Higgs Robert J., and Manning, Ambrose, eds. Voices from the Hills: Sekcted
Readings of Southern Appalachia. New York: Fredrick Ungar Publishing Co.
in cooperation with Appalachian Consortium Press, 1975.
High, Ellesa Clay. Past Titan Rock: Journey Into an Appalachian Valley. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1984.
Hornbuckle, Jim, and French, Lawrence, eds. The Cherokee Perspective: Written
by Eastern Cherokees. Boone, NC: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1981.
Irwin, John Rice. Musical Instruments of the Southern Appalachian Mountains.
Norris, TN: Museum of Appalachia Press, 1979.
Jolley, Harley E. Blue Ridge Parkway: The First Fifty Years. Boone, NC: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1985.
Joyce, Jane Wilson. The Quilt Poems. New Market, TN: Mill Springs Press,
1984.
Lyon, George Ella. Mountain. Hartford, CT: Andrew Mountain Press, 1983.
Marion, Jeff Daniel. Out in the Country, Back Home.Wwston-Salem,NC: The
Jackpine Press, 1976.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Orchard Keeper. New York: Random House, 1965.
�BIBLIOGRAPHY
529
Miles, Emma Bell. The Spirit of 'the Mountains. 1905. Knoxville, TN: Reprinted
by the University of Tennessee Press, 1975.
Miller, Jim Wayne, ed. I Have a Place. Pippa Passes, KY: Alice Lloyd College,
1981.
Miller, Jim Wayne. Reading, Writing, and Region: A Checklist, Purchase Guide
and Directory for School and Communities Libraries. Boone, NC: Appalachian
Consortium Press, 1980.
Montell, William Lynwood. The Saga of Coe Ridge: A Study in Oral History.
Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1970.
Murray, Ken. A Portrait of Appalachia. Boone, NC: Appalachian Consortium
Press, 1985.
Norman, Gurney. Divine Rights Trip: AFoffctofe.NewYork: Dial Press, 1972.
Page, Linda, and Wigginton, Eliot, eds. Aunt Arie: A Foxfire Portrait. New
York: E.P. Dutton, Inc., 1983.
Roberts, Elizabeth Madox. The Time of Man. 1926. Lexington: Reprinted by
the University of Kentucky Press, 1982.
Shapiro, Henry. Appalachia on Our Mind. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1978.
Slone, Verna Mae. What My Heart Wants To Tett. Washington, D.C.: New
Republic Books, 1979.
Smith, Lee. Oral History. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1983.
Walls, David, and Stephenson, John. Appalachia in the Sixties. Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1972.
Weller, Jack. Yesterday's People: Life in Contemporary Appalachia. Lexington:
University of Kentucky Press, 1965.
West, John Foster. This Proud Land: The Blue Ridge Mountains. Photographs
by Bruce Roberts. Charlotte, NC: McNally and Loften, 1974.
West, John Foster. Time Was. Random House, 1965. Re-issued Boone, NC:
Folkways Press (Drawer 1834), 1977.
Whisnant, David. All That is Native is Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American
Region.. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1983.
Whisnant, David. Modernizing the Mountaineer. Boone, NC: Appalachian
Consortium Press, 1980.
Wolfe, Thomas. You Can't Go Home Again. New York: Harper & Row
Publishers, Inc., Perennial Library Edition, 1973.
�
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Contributor
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<a title="Digital Scholarship and Initiatives" href="http://library.appstate.edu/services/digital-scholarship-and-initiatives" target="_blank">Digital Scholarship and Initiatives</a>
Publication
Digital Publisher
Digital Republication
Appalachian State University
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
A Southern Appalachian Reader
Description
An account of the resource
<span>This anthology of Appalachian literature is designed for high school students, containing fiction, non-fiction, poetry, drama, ballads, and examples of mountain speech and song.</span><br /><br /><a href="https://drive.google.com/open?id=1CbH-qxFIDZrwj0eYbaAWNqgJ3k4ofmqn" target="_blank">Download EPub<br /><br /></a><a title="UNC Press Link" href="https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469642109/a-southern-appalachian-reader" target="_blank">UNC Press Print on Demand</a>
Subject
The topic of the resource
American literature--Appalachian Region, Southern
Appalachian Region, Southern--Literary collections
Young adult literature, American--Appalachian Region, Southern
Mountain life--Literary collections
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
McNeil, Nellie
Squibb, Joyce
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Appalachian Consortium Press
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1988
Language
A language of the resource
English
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Appalachia
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
PDF
E-books
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed" target="_blank">https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed</a>
Spatial Coverage
Spatial characteristics of the resource.
https://www.geonames.org/12212302/appalachia.html
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a title="UA 76 Appalachian Consortium records" href="https://appstate-speccoll.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/9" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener"> UA 76 Appalachian Consortium records </a>
Is Part Of
A related resource in which the described resource is physically or logically included.
<a title="Appalachian Consortium Press Publications" href="https://omeka.library.appstate.edu/collections/show/82" target="_blank"> Appalachian Consortium Press Publications</a>
Appalachian
ballads
Jim Wayne Miller
Lee Smith
literature
oral traditions