This is how Appalachia drew me in.
First I spotted the communities with the odd names: Meat Camp, Lick Skillet, Nine Times, Lonesome, Hi Hat, Sandy Mush, Meadows of Dan, Beauty, Bitter End, Hell fer Sartan and more.
Then I saw the maze of mountains: dark, steep and involuted, sometimes undulating like serpents rising out of a green and choppy sea; at other times covered in redbud, dogwood and mountain laurel, looking deceptively staid and genteel.
Then I heard the talk: vivid, metaphorical. I remember the old man who was rocking on his porch, whittling a whimsical toy called a gee-haw-whimmy-diddle and thinking about the creek running by his home. ”If that ol`
creek didn`t rattle, I couldn`t go to sleep at night,” he said.
Or the storekeeper watching a neighbor trudge up the street. ”That feller looks like the hind wheels of hard times,” he observed.
I remember some striking coal miners whose determination was perfectly expressed on a large tin sheet nailed to a tree. In hand-painted letters, it read:
WE WILL NOT EXCEPT A
SWEET HEART CONTRACT
NEVER NEVER NEVER NEVER
WE ARE HERE TO STAY
WE WILL NOT BE BULL DOGGED
OFF OUR PICKET LINES BY
THE STATE POLICE OR THAT
COAL MINE OPERATOR BYRD HOGG
OR ENYONE ELSE. WE BE HERE
WHEN THE MORNING COMES
So that is how I was hooked. And I worked here in the Appalachian region for seven years, writing and editing for Appalachia magazine, the Appalachian Reporter and a rural women`s journal. I returned almost 20 years later, following a route that a tourist might take-an unconventional tourist, that is, who would sacrifice some creature comforts for the intrigue of observing life in what Kentucky author Harry Caudill has called ”the least understood and most maligned part of America.”
Take a look, if you dare.
The Appalachian Mountains span parts of 13 states, but to my mind the region`s heart lurks in West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, eastern Tennessee and southwestern Virginia. This area was settled largely in the 17th and 18th Centuries by pioneers who trickled in from England, Scotland, Ireland and Germany. The mountains formed a physical and cultural barrier, both isolating and shielding them from change.
In the 19th Century, outsiders began to take interest in the region`s great natural wealth: first, its timber; then, its coal. To many company agents, the mountaineers seemed naive and unsophisticated; the companies bought their trees, land and mineral rights dirt-cheap. A pattern of exploitation set in, and the word went out that Appalachian people were slow and dumb.
One of the first books to describe the mountain mind in a positive way was John Fox Jr.`s turn-of-the-century novel, ”The Trail of the Lonesome Pine.” It told the story of two lovers: Jack Hale, a suave and urbane geologist, out to find his fortune in the undeveloped coal veins of southwest Virginia; and June Tolliver, a wild young mountain girl living in the shade of a single, lonesome pine. The trail was the path Jack rode on horseback, back and forth, back and forth, courting his love. And they grew together, the citified boy and the country girl, despite feuds and coal-boom pandemonium and the troubles that beset the region when the coal market crumbled.
The trail became a highway, Alternate U.S. Highway 58, just west of Abingdon, Va. and the North Carolina state line. Their drama is re-enacted every summer at an outdoor theater in Big Stone Gap, the community where Fox lived and where much of the story occurred.
Start in Abingdon
Abingdon is a fitting place to start this trip because it contains an elegant hotel, several fine restaurants, lively tobacco auctions in the autumn, and what claims to be the nation`s oldest, and most unusual, repertory theater.
The Barter Theater, as it`s known, began as a way for artists to keep off the bread lines during the Depression. It was the creation of Robert Porterfield, who brought a company of hungry Broadway actors to Abingdon, where farmers had no cash but plenty of crops and a hunger for culture and fun. A poster advertising the opening performance in 1932 offered tickets for ”30 cents or the equivalent in vittles. With what you can`t sell, you can buy a laugh.” Porterfield is dead, but the theater is still flourishing, and its patrons are still swapping-mainly for children`s performances. Lady Bird Johnson once bartered a magnolia tree for a ticket to ”Julius Caesar.”
Gregory Peck`s son swapped a bucket of peaches. Corn, cakes, pickles, jams and peanut-butter sandwiches are common currency.
At her home in Abingdon, Porterfield`s widow related how, not so long ago, a farmer and his wife appeared at the box office with a cow and a pail.
”How much milk for a ticket?” asked the farmer. ”A gallon,” he was told. So the man milked the required amount and headed into the theater.
”What about your wife?” the box-office attendant asked. The farmer replied, ”She can milk her own ticket.”
Swappers also congregate every Wednesday morning at the Trade Fair in Ramsey, Va., near Norton. The fair is a kind of giant flea market, mountain-style, where locals come to trade pigs, pistols, vegetables, horses, knives, and assorted odds and ends.
Another way to catch the spirit of Appalachia is by attending one of the homey, unpretentious music festivals that abound throughout this area. As a mountain proverb says, ”God respects you if you work, but he loves you if you sing.” This deity apparently prefers traditional Scotch-Irish and English ballads, bluegrass and country songs, gospel and shaped-note singing, or folk hymns. The single-best spot to sample the traditional fare is the Carter Family Fold in Maces Springs, Va., near Gate City.
The commotion started in A.P. Carter`s grocery store one Saturday night in 1974, when A.P.`s daughter, Janette, began singing some haunting mountain tunes and playing her autoharp for folks who had gathered `round. The performances became a regular event, so popular that the store couldn`t begin to contain the audiences. In 1976 Janette`s brother, Joe, built a large shed next door. If the music business didn`t go, they planned to convert the shed into a chicken house.
Today the store is a family museum, and the shed has become a back-roads mecca for all those who love the old-time sounds of dulcimer and dobro, fiddle and guitar, as well as buck dancing or flat footing. ”That`s when you dance like youse a killin` termites,” Joe explained one Saturday.
It was several hours before the performance, but already neighbors up and down Poor Valley had come to the Carter Fold to sit and visit. In the Bible, a fold is a ”gathering place,” Janette said. She talked about her famous singing family, a father bored by any conversation that didn`t include music and a mother with a hugely resonant voice. (Janette and Joe are first cousins of singer June Carter Cash.)
The sun was dropping behind Clinch Mountain. Fireflies flickered. Like a last fragment of sunlight, a large yellow bird-a meadowlark, perhaps-flitted across the newly cut grass and perched on a fence post.
”I`m just a tryin` to keep alive the music that my parents done,”
Janette said. ”It would be a dishonor to bring in anything else.”
Let it be plain, the fold offers wonderful stuff. But to grapple with the Appalachian core, you must go deeper-up Virginia Highway 63, along the Kentucky state line, for instance, through old coal towns such as Trammel and Carbo. Or, better yet, pass through Pound Gap into the Cumberland Plateau of eastern Kentucky.
This is a land of jagged ridges and narrow, winding valleys. The mountains are so vertical that they seem concave-which for many years made settlement difficult and travel almost impossible. As author Caudill observed in an interview at his Whitesburg, Ky., home, the local residents have been
”the least mobile human beings in the country.”
How to describe the people here? Loyal Jones, who directs the Appalachian Center, which coordinates studies and research on the region`s history and culture at Berea College in Kentucky, tells a story about a great storm that left locals snowed in for weeks. A Red Cross team heard about an old lady way back in the hills, living alone, and went to help her.
When she appeared at her door, a team worker said, ”Hello, we`re from the Red Cross.”
Before he could say another word, she replied, ”Well, I don`t believe I`m a goin` to be able to help you`uns any this year. It`s been a right hard winter.”
These folks were proud, individualistic, self-reliant. But they were also largely poor, uneducated and easily victimized. Even those who refused to live in the company towns-where the coal bosses held dominion-were profoundly affected by the coal industry and the damage it inflicted on the land and the mine workers.
The mountain people, as Caudill noted, were also ”short-fused.” They had their own code of honor-if you are my kinsman or friend, whoever hits you hits me-and a predilection toward fatalism and violence. People still call their counties ”Bloody Breathitt” (famous for feuding) and ”Bloody Harlan” (where the battle over union recognition was more bitter and protracted than anywhere else in the country).
All this, plus the much-publicized taste for moonshine, gave the Appalachians a reputation for being ignorant, backward, even barbaric. Historian Arnold Toynbee called them the ”Riffs, Albanians, Kurds, Pathans and hairy Ainu” of the New World. Some locals still are battling such stereotypes; others have accepted them. As Linda Scott, a coal miner`s daughter and social psychologist from Two Mile Hollow, observed: ”You don`t even wait for someone to put you down. You do it yourself.”
A visitor hears mixed views about whether the federal ”War on Poverty”
program, which brought a massive infusion of federal dollars and another layer of bosses, helped matters much. In a place like Hazard, Ky., a poverty warrior`s mecca in the 1960s and early `70s, you can see the changes. There are scads of new buildings-a hospital, city hall, library, vocational-technical school, community college and several fast-food stops-as well as a new shopping center, airport and four stunning highways.
The infant mortality rate is down, out-migration has been slowed, education is improving, the quality of community services has risen, and average per capita income is up. But the new facilities and the wealth are also concentrated in population centers such as Hazard. Go a few miles away to Barwick or Viper or Blackey and you will see old poverty, unchanged by all the federal fuss.
Some say the new roads have destroyed the old mountain lifestyle. As Caudill put it, ”The Appalachian culture as a living, vibrant thing is dead as a dodo.” Others see pride resurgent.
Jeff Hawkins, a high school teacher from Hog Hollow, observed: ”I think there`s a new hillbilly dream: to get a good job away, but then come back and retire in the mountains. Every weekend the highways are full of people coming back-to retire, or just to stay a few days.
”There`s this joke I hear,” he continued. ”It`s about this man who goes to heaven, and he`s looking around up there and sees some people chained to a wall. So he asks, `What`s wrong with them?` And St. Peter says, `Those are hillbillies from Kentucky. If we didn`t chain `em up, they`d go home every weekend.` ”
At Appalshop, an artists` collective documenting and celebrating the mountain heritage throughout Appalachia, film maker Herb E. Smith believes he has seen the growth of a distinct, if subtle, regional culture. ”It`s in people`s style, their manners, their sense of connection to the land and to each other,” he said.
”When you peel away all the layers and get down to the core, I think it`s that here everybody is somebody,” he said. Smith talked about the mountains, how people feel held by them, tucked in the tight folds of land, embraced. ”You know you belong in the enclosure,” he said.
A few miles away, in the tiny town of Blackey, Ky., about 20 miles southeast of Hazard, Joe Begley was swinging on the porch of his general store. Inside were groceries, supplies and mountain memorabilia-old hornets`
nests, saddle bags, rustic iron tools, political buttons, the caps of dead miners and feed boxes of ponies that had carted coal deep inside the mines.
Despite the changes that have come to the mountains, Begley said, people haven`t lost their touch with nature or their concern for each other. As the rest of the world becomes increasingly fake and superficial, full of ”Mickey Mouse and make-believe,” he said, Appalachia remains ”a kind of wild-animal refuge” where people can be exactly who they are without pretense.
As he spoke, across the creek a fellow on another porch began picking a moutain ditty on a banjo. The sprightly tune floated down the hillside and up the steep, lush hollow.
