THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 28, 1996 TAG: 9601290236
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN
LENGTH: Medium: 82 lines
Somewhere between Ma and Pa Kettle and ``American Gothic'' is an authentic, rural, roughhouse-and-roots realm of hard work, good grub, farm faith and family folkways.
Seventh-generation balladeer and storyteller Sheila Kay Adams testifies that it exists in her new collection of Appalachian tales, Come Go Home with Me (University of North Carolina Press, 118 pp., $19.95).
Or, at least, it did. Adams' sweet-tart memories of Sodom, N.C., up in the mountains of Madison County, spring from her childhood, and times have changed.
``The roads have been paved, the mobile homes have altered the views, telephones ring in every house, and most of the young folks who still live there leave bright and early for jobs in Greeneville,'' she concedes.
Progress of a kind. But the warmth and the wildness of a community named for prostitutes who serviced Civil War soldiers live on in this foot-stomping, brimstone-breathing, skillet-banging, burst-blackberry-drizzler of a book. Adams celebrates sly wit and common sense.
She's a country ham.
Here you'll find dialect-seasoned stories of Tootie's new frock, Breaddaddy and the tattletale mule, and the Ghost Dog of Gudger Tract. You'll discover how Little Corrie got Big Otis out of his green suit at the funeral parlor and how Sealy improved Snowfluffy the feline with a fast can of spray paint. And you'll also encounter, woven up into every part of the fabric like fine gold in a hook rug, Granny Norton, staunch supplier of sustenance, sagacity and sudden wonder:
``Granny looked up and about that time a big yellow and black butterfly landed on the bank beside her, and then another, and another. They swooped down out of the sky and covered the banks of the stream, the trunks of the trees, and me and Granny. . . . And through the living yellow I could see Granny's blue eyes.''
Adams reveals a world through those eyes that is unencumbered by computers but suffused with savvy. It is a world that must shift shape to survive but need not disappear altogether.
Which brings us to poet-professor-farmer Wendell Berry, who has been working the land of Henry County, Ky., for 30 years and the pages of thought-provoking books for 32 volumes, winning such official praise along the way as the T.S. Eliot, Aiken Taylor and John Hay awards.
His new selection of essays, Another Turn of the Crank (Counterpoint, 109 pp., $18), is a carefully reasoned roar for the restoration of sustainable agrarian life that could extend all the way to preservation of community worldwide.
Berry is talking underdog politics here.
``Farmers sell on a market that because of overproduction is characteristically depressed,'' he notes, ``and they buy their supplies on a market that is characteristically inflated - which is necessarily a recipe for failure, because farmers do not control either market.''
His answer: produce, buy and sell where you are.
``If farmers do not wish to cooperate any longer in their own destruction, then they will have to reduce their dependence on those global economic forces that intend and approve and profit from the destruction of farms,'' writes Berry, ``and they will have to increase their dependence on local nature and local intelligence.''
In a lot of ways, we seem to be losing ground.
Another voice that would connect us to our resources is that of poet Mary Oliver, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. In Blue Pastures (Harcourt Brace, 122 pp., $22), she sings of words and woods, ``past fire roads and the bike trail, among the black oaks and the taller pines, in the silent blue afternoons, when the sand is still frozen and the snow falls slowly and aimlessly, and the whole world smells like water in an iron cup.''
Consider the marvel of what we see, says Oliver.
It takes about
seventy hours to drag
a poem into
the light.
But she, like kindred spellbinders Sheila Kay Adams and Wendell Berry, can perform that same crucial service for us in an instant. MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia Wesleyan
College. by CNB