ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, October 27, 1996 TAG: 9610290025
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LEE SMITH
NOT SO long ago, I drove my new mother-in-law up to the mountains of Southwest Virginia so she could see where I came from. As we wound farther and farther off the interstate, higher and deeper into the hills, she kept checking her seat belt and sneaking sidelong glances at me from her perch on the passenger seat.
Finally, on that last curvy stretch from Richlands to Grundy - past one of the biggest deep-shaft mines in the world, past innumerable coal trucks bearing such names as ``Tennessee Stud'' and ``Not Paid For''; past the communities of Raven, Shortt's Gap, Garden Creek, Dismal and Deel - she blurted out: ``I never thought it would be like this!''
``I know it,'' I told her. ``I know you didn't.''
But there was not any way I could ever have told her what it would be like; I just had to bring her along to see for herself what is, to me, the most beautiful, the most interesting place in the world: Appalachia, the rugged terrain of my heart.
Now, my mother-in-law is an educated woman, a senior English teacher for many years. But she is not a Southerner, poor thing. She was born in Boston and has lived most of her life in upstate New York, so all she had was a certain ``Gone With the Wind'' idea of the South.
``Where are all the big houses?'' she wanted to know. ``The lawns? The gardens?''
``Not here,'' I told her. ``That was someplace else.''
Someplace else, a world away.
Our exchange reminded me of my introduction to Southern literature, taught by Louis Rubin at Hollins College, in the 1960s. I was a sophomore; we were reading the novels of William Faulkner. Though I loved the language, those novels might as well have been set in Turkey, as far as I was concerned. They might as well have been set in Iceland.
Faulkner's South was not mine.
For starters, the only columns in Buchanan County were on the Presbyterian Church. There were no black people. Nobody I knew was attached to the soil in that mystical blood-bound Faulknerian way - everybody had long since sold the timber and mineral rights to their land, which was mostly too steep to farm anyway.
Mining had taken its toll on the landscape, as well. We weren't allowed to play in the river because they washed coal in it upstream; the water in the Levisa River behind my house ran black as night. Nobody had much money, and there was no aristocracy either - unless we were the aristocracy, us town kids whose parents owned the stores and didn't go down into the mines, who took pimiento cheese sandwiches to school in our lunch bags instead of the corn bread and buttermilk in a Mason jar brought by the kids from the hollers.
If a class structure existed in that town, it mostly had to do with where you went to church (and believe me, we all went to church). My mother had explained the social ranking of the churches: Methodist at the top, attended by doctors and lawyers and other ``nice'' families; Presbyterian slightly down the scale, attended by store owners; then the vigorous Baptists; then the Church of Christ, who thought they were the only real church in town and said so. They had hundreds of members.
And then, of course, at the bottom of the church scale were those little churches out in the surrounding county where people were reputed to yell out, fall down in fits and throw their babies. (I didn't know what this meant, exactly, but I knew I'd love to see it, for it promised drama far beyond the dull responsive readings of the Methodists and their rote mumbling of the Nicene Creed.) We also had a few Jews, a few Catholics, and no Episcopalians at all.
That tells you something, doesn't it? A town too poor for Episcopalians.
Furthermore, nobody I knew ever even mentioned the Civil War. It was something that had happened in a book. Of course I had been to Richmond, all the way across the whole state of Virginia, and I had seen all those marble generals on their marble horses riding grandly up and down Monument Avenue, but that was someplace else. Someplace else, a world away.
The Appalachian attitude toward the Civil War is perhaps best symbolized by the church in Abingdon that had two front doors: one for those families who went with the Union, the other for those who stood with the South. If the motto of the white deep-South Southerner is, ``Forget, hell!'' then the motto of the Appalachian Southerner is, ``Forget? Hell, yes!''
So I read Faulkner the way I read Proust.
It would be later in the semester, when Mr. Rubin introduced us to the writing of Eudora Welty, that I would finally find some people that I knew on the printed page.
And it was later yet that I found James Still, all by myself, perusing the S's in the Hollins College library. Here I found the beautiful and heartbreaking novel ``River of Earth,'' a kind of Appalachian ``Grapes of Wrath'' chronicling the Baldridge family's desperate struggle to survive when the mines close and the crops fail. This is not only one of the best Appalachian novels ever written, but it is also one of the best novels ever written.
And yet James Still is not usually taught in so-called Southern literature classes.
Why not?
Because Appalachia is to the South what the South is to the rest of the country. That is: lesser than, backward, marginal. Other. Look at the stereotypes: ``Hee Haw,'' ``Deliverance," ``Dogpatch" and ``The Dukes of Hazzard.'' A bunch of hillbillies sitting on a rickety old porch drinking moonshine and living on welfare, right?
Wrong. All of this is wrong; none of this is true.
Appalachia is another South, an almost secret South. All you have to do is get in a car and drive into the beautiful wild mountains of North Georgia or North Carolina, in east Tennessee and Kentucky, or Southwest Virginia and West Virginia, by God.
You will understand immediately why our formidable geography acted as a natural barrier for so long - keeping others out, holding us in, allowing for the development of our rich folk culture, our distinctive speech patterns, our strong sense of tradition and our radical individualism.
Appalachian people are more rooted than other Southerners. We still live in big extended families that spoil children and revere old people. We will talk your ears off. We excel in storytelling - and I mean everybody, not just some old guy in overalls at a folk festival. I mean the woman who cuts your hair, I mean your doctor, I mean your mother. We are religious. We are patriotic.
Our great music is country music - which was always working-class, from its beginnings in the old-time string bands right up through honky-tonk and the ``high lonesome'' sound of bluegrass to present-day glitzy Nashville's Garth Brooks.
My father would never leave Southwest Virginia; he said he ``needed a mountain to rest his eyes against.'' I feel the same way. Increasingly, as the ``New South'' homogenizes the old, our world apart becomes increasingly desirable - a world to be a part of.
Lee Smith is a writer who lives in Chapel Hill, N.C., and was born in Grundy. This article first appeared in the Atlanta Constitution.
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