Appalachian History

My neighbor across the creek is already up and busy with his saw and hammer, despite it being Sunday, despite his having worked in the mines all the other six days of the week, often in water shoe-mouth deep, as he tells me, and in spite of there not being a plank requiring sawing or a nail needing driven.

He must be doing something, just as I, propped up here by pillows on my four-post walnut bed, itself a creation of Jethro Amburgey, the dulcimer maker. I find I've written seven pages in a notebook --- extraneous matter, hardly any page belonging in subject to any other, pages looking toward books or manuscripts partially written, or only projected to a number I could not possibly complete given my age and biological life span.

The lady who once asked me, "Do you do your own writing?" and to whom I replied, "No, I have seven dwarves," has lately inquired, "Where do you get your ideas?" For me ideas are hanging from limbs like pears, from fences like gourds. They rise up like birds from cover. They spring out of reports in the Troublesome Creek Times, from a remark in a country store, a happening.

From childhood I've been a reader, when there was anything to read, and I suppose I've read an average of three hours a day for half a century. Reading jaunts with mountain climbers in the Himalayas, the South Pacific, the American Civil War, World War I, the mysteries of Mayan civilization to name a few tangents, and the entire corpus of many an author. Curiousity like an itch that needs scratching.

The question is often asked: "Who influenced you to write?" Certainly it wasn't handed down in the family, and I can't think of an author I wish to emulate although I have admired the works of many. I was already scribbling before the great books came to hand. As an English observer of Appalachian folk in Harlan County, Kentucky, said, "Not knowing the right way to do things they did things their way." I did encounter the novels of Thomas Hardy during college days and the fact that I've always written about the common man may have been sparked by him.

The only class I ever cut was when I was deep in Far From the Madding Crowd and could not put the book down. The most memorable book read in college, and in French, was Alphonse Daudet's Le Petit Chose. I must grant some credit to a decade of issues of the Atlantic I came upon during the late 1920s. Otto Jespersen's The Philosophy of Grammar directed me toward "living language" as opposed to the formal.

It took time, my own time, to figure out the King of England is a myth, and all that implies --- the myths we live by, county lines, state lines, imaginary acts made actual by acceptance. I learned an apple is a modified leaf. My self-education proceeded from such facts. I am more an autodidact than a classroom scholar.

"How did you escape the stereotype 'hillbilly' writing?" -- a frequent question. That is, the stereotypical mountaineer and his dialectical speech as rendered by several authors of fiction in the past. I was hardly aware of them, didn't have access to their books. My experience was with the folks themselves.

As for handling dialect in my fictions and Notebooks, the way folk actually talk, well, now, dialect of any sort on a printed page always bothered me. Peculiar spellings can't account for the tone of voice, body language, the intent behind the statement. My aim is to invoke speech. To expect the true sound of it to happen in the reader's head. Aberrant spelling rarely accomplishes it. I trust to preserve the "voice" of the speaker.

I answered a set of down-to-earth questions at Carmus Combs' store the other day. A fellow inquired, "How many years have you lived amongst us?"
"This year makes forty-six."
"You're the last 'possum up the tree. Everybody your age when you come here are dead. Hain't that so?"
"I thought they'd live forever."
"What's your notion about dying?"
"Death is as natural as sleep," I said, quoting Benjamin Franklin. "We will arise refreshed in the morning."

My neighbor is still hammering and sawing. He has apparently decided on something to build -- a doghouse, a chicken coop, perhaps a playpen for his children. He will not halt until it is accomplished. It is his act of creation.


from "Autobiography of James Still," November 2003, Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series; vol. 17, Gale Research
online at http://faculty.colostate-pueblo.edu/sandy.hudock/jssection5.html

A native of Alabama, author James Still (1906-2001) spent most of his life in the Hindman Settlement of Knott County, KY. In addition to his writing, Still worked as a farmer, librarian and teacher. Winner of many literary awards, including two Guggenheim fellowships, Still published novels, short stories and poems which reflected his passionate feelings for the Kentucky mountains.

Appalachian writer James Still (1906-2001) moved to Kentucky after he was grown, and stayed, finally living in Hindman but keeping his original cabin, located between the waters of Wolfpen Creek and Dead Mare Branch, on Little Carr Creek, where he wrote most of his books, poems, and articles.

For 40 years Still gathered sayings from the local people, which he almost did not allow to be published--- he said it is hard to show in writings "changing inflections on one syllable to give [a sentence] two radically different endings."

Finally he did allow them to be published. His comments from the preface may give us some idea why:

"The first notebook entry was recorded some forty five years ago. Most of the participants are dead. Save for their gravestones, this is the only record for some that they lived and laughed and wept and had opinions like the rest of us. I have long tried to speak for them. Here they are speaking for themselves."

"I don't want or expect Appalachian speech to be like any other. It has its own individuality, its own syntax. To be unlettered is not necessarily to be unintelligent. It's a rare day when I'm out and about that I fail to hear something linguistically interesting."

There are 23 Wolfpen notebooks, 6x4 inches wire hinged.

"I can't name the exact year I started jotting down things they said in notebooks. I did it only for my own eyes. You might say they were written to inform stories and poems to come, yet I never thumbed through looking for an idea or a quotation. The purpose of the notebooks was to cover every facet of life in my community as well as all of the county and the counties adjoining.

"The period covered is roughly 1931 to 1965. The setting-down, I mean. I did come to believe they might in future be of interest to folklorists and social historians."

From "The Wolfpen Notebooks," by James Still---

"I want everybody to stop calling me 'Little Old Nasty Thing.'" Judy Gibson (age 4)

"These shoes I’m wearing were so tight when I first bought them I had to wear them a while before I could put them on." Willie Stewart

"If you see some pore little underly children, give to'em, do for'em." Martha Burns

"I paid Huck Francis a dime to see his picture show. Huh. It wasn’t nothing but shadows on the wall." Uncle George Childers

"My Daddy, when he died, I couldn’t hardly give him up. We used to hunt together and fish together and work in the fields together. My brothers, they went to school and became doctors and teachers and made something of themselves. I didn’t know what an education was. Now my brothers are shut up in schoolhouses and offices while I’m out here in the sun where I want to be." Okla Thornsberry

"Yeah, bless your soul, sure as Sunday morning. I'm scared to death of dying. We all dread that stinking death." Frank Hicks

"Do you remember the little Bosley girl in last year's first grade? Had long yellow hair, never smiled. Well, she died last summer. She started bleeding and nobody could stop it. There was no funeral and no casket. They just wrapped her in a quilt and buried her." Edith Orick

"Death is not a strange thing amongst the people." Preacher 'Tater Bill' Smith

"Some years back when I was the nurse at the Knott County Health Office I accompanied Dr. John Wes Duke in his visits to schools and assisted him in inoculating students against typhoid fever. I recall one school up in the head of a long hollow where he said everybody was akin to everybody else. When we had finished he spoke to them, 'Children, I have something to talk to you about. All of you look like a bunch of dried apples. Your stock is running out. Now here is my advice. When you grow up, and get into your head to go sparking, don't go up the creek, and don't go down the creek, go over the mountain.'" Sylvia Auxier


sources: www.kentuckystewarts.com/RowanCounty/JamesStillAppalachianwriterdies.htm
The Wolfpen Notebooks: A Record of Appalachian Life, by James Still, University Press of Kentucky, 1991



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