Appalachian History

The following review by Charlie Wykes appeared October 29, 2009 in the online publication viewfromheremagazine.com

When Pemberton returned to the North Carolina mountains after three months in Boston settling his father’s estate, among those waiting on the train platform was a young woman pregnant with Pemberton’s child. She was accompanied by her father, who carried beneath his shabby frock coat a bowie knife sharpened with great attentiveness earlier that morning so it would plunge as deep as possible into Pemberton’s heart.

So opens Ron Rash’s Serena, a novel set in the Appalachian Mountains that follows the fortunes of the eponymous central character and her husband as they create a timber barony in 1930’s America. From the cover art on my paperback edition, you might be forgiven for thinking that what follows Rash’s wonderful opening lines will be a novel of romance and tribulation. How delighted was I to find something far more engrossing; both in content and style.

What Rash has created here is grand theatre, in the best possible sense. He quotes Marlowe on the cover page and I was struck by just how this novel follows the form of Elizabethan drama. It soon becomes apparent that Serena is no heroine as she ruthlessly pursues her ambition. Nor is Pemberton, her equally ambitious husband, heroic. Whilst he has faint qualms about some of Serena’s methods he is not one to let concern for his workers or his business partners stand in their way.

In keeping with Marlowe and Shakespeare a cast of supporting characters are introduced; some major, some minor, some serving to shed light on the characters of the Pembertons and others to provide commentary on their actions. Some are comic, others menacing and yet others heroic in ways the Pembertons will never be. Apart from Rachel, the young girl who has borne Pemberton a child, we are seldom privy to their thoughts, just as we know little of what the Pembertons may be thinking. This is not a novel that presents its characters from within; rather we know them through their deeds and judge them accordingly.

And when their deeds are as remarkable as Serena’s a novel less assured than this might rightly be met with some head shaking. Rash however is a very accomplished writer indeed. His work as a poet and his detailed knowledge of Appalachian history, which he teaches as Parris Distinguished Professor in Appalachian Cultural Studies at Western Carolina, allow him to write with power and grace and so detail a time and place where such things seem not only possible but entirely right.

He clearly has a deep love for the land and the history of the peoples who have tried to shape it and it is perhaps not going too far to say that in some sense, that Rash has characterised the land itself as locked in struggle with Serena; who embodies the destructive nature of human progress. As she cuts down both trees and people to turn a profit, so the mountains and trees cut down people in their turn. In contrast Rachel is accessible to us, we learn of her thoughts and fears for herself, her son and her way of life. She in a sense is the positive aspect of humanity that is diametrically opposite to Serena.

As for the workers and businessmen, some of the supporting cast I mentioned before, they are in turn awed and cowed by Serena and what she represents. Some strive to do her bidding, some seem to venerate her and some rightly fear her. None it seems can fathom where she came from or what drives her on. In this she is like the great eagle she trains to hunt snakes; beautiful and terrible and utterly unafraid.

In writing the above I am conscious that I have yet to discuss plot. Again, rather like the Elizabethan drama, Rash uses plot as a canvas upon which to paint his scenes and to comment upon the actions of mankind. That said, the story is entirely satisfying and centred upon Rachel who can bear a child and so sustain a future and her struggle with Serena who is barren and can leave no legacy save through destructive force of will. In parallel with this, the book details some of the events surrounding the establishment of the National Park in the region and the impact this had upon business and livelihood.

This second narrative is also concerned with sustainability versus profit, industry versus nature and is as relevant today as it was then. It is not however the reason you should read this book. Instead read it for its remarkable sense of time and place and Rash’s wonderfully vivid recounting of people and events set in a hostile yet magnificent landscape. By all means reflect upon how man and nature may come together and for what purpose but at the same time simply enjoy what I found to be one of the most engrossing and substantive books I have read for a long long time.

But, strange as it seemed to him, there were minutes -- sometimes half-hours -- when, without his knowing why, the black burden seemed to lift itself again and he knew he was a living man and not a dead one. Slowly -- slowly -- for no reason that he knew of -- he was "coming alive" with the garden.
---The Secret Garden

Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924) left an indelible mark on children's literature, providing a path to the secret garden in all of us that is often lost in adulthood. But her own childhood was far from idyllic. Frances' widowed mother Eliza moved with her five children from England to Knoxville, TN in 1865 where her brother had earlier moved and was struggling to keep a dry goods store going. He next moved Eliza and the children to New Market, where he had a cabin.

This was a dramatic shift for the Hodgson family. Frances had been born in Cheetham Hill, outside of Manchester. In late 1849 Manchester was a thriving textile center fueled by the success of the cotton mills. Edwin and Eliza Hodgson had a successful home furnishings business, providing customers with such products as chandeliers, ironwork, and brass door fittings.

But it all changed dramatically in 1854 when Edwin died at age 38 of a stroke. Eliza tried to keep the business going but the start of the Civil War in the United States affected cotton imports and the textile industry experienced a tremendous rate of unemployment.

And so the Hodgsons were hurled from upper middle class comfort in Manchester to hard scrabble poverty in New Market, now often going to bed hungry. And yet the move from industrial England to rural America was for young Frances a journey to the green, natural world that would become a central theme in many of her later works, including 'The Secret Garden.'

The move would also prove instrumental in Frances' development as a writer. Although she had always been obsessed with storytelling and often amused her schoolmates by acting out tales of adventure and romance, the financial strain of the emigration caused her to turn to writing as a means of supplementing the family's income.

The Hodgson's neighbors were Dr. John and Lydia Burnett and their son Swan, whose great-grandfather was Adam Peck, the earliest settler of what would become Jefferson City. Frances and Swan would spend much time together and would begin a relationship that would lead to marriage in 1873.

Frances Burnett's first published story, "Miss Carruthers' Engagement," appeared in a magazine called Godey's Lady's Book in 1868. Her paper and postage-stamps for the venture had to be earned by picking and selling wild grapes. She began to write five or six stories each month, for $10 apiece and supported her family by writing. As stories began to be published in Harper's, Atlantic, Scribner's Monthly, and Peterson's Ladies' Magazine, she earned enough money to move her family back to Knoxville in 1869.

After the death of her mother in 1872, the family became increasingly dependent on Frances' writing income. She accelerated her career as a popular writer. Swan, whom she married the following year, was preparing to specialize in the treatment of the eye and ear. He wished to further his specialty by studying in Europe, and Frances financed his wish, once again becoming responsible for the bulk of her family's income. After the birth of their first son Lionel on September 20, 1874 in Knoxville, they left Tennessee, never to return.

Over the course of her life, Burnett wrote more than forty books, for both adults and children. While her adult novels are considered to be quite sentimental, her children's books have withstood the fickleness of literary fashions. 'The Secret Garden,' the story of how Mary Lennox and her friends find independence as they tend their garden, has been described as one of the most satisfying children's books ever written.


Sources: http://library.cn.edu/speccoll/burnett.html
http://us.penguingroup.com/static/rguides/us/secret_garden.html
http://www.tickledorange.com/FHB/Biography.html

Book Review: 'Spruce Pine,' by David Biddix and Chris Hollifield, Arcadia Publishing, arcadiapublishing.com, $21.99

It’s fitting that Arcadia Publishing will release “Spruce Pine,” the latest in its ongoing ‘Images of America’ monographs on small towns across America, here in the US market on Sept 28. Locals of this western North Carolina community may appreciate that the book’s appearance coincides with the anniversary of the two week trek of the Overmountain Men, who made their way from Virginia and across the Blue Ridge during the Revolutionary War, passing through the area en route to the famous King’s Mountain battle of October 7, one of the turning points of that war in the southern theatre.

This volume follows the overall series pattern: at 126 pages and 222 photos, the book takes a ‘Life’ magazine photo-essay approach to its topic, and keeps in-depth analysis of big historical trends offstage.

That will suit genealogists with family connections in the area just fine, though. The authors have carefully captioned the individuals seen in page after page of group photos representing just about every conceivable small town organization: school groups, church groups, Boy Scouts, sports teams, mining workers, fire department members, and so on.

Local sons David Biddix and Chris Hollifield have seamlessly edited photographs from standard sources, such as the National Park Service and East Tennessee State’s Appalachian Collection at Sherrod Library, with personal photographs from a number of local residents, and it’s the latter that makes this book such a valuable addition to the bookshelf of anyone interested in the town or the region.

The authors could have delved a bit further in their fact checking in one or two instances: they tell us that the English Inn, one of the earliest hotels in the area, is reputedly the largest log structure in North Carolina. Well, is it or isn’t it? And at another point we’re told that the South and Western Railway cost more than $1 million per mile of track to build. In today’s dollars? Not made clear. These are minor quibbles, and thankfully not typical throughout the book. Overall the captions, like the arrangement of the photos, follow a clear narrative arc, from early settlers to the building of railroads and establishment of mining, through the two World War eras, and on into present times and the emergence of modern interactions with the outside world.

The book rightly keeps its main focus on local goings on, from a profile of Dr. Charles Peterson, the ‘father of Spruce Pine,’ down to entertaining shots of the Mayland Fair or folks hanging out at the White Swan Restaurant for a soda.

But county fairs and soda jerks are part of small towns everywhere. While tying Spruce Pine into broader American small town culture, Biddix and Hollifield have simultaneously done a marvelous job of capturing the specific soul of Spruce Pine. We meet, for example, the Woody family, who for seven generations has made ladder-back colonial chairs in town. They made one for President John F. Kennedy, and The Smithsonian Institution has a Woody rocker as part of its permanent American Crafts Collection.

Spruce Pine does have several more claims to fame on the national stage. The Chestnut Flat Mine produced the quartz that was used to cast the 200-inch mirror for the Hale Telescope at Palomar Mountain in California. Local son Roy Williams, who led UNC to NCAA championship glory in 2005 and again this year, is a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame. And businessman Brad Ragan’s Carolina Tire Company and its parent Brad Ragan Incorporated became Goodyear Tire’s largest retailer, with worldwide operations.

‘Spruce Pine’ is also quick to point out that plenty of well known people have been through town, from Presidents Nixon & Ford, to music stars Bill Monroe, Chet Atkins and Kitty Wells.

In her forward to the book, local children’s book author Gloria Houston waxes poetic about trying on prom dresses at Belk’s store, and the smells of disinfectant and popcorn butter at the Carolina Theatre, which sets the boosterish tone of the book overall, straight through to the end page photograph of a 1950s billboard promoting Spruce Pine as ‘The heart of vacationland.’ If you’re looking for labor strife, murders, or affairs between the choir director and the mayor, you won’t find any of that between these covers. And that’s a shame, because history isn’t only made up of the good old days, although those are fun to revisit.

"The clouds were blowing away from a densely instarred sky; the moon was hardly more than a crescent and dipping low in the west, but he could see the sombre outline of the opposite mountain, and the white mists that shifted in a ghostly and elusive fashion along the summit. The night was still, save for a late katydid, spared by the frost, and piping shrilly.

"He experienced a terrible shock of surprise when a sudden voice—a voice he had never heard before—cried out sharply, 'Hello there! Help! help!'

"As he pressed tremulously forward, he beheld a sight which made him ask himself if it were possible that Alf Coggin had sent for him to join in some nefarious work which had ended in leaving a man—a stranger—bound to the old lightning-scathed tree.

"Even in the uncertain light Tom could see that he was pallid and panting, evidently exhausted in some desperate struggle: there was blood on his face, his clothes were torn, and by all odds he was the angriest man that was ever waylaid and robbed.

"'Ter-morrer he'll be jes' a-swoopin'!' thought Tom, tremulously untying the complicated knots, and listening to his threats of vengeance on the unknown robbers, 'an' every critter on the mounting will git a clutch from his claws.'

"And in fact, it was hardly daybreak before the constable of the district, who lived hard by in the valley, was informed of all the details of the affair, so far as known to Tom or the Traveler,—for thus the mountaineers designated him, as if he were the only one in the world."

---from The Young Mountaineers / Short Stories, by Charles Egbert Craddock, with illustrations by Malcolm Fraser, 1897


Tennessee author Mary Noailles Murfree (1850-1922), better known as Charles Egbert Craddock, was born in Murfreesboro, TN. For fifteen years she spent her summers in the Tennessee mountains among the people of whom she writes.

"Miss Seawell might have written her stories from anywhere, but that is not true of the greatest woman writer in the South, Miss Mary Murfree," commented Anna Leach in Literary Workers of the South(1895).

"It is her delineations of mountain character, and her descriptions of mountain scenery, that have placed her work in the place it holds. Her style is bold, full of humor, and yet as delicate as a bit of lace. To Mary Wilkins' gift of giving exact pictures of homely life, Miss Murfree unites great power of plot and a keen wit. The little old woman who sits on the edge of a chair in one of her novels, has added stores to America's proverbs. 'There ain't nothin' so becomin' to a fool as a shet mouth,' has taken its place with its older kindred."

"Her work was published by a well known Boston editor for several years before he discovered that she was not a man. Her handwriting is very heavy and black, and it was Mr. Thomas Bailey Aldrich's joke to say, 'I wonder if Craddock has taken in his winter supply of ink, and can let me have a serial.'

"One day a card came to Mr. Aldrich bearing the well known name in the well known writing, and the editor rushed out to greet his old contributor, expecting to see a sturdy Tennessee mountaineer. When a slight, delicate little woman arose to answer his greeting, it is said that Mr. Aldrich put his hands before his face, and simply spun around without a word, absolutely bewildered by astonishment."

"The sensation in the Atlantic office spread everywhere and gave tremendous vogue not only to the book but to the type of short story that it represented," observed the Cambridge History of English and American Literature in retrospect. "No one had gone quite so far before: the dialect was pressed to an extreme that made it almost unintelligible; grotesque localisms in manners and point of view were made central; and all was displayed before a curtain of mountains splashed with broad colours."

Murfree's critical reputation has not fared well more recently. "Her fiction has been consistently criticized for its stereotyping of the mountaineer and for its overblown, highly romanticized descriptions of the landscape," says Allison Ensor of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. "Almost every reader notices the wide gap between the tone and vocabulary of the narrator and the mountain dialect of her characters. Like many other local color writers, she felt it necessary to provide as narrator a cultured, sophisticated intermediary, someone like the reader she hoped to reach."


sources: http://tennesseeencyclopedia.net/imagegallery.php?EntryID=M131
Literary Workers of the South, by Anna Leach, Munsey's, 1895 at www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/murfree.htm
The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21) VOLUME XVI. Early National Literature, Part II; Later National Literature, Part I.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/20365/20365-h/20365-h.htm#pallid

IT IS NIGHT, and we are in this jungle. This is our home tonight. Our home is a garbage heap. Around us are piles of tin cans and broken bottles. Between the piles are fires. A man and a woman huddle by the fire to our right. A baby gasps in the woman's arms. It has the croup. It coughs until it is black in the face. The woman is scared. She pounds it on the back. It catches its breath for a little while, but that is all. You cannot cure a baby of the croup by pounding it on the back with your hand.

The man walks back and forth between the piles of garbage. His shoulders are hunched. He clasps his hands behind him. Up and down he walks. Up and down. He has a look on his face. I know that look. I have had that look on my own face. You can tell what a stiff is thinking when you see that look on his face. He is thinking he wishes to Jesus Christ he could get his hands on a gat. But he will not get his hands on a gat. A gat costs money. He has no money. He is a lousy stiff. He will never have any money.

Two hobos walking along railroad tracks, after being put off a train. Unknown date, unknown photographer. Library of Congress.

Where are they going? I do not know. They do not know. He hunts for work, and he is a damn fool. There is no work. He cannot leave his wife and kids to starve to death alone, so he brings them with him. Now he can watch them starve to death. What can he do? Nothing but what he is doing. If he hides out on a dark street and gives it to some bastard on the head, they will put him in and throw the keys away if they catch him. He knows that. So he stays away from dark streets and cooks up jungle slop for his wife and kid between the piles of garbage.

I look around this jungle filled with fires. They are a pitiful sight, these stiffs with their ragged clothes and their sunken cheeks. They crouch around their fires. They are cooking up. They take their baloney butts out of their packs and put them in their skillets to cook. They huddle around their fires in the night. Tomorrow they will huddle around their fires, and the next night, and the next. It will not be here. The bulls will not let a stiff stay in one place long. But it will be the same. A garbage heap looks the same no matter where it is.

We are five men at this fire I am at. We take turns stumbling into the dark in search of wood. Wood is scarce. The stiffs keep a jungle cleaned of wood. I am groping my way through the dark in search of wood when I stumble into this barbed wire fence. My hands are scratched and torn from the barbs, but I do not mind. I do not mind because I can see that we are fixed for wood for the night.

We will not have to leave our warm fire again to go chasing through the night after wood. A good barbed wire fence has poles to hold it up. A couple of good stout poles will burn a long time. What do I care if this is someone's fence? To hell with everybody! We are five men. We are cold. We must have a fire. It takes wood to make a fire. I take this piece of iron pipe and pry the staples loose.

This is good wood. It makes a good blaze. We do not have to huddle so close now. It is warm, too, except when the wind whistles hard against our backs. Then we shiver and turn our backs to the fire and watch these rats that scamper back and forth in the shadows. These are no ordinary rats. They are big rats.

But I am too smart for these rats. I have me a big piece of canvas. This is not to keep me warm. It is to keep these rats from biting a chunk out of my nose when I sleep. But it does not keep out the sound and the feel of them as they sprawl all over you. A good-sized rat tramps hard. You can feel their weight as they press on top of you. You can hear them sniffing as they try to get in. But when I pull my canvas up around my head, they cannot get in to me.


Waiting for Nothing, by Tom Kromer, Alfred A. Knopf, 1935
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~ma01/White/anthology/kromer.html

Huntington, WV born Tom Kromer dedicated his novel about the Great Depression’s suicidally down and out to "Jolene, who turned off the gas." He never completed another book.

He was at work in the field. The sweat ran in trickles down his back and cascaded from his eyebrows into his eyes. The world was still and bright and fiery in the blaze of a July noon. He rested between the plow handles behind the mare. Sweat traced little rivers down the legs of the mare and dripped into the damp new-plowed ground between the corn rows.

The blades of the corn waved a little at the height of the mare’s back, they moved a little to the wind that came through them, diluted by each row of corn as it crossed the field. The wind was as active as a young pup in the sedge at the field’s edge. By the time it reached him it was like the warm and fetid breath of a dying animal.

As if it were the appointed time for her to come he looked up and saw Old Nance, his mother’s friend, hurrying toward him from the road. She came with her old ambling gait toward him down a corn row. He began to unhitch the traces. It seemed that he would faint from the heat and lie on the cool earth where the plow had turned up the dampness that dwelt below the surface of the soil.

He would escape the news bearer from the road. Old Nance, Old Nance who had been with his mother lying sick in her room. But he took the mare by the bridle and met her on the way.

From "Better a Dinner of Herbs" by Byron Herbert Reece

Byron Herbert Reece was born in 1917 at the foot of Blood Mountain in North Georgia. In 1935 he was admitted to Young Harris College, about 18 miles from his home, but had to leave to help out on the farm. When admitted he had already had some success publishing poetry in national publications. He attended sporadically from 1935 until 1940, but failed to graduate because of his refusal to take either mathematics or French.

He returned to the farm and wrote more poetry with increasing success in publication. In late 1943 Dutton agreed to publish a volume of poetry titled "The Ballad of the Bones." By January 1946, the book was in its third printing and the mountain farmer found himself in increasing demand as an author. From 1946 until 1954 he published 4 volumes of poetry and 2 novels.

Byron Herbert Reece's health began to fail and with it went much of his desire to write. The farm that was so central to him when he was younger became a burden, and he became ill with the tuberculosis that plagued his parents.

He entered a sanitorium in 1954 to control the TB, creating additional financial and emotional hardships. He relied on Guggenheim Fellowships and other grants to writers to cover his expenses rather than farming. He turned to teaching as well, spending terms at Emory, UCLA and finally returning to Young Harris College, too ill to continue to support himself by farming.

On June 3, 1958, with his final papers graded and neatly stacked and Mozart’s Piano Sonata in D playing on the phonograph, Reece shot himself in the diseased lung. He was not yet 41 years old.


source: http://library.yhc.edu/WebReece/Biography.html



Byron+Herbert+Reece appalachian+authors appalachian+literature appalachia appalachian+history history+of+appalachia

Publishers' Weekly 145 (March 25, 1944):
"Strange Fruit banned by Boston booksellers"

Says a Cambridge adage: "Banned in Boston is the trademark of a good book." On this date in 1944 Cambridge Police Chief Timothy J. O'Leary, Boston's Police Commissioner Thomas F. Sullivan, and the Boston Bookseller's Association all joined in squashing the sale of Strange Fruit, Lillian Smith's recently published controversial novel about Southern racial problems, miscegenation and lynching. "The boldest indecent passages I have ever seen," said Sullivan. The group asked the author to delete three lines of "sexual phraseology," thereby adding the novel to the long list of Boston's hallmarked books.

Smith, for many years director of the Laurel Falls Camp for girls in Clayton, GA, achieved national fame with the publication of Strange Fruit, which tells the story of the forbidden romance between a white man, Tracy Dean, and a black woman, Nonnie Anderson.

Commissioner Sullivan insisted that he had not banned the book, in fact "had no right to do so." He had merely dropped in at Boston's oldest booksellers, the Old Corner Bookstore (whose head, Richard F. Fuller, was also President of the Boston Board of Retail Book Merchants), and drawn an interested clerk's attention to Strange Fruit's overripe passages. Soon all Boston booksellers received a notice from the Board of Retail Book Merchants asking them to withdraw the book.

Detroit was quick to follow Boston’s lead. Nor was the black community particularly won over. In 1945 Dean Gordon B. Hancock, editor of The Associated Negro Press wrote: "It is difficult to imagine a more subtle yet scathing indictment against the Negro race in general and the Negro womanhood in particular than that presented in Strange Fruit."

Smith’s publisher fanned the flames. In response to the requests of some Boston booksellers to make "minor changes," Reynal & Hitchcock issued a statement that they "have no intention whatsoever of tampering with a fine and important book in order to transform it to what official Boston might regard as acceptable. The book was published because Reynal & Hitchcock consider it an outstanding work of literature."

Within 2 weeks of the ban, Smith’s book was selling 3,000 copies a day, while a new edition of 50,000 copies was tumbling off the press.

Thanks to the ban, the novel created a sensation in 1944, going on to become a best seller, and was dramatized by Smith and her sister, Esther, for Jose Ferrer’s Broadway production of it the next year.

"In trying to shut the Negro race away from us, we have shut ourselves away from the good, the creative, the human in life," wrote Smith about the response to her work. "The warping distorted frame we have put around every Negro child from birth is around every white child from birth also.

"Each is on a different side of the frame, but each is there. As in its twisting distorted form it shapes and cripples the life and personality of one, it is shaping and crippling the life and personality of the other. It would be difficult to decide which character is maimed the more--the white or the Negro--after living a life in the Southern framework of segregation."


sources: "Overripe?" Time magazine April 10, 1944
www.georgiawomen.org/_honorees/smithl/index.htm
Patton, Randall. "Lillian Smith and the Transformation of American Liberalism, 1945-1950." The Georgia Historical Quarterly(GHQ). Volume 76, no. 1-2, p. 373-392, 1992.
www3.isrl.uiuc.edu/~unsworth/courses/entc312/s99/search.cgi?title=Strange+Fruit


Lillian+Smith appalachian+literature banned+in+Boston Clayton+GA Laurel+Falls+Camp appalachia appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history