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AUTHOR Arnow, Pat, Ed. TITLE Insiders/Outsiders. INSTITUTION East Tennessee State Univ., Johnson City. Center for Appalachian Studies and Services. PUB DATE 88 NOTE 41p. AVAILABLE FROMNow and Then, CASS, Box 19180A, East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, TN 37614-0002 ($2.50). PUB TYPE Collected Works - Serials (022)* -- Creative Works (Literature,Drama,Fine Arts) (030) JOURNAL CIT Now and Then; v5 n2 Sum 1988

EDRS PRICE MF01/PCO2 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS Cultural Images; *Cultural Pluralism; Cultural Traits; Essays; Geographic Regions; Personal Narratives; Poetry; *Regional Characteristics; Short Stories; *Stereotypes IDENTIFIERS *Appalachia; Appalachian People

ABSTRACT This journal issue focuses on insiders and outsiders in Appalachia, the mixing of cultures, and the diversity of the region. The lead article mixes memoir with analysis of the importance of home and homeplace to people from the Appalachians, many of whom are forced to leave permanently in search of work. A second article considers the strange contrast betwecl outsiders' fascination with things Appalachian and some nativesdesire to get rid of their country accent and country ways, pointing out the difficulty for some insiders to feel comfortable inside. Contradicting the stereotype of the Appalachian hillbilly, there are profiles of Appalachian residents of Italian, Jewish, Chinese, and Filipino descent who maintained their native traditions. Other articles include selections from a new novel by Gurney Norman and from the journals of novelist Harriet Simpson Arnow, and memories of a city boy who felt superior to his country cousins. There ale also reviews of two novels about Appalachia for children, a colle7.tion of essays about urban Appalachians, Appalachian poetry, Baptist worship practices, and reviews of films about migration into and out of Appalachia and a rural North Carolina autobiography. (DHP)

Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document. *********************************************************************** . :: %. : Center for Appalachian Studies and Services/Institute for Appalachian Affairs East Tennessee State University

Philip Almazan. Greeneville, Tenn., and Betty Childress. Bristol. Tenn.. perform a traditional Filipino don( at the Phil-4 /11(luh Christrnw, 1).ortt. /ohris4m (its Inn

U 111. DEPARTMENT OF E:tUCATION "PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE THIS Office ot Educational Research and Improvement MATERIAL HAS BEEN GRANTED BY EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC] Pal. A rhoLc) A.,This document has been reproduced as" eceived !tom the person or otganaatron onginahng .1. Cl Minor chanpls have been made to improve reproduction Quality

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.4% 8 A girl and boy say goodbye at the Knoxville bus station, Knoxville, Tenn., September. 1943. Photo by Esther Bubley for the U.S. Office of War Information.

What California Means To Me Part 34 Somewhere about half way between Maryville and Sacramento in my teens I heard Bob Wills play. Wayne Hogan Now and Then Contents COLUMNS 2-4 POETRY Editorial Board What California Means Bert Allen, Ed Cabbell, Pauline Cheek, to rae ifc Mary Chiltoskey, Robert J. Higgs, ESSAYS Wayne Hogan Marat Moore, Rita Quillen, and The Ideal Home 5Kevin 4 Fred Waage Dot Jackson Judy Odom Barnett. 9 I= I= I= Inside, Looking Out 7 Amy Tipton Gray Gary Carden The Disappeared .17 Staff Slaying the Mythical Ann Kilkelly Director - Richard Blaustein Large Mouth 23 Editor - Pat Amow Kingdom 9 Bonny Stanley Robert Bess Poetry Editor - Jo Carson Transplanted 23 Music Editor - Ed Snodderly Outsider/Insider 26 Gretchen McCroskey Associate Editor - Jane Woodside George Ella Lyon Subscriptions - Ruth Hausman From Away 23 Support Staff - Carolyn Cerrito, You Know You're an Glenn McKee Margaret Liu, Kathy M. Smith, Insider When... 36Cold Mountain 25 Cathy Whaley Martha Whaley A Roadside Stand 25 Thanks - Charles Moore, Larry Smith Bill Wood ©Copyright by the Center for Appc chian PROFILES Waiting for Studies and Services. 1988. Flying Saucers 36 SBR No. 260-063-87 Sylvia Attilli Basconi 10 Felicia Mitchell Mary Alice Basconi First -Love Summer 37 Mary Ernestine ODeli Volume 5, Number 2 Ida Ginsburg 12 The Last Family Reunion. .37 Summer, 1988 A Kosher Household 12 Bob Henry Baber I= I= =I Pat Amow REVIEWS Tom Huang 14Borrowed Children Richard Blaustein by George Ella Lyon. .. . 26 Nc-nv and Then Magazine Roberta Herrin Now and Thenhas been published three The Phil-Am Club 16 times a year since 1984 by the Center for Mary Alice Basconi A Regular Rolling Noah Appalachian Studies and Services at East by George Ella Lyon.. . . 27 Tennessee State University. Subscriptions are $7.50 per year, $10.00 for institutions and DIARY Sarah K. Davis libraries. Too Few Tomorrows ISSN No. 0896-2693 Submissions of poetry, fiction, articles, Early Days at Keno 33 by Phillip J. Obermiller & personal essays, graphics and photographs Harriette Amow William W. Philliber. .28 concerned with Appalachian life past and Richard Blaustein present are welcomed if accompanied by a self-addressed stamped envelope. MUSIC Long Journey Home Address correspondence to: Editor, Now directed by and Then, Box 19180A, ETSU, Johnson Subways Rumbling Elizabeth Barret 28 City, TN 37614-0002. Phillip J. Obermiller East Tennessee State University is fully in in My Mind 34 accord with the belief that educational and Being a Joines employment opportunities should be available Richard Blaustein to all eligible persons without regard to age, directed by sex, race, religion, national origin or handicap. Waitin' for the Sunrise....35 Tom Davenport 29 Ed Snodderly Jane H. Woodside The views expressed in these pages are those of the authors and do not necessarily Zone 3 represent opinions of East Tennessee State STORIES edited v Malcolm Glass & University or o the State Board of Regents. David Till 30 Meeting of Minds 20 Jo Carson Gurney Norman Giving Glory to God = I= I= in Appalachia The Incredible by Howard Dorgan 31 Expanding Sentence. ..21 R. Chesla Sharp Wayne Hogan is a freelance writer and illustrator Lance Olsen Dear Flora Mae & from Cookeville. Tenn. Ills poems have Other Stories appeared in MSS, Cotton Boll the Young Republican 24 by Patricia Shirley 32 MacGuffin. Crab Creek Review and Randy Oakes elsewhere. Ed Davfc Now and Then/1 From the Director From the Editor

This issue of Nowand Thenis the sort of magazine we When I was growing up in Chicago, I lived in a were hoping to produce when the Center for Appalachian neighborhood that most families were interested in getting Studies and Services was established in 1984. From the out of. The goal was the suburbs. We worked to remove very beginning, we were seeking to avoid stereotyped the accents tl-slt exposed us as working class children or approaches to Appalachian Studies and also to break grandchildren of immigrants. Religion and customs became down barriers between professional scholars and the diluted to a more bland mix, one that would be acceptable general public. We carefully examined the publications outside the neighborhood, one that would not draw being produced by our colleagues in this field and decided attention or ridicule anywhere in the country. that we wanted a magazine with its own distinct We succeeded. We went out in mainstream America, personality, one which could not be easily pigeonholed as and no one stared at our odd ethnic ways because we just another little literary review or academic journal. didn't display odd ethnic ways. Back in my old Striking out in a new dire;:tion is never the easiest path neighborhood, I now feel like a tourist. I am charmed by to take, but the warm respcmse thatNow and Thenhas the accents and fascinated by the shops that I used to received from scholars, writers and subscribers in the consider the most mundane places in the world. Appalachian region and elsewhere tells us that our efforts In fact, I feel like a tourist about anywhere I go. I don't are being appreciated by the kind of people we want to belong anywhere, everywhere I am an observer. reach. Except here. I have found a home. I know the names of In this Insiders/Outsiders edition ofNow andThen, our the mountains, I can find morel mushrooms and pink intent is to illuminate the cultural complexity and social lady's slippers. I've learned that, unlike Chicago, you can diversity of a region which has often been dismissed as look righi at strangers' faces and even say hello as you homogenous, rural and isolated. In actuality, Appalachia is walk down the street or grocery aisles. I've found that if I becoming more cosmopolitan with every passing day. step into any place with more than 20 people in it, I'm Southern mountain people who have migrated out of the likely to know at least one person. region must cope with the same problems of balancing the Yet, I'm still an outsider. I have envied those who have a preservation of ethnic identity against pressures towards heritage here to fall back on, a place to come to. assimilation into the dominant society which face members Storyteller and dancer Anndrena Belcher grew up not of minority groups who have recently moved into three miles from me in Chicago, she went to the next high Appalachia. This in turn reflects broader issues which school over. But when she moved to this part of the affect people caught between traditionalism and country. she was making a circle, coming home. Her story modernization throughout the contemporary world. is featured in the film LongJourneyHome, reviewed in By the time you read this latest issue of Nowand Then, this issue on sage 28. Those who have more recent the Center for Appalachian Studies and Services will be immigrant pasts cannot stake such a claim. We have to evaluated by the Tennessee Higher Education Commission rely on the kindness of strangers. and the State Board of Regents to determine whether it is Generally, wherever we go, we find goodwill. But worthy of being designated an "Accomplished Center of sometimes there's resentment, or simply a lack of Excellence." Over the past four years, as a Center of understanding. Excellence we have not only succeeded in bolstering the But the trouble we may have had feeling at home here is identity of East Tennessee State University as a major paralleled by people from the region who move elsewhere. contributor to Appalachian Studies through the publication Just as I abandoned as much evidence as possible that I of this magazine but have otherwise met the various was from a certain place, many of the people from this measures of performance set for tr:including support for region have felt compelled to get rid of their accents and media and book projects, covering me costs incurred by their mannerisms to avoid comments or ridicule. CASS faculty members and fellows in making In this issue of NowandThen, we're talking about these presentations at professional conferences, encouraging tensions that come with the mixing of cultures, feeling at active participation in the activities of organizations such home, feeling left out, getting confused, getting mad, as the Appalachian Studies Association and the getting therapy, getting in, getting out. Appalachian Consortium, seeking grants and contracts to And this issue of Nowand Thenis about the diversity fund research and public service projects, providing service of the region. Appalachia has never entirely fit its to public schools, as well as sponsoring events attracting reputation as a pure Scots community. There's mg been visiting scholars to this campus. a good-sized black community here, and a small band of To continue this work_CASS needs your encourage- Cherokees never left. For more than 100 years immigrants ment and support. Individual subscriptions toNow and from every background have moved in. Will the real Thenare $7.50 a year for three issues; institutional Appalachian please stand up? ,subscriptions are $10.00. Larger contributions will be Let's all stand up. I think we can figure out a way for gratefully appreciated and will help continue the work of each of us to maintain our unique cultures and still find a the CASS Fellowship Program. We've come a long way in home in this unique Appalachian world, too. a short time but we need your help today more than ever. So, OK, you guys, I said stand up! All a youse! Pat Amow 0 0 0Richar.I Blaustein 2/Now and Then 5 However, I suppose I would come to regard it differently in time, [though] the beauty could never die, only the novelty would wear off." In the 1920s Beeson, Mathes, Paul Fink and Roy Camer formed a Sunday hiking club which they rrred to as the A.B.F.M. club. The initials stood for "able-bodied and feeble-minded." RAVE toUR Beeson remained interested in hiking and in the geography of the region Pic-TORE throughout his life. N(1\\ Beeson's architectural work also G.ouNe_ brought him in contact with the inhabitants of the region. He' visited myyp\uNc\\INN Bann: Elk, N.C., in 1917 when v\p,N(. designing the new hospital for the 0,0 town. In his reminiscence of the visit, $ 22- °poG;14 )111G Beeson stated, "The mountain people at that date were really primitive rustics and very few had been far from nume. ...The women worked all the time and were old, in looks, at 30... ." Still, Beeson maintained that the "mountain folks" were "very friendly and hospitable to all strangers, who were always invited in for dinner and From the. Archives to spend the night." During his lifetime, Beeson saw The development of railroading, coal After hearing of the Hatfield-McCoy much change come to the southern mining, timbering and manufacturing in feud, Beeson and a friend, Frank Boes, Appalachian mountains which had the southern Appalachian mountains decided to hike into Pike County, Ky. become his home. The Appalachian provided work for the inhabitants of In his description of the trip, Beeson Trail and Great Smoky Mountains the region and also resulted in stated, "A tall mountaineer appeared in National Park were created. He also migration of laborers and skilled the trail ahead, blocking our advance, witnessed changes in living conditions professionals into the area. Many of so we pulled up for some talk. The and the effects of anti-poverty the migrants made southern stranger was a cadaverous-looking guy programs both during the Great Appalachia their home and became but without the fierce, mean Depression of the 1930s and during instrumental in the development of the appearance we had been hoping to the Great Society of the 1960s. In region. see. In fact he had a pleasant face 1969, Beeson wrote of the changes for Among the collections held by the [though] the eyes were sharp and people living in the Poga community of Archives of Appalachia are the papers suspicious. He was dressed country Carter County, Tenn., "Now it is of one migrant, D.R. Beeson, Sr. In fashion and carried a single-barrel shot interesting to evaluate the advantages, 1903, Beeson was working as a gun. Our dreams of an ideal tough in a general way, that such folks draftsman for U.S. Steel Corporation customer had faded." achieve from the Uplift; the better in an office near Pittsburgh. He Beeson left Gary, W.Va., in 1905 living conditions, educational facilities; accepted a transfer to Gary, W.V., as and moved to Bristol, Tennessee- more cleanliness, sanitation and health; a part of a company coal development Virginia in order to work for George L. but change to a condition of project. According to Beeson's written Carter, developer of the Clinchfield discontent, uncertainty about the account of his move, "Most all the Railroad. In 1912, he began wor':ing future, religious doubt and constant boys in the Ambridge office wanted to as an architect in Johnson City. While worry and dissatisfaction with things in get the call as we had heard plenty of living in East Tennessee, Beeson general." wild tales about the region, and continued hiking and photographing The Archives of Appalachia is adventure seemed to have her hand the mountains. In 1914, he and C. interested in collecting other materials out beckoning us to a mighty attractiveHodge Mathes (a professor at East documenting mountain life and possibility of new experience in a part Tennessee State Normal School) took changes which have come to the area. of the USA that was pretty much a week-long hike through the Smoky For more information, contact untouched by the hand of what we Mountains to the summit of Mount Archives of Appalachia, Box 22,450A, considered as civilization." Guyot. Beeson and Mathes made threeEast Tennessee State University, Beeson remained in Gary for two other Western North Carolina walking Johnson City, Tenn. 37614, phone years. With his curiosity about the trips in 1913 and 1914. Beeson said -(615) 9294338. people and interest in nature, he began that from Roan Mountain, "The hiking into the mountains and mountains in the distance stick up Norma Myers Thom-3 photographing the scenic landscapes. [through] the morning fogs like islands. and Marie Tedesco Now and Then/3 extreme northeastern section of articulate and sometimes militant From the Museum Tennessee, had been Republican since conservative, Reese also kept closely Civil War days. informed on pending legislation and The Reece Museum is named for a Reece's first dealings with politics twice left his sickbed to vote against remarkable Tennessean, an ultimate came in 1920 soon after he had successful Administration efforts to "inside who spent much of his life returned from the war. He took on enlarge the powerful House Rules outside the area on behalf of East Incumbent Sam R. Sells, a veteran of aCommittee, on which he served as a Tennessee. decade in Congress. Presumably the member of the Conservative Bloc. Brazil la Carroll Reece was born rookie candidate had little reason to While in Congress, Rep. Reece December 22, 1889, on a farm near hope for victory, but he ,cle, in on the worked hard to earn lasting First Butler in Johnson County, Tenn., one coattails of Govemor Alf Taylor. district support. Most of Upper East of 13 children. He was named for an In 1920 at the age of 31 Reece was Tennessee was stili agricultural and far ancestor, Major General Brazil la the youngest member of Congress. He behind the rest of the country Carroll McBride, who fought in the became associated with the isolationist technologically and otherwise. Reece War of 1812. wing of his party, voting against the was devoted to bringing industry to Reece received his bachelor of arts draft in 1940 and against the Lend- Tennessee and encouraging degree from Carson-Newman College Lease Act the following year. From advancement in the area. He was often in 1914, then enrolled at New York 1940 on Reece served as a Republicanpresent at groundbreaking ceremonies University for his master's. National Committeeman and State of new industrial plants such as the In 1917, Reece enlisted in the Army, Chairman for Tennessee. Strom plant in Erwin. Reece also one month after this country entered Over the years, Carroll Reece attended the annual Memorial Day World War I. As a lieutenant, Reece suffered only two Congressional services at Mountain Home. He had a commanded the 3rd Battalion, 102nd defeats. The first was in the campaign significant role in expanding TVA, the Infantry of the American Expeditionary of 1930 when he was unseated by planning and building of dams in the Force's 26th:Division in some of the Oscar B. Lovette of Greeneville, who area and Tennessee in general, and is hardest fighting of the war. He rose to ran as an Independent catching Reece credited with bringing federal monies the rank of major, and was highly by surprise in a 10day race, and into the district to build roads. decorated for bravery in combat. carrying most of the Democratic and Reece entered the Bethesda Hospital After Armistice, Reece returned to Independent votes. The second was in in January 1961 for treatment of what his prewar position on the faculty of 1948 when, after having resigned his was then believed to be pleurisy; New York University where he became House seat and serving two years as 'however, it proved to be cancer. The director of the school of commerce, National Party Chairman, he ran 71-year-old Congressman died at accounts and finance. In 1928, he unsuccessfully for the Senate against Bethesda on March 19, 1961. Reece received the'honorary law degree from Estes Kefauver. had served from the 67th Congress Cumberland University and attended After his return to Congress in into the 87th Congress, the longest Tusculum College and Lincoln 1950, Reece appeared less in the service of any man from the First Memorial University where he received national limelight. His most publicized Tennessee District in its history. a doctor of humanities degree. and controversial activity was in 1954 Reece was a Republican from the when he headed a special committee Margaret Carr Democratic "Solid South"; his district, investigating tax-exempt educational tucked away in the mountains in the and philanthropic foundations. An toI=1

But you, and keyboard synthesizers. Kevin my son, I sing you For you you walk the ridges red-winged maple seeds I should've tried dreaming asphalt. and dark smoke a rap song. The clean smell of the pine trees drifting That would surely please you. sets you longing on the same free wind. But I wasn't raised for rapping for hot gasoline like Run DMC. and melting tar Judy Odom I can't quite catch the beat. and diesel fumes. =:=1 =I CI I don't like rhyming. You contemplate the mist And besides, that settles in the hollows Judy Odom's work has appeared in I've lived too long and imagine buildings Crescent Review, Homewords, here in these mountains moored in L.A. smog. Mississippi Arts and Letters and Now to feel easy And so, and Then. She won the Sherwood making poems out of broken I give you what I can Anderson award for fiction in 1986 and glass this poem 1987. A high school English teacher in and ghetto jive blending dulcimers Johnson City, she was selected First District and wild erratic horns. and drums Teacher of the Year in1988.

4/Now and Then O

O Painting by Walter Woodin Mauldin in Miami,'Fla.. sometime in the 1920s. The ideal Home Return from Flatland Exile Dot Jackson

Brush had taken the fine corn fields Of course there were the cotton come up so hard and who kept one of Chastain's Bottoms, along the mills. Anybody could go to town and hand around his knife. Oolenoy River, and that is where it all work in the mill, live in the mill village. So once married they had gone to caught up with me. Lots of people walked away from the Atlanta and Palm Beach and Miami My parents had been gone from land, away from the corn rows and where a building boom was on. And in Pickens County for close to 60 years. cotton rows, glad enough to spin for a way they did all right. My daddy built They had gone before their children some guaranteed return, no matter them a comfortable house, on a lot in were born. The matter, of course, was how small, rather than to arub and a pasture that his research had shown money. gamble with the earth and sky and him was the highest spot in Dade They left when the farms where they often lose. County, Florida: altitude 11 feet. The had grown up were about played out, But the other thing Ebout the mill people on the lower slope of this their red dirt washed off the hills and was this: there would be months that pinnacle he Herred to as "them people slashed by gullies. My mother could you went into that thumping brick in the holler." have kept her job teaching school, but netherworld before the sun carne up, He built different sorts of houses for in that time it was an unseemly thing and you came out of it after the sun rich people. Some of these people had for a wife overtly to make the living. went down. And in there, somebody him build their furniture, too, pieces As for my father, he was a man of told you what to do and when to do it. shaped and carved and inlaid with his many graces. Almost none of which Cotton mill bosses sassed people knife. provided money. Not here. He had a sometimes. My mother took fairly well to all of fine ear for music, but he had shot off My daddy, orphaned at five, had this. The streets and neighborhoods three of I-'s fingers as a child. He nevercome up very hard. Caught in a were alive with strange people, learned, then, to fret the strings right- threatening place where someone actedsometimes in strange clothes, whose handed. So he made and fixed other biggety and rude, he always had his words and ways she could not people's fiddles and banjos and various good hand in his pocket, his fingers understand. But they interested and other "boxes," as needed; he did these tight around his knife. That is why my entertained her, gave her much to things for nothing, as a neighbor. daddy could not go into the mill. remark about and ponder on. Also, He built rabbit gums and bird traps; There was this other matter, too. Mysince she had suffered from he was an artist with a piece of wood mother was not on the best Df terms tuberculosis as a girl, the warmth of and a pocket knife. There just was, in with her family. They had thought the wintertimes made her grateful. that time, no money in it. Not here. poorly of her marrying a man who had Still, there was that wistful eagerness Now and Then/5 8 Ideal Home... When people die there is sometimes jobs, became the be-all, end-all of so much to do that mourning is existence. with which she embraced-all people pushed aside. When my father died I And here, on this little winding road, and all news frorn.Home There was had a small child and an infant and its narrow, pothbled identity the way she wculd say o Florida was in the throes of morning sickness threatened by encroaching briars and people who were going to the with the third. The family simply got vines, I began at last to cry. All the mountains for the summer, "Give the through the funeral and visiting and theway up the-mountain I wailed aloud for hills my love." Orie woman I remember settling and leapt back into business asmy mother, and for the lonely, looked at her, very puzzled. "The usual. homesick old man who iced to rock Hills? Do I know them?" the woman When-my mother died there were me on his lap, and for the little ones I said. (The answer to that, most teenagers with troubles, a job that used to rock on mine. certainly, was No.) would not quit and a marriage that About seven weepy miles down into Of visiting, job-hunting homefolks was about to. Eastatoe Valley, the road, which used there were a gracious plenty in the More and more time was taken up to go another dozen miles or so to my hard Depression timer. The porch of by jobs and other things that passed Granny's, now came to an abrupt end. an evening would be full of them, the for Life. Kinpeople here in our own Well, it didn't really end. It went on, its women rocking, the men perched on country died. When they were gone, I faded yellow center line going deeper the steps and banisters, the soft air full came here less and less. and deeper into the aquamarine of of their laments, their Lucky Strikes Ard then here I was, back for a day Keowee River, which was now a lake. and Camels glowing in'the dark. in my family's hills. This time a The old covered bridge we used to They were displaced persons with magazine had sent me to write about cross on was now gone. There was red dust still on their A-Model Fords the curious truth that yes, Dear just an expanse of crystalline blue, and homesickness in their hearts. Tourist, there are mountains in South rippled with the wakes of motorboats. Many of them, like my mama and my Carolina. Hilltops were now islands, linked by daddy, would never go Home to stay I had spent the night in the swags of high-tension wires that again. But oh, they would talk. campground at Table Rock State Park. drooped from ranks of towering steel It was after my father died, old and Up with the larks the next moming, I pylons. cantankerous and out of place, that I started out to see what progress, in the I got out of the car and took off my knew I had to come home. Trouble shape of a hydroelectric project, had shoes and walked out on the old road was, in Carolina the jobs that paid wrought in the Eastatoe Valley. with little pearl-pale fishes nibbling at were in the cities. Better that than Turning down that shortcut through my toes. So strange, so changed. another generation withering in the the Oolenoy bottoms was as natural But home. flats. as if I had driven that road only Home. So I could work in Charlotte and yesterday. Except the Chastains' fine, It took another three years, but I come here and bring my children on tended fields I used to covet, back bought this little old house within the weekends, sometimes, when they when I was as young and green as the waiking distance of where both my were small. It was close to a 300-mile willows along the stream, were parents had been bom. And one day I round trip, but it seemed like heaven. overgrown,with years of weeds and was hanging a picture my father had When we finally got my mother back saplings. painted during his decades in flatland to Carolina, it was just weeks before I thought about a precious exile. she died. I wonder if she ever knew photograph that hung on the wall of It was of a little cabin set against how close she was to home. When we my office back in Charlotte. It had some blue mountains. We had always would push her wheelchair out into the been made here, in this valley, long laughingly called his work of art "The yard, and the wrens would be scolding, ago; it was a picture of two of my Ideal Home." Now, after I drove a tack and the lilac hushes blooming, children with their blackberry buckets, and hung it on the wall, I happened to sometimes she seemed to know. She trudging up the road toward the look out of a front window. There it couldn't speak, but there would be a sunset-tinted face of Table Rock. was the identical setting. The three little glow in her eyes, a flicker of a Along the roadside, in the picture, humps of Six Mile Mountain and an smile. someone had planted a row of white old cabin, still standing, that I pass by pine seedlings that were then about every day. head-high to a small child. Now, the Never a rosy morning, nor an trees had grown to a massive evening full of wood thrush song, may windbreak that shut the mountain off I forget to be thankful to be Home. from view. It was as the hymnist William Croft had written: Time, like this ever-rolling 1=1 1=1 A stream, had borne my blackberry- picking children away, into adult lives of their own. Time had taken my Dot Jackson is a reporter for the parents and their only other child. With Greenville News-Piedmont and considerable help from our fellow man, Rues in Six Mile,S.C. She wrote about it had taken the valley in which my the Pickens County Congressional ancestral f mily lived in quiet self- Medal of Honor winners forour sufficiency, before money, and thus "Veterans" issue. 6/Now and Then YE

'MIMI`lila Gary Carden While I was teaching at LeesMcRae Eventually, the ballad collectors and college, boy. This ain't no way to make College in the 60s, a healthy oral historians went away, off to a living." In college, instructors percentage of the faculty was from record Gullah or Cajun or Zuni songs commented on my "quaint syntax," "outside" the mountains. Some were and legends, leaving me to stew in my and students from urban areas found enthralled by what they called "the own juice. To a great extent, the my "clodhopper walk" amusing. The Appalachian experience," and spent a frustration and anger that I felt at change was painful, but I made it, considerable amount of time collecting having my culture analyzed, interpreted emerging from the regional teachers' folk tales and ballads. I frequently and appreciated by transient scholars college with a behavior pattern that found myself in the ironic position of resembled that of Vietnam vets who caused my Aunt Elsie to conclude that having my own culture explained to found themselves seething with rage education had given me "the big head" me. Hearty bearded chaps wearing after seeing Apocalypse Now or The and the belief that I was better than Pendleton shirts and carrying tape Deerhunter. It wasn't the inaccuracies my own raising. recorders delivered little that angered people; it was the glib In my defense, I began to have extemporaneous lectures on stoic arrogance of an evaluator who claimed serious doubts about newly acquired fortitude, individuality and mountain to "understand" an experience that had values while teaching English and wisdom. I had to remind myself that left those who participated in the event speech in a North Georgia high school. the idioms, colorful metaphors and bewildered and confused. How was I My students had painstakingly customs described by these feverish to account for the fact that I hefailed prepared a five-minute speech on "Why historians were part of the heritage I to perceive the beauty and integrity of I am an American." After two weeks of had struggled to escape! There I sat in my own culture? Ignorance? A lack of drill, there was not a single drawl, my little SearsRoebuck suit listening sensitivity? twang or apathetic vowel in the class. I to outsiders wax eloquent about My frustration was compounded by was so pleased by their progress, I Chaucetian dialect. My God! I had the fact that I grew up in a time in asked the principal to arrange a special spent years trying to rid myself of the which Appalachia was held in low chapel program in the auditorium. lazy "i" and "e," and quaint expressions esteem by insiders and outsiders alike. Following the program, the principal like "peaked," and "gaunt" (pronounced At school, the teachers encouraged us approached me in the lobby. That to rhyme with "saint") and "fair to abandon our mountain twangs and was jest fine, Mr. Carden! Jest Finer complected" only to learn that they pursue college preparatory courses. WeThen, he looked a bit perplexed and were infinitely respectable because theylearned to be ashamed of homes added, "But tell me, why did they talk bespoke a rich cultural heritage! It was without indoor plumbing, and my own so funny?" He was right. They did talk enough to make a grown man fall on grandfather would stare bleakly across funny. In fact, they sounded as though the floor, bite his leg and whimper. his hillside farm and say, "Go to they had been imported. It occurred to Now and Then/7 10 Inside Looking Out... them because of my grandfather. He discussed my general lack of talent had never recovered from my father's and always concluded, "Mark my me that since we have to communicate death, and, as a consequence, would word! He will end up in reform school, with our friends and neighbors, it not allow any discussion of it. the chairi.gang or worse!" Were they probably makes more sense if we Accidental reminders would-send him kidding? More than 40 years later, I'm speak in a familiar manner. So, I to the barn where he would stay for still not sure. stopped much of the foolishness with hours, staring at the Balsam So, _I grew to hate the man from enunciation and concentrated on logic, mountains. Occasionally, he would New Jersey, perhaps because his order and clarity. play an old fiddle or sing hymns from transition was too easy. Effortlessly he Nevertheless, a decade later, I sat in an old shape-note songbook. acquired what I had cast aside, and the faculty lounge of a small college on My grandfather observed that I aid then he showed me its immeasurable the edge of Beech Mountain listening not bear the slightest resemblance to value. But most of all I hated him to a man from New Jersey talk about any member of my father's family. because he enjoyed a status that was the levels of meaning in a local folk That, in conjunction with the fact that denied me. He felt himself to be tale. It was a story I had heard all my I was left-handed and had created a comfortablyinside. life. As I listened, he used a pocket number of imaginary playmates, led In later years, I went to work for the knife to cut a "chaw" from a bar of my grandfather to conclude that I was Cherokee Indians. There is'an analogy, Day's Work and experimented with a totally a product of my mother's side I think. I took solace in the fact that few chords on his fretless guitar. Why of the family and therefore doomed. the lines were clearly drawn. All non- was I so irritated? This man's rendition Bad blood, he called it. My forebears Indians are outsiders on an Indian of the story and the music were very were drunks, suicides and murderers. reservation. Each day, the good. Exceptional, in fact. Why did it When he repeated his conclusions to anthropologists and the oral historians bother me that he could readily adapt his sons and daughters, they would wander the reservation. They record to my culture? In some way, I feel peer at me intently and nod as if to old tribal chants and question local demeaned, and perhaps....betrayed. say, "Yes, now that you mention it, it'smedicine men about herbs and My father was a mountain musician obvious." Occasionally, one of my charms. Like the man from New who was murdered by a drunk when I uncles _would observe that I stood, Jersey, they interpret and analyze. 'kwas three. Shortly afterwards, my walked or laughed in a manner that However, there is a difference. They smother dressed me in my Sunday reminded him of my mother's family: a do not slide casually into the role of clothes and left me on the front porch retarded uncle, or a psychotic the Cherokee. When they attemptio of my grandparent's home. I grew up grandfather. sing the song, bhoot the bow or mimic surrounded by musical instruments and Here is the point, I think. In the the dance-step, the old Indians smile a house full of old photographs. In a midst of my grandfather's family, I and look away. The nonndians black trunk in the attic, I found my became anoutsider.Sundays, when become embarrassed and laugh at father's mildewed hats, dozens of ivory the family would gather on the porch their own ineptness. They cannot do it. picks and packages of Black Diamond after dinner, became a purgatory for Their interpretations sound flat banjo strings. I was afraid to remove me. My Aunt Alva frequently because in the final analysis they will never understand what the words mean. Sometimes, when I see Cherokee elders turn from the oral history specialist and talk to each other in their own language, I stand with the other outsiders and imagine that this is like my grandfather's porc'i on Sunday. The words are gentle murmurs and the elders nod and smile in agreement. Are they saying, "Bad blood?" Are they saying, "He is so inept....no talent at all! Who does he remind you of? Remember the fool who came with the crystals last week!" They smile at the oral historian and nod. 4e4-4 $ MOM= 4M $4 =3 =3 =3 Gary N. Carden worked for several years for the Cherokees in Cherokee, N.C. That experience provided the inspiration for his play, Uktena, which was selected for production by 44* , ,- i the Atlanta New Plays Project in 1986. His new play, The Rain-drop Waltz is being produced this summer t by the Kudzu Players at the Folk Art Cherokee Indian children dance at Banner Elk, North Carolina. festival. Center on the Blue Ridge Parkway. 8/Now and Then 1 Barnetts There was a green and white square metal rocker Slaying, the Mythical, on her grandmother's porch in Roan Mountain. It screeked. Kingdom In the summer Maw Barnett Bonny Stanley would sit in it and look at her. Which of the following definitons of Appalachian (n.) is She lived in Johnson City. correct? 1) One born on a mountaintop in Tennossee, Maw's eyes were blue like no blue she had ever seen, maker of moonshine, player of the dulcimer, slayer of the her hair white and thick and fine and smooth Queen's English (unless the queen is Elizabeth p and tight in a flesh colored net. possessor of an eighth grade 'education, member Her skin was soft, and rested on her face snake handling religious sect, or 2) ON born in a city-who like snow on jutting rock. has always lived in a city, a Roman Catholic, one whose grandparents had college degree:), one who loves opera Maw had been married at thirteen or fifteen and isn't too fond of Lbuntry music. Most people from and ht .d named eight or ten children, outside the region would say, "Number One, of course; and most of them still lived. Number Two is a carpetbagger who moved into the area Vestal and Virgil and June and Elizabeth and Charlie. to work at Oak Ridge or TVA." Wrong. I'm not too 5utt Crick (for Crystal! and Mary. where Number One lives except in the mythical kifigdom And Brownlow. But nobody knew for sure about Brownlow of Appalachia Stereotypica, but, as a Two, bom and bred Maw sat there in that rocker like a bag of meal in a bin. in the Briar Patch of Knoiville,_Tenn., as were many of my relatives going back to the1700s, I' know there are Sooner or later she would say to Vestal or Crick many like me all over Appalachia. Most of my life I or Elizabeth thought I was Just an ordinary Tennessean. "Now tell me again. There has been a more urban, educated side to Who is Beth Ann adatin' this week? Appalachia for a long time, just as there have been That boy from up Heaton Creek? No? That's right. colleges in these hills formary years: the University of She quit him the other day for who was it, now?" Tennessee, founded in 1794; Emory and Henry College, Beth Ann's grandmother would provide the name. 1838; Sewanee, 1857; Knoxville College, 1863; East It was always a new one. Tennessee State University, 1911. There his been Then Maw would say religious diversity too: The Roman Catholic Church of the "That Beth Ann. She's really somthin'. Immaculate Conception, founded in Knoxville in 1855, is You seen that outfit she wore up here the other day? one of the oldist historical churches in the state; Jewish Made it herself. Makes all her own clothes." religious communities in Knoxiiille and the TriCities date. And after that from the 19th century; Appalachians are a diversegroup TetIi Ann's a little skinnier than she is, ain't she? and have been from the earliest days. Yet misconceptions She's sorta chunky. persist. And taller. Beth Ann's taller, too. And pretty law. When ',went off to school in Washington, D.C., in Yes. Beth Ann's sure a fine girl." 1957, any number ofpeople asked, "Are those your first pair of.shoes?" There was one thing more. I answered, "No, do you have on your first pail)" "Is SHE datin' any Vet ?" More recently, just two summers ago I attended a Elizabeth would answer (not very loudly) National Endowment for the Humanities Institute on the "No, but she gets real good grades." 16th century French essayist Montaigne at Duke Then, remembering of a sudden, (her voice just a little louder) University. After,a while the questions arose: "I-low have "And she has a real pretty handwriting." you managed to traveso much coming from Tennessee?" They all always, always turned to look. "How in the world did you learn tospeakFrench? I enjoyed answering, "My grandmother taught me Sometimes, in the summer, French. She learned it as a child growing.up in the hills of she just didn't care North Georgia. She used to read from her Fiench Bible that Paw Barnett ;lad run off every chance he got every night,to keep up her proficiency." to hunt and drink and dance and fiddle and pick his banjo yo' .must be an exception to the rule where you and had never farmed an acre of land he could call his own live," they persisted, in all his life. "Not at all," I answered. "You're just thinking of Amy Tipton Gray Appalachian stereotypes. All of my friends are better educated and more cultivated/than I." 0 0 A few had the grace to bkish. 1:E1 EMESI

Amy Tipton Gray is employed by Caldwell Community Bonny Stanley teaches English at East College in Hudson, N.C., where, among other things, she Tennessee State University. co- tenches; a course on the history of country music. Now and Then/9' Profiles

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1. Sylvia Attilli , ,ip!ri, Basconi

Nearly a century ago the rate of population growth in West Virginia eclipsed that of the nation: Thousands of southern Europeans flocked to Appalachia for jobs in coal mining and Sylvia Attilli (second from left) in Sophia Meat Market, Sophia, West Virginia, in railroading. Between1910and1920, the 1940s. when immigration reached its peak, the largest portion of West Virginia's prosciutto and salami hanging to cure Occhio, or Evil Eye. As another foreign-born population came from for the winter and the pasta her precaution, Mrs. Attilli kept a comita, Italy. mother rolled out by hand with her the Italian good-luck hom, hanging in Among them was Nicola Attilli, a "noodle stick." the house. young man from Perucfa, Italy, who Italian was the family's language; There was warmth in the Italian arrived in1913in search of a railroad Basconi's mother, a homebody, knew communities that dotted the coalfields job. He later became a merchant in theonly a few words of English. Holidays first in South Clinchfield, Va., coalfields. were celebrated as they were in Italy: where Basconi was born, and later in Attilli passed away years ago, but On Christmas eve Fidalma Attilli made the West Virginia towns of Thorn Hill, his daughter Sylvia, who worked in his a special dish, baccala, from dried cod;Matewan and Sophia. Basconi stores, remembers her father's efforts for Christmas she would make the remembers her home as a gathering to support his family as a railroad fruit-studded sweet bread, panettone. place for Italian families, with men worker, a baker, a miner and a grocer. On Easter the traditional time for playing cards, women visiting and Sylvia Attilli Basconi is my mother-in- cutting the sausage and opening the children in lively play. Because so law. A retired storekeeper, she lives wines Basconi's_mother baked anise many Italians lived in the Thorn Hill with her husband Americo in Beckley, cake in the shape of the initials of her area near McComas in the early W. Va. five children's names. 1920s,Basconi says their community Sylvia Attilli Basconi's Appalachian "We lived too far to even go to got the nickname "Little Italy." girlhood memories are bittersweet. She church," Basconi says, "but daddy Even so, they were not at home. remembers delicious foods: the crusty always managed to get every one of us Basconi remembers how she and ether Italian bread her father baked in his baptized (Catholic)." Italian schoolchildren in McComas outside oven; the ricotta, provolone There was also folklore from the old would eat outside, fearing thCr and romano cheeses he made from thecountry. A red ribbon pinned to an classmates would ridicule the'.t ager family cow's milk; ill:: home-made infant's clothes warded off the Male lunch of Italian bread and lima beans. 10/Now and Then 1.3 She still recalls the name of the town not to do business with the local bank. of traffic, people moving on, to doctor's daughter and the fine lunches Accica and Basconi recall how the different parts of the country. Sixty she carried: white-bread sandwiches town banker, in retaliation, reported years ago it was a lot different than it (with no crust), made with bacon, the pair for having wine during is now." lettuce and tomatoes. Prohibition. According to Basconi, "we Basconi, who fought off the insults Basconi says Italian children first- moved in on a Wednesday, and the as a young schoolgirl, likes to put it all generation Americans grew police came in with a search warrant behind her. Nowadays, she agrees that accustomed to being called "garlic on Sunday." prejudice has faded as Italians and snapper," "spaghetti bender," "dago," "The law looked in the basement, other immigrants have married into the "wop," "hunky." They also got used to even the trunk," Accica says. "We local population. the fights that followed. were just making a little wine now and "If they just stop arid think, Those jeers made such an then, just for holidays...just for home everyone's some kind of mixed-up impression on young Basconi that, at use. We never sold any. The guy just foreigner," she says. "No one's a true 72, she still remembers the names of wanted to show if we do something American but the poor Indians, and I the boy whose nose was broken by herwrong, they'd pay you back. think they got a dirty deal. They got brother and of the girl she smacked in "He tried to get us in the crack. In kicked out of their country." the fifth grade. Prohibition, ycu could go to jail for "When we lived at Thom Hill, we that. Back in the old country, we were Mary Alice Basconi had a girl, Myrtle Munsey was hei raised on wine because ifs all we had, name. I never will forget her," Basconi mostly. It was a way of life. We says. "She was an only child...this was happened not to have any (when the an American family that lived among a authorities came). We didn't make any f=:3 f=:3 bunch of Italians. more after that. We knew what was "She'd come up and play with us. going on." My poor or mother, I don't care if 15 The store in Matewan did a healthy kids comes in a yard, when ifs time to business among the area's immigrants. Mary Alice Basconi is a freelance eat she'd feed 'em all." People from Spain and Poland as well writer living near Johnson City, Tenn. As Basconi tells it, Myrtle liked the as Italy bought foods they couldn't get Italian meals and made it a point to be elsewhere. Basconi remembers on hand fcr dinner every night. At stocking Spanish chorizo sausage and school, where many of the children garbanzo beans, plus 20-pound boxes were Americans, things were different. of spaghetti. "After she come up to eat with us, "We had the merchandise because she called me a hunky on the we knew what they liked. They schoolground, and I smacked her," couldn't find it in the American stores," Basconi says. "She went in and told remembers Benny Accica, who still the principal about it, and he started to lives near Matewan, in Red Jacket, W. spank me. I said, 'That girl comes up. Va. The spaghetti boxes were at our house every night and eats 74 supper with us. Eats our food and then unmistakable when customers carried comes down here and calls me a them along Matewan's only street, and hunky? That's the reason I smacked some patrons found themselves her.' ridiculed by American children. "Do you know that evening she "People would make fun of them," ar" come up at the house, just like nothingBasconi says. "So then they got-so happened? And I said, 'I dare you to they said we had to wrap the boxes. go inside this gate.' " But they knew what they was carrying "Hunky" a slur against even though they was wrapped. So Hungarians didn't fit, although then what they'd do was come up numerous Hungarians had also early, pick up the spaghetti box, go emigrated to the West Virginia coal down by the river bank and hide it, towns. "I guess it's just because they and then they'd go down pick it up of didn't know what nationality we were," a night after it'd get dark. Because they Basconi says. "For a long time people would call them hunkies and dagos thought I was Spanish." and spaghetti benders, ol' garlic eaters. The family moved to Matewan, in But buddy, just like I say, we'd catch Mingo County, W.Va., where Nicola 'em, we'd beat 'em up.' Attilli opened a store with Benny Accica, who f-ame to this country at Accica in 1927. Accica, who knew 17, took the ridicule in stride. Now 84, Attilli's family back in Italy, emigrated he says he felt like an outsider only from the Umbrian town of Norcia in "two, three years, maybe five. But it 1921. wear off. The partners rented their building "They feel you got no business here. from another Italian, who wamed them But not now," he says. "There's a lot Americo and Sylvia Beacon!, 1988. Now and Then/11 I 24 and city life was causing her husband Yiddish was her first language, and 2. Ida Ginsburg health problems, the couple began she leamed English when she went to looking for a less hectic place to live. kindergarten. With a degree in home Dr. Ginsburg accepted a job at the economics in 1927 from Simmons Ida Jean Kain was a consummate Mountain Home Veterans College in Boston, she went to work New Yorker. While still in her 20s, she Administration Hospital in Johnson for Lever Brothers, then to the test wrote a daily newspaper column that City. kitchens at the Herald Tribune Home was syndicated in 78 newspapers Ida Ginsburg had never before seen Institute. After she received her across the country. When she needed the South. She remembers, "When we a break she'd take a walk down Fifth drove into Mountain Home, it was Avenue. And when she married Julit's paradise. It was the last day of April, Ginsburg in 1939, her friend Fiore llo 1951, and the dogwoods on Dogwood LaGuardia, New York's colorful mayor,Avenue were blooming. It was just like performed the ceremony, and the heaven had opened up." publisher of the Herald Tribune stood But it was not an easy move for a as a witness. Northeastern urbanite. At first, she The bride and her physician husbandadmits, "I was miserable." When the moved to Ellis Island where he worked VA hospital director asked where her at the Public Health Service Hospital. fumiture was stored so that he could The staff house where the couple lived,send for it, she didn't want to give the Ginsburg remembers, "was magnificent address. She said, "I don't think I'll do with gold fittings." Though her new that because I'm not sure I'm going to mother-in-law didn't exactly approve of stay here." a woman holding a job after marriage, Nothing in her cosmopolitan Ginsburg continued working at the background except affection for her Herald Tribune, commuting to husband prepared Ginsburg to live Manhattan every day by ferry. in East Tennessee. Born in Worcester, Moving to a small town in East Mass., in 1909, of a Russian Tennessee wa.; not something Ida immigrant father and a first generation ida and Julius Ginsburg before Ginsburg would have thought much American mother, she was reared in departing for Johnson City. Tennessee. about. But because the strain of work an Orthodox Jewish household. April. 1951. How to KeepaKosher Houset It's not easy. meal. Dishes and utensils for milk which means no shrimp or lobster, Most Jews today don't try following products must never be used for and no scavenger fish. Birds of prey the strict dietary codes set.forth by meat, and dishes for meat must never and scavenger animals are also Jewish law_ Its an exacting, time- be used for milk products. Over the excluded." ccnsuming process, even in large years Grossman has collected two Most of her food, except meat, cities that have kosher food available. sets of every kind of kitchen Grossman can buy at the And in an area like Upper East accoutrement. which she carefully supermarket here, including Tennessee, the process takes real keeps separated: milk dishes vegetables, fruit and cheese. But she dedication. in right cupboards, meat dishes in the does have to be careful. "I've been Mickey Grossman never thought left. reading labels for years." For twice about whether she would To be kosher, meat also must be instance, "Beef fat is in all sorts of continue to keep kosher when she slaughtered in a special manner. things, including icings and cake and her family moved to Johnson "When the,meat is kosher-killed, it's mixes. Even Ritz crackers." (The fat City 12 years ago. "It's a way of killed very quickly and painlessly; would be from cows that were not making your religion a daily part of that's the main concern then the kosher-killed.) your life," she says. blood is drained out and the meat is She looks for special symbols In her North Side home filled with cut up and inspected by rabbis. We're sometimes found on packages. a menagerie of pets she takes a not supposed to eat blood. There Pareue means a product contains break in her schedule as an can't be any blemishes or disease. neither milk nor meat.products. "Like occupational therapist and mother of The meat and poultry are soaked in an egg would be pareue." A product three to talk about how she follows water and salted with kosher salt, that is kosher, and there are a few to the dictates of the Old Testament. coarse salt, to dry out the blood." be had at area supermarkets, is "Kosher is outlined in Leviticus. It The only animals that may be marked with a "K" or a "U" with a says not to eat the calf in the milk of eaten are those that "chew their cud circle around it. its mother." In aitosher household and split the hoof" (which means Getting meat is the hardest part. that means milk products and meat pork is out pigs don't chew cud). The nearest kosher butcher is in products are never eaten in the same "Fish have to have fins and scales, Charlotte, N.C. "The first thing I did

12/Now and Then .1 5 masters degree in journalism from in the 1950s. She joined the Business Cornell, she began writing her own and Professional Women's Club, column about food. To help people Monday Club, the Leac..e of Women deal with shortages of protein, she and Voters and the public ii`or,y's board of Mayor Laguardia also broadcast a trustees

weekly radio show about nutrition. The Ginsburgs also became active in Mt Johnson City was a different milieu the one synagogue that served the Tri- entirely. "You couldn't go to a Cities, in Blountville. "We never museum. You couldn't go to the belortged to any structured religious theater. There wasn't even a decent group in New Yak, but coming here movie. There were so many things that we needed some identification." weren't available that we'd been used For the members of the congregation Ida Ginsburg to. We used to get care packages from she baked great quantities of egg braid Irsy parents pumpernickel bread, bread challah a culinary treat in have lived to her 79 years in a city. salami, all kinds of dried peas and which she takes pride. Over the years The community has been all-important. beans, things you couldn't find :,:are in Johnson City, she made friends "I have lots of friends, and this has then." instde and outside the Jewish sustained me." The publisher of the Johnson City community with people of all Though she no longer bakes challah, Press-Chronicle, Carl Jones, knew Ida backgrounds and ages. Ginsburg still prepares delicious meals Jean Kain from a publishers' meeting It took "at least 10 or 12 years" for for her friends and oversees a lush in New York, and his paper carried herGinsburg to feel completely at home. garden in her North Johnson City brick column. When he heard that she was But she eventually felt rooted. When home. She has a strong voice, strong unhappy in Johnson City, he offered her husband retired, they decided to good looks and walks three miles a her a part-time job at the newspaper. remain in Johnson City, and when Dr. day. She was glad for the work, but after Ginsburg died in 1972, Ida Ginsburg Looking back on her long period of four years she felt compelled to quit still did not consider moving. adjustment and the contentment she because she had 4.3 "wake like the wife She explains that a big city would feels here now, she reflects, "This is at Mountain Ho:.,e." cost too much. "I couldn't live where I live. You pick out the best She became involved with anywhere else as nice as I live here." things. It grows on you." entertaining and civic organizations And she's convinced that because of Pat Amow the way women were expected to do the strain of urban life, she wouldn't =I =I =I Id in Johnson City, Tennessee AOhen I moiled here was buy a big class, Wendy didn't have any because civic and social functions in Asheville. .'freezer."- Then she bought another. they were from McDonalds, which Yet Grossman does not think of :Every timeshe visits a big city; makes themmith beef fat. herself much as Southern or .- Grossman' brings back -boxes- full of But she knows her children can mountaineer. :-kosher meat. handle the problems. "I managed, and She doesn't feel terribly linked to Eating out at restaurants also takes all those before managed." her personal family history either.

-s; special care. Most fast food is not She tells how her father, when he Like many other Jews, her forbears allowed, not eventFreneh fries was a GI during World War II, emigrated to the United States at the. because they're often Ceoked.in beef managed by trading other soldiers his turn of this century from Eastern fat (Grossman always cher.ks.) meat for cheese. Grossman herself Europe. Her faniily history has faded. ,:penerally in restaurants sheorders always carried 1 4. lunches to school "I can't trace my family back any Salads or fruit plates. "If I were in Asheville, N.C., where she grew further than my grandparents and Orthodox, I Would not eat anything up. In college, at American University maybe one or two great- out-except an apple and maybe a in St. Louis, Missouri, she kept grandparents. I don't know names or ,hardboiled egg. But rm trying to live special food in her dorm room. what they did or anything about in today's society too. I do the best I Taking the trouble to keep kosher them." But Mickey Grossman :can." As a Conservative Jew, and being an observant Jew gives maintains her heritage in a wider Grossman does not adhere to Jewish Grossman the sense that she is sense, through religious customs. "I :law as strictly as Orthodox Jews. linked with her heritage. She could love the tradition. Through traditions Her children; David, 23, Joel, 19 also claim a Southern Appalachian I am able to have some roots." andWendy 1313, also try to keep heritage. Her grandfather, David ' --,kosher. Grossman says they do it by Schandler came to Asheville in 1912. Pat Amow Choice even though it causes some He opened a delicatessen, and his ,problems. "They get teased a family became an integral part of the And-they have to exercise self- community. Her parents took over =I 0 0 For instance, when Wendy's his enterprise, Schandler's Pickle -teacher brought in cookies for the. Barrel, and were always involved with

Now and Then/13 16 Appalachia are most likely to be found I asked him to describe his initial 3. Tom Huang in professions such as medicine, impressions of this area. He science and engineering, working for responded, "Oh yes, I thought East ;How long have the Chinese known universities, hospitals and large Tennessee was a beautiful area. about the Southern Appalachians? Theindustries. People were very friendly, and I didn't ginSeng trade has been going on since How does living in the Southern experience any prejudice, even though the late 18th century, but until very Appalachians affect the social and during that particular time black people recently there was seemingly little else cultural lives of Chinese professionals and white people were separated to attract Chinese migrants to this part and their families? :low do they had to chink coffee in different sections of this world. However, with the maintain any semblance of identity and of the bus terminal. Personally, I have exodus of middle-class educated continuity with Chinese culture in this never really experienced any type of Chinese to Taiwan and elsewhere afteralien environment? To get answers tc prejudice." the establishment of the People's these questions, I called upon the Despite some inevitable Republic of China in 1948, and with chairman of the ETSU Chemistry homesicknesses and culture shock, the continuing interest of, such people Department, Dr. Thomas Huang, who Huang adjusted well to life in Johnson in scientific and technical careers, and has lived and worked in the upper EastCity and was delighted to return to the even more recently, because of Tennessee area for more than 20 area with his wife when he was offered exchange programs ;inking Chinese years. a fulltime position on the ETSU and Arearic.11n universities, the Chinese Tom Huang, whose actual Chinese chemistry faculty in 1971 after population of -Ite Southern name is Dao Xing ("bearer of the completing graduate work in Illinois. Appalachian region has been growing. truth") was bom in Chungking in 1939. There were only a very few other Admittedly a small aad not very His father Huang De Xing, an speakers of Mandarin Chinese in the obvious minority, Chinese in accountant in,a government efice, and area when Tom Huang joined the his mother, Chen Sou Mei, were both ETSU faculty, but since the mid-70s natives of Hubei Province: Huang has there has been a marked increase in vague memories of the celebrations the Chinese population. Aside from the which erupted in Chungking in 1945 Chinese faculiy me-thers and students following the end of the Japanese at ETSU, there are now also a occupation. He recalls a little of his substantial number of medical doctors, family's escape from the mainland to scientists and engineers in the Tri- Taiwan, especiallythe boat ride from Cities. Shanghai and the seemingly endless To preserve some sense of cultural train ride from the north end to the continuity, he helped establish a group south end of the island. called the Appalachian Chinese The Huang family was able to re- Association about 15 years ago. As establish itself on Taiwan in Huang explained, "It has been founded reasonably comfortable circumstances. primarily because we like to promote His father began teaching accounting the Chinese cultural background and at Taiwan National University and we want our children to recognize our worked his way up to vice-president roots. We want them to know a little for administration, a position he held bit about China. Seven, eight years for 20 years. ago, we started a Chinese school for Like many Chinese students of his the Tri-Cities. We have one class for generation, Tom Huang felt obligated the older kids and another one for the to pursue a career in science despite younger ones. The classes usually last his love and talent for vocal music. "Of three to four hours and include course, in China at that time, if you language chilling, some music, singing were a good student, you couldn't in Chinese, a little bit of sports, and possibly major in music. So I didn't Chinese games." really consider it seriously because the The Appalachian Chinese society put so much pressure on the Association also celebrates Chinese students if they could do well holidays and provides much-needed academically, they should go into opportunities to reconstruct a Chinese science." social environment, if only After completing a ba. helor's degree occasionally. Living in predominantly in chemistry at Taiwan National non-Chinese milieu creates identity Huang De Xing and Chen Sou Mel with problems to which some Tri-Cities their son, Dao Xing, in Chungking, University, I 'Luang accepted a 1940. Dao Xing (Tom Huang) now fellowship from the University of Chinese adapt better than others, and teaches chemistry at East Tennessee Illinois and came to the United States being able to retreat, at least State University. He lives in Johnson City with his wife, Janice and their in 1962. His English teacher at the temporarily, to the relative security of children, Margaret, a student at University of Illinois was a native of the Appalachian Chinese Association Georgetown University, and Steven, a Johnson City who helped his student helps to provide emotional security and senior at University High. Huang De Xing, who Is now 84, also lives with the obtain a teaching assistantship at communal solidarity. family. Chen Sou Mei has passed away. ETSU. Huang reported that Chinese- 14/Now and Then These gatherings offer a new 4. The Phil-Am immigrant a hearty welcome from Club people who know what it is to move so far from home, people who know The Philippines was never my exactly what they've given up in homeland, but when I am among leaving. Filipinos it sometimes seems like home to me. My Filipina mother came to this Ted Cruz, an Elizabethton, Tenn., country in the early 1950s to attend physician, stands beneath a tinsely graduate school. She met my father, Filipino star on the stage of St. Mary s an American, and set out to become a School in Johnson City. He is wearing housewife and mother in the South. the Barong Tagalog, the traditional Homesickness got the best of her in white shirt men wear for formal 1961. My parents took their three occasions. He is trying to address a small children across the Pacific for a crowd of merrymakers at the Phil-Am summer, staying in the Philippines club Christmas party. through the birth of their youngest "I know you have heard a report of child. violence and killing in the motherland," I was only four then, but I remember he tells the group. "They are clearly the tropical showers in the happening, but they are not as bad as 'afternoon; women thrashing rice for they say in the newspaper." supper in round, flat baskets; the street Cruz, an ardent supporter of vendor crying "Balut!" each evening as Philippine President Corazon Aquino, he peddled a native egg delicacy speaks of the government's progress through the town. And in my church and the "investment opportunities" school, the orderly ranks of students back home. pledging loyalty to their flag under the In the back of the hall, another morning sun. Filipino scoffs. "I'm an Enrile man," he Seven years have passed since I last says, referring to one of Mrs. Aquino's visited that country, but I have picked rivals, military man Juan Ponce Enrile. i'oo Huang up the Filipino habit of spotting In this way, politics and celebration countrymen at stores, in church, on entwine in a classic Filipino style. the street. This is how I heard about a Cru7. steps aside so the speaking Protestants can also partake Phil-Am Club in Upper East Tennesseeentertainment can begin: his young of the fellowship of the Tri-State and Southwest Virginia. Its existence son, Jeffrey, belting out the theme Chinese Christian Association, which here didn't surprise me; everywhere song from "La Bamba"; a series of draws its membership from upper East there are Filipinos in America, it seems dances representing different regions of Tennessee, Southwest Virginia and there are Phil-Am clubs. the Philippines; and a romantic Filipino Western North Carolina and holds It is easy to understand why. While love song from club president Betty services in Chinese at Central Baptist American culture is rooted in a love forChildress. Church in Johnson City. independence, life in the Philippines The dancers are resplendent in Asked about similarities and centers around community and family. colorful, sequined native gowns. Their differences between Chinese and In that sense, these immigrants share aperformance includes such favorites as Appalachian cultural values, Huang bond with their Appalachian neighbors,the bamboo dance of the Philippines' believed that both Chinese and who buck current trends by nurturing Visayan islands a dangerous-looking Appalachians find great emotional strong family and regional ties. number in which steps are taken security in their families. But the In other ways the cultures are between clacking bamboo poles. The Chinese generally tend to stress profoundly different. The Filipino worlddance depicts a long-legged bird, trying academic achievement while is an Asian culture carrying Spanish to jump from one rice stalk to another Appalachians tend to be more oriented undertones. And while immigrants in to get its food. towards vocational education. larger cities find solace in ethnic Next, a beauty contest. Contestants Huang has been instrumental in neighborhoods, here foreigners must are men in drag; the audience hoots helping his fellow Chinese in all walks blend as best they can into small-town and howls. Again, politics: An emcee of life feel more at home in Appalacl Ilan life. introduces a paunchy, hairy-legged Appalachia, and he has helped bring But at the PhilAm club's seasonal contestant as Miss Hawaii, "Imelda." more Chinese faculty and students to celebrations, marked by glorious native Wild laughter erupts at this joke on the ETSU. And he has made a successful cuisine and traditional Filipino games former first lady of the Philippines. adjustment to life in America while still and dances, it is the Anglo-American The Phil-Am Club was founded in maintaining a positive and vital who feels out of place. What these 1982 and draws members from all connection with his Chinese heritage. parties capture is the essence of the over the region from Greeneville to Philippines the warmth of the Elizabethton in Tennessee, from Richard Blaustein people, the smells of the special Richlands and Wise to Bristol in cooking and the musical lilt of the Virginia. A handsome young couple 0 1==1 language. the club's newest arrivals from the 18 Now and Then/15 Phil -Am...

Philippines drives to this party all the way from South Carolina. "The group is getting bigger and bigger as people keep coming in," says Ted Cruz. "In fact, we have five new physical therapists at the hospital they were some of the dancers. That's how they remember the dances. They just got here," he says. Cruz says people "just hear about the club. They know there will be Filipinos wherever they go." What makes it special is its non- elitist air. No matter who you are or what your position, you are welcome if you are Filipino or merely appreciate Filipino culture. Some of the club members are like Cruz, medical professionals who have PerfOrmers at the Phil-Am Club's annual Christmas party, St. Mary's School, found jobs in the hospitals of Jettison City. Left to right: Malty Cruz, Betty Childress, Aida Crumley, and Appalachia. Others are women who Laling Legg. married American military people they met back home. Except for the children, most Phil-Am members were born in the Philippines and still speak Spratt says he met his wife in her can be irritating: "locals" at school who with a unique Filipino cadence. home of Olongapo City, where she bluntly ask, "What are you?" or the But the children born here often worked as a cashier and sometime people who assume she's Japanese. speak with American accents, waitress at the Chopstick Cafe. They I'm a big deal here," she says sometimes picking up the mountain got along, and when Spratt popped thedisparagingly. "But still, I'm used to twang. One youngster is described as question, she accepted. going up to white people here and just having "two voices," one for home and Married for five years, the Spratts talking. I think, 'What would it be like one for outside. moved to Elizabethton after leaving if I went to a place like San Francisco?' A t the party young children are homes in Kentucky and Louisiana. I went to California and visited some running about endearing with their Carmen Spratt likes it here better than relatives there. It seemed like Filipinos thick dark hair, wide dark eyes and anywhere else she has lived in this there didn't intermix as much (with button noses. Teenagers have come to country. Anglos)." this celebration, too, although some "She thought she'd feel like an She sees herself as "more American say the events are more fun for the outsider, but it wasn't like that at all," than my dad would like me to be," but youngsters. Ray Spratt says proudly. certainly Filipino at heart. She points One man explains how he and other Carmen Spratt hasn't always felt so out that the concentration of Filipinos Filipinos give traditional Filipino dance at home. In Kentucky she missed the at the party belies the reality that performances in local schools. company of other Filipinos; in she lives in a predominantly Anglo "People in the Appalachian area Louisiana, where she detected anti world. have not seen much of this thing," he Vietnamese sentiment, she was "This, I'm exposed to twice a year," says. It is very different from the mistaken for a Vietnamese. she says. But it is an important Appalachian culture. One student (in "I notice people here are friendly connection. Southwest Virginia) said to me, 'Ifs they greet you every time they see you. "I'm an American citizen, but I'm a very nice. I'll start looking for things in But there (in Louisiana), they just look Filipino. I act like an American, I do the library about the Philippines.' It at me from the bottom to the top American things, but I'm still Filipino." was an eyeopener for them." because I'm different, and they don't Hearing her words, and surrounded Carmen Guererra Spratt is happily like Vietnamese," she says. "We have by the Phil-Am club members, I find exchanging addresses with several Filipinos here. I don't feel like I'm a myself for an instant feeling the same women. This is her first club event. stranger here anymore." way. She was spotted in the Johnson City She likes the club. "It reminds me of 131ro mall by some club members who where l-come from," Carmen Spratt invited her to the party. says. When she was born in 1c56, Mary "She's 30 years my jt dor," says her One teen, who lives in a small Alice Basconi became the first husband, Ray Spratt, who retired from Appalachian city, says most people American in her mother's family. She his Navy civil service job in the she knows accept her without now has many Filipino-American Philippines in 1983. hesitation. There are exceptions, and it relatives across the country. 16/Now and Then 19 L As I see it from my window, Las Locas go round on the screen, I am impressed they must-remember fields, how flesh by my neighbor's laundry, feels dirt. the socks hung in pairs, pastel cuffs They moum matching like new toys. los desaparecidos

She certainly has vision, the-husband los maridos my neighbor, the childrenlos niflos y las ninas though she appears the sons los hijos to retain as much capability for chaos lie in mass graves, as I. Her garage roof sags, her car seeps rust, bones without skulls in Argentina, her man.went to South America, in KampuChea, in El Salvador. and she plays Chopin, by herself, image by image disappears in the afternoon into 0-.:::blown world. passionately, and with mistakes. And now on the screen they say Notes stumble a woman nearby and rise to me raped, dead, head stuffed into a toilet I am here and things grow at the University. together without regard fofiform or orderliness. They have bound her hands and feet, they have numbered all her bones. I am in fact growing to the carpet, flesh' straining The general drinks from a cup toward earth, of gold, counts gravity pulling my breasts tongues, fingers, ears, and bones and spreading out my feet. like forks. I am almost disappeared not mother not virgin not wife not lover III. not whore. The University rises from my window, Euclidean color Woman living alone of bone over in a round of pain my neighbor's socks, the sag of history notes and bones, and rooves. And despite the forced notes and bones. memory, the black Arthurian idyll, the notes IL still crack On the screen of my TV, flecked like my hair, My life Argentina open and the women like called "las locas" an egg. circle the town square. In Argentina they are crazy, Ann Kilkelly they leave their kitchens leave =3 ==7 children whose eyes blink loss, children who carry other children Ann Kilkelly teaches at Transylvania University in on hips not yet round. Lexington, Ky., and is a dancer and writer.

Now and Then/17 "*s

Bertha Hill the ivife of a Mexican miner making stew, Scott's Run, W. Va., September, 1938. Photo by Marion (l.r) Elisabeth Ann Hampton, Margaret Post Wolcott for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Dudley, Nancy Rhea and Mary Williams, Farm Security Administration. donesborough, Tenn., late 1940's.

Nicola and Fidalma MUM and four Ws: Thai still live in the company W. Va., in the 1920's. Sylvia, who ie. hose. Which dieltheite since-1914. They have five rooms for which on the far' Ply31640 inoistftly,reit This fee includes cost Of electricity and garbage on; Thei.have running eater and oink in kitchen but no bath or inside ,thilet:MartieMaJetcsYk wawa miner'for about 40 years. The son is now a ininerlifithis famiksharei the house with his parents. :Photo by'Russell Les; Gary, McDowell County, W. Va., August, 1946. 18/N and/Then ,21 AN

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Cherokee Indian child with blow gun at festival in Banner Elk, N.C. Nairoi Schandler,nvoeia a delicatessen and kosher Meat market, SchandleaPickle Barrel, Asheville, N.C.; 1980., After Schindlii:died in 1988,1he Pickle Barrel closed: Daughter Mickey, Groeimawde.cribel'haWlo keePe;kosher c!! P*Ife:12.

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/ Atammtm- TMOlieDeliner Haritigton,Irlitol, Va., and friends perform at the 1987 HotnefolkSi-inativit -it ETSU. Now and Then/19 22. Meeting of Minds from Crazy Quilt: A Novel Gur ley Norman

Author's note: This piece is from or American life, but indeed, in the life Helen was my shrink for awhile in Crazy Quilt, a novel 1 have been of the,hole world in our time. the late 70s. When I went back to her working on for a good many years. My in '86 I asked her if she remembered hero, Wilgus Collier, is a 48-year-old Between what we think and what we my litany of childhood traumas and semi-alcoholic weekly newspaper editorare able to say: what we see in our grownup problems. Refresh my in fictional Blaine, Ky., a veteran of mind's eye, and the words we find to memory, she said. I gave her a quick Chicago in 1968, divorced, depressed, speak about it: language: mental summary but it all sounded so recently-broke-up again, who for a yea: process. hilarious in the re-telling we both has driven once a week from his Here at Bluegrass Clinic we ponder cracked up before I got halfway hometown in the mountains to see his such things, in the evenings and early through it. War. Funerals. Loss. Grief. shrink in Lexington outside the mornings and during the breaks Tragedy. Boo hoo hoo. I felt mountains. Wilgus, an "insider," must between the sessions. completely healed after that one go "outside" for his healing to a Sometimes we ponder session but Helen said beware of all "middle class" Esalen-type clinic. them during the sessions. forms of elation. So I drove to I think of this novel as an attempt to No holds barred Lexington to talk wit--lelen once a reconcile the traditional and is Helen's motto. week for a year, after Jhich she said, the modem, the Wilgus, you better come live at "old" and the "new" the Clinic awhile, we've .got to as discordant get you over the hump. elements not only in I, contemporary Appalachian, Boone as a good man, a fine man, a sweet man, a competent man, a grownup man, a modern man, a compassionate man. a "whole man" well along on his process of individuation, a worthy model for contemporary American

k males. When I said that, Jay the exProgressive hooted (continued on page 22) Lance Olsen tr." v77.7. ft777.Xm4." 7` " : , T. 65,4.,

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now holding in your hands, into similes and my tongue and then this: our cabin whirling up at each of us cupping a warm has stuttered into me, our cabin sissing up at me, 70 mug of cinnamon-raisin alliteration so that worse (10:43 p.m.) miles to the east, in cider, I'll give you an than a wordman I have become Meniffee county, first on a highway apple and you give me an the static of strangers, so and then on a series of winding and orange back if you want or that worse than a thoughtman give me a peach it doesn't I have beccme the mouth cave increasingly hilly and woody backroads matter but here's the nugget for others, dragging the through towns with names like here's the heart here's what scroll bar up and down the Camargo and Grants Lick, past fields we're going to do glowing void looking for a of yellowTeen tobacco and the proper place to start, Primitive Baptist Church which is no momentary flutter down II. COMPUTER GRAPHICS larger than a smai sagging garage and among the vital organs that the Lucky Stop Pentacostal Barn and that evening, this this is the time my fingers which doubles as a usedcar lot and won't move evening, December 31, 1987, block letters in white paint on the side at 9:11 p.m., chilly drizzle of another gray barn that spells falling outside, delicate III. THE SENTENCE TAKES AN SECULAR HUMANISM IS THE clacking and humming noises IMAGINATIVE TURN DEVIL'S WORK!!! and into and out of around me,I hunch before but then something crouching at the the last town, Frenchberg, which the pearl excitation of base of the skull something lurking at consists of a Methodist church and a phosphors on my computer the base of the skull something upstairs in my den and Piggly Wiggly Food Mart and a post conclude that the point hunkering down at the base of the office and Mom's Kuntry Kitchen, seems to be that my life has skull leaps, pitches up, charges at me running out of paved road and running twisted itself into a DNA howling through synapses and hooting out of gravelled road and finding your thread of narrative through dendrites, flashpoints sparklingwhite Dodge Colt spattering through conventions, a double-helix like neutrinos, nerves dying in seveninch deep mud puddles and where my eyes have ironed abundance, exquisite showers of gold, lurching through hiphigh wild grass and Now and Then/21 24 Incredible... that the worst thing about.Kentucky Meeting of Minds... was the prevalence of snakes but Ferrell saying they aren't so bad, you bobbing over dried red dirt to the point and laughed and howled and jeered in just shout 'em and me thinking my that you aren't really sure if you are on such manic glee he nealy fell over in a road anymore, no running water and mother would yelp and run back to herhis chair. Boone was an Indian killer, car and drive madly away and that I no indoor plumbing and no heating asshole! Jay hissed at me, and seven and no insulation and holes in the roof would never see her again, thinking of the 11 people in the psychodrama and the glass in the front door she was so afraid of bullets that I hid circle nodded in agreement. The lovely 'shattered last winter by a hunter my shotgun before she came and Dorothy looked at me with soulful never even mentioned that I had one, searching for some warmth who left a sympathetic eyes even as she nodded note of thanks tacked near the but she didn't even clinch, just asked her agreement with Jay. Bitch! I fireplace, how? and I said how what? and she thought, but equally I thought: I asked Ferrell how do I shoot them? understand. I love you. Ili see you in and Ferrell came' by the next day and IV. CLAUSES CONCERNING FROG the evening, I said to her with my eyes. EGGS, SASSAFRAS, AND TWO showed her with his .22 rifle filled with We'll take a walk across the grounds birdshot, taking her into the woods for SNAKES to the spring and the old gazebo, I'll an hour, me hearing snap after snap me in the midst of it all just wanting hold your hand and listen as you talk one thing in life, one thing, just after snap, and when they returned sheabout your drinking days and your was holding the gun, and Ferrell vim. wanting to be able to look well at the attempted suicides, and I talk about outhouse, redwood and tidy with the showing her how to pick raspberries, my World War II obsession, the Third and later that day he brought out a jug remains of an indoor-outdoor carpet on Reich, and Rising Sun, the Eastern of moonshine for her once because she the-floor and a bucket of lime anda Front, the Americans training at home had wondered aloud what it might plastic dovecolored cup in the comer with broomsticks during the Battle of taste like where you sit with the door open in Stalingrad. I'll tell you what I see at summer for the breeze and with the night when I walk the grounds alone. V. AN ORANGE AND A PEACH door open in winter for the view of Dorothy smiled and accepted my and there is that magic day last naked pines and cedars sloping down invitation, even as she nodded in autumn after a cold rain when my wife gently in front of you and then abruptly agreement with the exProgressive, who and I picked up our walking sticks and falling away off a limestone cliff into hissed so hard a second time snot flew thousands of acres of uninhabited went out for a hike, sky a solid heavy out his nose. woods, though my New York mother grey and leaves all down and a keen chill in the Ain following a new trail 72 years old and wildly feisty is Listen: I said with some heat. Hiss unable to pronounce the word deeper and deeper into the woods, wet all you like. But in Westem Kentucky birches the color of cinders, our fingers outhouse on her first recalcitrant visit there's this big coaldigging machine, growing stiff and,pink (it's suddenly and so I have to tell her call it a three stories tall, with jaws, man, that New Year's now, 12:01, happy 1988!), cathedral and she does, and just eats whole truckloads of cTaund at a walking and talking for several hours, wanting to look well at the fiveinch bite. It's got legs! It walks, man, for 20 listening to wild turkeys in the long acombrown lizard that waits years its been walking on this certain distance, then deciding to head back, every morning on our top step, head piece of ground, around and around, but, stunningly, when we turned raised with dignity and alertness, eating dirt and scooping up coal to around the trail had disappeared, must reptilian grin frozen on his face, at the heat and light the nation. Gradually the have been growing smaller and less thousands of large astonishing jelly- machine has dug a hole 300 feet deep well marked the last mile or so, and all bubble sacks of frog eggs in the and a quartermile square around the we saw were woods and we were far puddles sprinkled throughout the rims of its pit. Finally the coal in that enough down in the valley that we had woods, at the blueblack ratsnake that particular spot is gone. And after 20 no way of seeing any landmarks and forms a scrawl like a discarded bicycle years, the machine itself is done for, my wife saying we're lost and my heart innertube among the wild blueberry too. Parts worn, design obsolete, there bushes and sassafras shrubs near the clattering around inside my ribcage and it sits at the bottom of its pit, and they then stilling and with her words me ledge at Whippoorwill Point on the can't get it out. It would cost the suddenly realizing that I'd finally gotten eastem end of our property, at the company more than the thing is worth to where I had been heading for a long undulating bands of chestnuts and to dismantle it and take it out so long time. hourglasses which are the copperhead what's the company going to do? that coils in the leafy shadows of a Leave it there, that's what. Bury it rotten log, arrogant and only 0 - I= where it quit. Think about it. apparently lethargic, thinking of my Bullshit! shouted Jay the mother coming to visit for a week last Lance Olsen is author of Ellipse of exProgressive. You're no drunk. You're spring, terrified at the prospect of Uncertainty: An Introduction to an imposter. You're a goL;damn nut accidently stepping on one, taking our Postmodern Fantasy, as well as case! snakebite kit with her wherever she numerous short stories, essays and Oh, I'm a drunk all right, I said to went, running into Ferrell Baily reviews. His second study of Jay. And a neurotic and a depressive retired school teacher, blind in one eye postmodern fiction, Circus of the and a solitary and brooding self- as we walked down the gravel road Mind in Motion, will be published indulgent failure, just as my girlfriend late one afternoon, my mother (11:17 next spring. He teaches at the Gretchen said. And I may be a nutcase p.m.) immediately beginning to explain University of Kentucky. too. I don't want to justify myself or try 22/Now and Then 25 'to appear to anyone in any winning light. I know I'm not a pretty sight to look at, and my recent persona Loge Mouth victories are minor ones. But swell as they may be, they are actual, I have While the proprietor rings up the tab earned them, I have paid hard dues for for the CatchO-ThDay, hest not to praise them and I will not anymore apologize the glazed prize nailed above the register. for any information that flows through Because hi every Lakeside Restaurant me. Hiss if you want to. But listen: not from Tampa to Tacoma, anglers share three months ago, the government some version of the tale: issued a call for someone in this country to write a myth for the nation, Yeah, this one's big, to be read by the people of future but that lake's spawned some specimens no rod ages, a story, to be inserted, planted, will land. A Cessna went down near the dam as it were, like a seed in the public i ii '62 I think. The Corps brought in consciousness, that it might take root two divers with arc lamps to find the wreck and be told and re-told in oral and raise it, or haul bodies up, at least. transmission for centuries, a story that Well, at 300 feet the water's thick will explain the nuclear dumps to as stew-. The papers said they got split up people and make their presence and and one man drowned...that was the Army's line. their dangers known in a way that no system of physical signs could ever be But that guy down the'har was in`the boat depended upon to stay posted and ;Aint that right Tarsh?) when the survivor rose convey the word for the thousands of like Jonah walleyed gasping for God's air, years required. Poor government. Poor and to this day he's locked in a room with sad public and its representatives, no sharp edges... bereft of all art, legend. lore. I wrote to and that plane's the government, I told it about the still Toyota plant rising on the ground down where the ancient bison fed, About the there. Shawnees and the Cherokees hunting there, and Boone, and the legend of Robert Bess the bluegrass as an Eden. Here is tour myth, I told the government. And I will tell more. Transplanted Nutcase! screamed the lay the From Away exProgressive. Even here, scent of streaked bacon Lester .transplanted" (to be continued) seeps up the stairs no better than pin oak Copyright 1988 Gurney Norman to my third floor classroom. 'so grew up stunted by where he'd been. =1 =1 =1 It is November, Gurney Norman's first novel, Divine hog killing time. Only thing he does Right's Trip, appeared in the pages Galvanized tubs spill tenderloin, with his roots is of The Last Whole Earth hams, shoulders over the kitchen floor. scatter-along life's Catalog. In his book of stories. path whatever dirt Kinfolks, the Wilgus Stories, Shadows feed chunks of lean meat he :nanages to shake Wilgus Collier is a young man growing to Conrad Wither's sausage mill. off somebody's past. up in Eastern Kentucky. iron skillets bubble on the wood stove. 1==3 Fresh meat steams the air. Glenn McKee Gurney Norman and Lance Olsen I am still trying to find my way home. have been pushing the boundaries of fictional styles. A dialogue between Gretchen McCroskey =1 =1r= them called "Frankenstein in Palestine, or: Postmodernism in 0 0 Appalachia" is being published in the Robert-Bess is poetry editor forArtemis.He is the author of a chapbook, latest issue ofPine Mountain Domestic Birds, and his poetry has appeared inLight Year '87, Sand and Gravel.$5.00 to FIC84 Northeast Journal,and Kentucky Poetry Review. Box 436, Whitesburg, Ky. 41858. Gretchen McCroskey's poetry has appeared in several regional publications = o c=zi including Now and Then. Earl Dotter, whose photo!: of coal mining have been widely published, works for toe Glenn McKee, a native; Southeast Ohio who now lives in Maine, hes had Amer:can Labor Education Center in poems published widely in regional magazines. Washington, D.C. Now and Then/23 Al_

..11111

Randy W. W. Oakes

"Want something cool to drink?" my My father worked for a textile mill in I pored over the Review during study aunt said. I said yes and wiped my Greensboro. He fixed looms and period at school. I learned that Social forehead. We sat inches from the recovered from minor injuries. My Security was a joke and that my father fireplace. Although it was early mother said they were the mill's fault. should be expected to invest his October, my uncle tossed in another My father disagreed. He never said money for retirement. I hated Keynes log. My aunt handed me a glass of anything against the Company. I once and fiscal policy and extolled the tapwater. These people never drank heard my uncle call him a Company virtues of monetary reform. Coke. man. He often talked about work "Nice truck," I said. We did this every other Sunday. during our Sunday afternoons. "Picked it up last week," Bud said. After church we drove to Burlington to "Here's the cat," my aunt said as "It'll be mine in a year." I had no idea visit my father's family. My mother Bud closed the screen door. He wore awhat he meant. Money meant little to talked to my aunt; my father talked camouflage vest and baggy jeans. He me in a practical sense. I saw only hunting to my uncle. If I was lucky I warmed his hands at the fire. I took what money represented, and it got to talk to my couisn Bud, who was this opportunity to slide my chair back,certainly meant more than a truck in two years older than I and had once away from the fire. need of paint. Bud cracked his had a black snake fall from a tree onto "Hey," Bud said, as though he had knuckles. When he had carefully his head. As far as I knew, nothing just seen me. milked the last finger, he spat and else had ever happened to him. Still, We nodded to one another. He wiped his mouth with an open hand. being struck on the head by a black signaled for me to follow him outside. "I'm leaming golf,'' I said. I had snake was more than I could boast. "Bring your gun?" he asked as we bought a cheap pitching wedge and a I drank the water and hoped that jumped off the back porch. putter at Woolworth. After supper I Bud would show. My parents didn't "No," I said. "No cartridges." chipped and putted in the yard. My make me come. "If you don't come, "Too bad," he said. friends whistled at me as they passed. you won't get that magazine," my "Mine," he said. He.pointed to a "It's Sam Snead," they said and father had said. He was talking about Ford pickup. I nodded. Bud had laughed. the National Review. finished high school. He farmed with "Never liked golfing," Bud said, and I "It's a joumal," I said. his father and did "public" work in winced. No one said "golfing." That "I don't care what it is," he said. town. was common. "You won't get it." A newsstand in We climbed into the back of the "Have you ever played?" I asked. Burlington was the only place within a pickup and sat wail our backs resting "No. Killed a copperhead last week," hundred miles which sold the Review. against the cab. We spent most of our Bud said. "Killed an October My father wouldn't let me subscribe to time in silence, cracking our knuckles copperhead." it because he didn't believe in and staring at our feet. "I'm going to college," I blurted out. subscriptions. "I don't want to be on 'Did they get to Kennedy yet?" Bud "You?' Bud said. "Who says?" any Yankee mailing lists," he said. So I asked as he nodded toward the house. "I do. I'm planning to go to Duke or endured such afternoons with the "No," I said. "They're talking about Guilford or Davidson." thought of a crisp, new, blueframed turkeys." Bud whistled. "Duke?" He said Duke "fortnightly joumal of opinion" in my "They'll get there," he said. to rhyme with puke. Common. hands. Perhaps the hands of the only I sat and thought about the National "Yes, Duke." I said. Duke rhymed underage Republican in North Review. I had been reading it for six with spook. I heard a Yankee say it Carolina. months. With a dictionary on my desk,that way once. 24/Now and Then "Boy, you'll be lucky to go to truck. "How's-Chub?" I said. I he started the truck and pulled away. Carolina. And you won't even go pretended to hold a cup of tea. I held He drove carefully. there," Bud said. The poor are out my little finger. "Has he skinned I looked toward the house. My suspicious of anything free, or nearly any rabbits lately?" Bud's brother was parents were on the porch. I envied free. I was offended. the best hunter around, and he could them and the simplicity of their lives. "What do you know?" I said. "You skin a rabbit in five seconds. Yet he They expected little and received less. never even walked across a college had recently bought a house, which heMy father called to me. I walked to our campus. I'll bet you don't even know would share with a man who taught atold Chevy. "Don't rush off," my uncle who William F. Buckley is." the beauty college in Burlington. said to my parents. "You kidding?" Bud said. "Sure I do." "You got no right," Bud said. He Tome back again, Sammy," my "Who is he?" I sa"4 stared at me. "You eat our food. You aunt said. She smiled at me. "Drive "He's Duke's hez.i.man," he said. get beans and squash and tomatoes careful, hon," she said to my father. "He's Duke's president?" I said. for nothing. Who do you think you I crawled into the back seat. I "Yes." are?" glimpsed my surprised face in the "You dummy," I said. "He's the I was feeling worse all the time. My mirror. I felt tired and lonely. My father smartest mars in the world. He's the parents loved these people. "I'm sorry," started the car. The collar of his best editor of the National Review. I'll bet I said. Sunday suit was frayed. Before putting you don't know what 'fortnightly' "You'd better be," Bud said. "You're the car in gear, he looked over his means." afraid I'll slap you silly." shoulder at me. Bud stood up. The freckles at the "I'm sorry," I said. "And that's the "What say we go get that magazine," corners of his eyes had moved. "Take last time I'll say it." he said. it back," he said. "I ain't a dummy." He "See this truck?" he said. "See it? I My throat tightened with love and reached into his pocket and drew out acan get in this thing and go anywhere I gratitude. roll of money. "Look at this, trash," he please. I can stay out all night, park on t==I 0 1=1 yelled. "What the hell you doing here. the side of the road. I can find me a visiting my old man? You and your woman. And I can love her. And her, Randy Oakes' work has a)peared in mill folks. You know what we do whenme." Real Fiction, Pembroke you leave? We laugh at you. We have Bud climbed down, opened the door Magazine and other literary journals. as a good laugh. You don't own and swung into the cab. "Take this,' heHe teaches at Grand Canyon College nothing. We own this land. Get out of said. He made an awkward, obscene and is working on a Fred Chappell my truck." gesture as he slammed the door. He number for the Twayne series on I jumped out and skipped beside the gave me an embarrassed glance beforeAmerican authors.

Cold Mountain A Roadside Stand

So I climbed that mountain, offered An old woman talks with one eye a requiem for my child, and scattered while she bags plump cantaloupes. her ashes as wind kicked up dust. "I've seen com grow from rock A small bone stuck and sunlight frith roses, to the bottom of the um seen times as black where the marrow hadn't dried as the back of this glass eye before fire set the soul free of flesh. my mother left me when she died. Call a priest, I roared, If you eat these with salt, they'll then looked at my hands. draw the worms from your veins." They cradled the bone in open air. As I walked back down the mountain, Bill Wood I packed its full weight home. Bill Wood ==3 0 =3

Bill Wood has had poems published in Artemis, The Arts Journal, The Laurel Review, Tar River Poetry, Calliope, Blue Buildings, Blue Pitcher, Skyline, and others. He makes his living, however, cleaning, repairing and installing septic tanks, which, he says, "is called euphemistically,a rural sanitation engineer."

Now and Then/25 retum the ascent. To complete the insider to feel at home amid foreign Review joumey, Mandy must retum to Goose rituals (ducks parading in the lobby of Rock; she must make a "round trip." the Peabody Hotell) and among her Twelveyear-old Mandy is the third stranger-kin, such as Aunt Laura, who Borrowed Children of five children. When the sixth child, knows alcohol and the blues. Aunt by George Ella Lyon Willie, is bom, Mandy is taken out of Laura takes Mandy to Beale Street, to Orchard Books school to cook, clean, and tend the Crawfish Alley, to where a man plays New York, NY 1988 children while their mother "a long black hom. It sounds like a $12.95 (hardcover) Ages 8-adultconvalesces. As a reward for her bird squealing....squealing in tune sacrifice and industry, Mandy is mind you. Squealing with joy and pain Roberta Henin allowed to spend Christnias with her and fear." matemal grandparents in Memphis, For all her "strangeness," Aunt Laura In an essay entitled "The Nature and outside the circle of her family and her is --much like Mandy; both feel isolated Aim of Fiction," Flannery O'Conner community. and misplaced. As Mandy listens to says of the novelist, "[The] descent Being an outsider is not new to Laura's stories about Rena, (Mandy's into himself will ...be a descent into Mandy: "It seems like I've always mother), Mandy realizes that her his region" (Mystery and Manners). known...,whatever creek we've mother, too, has felt "joy and pain and Whether this is true for novelist lived on, that I didn't belong. I've fear." Mandy's vision of Goose Rock George Ella Lyon, only she can say, wanted something Wish Books didn't has been narrow incomplete. On but it is certainly true for Amanda carry finer than combread, higher the return trip the ascent Mandy Virginia Penitt, the main character of than any ridge. How could I be like sees with her heart. And, she finds, Lyon's first novel Borrowed that, bom to Mama and Daddy?" She the heart has keen vision; the heart Children, which is set in Goose Rock, fantasizes: Could she be the daughter sees completely. Ky., during the Depression. For of a wealthy Boston family who sent Mandy has made a "round trip." Amanda (or Mandy, as she is called) their baby girl to "some beautiful spot" "You come back the same way you the descent into her region (and her to be found by "a family with a touch went," she explains to her younger self) is accomplished by briefly of refinement"? sister Helen, who can't understand stepping outside it. The key is the In Memphis, Mandy expects to be an why a trip between two places is round

Outsider/Insider:A Grown-Up Who Writes for Children George Ella Lyon That_the colon in this title signals child. "What will you major in?" How how the world looked before we put an equation outsider- = grown-up, is that fingerpainted bed going to look on goggles, how it felt before we insider = children baffles and on your resume? armadillos got suited up. intrigues me. In what sense am I an I read in a hyperactive-parents' I have only gone as far back as the outsider in the child's world? What periodical that kindergarten is not too alphabet. I love to dwell on one letter, child? What world? Obviously I spent young to start thinking about a one word, one form. Eve is in the a long time as a child, as various resume. Lord knows what the ride is, high chair, Adam in the playpen; let's children: baby, toddler, pre-schooler, but we know that our children will get them out and name the world first-grader, and so forth. Less need a ticket. Little Judy had better again. We will not start with Apple.' obviously, those children (and my get on her toes and dance at least by Accordion? Abacus? Aorta? My tum memories of their friends) still travel flu:: time she's out of diapers. Else on the wheel of 26 Chances begins with me. Inside. My insiders. Still less what's an adulthood for? with Aspen, because I decided to go obviously, I have new children. I don't Now there's a question we would through the forest. "Aspen, Buttemut, mean my visible ones Ben, who is all but die to keep from asking. We Cedar" (from A B Cedar: An eleven, and Joey, who is sixteen know, we continually say, what Alphabet of Trees, to be published by months though certainly they childhood is for: it is to get you to Orchard Books in 1989). keep me in touch with the welter of adulthood. But adulthood? Is it for "Children are not a race apart, but childhood in an ongoing way. I mean having things? Power? Our own ourselves when new," writer Paula new children in myself, new dreams homes? Whose homes did we grow Fox tells us in Celebrating Children's waking up, struggling to walk, hoping up in? Books. That is who I am writing for. to spell their names. I don't want to romanticize Today's children, yes, and We are all in the 7.rocess of childhood. Even relatively happy ones tomorrow's, I hope. But for you, too, becoming, a fact we traditionally lie have a wealth of terrible moments before your world split into about to children. Why? To shellac because of the child's emotional outsiders/insiders; and for you when ourselves with the gleam of auth .pity? intensity, here-e-up perspective it did, when you first felt the slash of To scare them into focus? To narrow and lack of the fenses we cultivate that line. the horizon into a picture frame we over time. But s that freshness, can bear? "What are you going to be that unarmored quality which draws *See The Incredible Expanding when you grow up?" we ask the me back to childhood. I want to see Sentence, page 21.

26/Now and Then and not straight. But then Mandy Probably to a rug." Such clarity is a realizes; "You don't ever come back fitting vehicle for Mandy's round trip A Regular Rolling the same. The tracks are spiked down from Goose Rock to Memphis and Noah and the train stays on the track, but back back to knowledge of place by George Ella Lyon you come back from a different and self. Illustrated by Stephen Gammell direction entirely." This different Bradbury Press direction is the key to Mandy's growth. New York, NY. 1986 She comes back wiser: "I used to think 1==1 I couldn't belong to a family so far $13.95, Ages 5-10 back in the sticks...Now I see a Sarah K. Davis family isn't one thing or one place. Tonight Pm glad to know home is Roberta T. Herrin teaches children's What child or grown-up waiting. Home and the world, too." has literature at East Tennessee State not dreamed of taking a trip, going to Any twelve-year-old will appreciate University. This summer she is faraway places and seeing new sights? Mandy's growth, her anger, her self directing a Teachers Institute on In A Regular Rolling Noah George Ella pity, her self doubt, her need to belong Children's Fantasy Literature, Lyon tells the tale of a young boy from and to know.Butif adults dismiss sponsored by the National Endowment Pathfork, Ky., who helps a neighboring Borrowed Children as "merely a child's for the Humanities. family move their farm to Canada by book," they will be cheated of good train. Lyon is retelling the story in reading. Lyon's narrative never falters; memory of her grandfather who really she sustains a powerful first person made this journey as a boy. point of view in present tense. Her This is a beautiful picture book, with style is at once plain and eloquent. a simple yet powerful narrative. It The matter-of-factness is deceptive, the -begins, "Now I'd never seen a train/ sentences short but full. For example, before today, but I've heard its whistle/ she writes of a hand-me-down coat: down at the mouth of the hollow." "Anna is just one stop on this little Adventure beckons, and in a practical coat's road. Where is it going? way, the boy answers. His job is to tend the stock, including chickens and guineas, Rosie and her calf and Bad Patch (a mare that balks) inside a boxcar on the long rolling journey out of the mountains to "land flat as a griddle." Lyon's book is filled with sonorous imagery. After the train has travelled all day and all night, "In the morning it stops./ Someone slides the door open./ At first I see just the railyard,/ steam like fog in the hollow./ But then I feel what's happened./ We've run out of mountains./ Sky right down to your ankles./ Big wind might blow you away." These words are certain to be read over and over for the picture they 1'I II ii.* evoke, and the sounds of the words MI. are fresh and full of mystery. :4444.;171% There is so much tenderness here, such wonderful and loving detail, that both grown-ups and children will enjoy ; the mastery of Lyon's storytelling. Sure 14. enough, "World's a big affair," but how one ventures into the world with trt:711'-: love and care and awe is a message for all of us in A Regular Rolling Noah. C=1 = =3

Sarah K. Davis teaches English at East Tennessee State University and is program coordinator for the Teachers Institute on Children's Fantasy Illustration by Stephen Gammell, from A Regular Rolling Noah. Literature at ETSU-this summer. Now and Then/27 30 Review Too Few Tomorrows: Urban Appalachians In The 1980's edited by Phillip J. Obermiller and William W. Philliber The Appalachian Consortium Press Boone, N.C. 1987 $8.95 (paperback)

Richard Blaustein

This collection of 13 essays dealing with the Appalachian exodus takes a classical social science perspective. Short on illustrations and anecdotal details but long on tables and graphs, Two Few Tomorrows will primarily appeal to the scholarly reader who eschews sweeping generalizations in favor of rigorous academic exposition. This, however, is not meant to detract back to the time of the Civil War. Long Journey Home from the value of what has already Unlike many other migrant groups, been acclaimed one of the more urban Appalachians are not directed by Elizabeth Barret significant publications in Appalachian immediately distinguishable from their 16mm., color, 56 minutes, 1987 Studies to appear in recent years. hosts. Indeed, some of the contributors Also available in video formats Indeed, this volume raises questions to this volume would contend that the Appalshop Films which are at the heart of Appalachian persistance of a distinct Appalachian 306 Madison Street Studies: What is the basis of identity in the cities of the Midwest is Whitesburg, Ky. 41858 Appalachian identity? Is it inextricably more a factor of social class than tied to specific family and regionalism or ethnicity. Nonetheless, Phillip J. Obermiller neighborhood relationships? Can it the selective reconstruction of a survive the trauma of uprooting and distinctly Appalachian culture in an Feople moving in or people moving transplanting? Does migration urban environment is occurring. There away always means important changes inevitably lead to assimilation, or does are clear parallels to be drawn betweenfor families, towns, regions and it stimulate the development of an the specific development of groups like countries. Migrations of the past have emergent sense of collective identity the Urban Appalachian Council in usually had religious and political which compensates for the shock of Cincinnati and a more general roots, but economic migrations have social and cultural displacement? tendency throughout the modem worldbecome more common since the The scholars and researchers whose toward the establishment of formal Industrial Revolution. In the case of work is included in Too Few organizations which provide culturally Appalachia, when the jobs no longer Tomorrows provide no easy anowers displaced people with the opportunity come to the people, the people must to these complex questions. Instead, to socialize with significant, supportive go to the jobs. they do justice to the complexities and others. (In this regard, urban The second installment in Appaishop's ambiguities of the subject by avoiding Appalachians can easily be compared Film History of Appalachia, Long stereotyped interpretations of their with ethnics who have moved to the Journey Home, is a film about data. Even so, significant conclusions southem mountains and have formed migration into and out of Appalachia. concerning the urban Appalachian voluntary associations to preserve at It is a finely textured film, densely experience emerge from these essays. least a semblance of their original packed with information. Appalachian identity is as much a cultural identity.) The film's initial concem is with matter of external definition as internal While this work is laudable in many migration into the region and depicting ascription. Most Appalachians do not respects, it points out the need for the area's rich ethnic diversity. We see normally identify themselves as such further studies of ethnicity which through interviews and old but actually tend to avoid self address the complexities of multiple photographs how the opening of the definitions based on regional origins. cultural identities in the modem world. mines drew black workers from the This is not merely an understandable Too Few Tomorrows is an excellent deep South and immigrants from response to recent stigmatization by follow-up to the film Long Journey Southern and Eastern Europe into the hostile outsiders: it also reflects a Home and is otherwise a notable mining towns of Appalachia. traditional rejection of sectionalism by contribution to the literature in this Long Journey Home then provides a southern mountain people which goes field. background for the huge post-war 28/Now and Then outmigration from Appalachia by Appalachian migrants are just biding On Being a Joines exploring the economic impact of the their time until they can return to the automated mining machine, aptly region. This may be an acceptable a film by Toni Davenport called "the cotton gin of coal mining." premise for a docudrama, but it is a 16mm., color, 55 minutes, 1980 Here the filmmakers turn to newsclips serious lapse for those who would call with 44-page background, from the 1960s to describe the their product a documentary. transcription and commentary hardships caused by widespread Long Journey Home presents the Tom Davenport Films, unemployment in the coalfields. "push" factors of Appalachian Route 1, Box 527 The film concludes with three case migration while neglecting the "pull" Delaplane, Va. 22025 studies that highlight several importantfactors many Appalachians did aspects of Appalachian migration. migrate seeking basic economic Jane Harris Woodside Interviews with members of the survival, but many others migrated Eastern Kentucky Social Club in because they saw the possibility of a According to the film's introduction, various Northern cities present better quality of life in the cities. The On Being a Joines: A Life in the successful black migrants, many with opportunities in densely populated, Brushy Mountains gives a glimpse of jobs in the professions, who still industrialized areas attracted and 20th century traditional backwoods celebrate their cultural links with the continue to attract many people who Appalachian life and its demise. This region. Conversations with Anndrena see themselves as Appalachian but the film accomplishes through stories Belcher, her parents and'her have no compelling desire to resettle in told by John E. "Frail" Joules and his grandparents give the viewpoints of the mountains. This is particularly true wife Blanche, long-time Wilkes County, return-migrants, migrants, and non- of urban Appalachian women whose N.C., residents a few years before miarants respectively. In the final social, educational and occupational Frail's death in 1982. But such a scenes of the film, the camera follows prospects are greatly enhanced by description of the film's scope is far James and Denise Hardin and their urban life. too narrow. children back to the region after 14 Of the millions of people who left Covering the period from World War years "on the job" in Baltimore. James the region in the past 50 years, most I to the 1970s, the documentary Hardin finds the precarious economic are content to live among their co- weaves an autobiography out of 22 conditions of the region an acceptable workers, children and grandchildren in stories 17 told by Joines and five by risk for the benefit of raising his the familiar urban neighborhoods and his wife. A sketch of social change on children in the mountains. suburbs they now call home. "Bury me the eastern edge of Appalachia forms Long Journey Home investigates a under a sidewalk" is one urban a backdrop to the couple's life. Born in major theme in the history of Appalachian viewer's response to the 1914, Frail tells of a childhood in a Appalachia and for the most part film's back-to-the-mountains bias. small mountain settlement full of hard handles its subject quite competently. As another recent Appalshop work on the family farm. World War II But the film is not without its flaws. release, Strangers and Kin, so aptly marked a turning point, both for Frail Perceptive viewers will wonder how demonstrates, stereotypes and myths Joines personally and for his Appalachia's ethnicity and migration about Appalachians are rife. With community. Joines served in Europe, patterns can be presented without Appalshop approaching its 20th and the suffering he saw there, mention of the region's native anniversary, it may be an appropriate especially while present at the American population or their forced time for the filmmakers there to reflect liberation of a concentration camp, migration along the Trail of Tears. on some of their own romantic notions cost him his personal relationship with -Others will balk at the film's about the region and its people. a God he continued to dimly oversimplification of the region's acknowledge. economic problems; the automation of 0 0 0 In addition to this personal crisis, he mining certainly did contribute to the faced unprecedented social upheavals stream of economic refugees fleeing when he returned home as industry widespread unemployment in the Phillip J. Obermiller teaches in the usurped agriculture in Wilkes County. coalfields. But important structural Department of Social Sciences at Rising land prices thwarted Joines' changes were taking place in the Northern Kentucky University and is a dream of farming, forcing him to national economy that affected the member of the Urban Appalachian support his family chiefly by working jobs of Appalachian miners as well: Council's Research and Education as a mechanic in a garage. The last the conversion of steel mill furnaces Committee. part of the film concentrates on and home heating systems to natural Blanche's faith healing of a heart gas and the introduction of diesel condition, Frail's reconversion on locomotives on the raiit.. Ids, to name Easter Sunday of 1971 and the 1== I two. 1== I1== I couple's subsequent dedication to a A more fundamental probit.ic the charismatic movement. filmmakers' apparent acceptance .. In addition to giving a sense of the "return to the land" mystique. Made by du,....- Arwood is a photo major at rapid modernization of the region, the a group whose reputation is based on ETSU. film offers a wealth of information to "an unsentimental exercise in the student of folk narrative. Frail authenticity," Lone- Journey Home Joines tells the tales that made up his comes dangerously close to promoting life tall tales, comic anecdotes, war the romantic notion that most stories and religious narratives in 32 Now and Then/29 Review Zone 3 On Being a Joines... Edited by Malcolm Glass and David Till Box 4565, Austin Peay both natural and staged contexts. The Jr[7.7. "et, State University filmed record gives a full performance 40,1,4 44 011 Clarksville, Tenn. 37044 of the tales and demonstrates how Published three times a year Joines' mimicry, body language,pacing $3.00 per issue, $8.00 for one and ability to play to the audience year, $10.00 to librar d made him an effective story-teller. institutions Watching Joines tell his tales also gives a sense of the many complex Jo Carson impulses behind storytelling. Joines' stories often affirmed family bonds by calling to mind a common past in the I have come late to reading poetry. I presence of his wife or children. They read what I had to in school, I bought sometimes served as testimony, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen expressing his deep and pervasive Ginsberg's books during the 60s but I religious beliefs. And they helped him didn't read them very carefully. I cope with memories of a painful past. carried the books around because it For example, one of the most was the thing to do, but what I really intriguing story sequences is the one wanted was for the list of names to be having to do with drunks. The son of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg an alcoholic, Frail first tells in a John "FraU"Joints and Jo Carson. A friend who teaches straightforward and painfully accurate University of North Carolina's Folklore literature spoke of a student who way what it was like to grow up with a Curriculum. The story is told entirely wanted a class in modem poetry hard- working but all-too-often by Frail and Blanche Joines and is not one in which you read modem intoxicated and violent parent. He then supplemented by historical and family poetry, but one in which you wrote it. I proceeds to tell five stories, both pictures. There is no narration. spent awhile as one of those. Someone personal narratives and "comic" local Letting Joines tell his own story pointed out that if I really hoped to anecdotes, that return indirectly, again means that the filmmakers at times write good poems, I should read them. and again, to his traumatic childhood traded off clarity for immediacy. In one Took 20 years, but now I do. experiences by featuring drunkards scene, Joines is assisting a surveyor by Poems come in as many varieties as who are sadistic or laughable or both. hacking down young trees in the weeds, and there are poets under every These stories allowed him to express surveyor's path. Only when reading therock, and some of them produce like safely, often under the camouflage of film guide does the viewer realize the kudzu, and some joumals publish a humor, the deep and abiding anger scene's significance: Joines is doing the whole bunch of it, so when I tell you children feel towards their alcoholic preparatory work for a new resort I've come to love poems, I want to put parent. development. a qualifier on it: good poems. And Also commendable is the careful Ironically, then, he was playing part when I say good poems, I mean poems attention the film pays 'to Blanche's in yet a further encroachment of I like. With that in mind, let me multifaceted contribution to her outsiders on his- fast - vanishing recommend a literary publication. husband's storytelling. She is shown as backwoods culture. However, the his audience, listening intently and disadvantages of the technique are empathetically, flinching as he recounts mitigated in large part by the excellent coming upon victims of Nazi torture in film guide. The guide provides regional, the concentration camps. And she tellssocial and biographical background in her own stories in a low-key, personal addition to an annotated transcript and style that contrasts with her husband's an enlightening discussion of the more dramatic and flamboyant creative struggle to make and shape narratives. Most effective is the the documentary. segment where the filmmaker cuts The film is of interest to students of back and forth between husband and Appalachian social history, narrative wife as they tell of Blanche's faith traditions and charismatic religious healing of a heart condition and Frail's movements. But it is also of interest to Included with the mail for this issue religious rebirth, getting both a general audience. For more than a ofNow and Thenwas a copy of the perspectives on an experience that wassocial history and more than a Spring, 1987, issue of a poetry joumal a tuming point in both of their lives. comprehensive record of a master called Zone 3. The title comes from On Being a Joinesis the third in a storyteller,On Being a Joinesis about seed packages. Zone 3 delineates a series of documentaries in the Frail Joines and his wife, two people growing season on a map of the "American Traditional Cultural Series" enduring and transcending personal USA. The Appalachian region also lies jointly produced by Tom Davenport of trauma and social upheaval. within Zone 3. A growing season. Tom DavenportFilms and Dr: Daniel Somebody gathered a fine crop of Patterson and other members of the MEM tiM3 poems. Emily Dickinson said "If I feel 30/Now and Then 3 physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry." I turned the pages holding on to the top of my head just in case... There were names among the contributors I recognized Joseph Bruchac, for instance, was here last year in the reading series called "Regionalism and Inspiration" sponsored by the English Department at ETSU and supported by CASS. I have seen a couple of the other poets in other joumals, but the majority of the poets in the issue of Zone 3 were new to me, which speaks in part to the volume of good work being done these days. And by way of example, the third part of a five part poem' by Heather Tosteson called "Sportsmanship": -e.

My son screams and pushes his friend out from under the kitchen table. "Give it back," he yells. 'Give it back." He is four, his friend, Chris, six. My son reaches out with his left arm. Chris waves hit-empty hands in the air. He twists his had to hear his mother. "Nothing. I don't have anything. I just Giving Glory to God like audiences at rock concerts, said" in Appalachia responding more to beat than to 'Please," my son cries. "Give it back to lyrics." me." Worship Practices of Six Chapters 4 and 5 deal with rituals 'What?" I ask him. 'My hand Baptist Subdenominatlons including footwashings, creek He cut off my hand" by Howard Dorgan baptisms, communions, dinners-on-the- I was just pretending" University of Tennessee Press ground and flower services. The book "Give it back," I say. Knoxville, Tenn., 1987 closes with a study of obituaries. 1-lowr Chris waves his hands in $24.95 The strength of the book is also its disgust. weakness. In his introduction Dorgan My son lurches forward, grabs at the R. Chesla Sharp tells about the time he was getting air. congregational approval to film a He approaches me now with his left Giving Glory to God in Appalachia is service and one elderly parishioner hand out, a study of 10 mountain congregations asked, "Will you ever use this film to flattened, as if it were balancing around Boone, N.C. They were make fun of me?" It is obvious that something. selected from six groups of Baptists: Dorgan has no intention of nvking fun I accept what he offers me. I can't see Missionary, Union, Primitive, Regular, of anyone. He has really give. us an for pity. I kneel beside him. Old Regular, and Free Will. apologia c: the faith. The celebrants 'F1it," he whispers. 1-lurry." The first chapter, on the beliefs of become his brothers, and the observer, the groups, is the least effective. at least once, becomes a celebrant. Dorgan's training is not the history of The outsider becomes an insider. This dogma, and the logic of grouping the C:==1 r.==3 C==I is a welcome change from so many particular six sects theologically is not books on Appalachia. But it is not too clear. ultimately the right stance for a But the remaining chapters deal with scholar. Jo Carson's Stories I Ain't Told the worship practices of the six The result is that any criticism which Nobody Yet is coming out next subdenominations and form the real Dorgan may have is so muted that the spring from Orchard Books. value of the book. Chapters 2 and 3 objective view of the detached outsider cover the delivery of the sermon, the is almost lost. In describing church sermonic content and the preacher. architecture Dorgan gives eight pictures 1=1 Dorgan, a professor of communication of Appalachian churches. One is a arts at Appalachian State, does an beautiful country gothic church, two excellent job of analyzing the homiletic are nondescript clapboard structures, Ken Murray's book of black and white delivery, which he describes as highly and the rest are hideous buildings. photographs, Portrait of emotional, the effect of which is "a Dorgan's statement that many Appalachia, is published by hypnotic rhythm that tends to Southem Appalachian churches do not Appalachian Consortium Press. dominate content, with congregations, match his "prototypical ideal" hardly 34 Now and Then/31 In "the Spree" 10-year-old Nellie first time I saw her driving that yellow Review narrates the tale of her Aunt Evanell's [1919] Oldsmobile coupe around the Giving Glory... stormy marriage to Earl Slone, who Alabama countryside. How well I would "give you his last dollar...if remembered her sitting stiff-backed seems adequate. The fact that you needed it," but who, when behind the wheel, impeccably dressed Missionary Baptists don't have any drinking, would tom-cat under his with ,:hite gloves, gray hair covered missionaries is buried in a statement wife's nose, beating her when she with a colorful, flowered hat." Jack about the name: "The title 'Missionary protested. It's to Shirley's credit that leams much later why Miss Pitts Baptist' has lost its original meaning to Earl is not unrelievedly evil. Nellie attends all town funerals; it is a lesson a large degree, since these small says, "I liked this deep-voiced man in history as well as compassion. independent churches are not who rared back in his old recliner, During 1918's flu epidemic, "the year extensively involved in mission work, cigarette smoke curling around his baldthe world thought it was dying," Miss particularly with foreign missions." head, newspapers draped over his Pitts' family was ravaged. It was then, Dorgan analyzes a sermon with the sock feet." after neighbors came, gauze masks following ending: "Now mothers, you However, Evanell's character is the covering their faces, to tend them, that know we love you. Amen? You know story's focus. Though timid, innocent she decided she would retum their we love you. But you know your place and willing to let Earl speak for both ofgoodness by showing her respect at in this world. Amen, you know your them for most of her marriage, Evanell,funerals for the rest of her life. place." Dorgan describes the sm-mon in one delightful scene enlists Nellie's Many more finely-drawn characters as one which shows traditonal values. aid in stuffing armloads of Earl's and details populate these stories: Dorgan's 13-year study, however, is beloved newspapers down the privy "Dear Flora Mae's" elderly Pap, who very valuable. It carefully and holes. Thus, after Earl, on the third prefers his own home crowded with sympathetically explains the practices day of a drunk, bums himself up, the son, daughter-in-law and grandkids of religious groups that are often reader isn't too surprised to see her to childless daughter Bessie's sterile neglected and, in some cases, the sitting "dry-eyed at the hospital when household; "Poor Uncle Elvin," who is study is probably the record of dying the doctor told her it was all over." overwhelmed with female suitors when sects. Appalachian studies is in By the end of the story, Shirley has his wife dies; "the Humdinger," whose Dorgan's debt. crafted a positive statement from star is a Studebaker ambulance named potentially negative material without Herschel; "The Initiation's" Lou who, ==:1 0 ==3 the compromise of sentimentality. after sighting the family ghost, is As good as "The Spree" was, I absorbed into a rural family; the admired "Miss Pitts' Last Funeral" evensurprise murderer in "Retribution." R. Chesla Sharp teaches English at more. Its old-fashioned, elegiac tone Flaws are few, though I found the East Tennessee State University. Faulkner's "A Rose For Emily" comes long letter in "The Initiation" to mind is the antithesis of the fast- overloaded with dialect, as if Shirley paced, violent "Spree." The focus is on had recently digested a dictionary of character described through a mountain terms: "ruction" and "a lavish sympathetic narrator. Middle-aged Jackof hard words" were delightful, but is returning to the tiny Alabama town "bodacious," "funned" and "nussed" of "Jasper Cove, a few miles into the seemed overdone to me. However, Cumberland foothills," where he spent most of the time, Shirley's style, Dear Flora Mae and summers on his grandpa's farm and settings and characters are right on developed a friendship with Nellie Pitts target, making these stories well worth Other Stories that endured throughout his boyhood, reading again and again. by Patricia Shirley young manhood during WW II and Seven Buffaloes Press, beyond. The story brims with history P.O. Box 249 described through three generations: Big Timber, Montana 59011 Captain Isaiah Nathaniel Pitts, who $6.75 (paperback) fought in the Civil War; his daughter Ed Davis, a native of West Virginia, Nellie; and Jack, who is 12 when he teaches English and Appalachian Ed Davis first meets the colorful Southern folklore at Sinclair Community College family. in Dayton, Ohio. He is the author of Patricia Shirley's seven short stories Though Shirley skillfully weaves Haskell, poetic Appalachian include humor (often ironic), murder throughout the story physical symbols monologues, and his fiction, reviews mystery, suspense and even a modem of the past, the plot and characters are and poetry have appearedinmany Appalachian ghost story, all except never merely appliquéd onto an literary magazines. one set in rural Kentucky. historical tapestry; rather they bring The author creates an immediately- history alive in a way textbooks never recognizable sense of place, and to say do. For example, Shirley's description that she writes concretely is an of Miss Pitts' car, in which she understatement. One knows these chauffered the captain around town multifaceted characters aeeply through until he died and then herself to their speech, actions and the countless townspeople's funerals: "I paraphernalia of their lives. knew that [she] was special from the 32/Now and Then 35 Harold, after a moment's dubious survey of the big beast licking her calf, rushed through the gate to her right side, squatted under her and began a struggle with the greedy calf. The cow stood patiently, even though we gave her no feed, and Harold emerged with Early Daysat Keno abort a pint. Both Harold and I wished Harriette Simpson Arnow we4.'uld measure the amount in the calf'somach. Afte. breakfast Harold and J climbed a distance up the hill pasture, and looked over the land and what we could see of the farm. The soil there seems fertile, laid down in benches Shortly after they married, aspiring trailer is a two-wheeled affair made to rather than in one straight sweep of writers Harriette and Harold Amow balance in the middle. The cow rode hillside, so that after all these years of moved from Cincinnati where they hadwith her head tied to the front end, neglect, erosion is not as bad as it been working on the Works Progress and naturally most of her weight was might.be. A strange lush land it seems Administration (WPA) Writers' Project, there, and naturally the trailer tipped where the wounds of the earth heal to a farm they bought in the hills of down in that direction, and the more thornselves. We found old gullies, half Wayne County, Ky. They planned to the trailer tipped, the more the cow as deep as the house, but filled now run a subsistence farm and write scooted toward that, end and the calf, with young pine and well-padded with novels in their free time. They stayed too. They had to be unloaded from thevarieties of wild grass and clover. It the farm for some five years, then back end, and there was a problem in seems horribly big and demanding wed to Detroit. There Harold physics, getting an unwilling thousand somehow, two old farms the natives worked as a reporter and Harriette pound cow up the steep slippery say contain more than 250 acres wrote The Dollmaker and other inclined plane of the trailer backwards. wandering down to the river embracing books mostly set in Kentucky. The He jacked the front end as high as it a graveyard, a creek with waterfalls, a following is an account of their first could be jacked, even lifting Henry's hill in cut over timber, river bluffs, a few days on the farm edited from rear wheels well off the ground, but all coal mine and a schoolhouse where Harriette's diary. to no purpose. about 15 pupils attend seven months The cow got restless and made in the year. Dozens of giant apple and terrific lunges against the trailer sides. pear trees have rotted until they no August 31 Harold swore, and I prayed and held longer bear fruit what little is borne I write by lantern light with the her head, or tried to. The calf got is of inferior quality, wormy and typewriter over my knees. Outside under her and when it seemed that shescraggly as the twigs on which they another white fog is rolling in from the would kill it, Harold went in and pulled grow. The scattered crop of corn, river and the high weeds that grow it out by the tail. The calf tossed its grown in many little patches where the through the deserted porches, the head a time or so, then it began soil is fertile and free from brush, is full broken windows and sagging floors nibbling grass, but though we had a of weeds, though much of it is quite drip with fog and dew. We came in live calf it still looked as if we would good, standing 16 feet high with two yesterday after leaving half our trailer have nothing more than a mess of beefbig ears. The springs are choked with load at a cabin at the end of the gravel from the cow. years' accumulations of soil and leaves, road, for the four miles of dirt road It ended with Harold letting the air with the spring house long since torn were too much for Henry, the Ford. out of the tires to make the trailer away and bumed. Coming down with another load a lower, then browbeating a friend into month ago, the brakes got so hot they going with him into the trailer, each September 5 smoked. catching a hind leg and pulling out the Harold went into Bumside today for Last night after getting here about cow. Once out she, like her son, begana load of supplies and brought back 8:00 o'clock we were thankful for the to eat grass. my sister Lucy, who after one glance mattress and springs we laid on the I dread tomorrow. Harold will then at the house, remarked that we should floor a month ago, ancl fell sound begin the business of milking her. He have our heads examined for coming asleep after eating a super of cold has never milked, and to me she looks to such a place.. . baked beans. like a brute with a mind of her own. ==I ==I ==I September 2 September 3 Harold got in about 10:00 o'clock The cow, shut away from her son all last night with a red cow with a white night, bawled at daybreak and rolled More from Early Days at Keno in face, and a little black bull also white- us out into the cold foggy dawn. I gavethe next issue of Now and Then ;iced; cost $46.00. He brought them Harold one of my stewpans, and teaching in a one-room school. ver the rough road in the trailer, together we herded the calf to the gate backed the trailer against a bank and and the waiting cow. Harold opened i,-,)Estate of Harriette Simpson Arnow, 1988, began the business of unloading. The the gate, the calf frisked through, and Used by Permission, Now and Then/33 36 Subways Rumbling in My Mind Richard Blaustein

There's a longstanding tradition of songs about country people feeling out of place in the big city, going back at least as far as "Take Me Back To The Sweet Sunny South" and including such modem classics as "The Streets of Baltimore" and "Detroit City." I decided to take this old theme and stand it on its head: "Subways Rumbling In My Mind" is the result.

You've all heard those lonesome country songs where a homesick boy Is stuck M some big town and he dreams about the way things used to be In that village In sunny Tennessee: Well my story's the other way around I'm a Brooklyn boy but I moved away from town Th,ugh the hill: are green and my neighbors they are kind I can still hear subways rumbling M my mind.

sw4 Coowtog s'INAO 13,41 4{,t OM. 1#6.4 G.to ON CHORUS: I can still hear subways rumbling D when at night my thoughts go tumbling through the empty lots and alleys where we Wert a «..eIS I Na Uwe Stwoklve Wei 54 T tWoite. 04*.r0w.tNN played And the summer nights were sweet 111.al111= ,1 1 ir when our neig:thors 'cross the street 11111 played the mandolins they brought from Italy A./ KA. chet.«.. 4144e weeV./ u to be. +ha l.%% w.a. Atte., A.4 phi&I0.)Am*Arm Like rays of sunshine through the haze I recall those golden days before the Smoky Mountains called to me IN.41.4 V111aye iw Sus./'U./Neste. And as much as I love these green rolling hills Is it so strange to find Iz. G l-/- km.," Immr- Mr- Mir..11=11 that when I lay me down to sleep .11 iomil 111 I can still hear subways rumbling In my mind CAN Allhow Suisuhys rombrwel in) mymind. Chaos: C Am No I never heard a freight train far away echo through the valleys and the hills but the moaning of the foghoms in the bay r C4,4 hots solowys esseAls101 w of Ni1h1 My IltiilltReyo was as lonesome as the mountain whipporwills ....i1=0...1., VIM 11, A And for all its commotion and its noise .11 WINN .111 OM. MO. all=01.41 IIM ...111111 11 Nam.. NMI 11. INr 1111../... my childhood home had Its simple joys 1-4., ht emptyIt 004 alleys otert we plyea. So even though I've left them far behind I can still hear subways rumbling in my mind.

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Leke.1 161 W.S. GOWN 'To Site I csu 54111hit. subways 0 Richard Blaustein, director of the Center for Appalachian Studies and Services, plays fiddle with the Dixie Dewdrops, an old-time band, and ry141:ssi'14mi Mimi with the ETSU Bluegrass Band. 34/Now and Then Waitin' for the Sunrise Ed Snodderly

Waiting for the sunrise comes from the idea of searching for something new. It also has to do with the motion of circling automobiles around drive-in parking lots. Those parking lots of the

Dutch Maid, of Shoneys or Pals aat Sudden Service; waiting for the !lours topass;you just never know what it all may bring. This song is presently a part of the Road Company's play, Echoes and Postcards.

In this little town All I do is roam around Looking for something, to thrill me. I've seen the bright lights Of a big city sky, but boys There was something missing.

CHORUS: Thislittle town is slow And I guess you might know That I've been here for a long time. Ltke a drifter passing through I've done some work and I've had the Ntorltrakt blues Now rm waitin' for the sunrise. Ill go to the station _MMI11=CM141 -- Where they smoke them cigarettes rH41,4 I oil'. tow,' an oisIvsk(14,1%O fou.a--Looliwi And stare into the long nights. C G Where talk Is so slow , If you really want to know There'll be someone wholl say it's alright. so ine.41-;w1 -to41%411 nee iue see4 the lariy,kr liswts 641 ciiy sty CHORUS: C Chalta C 0....

Bridge: some.Nws rrs; ssi Oh, how I'm waiting bkri- boy -Nett t* Irtlilate. tow' Like for the morning mall Time moves but mostly crawls I'm thinking of this I'm making some wish RHd r goeu yw mioer tooto Ve bee. 'Am,-to(0. IOWA I'm waitin' for the sun to come call. 1:1.--=.=:=1.=Erel""""'"6Iira p SmIMI IMMO MN CHORUS: .M11111 11/ t.Out a &icier PatsNV t*WI . sow tuorK IAA Vs,. Vat Ed Snodderly, 1984, Drivin i?:,and Music. G C 0 0 G O,h. IiHwa-tat-- fo,41.0 me( tri rJi mo.11 +: Mt moves

Ed Snodderly's newest record, "The Impenal Hotel," is due out this fall from Cloudland Records, and includes "Wallin' for the Sunrise." sy..e w;t1, cclist4N sew Su cvme coq 38 Now and Then/35 You Know You're an Insider When...

1. You can drive from Knoxville to Roan Mountain knowing without a doubt that if your car breaks down anywhere along the way you can call a relative for help without paying long distance charges. 2. You have an East Tennessee ancestor who ought for the Union in the Civil War. 3. You know that you could purchase a pint of moonshine within an hour, if necessary. 4. You're not sure that progress within a region is defined by the number of four lane highways found therein. 5. You have been given catnip for colic as a baby, smoked rabbit tobacco for fun as a kid, or drank sassafrass tea for your spring tonic at any age. 4,-1; 6. You use the following words comfortably at least once a Week: reckon, holler, catty.comered, fixin'. 7. The religion you were taught as a child keeps calling you back no matter how hard you try to forget it. Waiting for Flying Saucers -in Wytheville 8. You say Appalachia instead of "We'rebeing invaded by something." WYVE Radio Reports, October, 1987 Appalachia and you can I hear they come out at twilight, those flying saucers will be sure pronounce Elizabethton on the join the first stars over the mountainsto hover over the houses in town, first try. and twinkle blue and red, earthly phenomena worth studying 9. You like your green beans cooked little bulbs whirling. if studying's why they're-here. with streaked pork until they are They're watching us, it's clear, I sure don't think they're here DONE, your cornbread with a as sure as the hills have eyes to take over the farms and slop pigs, inch crust from being baked in an and the Air Force won't talk. learn all about dairy cattle old iron skillet, and your stack At MomandPop's over by I.81, and the price of turkey hens. cake with apple butter between I sat by a window for two hours, And if they need to transport me the layers just the way grandma eating pie and drinking coffee for a few days for observation, used to do it. until night fell and the only it might be a change of pace. lights coming this way were diesels So long as they understand when 10. Nobodyeversays to you, "And headed north to Pennsylvania. I get restless and sing, where are you from?" Next time, tomorrow, I'll sit on "Carry me back to Old Virginny.' the other side facing south where Martha Whaley Felicia Mitchell

Martha Whaley says she has been accusedofbeing a militant insider. A Felicia Mitchell teaches English at Emory and Henry Cortege in Virginia. native of Stoney CreekinCarter Her poems have appeared in a number of literary journals. County, Tenn., she now lives in Piney Flats. Tenn., andisa housewife and mother of four small children. She also works part time ashistoryof medicine Tony Feathers teaches art in elementaryschoolsin Greeneville, Tenn. librarian in the Quillen-Dishner College of Medicine Library. 36/Now and Then The Last Family Reunion

We were called back to the mountains called back from Ashtabula, Ohio Levittown, New York Alexandria, Virginia Atlanta, Georgia.

In our Ford station wagon, waiting at railroad crossings winding around mountains, there was dark parental talk. Jill got carsick.

On the farm new cars glinted in the sun dew burnt off. 4 - We ate: biscuits gravy and ham, fresh cream on Quaker puffed rice, canned blackberries.

There was the smell of sul"ur in the crowded kitchen the sound of kids boundinc ,iownstairs.

Roughhousing outside I fell to everyone's amazement on an Indian anowhead. A debate about whether or not stitches were required ensued. My opinion went unheeded. No consensus emerged. Finally, saved by The Word of Grandpa 0" ,3, I was given over to the sure hands of Aunt Helen, the nurse, "v- who cleansed the wound, made a butterfly, and sent me back out into the wind a wonderful wourkded warrior and the envy of every one of my 35 first cousins.

We played softball on the lawn built a dam FirstLove Summer hid under the porch hollowed a haystack Stubble prickling behind ;:ur knees, tormented a garter snake we lie in newmown field and watch the shifting clotids. I fell more deeply in love with Jacqueline. Pressing closed our lids, we change sky red to purple to black. Inside, Henry and Tessie's sons and daughters Having heard of peristalsis, fought bitterly behind closed doors and drawn curtains you have me drink an Orange Crush about who would pay for the new roof while hanging upside-down from a tree limb. and storm windows. (Documentation is vital to 10yearolds.) Bob Henry Baber By Independence Day we make our vow: you scratch our wrists with a rusty pin, our blood runs together. 1==0CO

First day of school Bob Baber writes fiction and poetry (often for Now and you catch a fieldmouse in a gallon jar, Then) and works for Appalshop, the media produrath laugh as it runs circles. Before it dies center in Whitesburg, Ky. you fling it squirming into a trashfire. I catch the scent of searing flesh

. .. 0 0 0 and know mingled blood is no proof at all Mary E. O'Dell is the coordinator/founder of Green River Writers and Green River Retreat. Her work has been Mary Ernestine O'Dell published in Plainsong, Haight-Ashbury, Passages North, Ind in her book, Blue Air and Wheels

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