Talking Appalachian, page 17
The participants in my study, once they experienced the power of literacy and learned to manage multiple tasks successfully, became invested in the concept of lifelong learning, seeking advanced degrees through correspondence and satellite programs. Completing college, they knew that they could accomplish whatever they set out to do. Like other college graduates, these women “learn much more than subject matter or skills. They learn implicit and explicit lessons about themselves as women and . . . about themselves as women of a particular race, class, and culture. These lessons in turn affect how they see themselves as learners and shape their future learning experiences.”25
Not content to remain in one position for too long, most of the employed women talked about job advancement. Mary, working in a lab at the time of my research, wanted to get a degree in English and work toward a master’s degree, “and maybe someday I’ll get to teach on the college level.” In the summer of 1999, Hope was planning to go back for her master’s, either in special education or in teaching reading on the elementary level—education that would help her move up the salary scale in the Preston County schools. When Judith finished her internship, she was planning to pursue graduate school. Jean’s plans included getting numerous nursing certifications and working toward her master’s in critical care nursing through correspondence. Sarah was aiming for a master’s in social work. Lucy worked at home, became more active in her son’s school governance, and continued to help others in various ways. All this illustrates that literacy is social practice and, according to David Barton and Mary Hamilton, “demonstrates the changing demands that people experience at different stages of their lives and offers convincing evidence of the need for lifelong learning systems which people can access at critical points when they need to respond to new demands.”26
The women in this study gained economic power by making higher salaries without moving outside the community. Jean describes the lack of economic power for women without a college education:
I think it’s a lot different for the girls than it is the boys. The boys can always get out and make a living. They can do something somewhere, somehow driving a coal truck, driving something, even though it’s not what you want them to do, they can still make the money. But for a girl it’s very hard. They can’t get out and do what they want. And who wants to house clean for $5 an hour the rest of your life? It’s fine; I’ve done it before. It’s good. But you don’t want to stay there the rest of your life.
Without an education, residents in rural regions like Appalachia are harder hit by the dwindling economy, so job opportunities are limited for both men and women. Some may ask whether women entering traditional occupations doesn’t just reinforce traditional low-paying work by keeping women in their place. But the study participants chose traditional professions because there was no alternative. They moved from minimum-wage jobs in retail and housekeeping—the only choices Jean describes for women—to salaried positions as teachers, nurses, and social workers.
The power of literacy relates to the sense of accomplishment in finishing a college degree, something the women valued whether they found jobs in their fields of study or not. Their power rested in their ability to be role models for their children, for the chance to be “somebody”27 and to move “from a passive to an active role . . . to see themselves as . . . instruments of knowledge and influence.”28 The women of Preston County are like the African American women in rural Georgia that Sue Hammons-Bryner studied: “women who grow up in rural poverty [and] are poorly educated in classrooms where they suffer from denigrating remarks about their success potential, yet who dream, do more than wish, become change agents, and fulfill goals.”29
Those who could not find jobs in their majors were frustrated with the job market, with perceived age discrimination, and with the inability to use the talents they had discovered during their four years at college; they blamed family pressures, the economy, and employers as opposed to blaming the college. We tend to hope that education will enlarge women’s vistas and encourage them to consider nontraditional occupations, but these Appalachian women did not have many choices. Still, they achieved personal and social change, which they surely would not have been able to do otherwise. In other words, “Education does offer women opportunities, and the credentialist tie between education and work is as strong for women as it is for men.”30 The key difference between their poor precollege experiences and their postcollege ones appeared to be that the women had become “instrumental in shaping . . . their destiny.”31
One of the most powerful statements these women made was deciding to remain in their communities: their acquisition of academic literacy did not destroy family or community. Many were not opposed to moving away or becoming more upwardly mobile, but they knew how disruptive such a move would be for their families. So they overcame family members’ objections to their returning to school and the constraints of gender roles; they advanced beyond minimum-wage jobs to get college educations. They voiced their concerns by using literacy for their own purposes in their jobs, churches, children’s schools, and homes, maintaining community values. These mountain women appear to be similar to Donehower’s informants, who “use literacy within this system in the ways that they can, or to choose to opt out of this system as it operates in mainstream society by staying in their own communities, and enjoying a different kind of relationship with literacy as a result.”32
This finding challenges previous literature about other nonmainstream groups who are alienated from their cultural moorings because of acquired academic literacy.33 Essays of working-class academics illustrate that the academy “has destroyed something even while it has been recreating [us] in its own image.”34 For many immigrant groups, education creates “the clash and dislocation in our communities.”35 Most notably, Richard Rodriguez describes his estrangement from his home and native tongue (Spanish) as a result of his education.36 Although language change was an issue for these Appalachian women, it was not nearly as dramatic as it is for nonnative speakers of English, as exemplified in case studies of Appalachian and Californian nonliterates. Juliet Merrifield and her colleagues found that there was less concern “about the impact of literacy language, and education on family relationships for the Appalachian group than for the California immigrants, some of whom fear the loss of their culture in following generations.”37 Although educated Appalachians may leave the region to find work, they usually come home often for visits, so there is less risk of a change in cultures. Likewise, many academics manage to bridge the gap and not feel alienated.
The women in the Preston County study might have had more economic power if they moved away, as some Appalachians do. However, Candy Knudson, a colleague who formerly lived in Preston with her professor-husband and was a nontraditional student in the Preston College English program, shared with me the evolution of her thinking about people who prefer to remain in the region: “The magnificent, awe-inspiring beauty of Kentucky’s hills and ‘hollers’ and the sense of familial commitment made me see ‘wealth’ and ‘resources’ differently. Having been pingponged as academic gypsies, back-and-forth these past many years and realizing too late the negative impact that has on family, I know that ‘poverty’ of soul and poverty of social ties are much worse than poverty of ‘stuff.’” Though I do not mean to valorize poverty, Knudson points out the advantages of remaining in the mountains. In fact, a study of the alumni of twenty-three of the thirty-three colleges that make up the Appalachian College Association revealed that many graduates of all ages remain in the area, supporting my findings.38
By taking their academic literacy and fitting it to their own purposes, these women maintained their common sense and cultural integrity, which they (and other working-class students) feared they might lose by going to college. One of the participants, Mary, said of her eighty-six-year-old grandmother, “I would give anything for her wisdom.” Common sense is defined as “the commonly held conceptions of the world held by various cultures, a culture’s way of seeing and believing . . . carried and transmitted by discourse.”39 Resisting the loss of common sense, and not wanting to be alienated from their families, many students drop out of college. In fact, common sense equates to personal empathy and experience, which, for Horsman’s adult education students, counted for more than an educated person’s knowledge;40 in other words, book learning does not equal “real” knowledge. Luttrell’s adult students in North Carolina and Philadelphia “were drawn to common sense and intuition because these forms of knowledge rest in women themselves (not in higher authorities) and are experienced directly in the world (not through abstractions).”41 Common sense, in reality, is a literacy with its own language and rules,42 and although it generally stands in contrast to education, the dichotomy may not be as absolute as the women feared.
The most important achievement of these nontraditional women, an outgrowth of the “personal is political” argument, seems to be “the sense of self-respect and worth gained from taking that first step into college and sticking it out until they finish[ed].”43 Not getting work in their fields did not seem to matter as much as having something they did not have before. These women’s narratives illustrate that “some people use literacy to make their lives more meaningful, no matter what their economic and political circumstances are.”44
Mary recently called to see if I could help her find a publisher for her poems. In the middle of the conversation, she described the hours she had spent constructing her Web page and went on to say, “After the interview with you [in the winter of 1999], I realized how much I missed writing, so I began writing poetry again.” In addition to the poems, she had written several articles for a local newspaper, summarizing her interviews with local bluegrass artists performing in the region. She informed me that she had quit her position as an environmental lab assistant to return to substitute teaching because the laboratory job was just not satisfying. Continually frustrated that she could not get a teaching job, Mary told me that the school principals she subbed for were pleased with her work, but “when a job opens, somebody’s cousin gets the job!” She has since moved to Pennsylvania, where she is teaching four-year-olds.
Because Preston is so small, I run into the other women occasionally or talk to them on the phone. At least quarterly I see Lucy’s letters to the editor about school conditions and related topics; she was recently elected to the Site Based Council at her children’s school. Lucy also had two works of art—a pencil drawing entitled God, Naked in Our Sins and a piece in acrylics called Memories—in an alumni art exhibit at Preston College. Sarah has taken a new job doing social work in a nearby county after quitting her job as director of a private social work agency. Hope finally found a teaching position closer to home than her previous two-hour round-trip commute. These and other conversations have confirmed for me the continuing importance of language and literacy in these women’s lives.
Notes
1. Katherine Kelleher Sohn, Whistlin’ and Crowin’ Women of Appalachia: Literacy Practices since College (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2006).
2. Victor Villanueva, “Cuentos de mi Historia: An Art of Memory,” in Personal Effects: The Social Character of Scholarly Writing, ed. Deborah Holdstein and David Bleich (Provo: Utah University Press, 2001), 269.
3. Theresa M. Lillis, Student Writing: Access, Regulation, Desire (London: Routledge, 2001), 2.
4. Elisabeth Hayes, “Voice,” in Women as Learners: The Significance of Gender in Adult Learning, ed. Elisabeth Hayes and Daniele D. Flannery (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000), 79–110.
5. Ibid., 80.
6. Anita Puckett, Seldom Ask, Never Tell: Labor and Discourse in Appalachia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), xiii.
7. See William Labov, Language in the Inner City: Studies in Black English Vernacular (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), 72; Peter Trudgill, Sociolinguistics: An Introduction to Language and Society (London: Penguin Press, 1995), 95; James Milroy and Lesley Milroy, Authority in Language: Investigating Language Prescription and Standardisation (London: Routledge, 1991), 91.
8. Gail Okawa, “Resurfacing Roots: Developing a Pedagogy of Language Awareness from Two Views,” in Language Diversity in the Classroom: From Intention to Practice, ed. Geneva Smitherman and Victor Villanueva (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 111.
9. Marina S. Obiols, “The Matched Guise Technique: A Classic Test for Formal Measurement of Language Attitudes,” http://www6.gencat.net/lengcat/noves/hm02estiu/metodologia/asolis15.htm.
10. Reid Luhman, “Appalachian English Stereotypes: Language Attitudes in Kentucky,” Language in Society 19, no. 3 (1990): 331–48.
11. Ibid., 332.
12. Kimberly Donehower, “Beliefs about Literacy in a Southern Appalachian Community” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1997), 98–99.
13. Kelli Caudill and Charity Quillen, Searching for an Appalachian Accent (Whitesburg, KY: Appalshop, 2002).
14. Linda Scott DeRosier, Creeker: A Woman’s Journey (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999), 58.
15. Ibid., 66–67.
16. Jennifer Horsman, Something in My Mind besides the Everyday: Women and Literacy (Toronto: Women’s Press, 1990), 90; Wendy Luttrell, Schoolsmart and Motherwise: Working-Class Women’s Identity and Schooling (New York: Routledge, 1997), 97.
17. Hayes, “Voice,” 94.
18. Ibid., 80.
19. Myrna Harrienger, “Writing a Life: The Composing of Grace,” in Feminine Principles and Women’s Experiences in American Composition and Rhetoric, ed. Louise W. Phelps and Janet W. Emig (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995), 151.
20. Anita Puckett, “Let the Girls Do the Spelling and Dan Will Do the Shooting: Literacy, the Division of Labor, and Identity in a Rural Appalachian Community,” Anthropological Quarterly 65, no. 3 (1992): 137.
21. Ibid., 143.
22. Hayes, “Voice,” 80.
23. Mary Field Belenky, Lynne A. Bond, and Jacqueline S. Weinstock, A Tradition that Has No Name: Nurturing the Development of People, Families and Communities (New York: Basic Press, 1997), 52.
24. Hayes, “Voice,” 52.
25. Ibid., 51.
26. David Barton and Mary Hamilton, Local Literacies: Reading and Writing in One Community (London: Routledge, 1998), 282.
27. Luttrell, Schoolsmart and Motherwise, 32.
28. Lori Neilson, Literacy and Living: The Literate Lives of Three Adults (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1989), 132.
29. Sue Hammons-Bryner, “Interpersonal Relationships and African-American Women’s Educational Achievement: An Ethnographic Study,” Sage 9, no. 1 (1995): 12.
30. Gillian Pascall and Roger Cox, Women Returning to Higher Education (London: Open University Press, 1993), 141.
31. Judith Fiene, “The Social Reality of a Group of Rural, Low-Status, Appalachian Women: A Grounded Theory Study” (PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 1988), 53.
32. Donehower, “Beliefs about Literacy in a Southern Appalachian Community,” 199.
33. Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez: An Autobiography (Boston: Godline Press, 1982); Patricia Bizzell, Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992); Sherry L. Linkon, Teaching Working-Class (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999).
34. Caroline Law, “Introduction,” in This Fine Place so Far from Home: Voices of Academics from the Working Class, ed. C. L. Barney Dews and Carolyn Leste Law (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 1.
35. Mike Rose, Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of American’s Educational Underclass (New York: Penguin, 1989), 226.
36. Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory.
37. Juliet Merrifield, Mary Beth Bingman, David Hemphill, and Kathleen P. Bennett deMarrais, Life at the Margins: Literacy, Language and Technology in Everyday Life (New York: Teachers College Press, 1997), 201.
38. Ernest T. Pascarella, Gregory C. Wolniak, Christopher T. Pierson, and Patrick T. Terenzini, “Appalachian Region Alumni Outcomes Survey (Preliminary Findings),” available from acaweb.org.
39. Victor Villanueva, Bootstraps: An Academic of Color (Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1993), 124.
40. Horsman, Something in My Mind Besides the Everyday, 90.
41. Luttrell, Schoolsmart and Motherwise, 32.
42. Katherine Vanderbrake, personal interview, 2002.
43. John Shiber, “Nontraditional Students: The Importance of Getting There,” Innovation Abstract 32 (1999): 102.
44. Beth Daniell, “Narratives of Literacy: Connecting Composition to Culture,” College Composition and Communication 50, no. 3 (1999): 404.
Language and Power
Anita Puckett
My point of view toward language is different from that of the other contributors to part I, so I must use some space to describe these differences and their influence on the study of language and power relationships in coalfield Appalachian speech. This perspective asserts that languages, whether spoken or written down in some way, should be viewed as always doing “cultural work.”1 That is, it assumes that we actually use language all the time to create “places” for ourselves in the social world around us. This process most commonly involves using speech to consciously or subconsciously accomplish specific goals or tasks. Examples might include asking for a hamburger at a restaurant and getting one, or having an intimate conversation with a loved one and becoming more closely bonded.
