Talking Appalachian, page 26
“Oh, no,” declared the father. “We want the person of higher educational attainment!” He turned to smile at my teaching partner.
Trying to smother her laughter, she simply pointed at me.
“No, we want the one with the highest educational degree.” Again, the parents turned and looked at my partner.
Finally, I tapped the man on the shoulder and said, “That would be me, honey.” I know it wasn’t professional, but I had reached my limit, and he was rude. To make a long story short, nothing I ever did suited them. The mother sent me a list of possible topics for investigation. When I thanked her and proceeded with the agreed curriculum, she complained to the principal that I couldn’t be sophisticated enough to plan a course of study for gifted children. He assured her that I had traveled widely and was trilingual. Then the parents complained that their children were picking up “hillbilly accents.” They finally went berserk when I introduced an Appalachian studies unit.
They fled back north, and the entire faculty breathed a sigh of relief. Both these people were highly educated but ignorant, in the sense that they were simply ill-informed. They equated accent with intellect.
When I first started attending the Appalachian Writers Workshop in Hindman, Kentucky, I met kindred spirits. Intelligent and talented, most of them speak a variety of Appalachian English. We all speak with perfectly “correct grammar” and can soften the edges of our accents when we choose. In our close circle, we code-switch and lapse into our comfortable dialects, using expressions and syntax we would never use in professional life. It’s a form of militancy, I suppose, against people who devalue our spoken words while admiring the written.
My writer friends and I have all had this experience: after a reading, a person comes up and offers to introduce us to someone who can “help with your accent.” I once had a man offer to read my poems to me so I could hear them free of my accent. Another said, “Thank God you don’t write like you talk.”
I suppose if Sir Phil Liggett read my poems aloud, the reaction would be quite different. He could even get away with saying, “I reckon my new book will be ready soon.” Confusing accent with intellect, it’s all a matter of perception.
Carrie Bishop
From Storming Heaven
Denise Giardina
Introduction to the Excerpt by the Author
Every young person who is the first in his or her family to go to college experiences the tension. Higher education changes experience and expectations, particularly with regard to language; those “left behind” worry they will be ridiculed or misunderstood or that their loved one will change in indescribable ways and be lost to them. When an entire culture—especially one that has been historically denigrated—experiences such an earthshaking change, and when this is coupled with the clash caused by mineral exploitation, the conflict intensifies dramatically. I tried to capture this conflict in my novel Storming Heaven, and the excerpt here is a prime example. A young man from eastern Kentucky is fortunate enough to go to Berea College, the classic path to education for mountain youth. At the same time, his family back home is brushing up against the invading armies of coal and timber speculators. And his sister, who will one day pursue an education in nursing, watches while her brother is drawn into the one circle that seems to value his education—the coal companies.
I had a dream the night Miles came home from Berea. I dreamed one of Flora’s quilts hung on the clothesline to dry. It was the double wedding band, neverending loops of purple and red on white backing, paths leading back into themselves, mountain paths that refused to run straight. The quilt did not sag on the line but was taut as if nailed onto an invisible wall. Something moved at its center; it was the point of a knife thrust from the back. The knife cut easily as through butter, with no sound of tearing. I knew Miles held the knife.
“Why are you cutting up Florrie’s quilt?” I asked him.
“To make little covers for the baby’s bed,” he answered cheerfully. “It’s all for the new baby.”
Miles always said “it” now, never “hit.”
“It sounds ignorant to say ‘hit.’ They shamed us out of it at school. Same with ‘aint.’ Educated people don’t use those words.”
Ben sat by the fire and whittled. “Chaucer said ‘hit,’” he observed.
Miles looked startled, then said, “That’s different.”
“Why?” Ben asked.
“He’s been dead a long time. He was medieval.” He said this last word as though it described a very disgraceful condition. “This is the scientific age.”
It rained all that September evening. Daddy, Miles and Ben sat up late, deep in conversation about what Miles called “business affairs.” I listened from the front porch.
“Subsistence farming,” Miles said. “That’s what this is. You can’t make it on subsistence farming any more. The economy is changing. Prices are going up. It’s the miners’ wages doing it. They see more cash than you do, Daddy, a whole lot more. When Pond Creek opens up over here, you won’t be able to make it without more cash.”
Miles planned to move to Pond Creek in November to become superintendent of a new coal mine that was owned by a Boston family, relatives of one of his professors at Berea. That is what education is about, Miles said. To prepare mountain youth to take their place in the modern world. We must not be left behind, he said. Who better to oversee a coal mine than someone who had grown up in the area, someone who understood the men he would supervise? Miles had spent the summer in Boston getting acquainted with his employers and learning what he called their “business philosophy.”
He wanted to buy Daddy’s trees for his coal company.
“We’ll be building houses, using timbers inside the mine. A coal company always needs trees. Daddy, it will be more money than you’ve ever seen. You can even build a new house for Ben and Flora and their children. You get some of the boys from Scary next winter and cut the trees, float them down to the sawmill at Catlettsburg. We’ll pay you cash right there. I can draw up the contract first thing when I start work.”
Daddy spoke so low I couldn’t hear what he said. But he came out on the porch after a while to smoke his pipe and take a breath of air.
“You going to do it?” I asked.
“Aint much to do that time of year no way,” he said.
“I dont think you should. The trees is too pretty.”
He looked at me. “Where’s the women?”
“Gone to the Aunt Jane Place.”
“Why aint you with them?”
“I wanted to hear yall talking.”
“Aint nothing for a girl to hear. Go on down there with them.”
I ignored him, as I did more and more in those days. He was usually scornful of me as well. It had started not long after Albion left, when Daddy learned I was doing most of the hunting. He led me way up on the mountain, pretending we were going to hunt together, then he took my gun and left me without a word. I sat and cried for a long time and listened to the report of his gun on a distant ridge. Then I stumbled down the mountain alone.
He told me he didn’t expect me to find a husband. I was not “deferrin” enough, my tongue was too sharp and I was too forward in my ways. I didn’t believe him. Aunt Jane was not “deferrin” and she had been married. Most of the women I knew on the creeks were strong and feisty and they all had men. Still he hurt my feelings. I held myself distant from him and from other men who might treat me the same.
The boys I knew didn’t interest me. I still waited for Heathcliff and felt nothing for Arley Whitt or Billy Good. None of them paid attention to me either. Aunt Jane said I had my nose up in the air. Flora said I was too shy to flirt properly. Only Aunt Becka said nothing, and her silence frightened me. Did she think us kindred spirits?
I rocked back and forth after Daddy went inside. Rain hammered the roof and drowned out the voices of the men. Spray from the bannisters left tiny wet spots on my cheeks. I closed my eyes and pretended they were the kisses of a man. I couldn’t see his face, but he would be brave and charming, and I would marry him. I put my finger to my lips and pretended he had touched me.
“I love you,” I said softly, to no one.
The High Sheriff
From One Foot in Eden
Ron Rash
Introduction to the Excerpt by the Author
Too often in popular culture, Appalachians have been shown as capable of little more than grunts when it comes to communication. But the language I heard from older relatives while growing up was both inventive and poetic, most obviously in its use of similes, as when my uncle told me a scantily clad young woman “didn’t have enough clothes on to wad a shotgun.” My hope as a writer is that I convey to the reader the richness of the dialect and some portion of its distinctiveness and rhythms.
There had been trouble in the upper part of the county at a honky-tonk called The Borderline, and Bobby had come by the house because he didn’t want to go up there alone. I couldn’t blame him. One badge, especially a deputy’s badge, might not be enough. It was a rough clientele, young bucks from Salem and Jocassee mixed with young bucks come down from North Carolina. That was usually the trouble, North Carolina boys fighting South Carolina boys.
I had a good book on the Cherokee Indians I’d just started, but when Bobby knocked on the door I knew I wouldn’t be reading any more this night. “Go have you a smoke on the porch,” I told Bobby. “It’ll take me a minute to get dressed.”
Janice didn’t open her eyes when I went into the bedroom to get my shoes and uniform. The lamp was still on, a book titled History of Charleston beside her. I looked at Janice, the high cheekbones and full lips, the rise of her breasts under the nightgown, and despite everything that had happened, and hadn’t happened in our marriage, desire stirred in me like a bad habit I couldn’t get shed of. I turned off the lamp.
Bobby and I followed the two-lane blacktop into the mountains. No light shone from the few farmhouse windows, not even a hangnail moon above. Darkness pressed against the car windows, deep and silent, and I couldn’t help but think I was seeing into the future when much of this land would be buried deep underwater.
“It’s a lonesome-feeling night, Sheriff,” Bobby said, like he’d read my mind.
Bobby lit a Chesterfield, his face flaring visible for a moment before sinking back into the dark.
“Haints are bad to stir on a night like this,” Bobby said, “leastways that’s what my momma always claimed.”
“So there are more things in heaven and earth than we might dream of?”
“What?” Bobby said.
“Haints. You believe in them?”
“I never said I did. I’m just saying what it was Momma notioned.”
The fighting was over by the time Bobby and I had got to The Borderline. Casualties were propped up in chairs, though a few still lay amidst shattered beer bottles, cigarette butts, blood, and teeth. It was as close to war as I’d seen since the Pacific. I let them see my badge. Then I stepped through the battlefield to the bar.
“How’d this start?” I asked Bennie Lusk.
Bennie held a mop in his hands, waiting for the last men on the floor to get moved so he could mop up the beer and blood.
“How do you think?” Bennie said.
He nodded toward the corner where Holland Winchester sprawled in a chair like a boxer resting between rounds, a boxer in a fight with Jersey Joe or Marciano. Holland’s nose swerved toward his cheek, and a slit in the middle of his forehead opened like a third eye. His clenched fists lay on the table, bruised and puffy. He wore his uniform, and if you hadn’t known Holland was sitting in a South Carolina honky-tonk, hadn’t seen the Falstaff and Carling Black Label signs glowing on the walls, your next guess would have been he was still in Korea, waiting at a dressing station to be stitched and bandaged.
“What do you reckon the damage?” I asked Bennie.
“Ten ought to cover it.”
Bobby and I walked over to Holland.
“Sheriff,” he said, his wrecked face looking up at me. “Looks like you got here too late to join the ruckus.”
“Looks that way,” I said. “But it seems you got your share of it.”
“Yeah,” Holland said. “Sometimes when a man’s hurting on the inside a good bar fight can help him feel some better.”
“I don’t quite catch your meaning,” I said. “All I know is you’ve caused a good bit of damage to Mr. Lusk’s establishment.”
“I reckon I did,” Holland said, looking around as if he hadn’t noticed.
“I know what it’s like when you get back from a war,” I said. “You need some time to settle back in. You pay Mr. Lusk ten dollars, and we’ll leave it at that.”
“I ain’t got no problem with that, Sheriff,” Holland said.
“Next time you’ll go to jail,” I said. I smiled but I leveled my eyes on his to let him know I was serious.
“We’ll see about that,” Holland said. He smiled too but his dark-brown eyes had gone flat and cold as mine.
He reached into his pocket and lay a leather pouch and roll of bills on the table.
“There, Deputy,” Holland said to Bobby, peeling off a five-dollar bill and five ones. “You run that money over to Bennie.”
Bobby’s face reddened.
“I don’t take my damn orders from you,” Bobby said.
For a moment I was tempted to go ahead and cuff him, because it was sure as dust in August that we’d have another run-in with Holland and he wouldn’t come quietly. Tonight he was already wore out and wounded. Tonight might be easy as it got.
“Take the money to Bennie,” I said.
Bobby didn’t like it, but he picked up the money.
Holland stuffed the roll of bills back in his pocket.
“Look here, Sheriff.”
Holland opened the leather pouch and shook the pouch’s contents onto the table. A Gold Star fell out, then other things.
“Know what they are?” Holland asked, dropping the Gold Star back in the pouch.
I stared at what looked like eight dried-up figs. I knew what they were because I’d seen such things before in the Pacific.
“Yes,” I told Holland. “I know what they are.”
Holland nodded.
“That’s right, Sheriff. You would know. You was in the World War.”
Holland held one up to me.
“You reckon them ears can still hear?”
“No,” I said.
“You sure about that.”
“Yes,” I said. “The dead don’t hear and they don’t speak.”
“What do they do, Sheriff?”
“They just disappear.”
Holland placed the ear with the others. They lay on the table between us like something wagered in a poker game.
“There was some said it was awful to cut the ear off a dead man,” Holland said. “The way I see it, taking his life was a thousand times worse and I got medals for that.”
Holland picked the ears up one at a time and placed them in the pouch.
“These here won’t let me forget what I did over there. I don’t take it lightly killing a man but I ain’t afraid to own up to it either. All I did was what they sent me there to do.”
Holland stuffed the pouch into his pocket.
“What did you bring back, Sheriff?” Holland asked.
“A sword and a rifle,” I said. “Nothing like what you got in that pouch.”
Then Holland Winchester said the last words he would ever say to me.
“There’s some that gets through it easier than others when the shooting starts, right, Sheriff?”
Those words were what I remembered two weeks later when Bobby interrupted my lunch.
“Holland Winchester’s missing,” Bobby said. “His momma’s got it in her head he’s been killed.”
Bobby sounded hopeful.
“You don’t think we’d be that lucky, do you?” I said.
“Probably not,” Bobby said, the hope in his voice giving way to irritation. “Holland’s truck is at the farm. It ain’t like he would walk to a honky-tonk from there. He’s probably just laying off drunk somewheres. Probably down at the river. I told her to call if he comes back.”
“Let’s give him a couple of hours to wander back home,” I said. “Then I’ll go up there and have a look-see.”
Janice sat at the kitchen table, and she flinched when I said “look-see.” Hillbilly talk, Janice called such words, but it was the way most folks still spoke in Oconee County. It put people more at ease when you talked like them, and when you are the high sheriff you spend a lot of time trying to put people at ease.
Janice wore a dark-blue skirt and white blouse. She had another meeting this afternoon. Friends of the Library, DAR—something like that.
“There’s a missing person up at Jocassee,” I said, “so I might not be back for supper.”
“That will be fine,” Janice said, not looking up from the table. “I won’t be here anyway. Franny Anderson invited me to have dinner with her after our meeting.”
I leaned over to kiss her.
“Don’t,” she said. “You’ll smear my lipstick.”
I walked back to the office and waited for Holland’s mother to telephone. When no call came, I got in my patrol car and headed up Highway 288 toward Jocassee, toward what had once been home. The radio said it was over one hundred degrees downstate in Columbia. Dog days are biting us hard, the announcer said. I had the window down, but the back of my uniform already stuck to my skin as I left the town limits. The road was wavy with heat and humidity, its edges cluttered with campaign signs staked in the ground like tomato plants, some for General Eisenhower or Adlai Stevenson and even one for Strom Thurmond. Most were more local, including a couple with my name on them.
The blacktop steepened and pressure built in my ears until I opened my jaws. The road curved around Stumphouse Mountain, and beyond the silver-painted guard posts the land dropped away like those old European maps of the unknown world. If it were late fall or winter I would have been able to see a white rope of water on the far side of the gorge, a waterfall that had claimed two lives in the last twenty years.
