Contemporaries were shocked when author Mary Noailles Murfree revealed she was a woman, but modern readers may be more surprised by her cogent discussion of community responses to unwanted development. Effie Waller Smith, an African American woman writing of her love for the Appalachian mountains, wove discussions of women's rights, racial tension, and cultural difference into her Appalachian poetry. Grace MacGowan Cooke participated in avant-garde writers' colonies with the era's literary lights and applied their progressive ideals to her fiction about the Appalachia of her youth. Emma Bell Miles, witness to poverty, industrialization, and violence against women, wrote poignant and insightful critiques of her Appalachian home. In The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature Elizabeth Engelhardt finds in all four women's writings the origins of what we recognize today as ecological feminism-a wide-reaching philosophy that values the connections between humans and nonhumans and works for social and environmental justice. People and the land in Appalachia were also the subject of women authors with radically different approaches to mountains and their residents. Authors with progressive ideas about women's rights did not always respect the Appalachian places they were writing about or apply their ideas to all of the women in those places-but they did create hundreds of short stories, novels, letters, diaries, photographs, sketches, and poems about the mountains. While The Tangled Roots of Feminism, Environmentalism, and Appalachian Literature ascribes much that is noble to the beginnings of the ecological feminism movement as it developed in Appalachia, it is also unyielding in its assessment of the literatures of the voyeur, tourist, and social crusader who supported status quo systems of oppression in Appalachia.
Riding Deep WatersAn Appalachian Meditation Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt (bio) Solitude is deep water, and small boats do not ride well in it. Only a superficial observer could fail to understand that the mountain people really love their wilderness—love it for its beauty, for its freedom. —Emma Bell Miles, The Spirit of the Mountains In 1905, Emma Bell Miles wrote a parable in her Appalachian manifesto, The Spirit of the Mountains (17). Concerned with unfettered development, new demeaning forms of service industry work, and erosion of community that she witnessed in Chattanooga and Walden’s Ridge, Tennessee, Miles picked up her pen to capture southern mountain cultures before tourism, industry, and rapid spread of national popular culture brought what she saw as devastating changes. Miles employed every strategy she had to hand—close textual description, poetry, paintings, folkloric song recording and transcribing, linguistic gathering of phrases and dialect, interviews, and, finally, the political radical’s protest voice, all in the spare 201 pages of the book. Today we might call it a hybrid, multigenre, experimental text. If she were writing it today, surely it would have a digital component, hyperlinks, and interactive crowd-sourced passages. The voice of The Spirit of the Mountains is as complicated as the structure of the book. Sometimes Miles writes in first-person singular: “Early next morning I shut the cabin door and took my way down the mountain,” on her way to learn how to [End Page 16] weave a coverlet from an older woman in the community (38). In other passages, the first person is collective: “We who live so far apart that we rarely see more of one another than the blue smoke of each other’s chimneys are never at ease without the feel of the forest on every side—room to breathe, to expand, to develop, as well as to hunt and to wander at will” (73). At still other times, Miles positions the narrator as an outsider looking in on mountain residents; after all, they “love their wilderness” (17), a perhaps surprising embrace of early-century wilderness aesthetics not placed in Northeast or West.1 She continues, “All alike cling to the ungracious acres they have so patiently and hardly won, because of the wild world that lies outside their puny fences, because of the dream-vistas, blue and violet, that lead their eyes far among the hills” (19)—and I am left wondering what the narrator thinks in this exuberance of their and they. At the same time, the narrator separates self from tourists, whom she calls summer people or city people: “‘Have we not built roads for a people too lazy to build for themselves?’ say the city people. . . . In short, haven’t we paid them well?” (195, emphasis in original). Calling out misunderstandings about lawlessness among mountain residents, suddenly a second-person “you” sneaks in as the narrator directs the reader: “If you read that no attempt has been made to bring the murderer to justice, you may be reasonably certain that the dead man was not valuable to his neighborhood” (75). In other words, “your” interpretation, “fostered by newspaper stories” (74), needs correcting. In the final manifesto chapter, which begins with a clarion “My people, everywhere” (190), the voices combine, sometimes in the space of a single paragraph: “the mountaineers must awaken to consciousness of themselves as a people. For although throughout the highlands of Kentucky, Tennessee and the Carolinas our nature is one, our hopes, our loves, our daily life the same, we are yet a people asleep” (200). Just when I think I have a handle on the text, Miles shifts yet again. The voice is so personal and so detailed that for years scholars tried to read the book as autobiography. But that proved inaccurate. The superficial observation from the small boat is wrong. Miles lived at times in urban Chattanooga, the birthplace of African American blues singer Bessie Smith and home to a vibrant arts community. Coverage of her writing appeared in newspapers, including the Chattanooga News, for which she wrote a semi-regular column, and the Chattanooga Times, the latter owned by Adolph Ochs (who led the New...
in the central library of the Wyomissing Hills Elementary School a weekly program for one-and-a-half to four-year-old tots and their mothers is being conducted to develop early childhood interest in good books, and to assist the parents in their role. The program pivots on literature for the tot or embracing the tot and has been called Mother Goose Morning. Scheduled half-hour visits for each child and his mother have given the child the opportunity to treat books with informal spontaneous discussion allowing what Lindberg (Micucci, 1964) claims is needed for maximum child development. Now in its third year, the program has been a volunteer staffed school-community endeavor, operating on private and civic donations for book purchases and utilizing borrowed books from both the school and public library. Nevertheless, kept in mind at all times is the type library service Knabe (1964) claims is a necessity.
Trying to Get Appalachia Less WrongA Modest Approach Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution The quiet presence of the mountains testifies that telling shortened and simplified stories of Appalachian people, places, and cultures might prove tricky. Few mountain ranges on the planet are older, have borne witness to more history, and have endured through more seasons of change. All photos courtesy of Roger May. When the editors of Southern Cultures asked me to guest edit a special issue on Appalachia, I said yes immediately. Not only is western North Carolina my family home, but Appalachian Studies is my most long-standing scholarly home. Literature, music, food, art, entrepreneurship, and scholarship from and about Appalachia are energetic, diverse, robust, and prolific right now—and they have long been so. I am thrilled and honored to have helped create this issue you hold in your hands. At the same time, when we began this process, my breath caught in my throat a bit. Because here's what I also know: everyone who has thought they could explain Appalachia—its places, people, or cultures—has gotten it wrong. Every ten years or so, Appalachia's people and culture figure in a national or international discussion—more often as pariahs than participants. Punch line and poster child, Appalachia has long been a cultural scapegoat for the environmental or societal [End Page 4] tragedies that people would rather debate or mourn than fix. All too often it is an empty vessel to be filled with whatever straw men (or women), unexamined assumptions, and a priori claims one wants to set up. Regularly, Appalachia is imagined to need a funeral, to be already gone, to cry out for remembrance. Especially when the discussions have aimed for uncomplicated or simple, the think pieces, talking points, and invocations fall frustratingly short. Maybe this is true about most places, people, and cultures. Big hats or hair, cowboy boots, oil fields, and the ability to leave the nation stand in as an "explanation" of Texas, where I lived and taught for ten years. Reporters "capture" the upper Midwest, where my father is from, by finding casserole dinners, ice-fishing with beer, and river flooding. Places thought to be rural have their population subtracted and their diversity erased; urban spaces, however different from each other, are tagged with an identical set of adjectives. Perhaps this is especially true in the United States today. Fast-paced and wide-swinging pendulums of political, social, and environmental change have pushed 2016 into 2017 and as much guessing as there may be, the ground on which the nation sits feels uncertain and unfamiliar. Appalachia stands out, however, in the sheer length of time that people have believed it could be explained simply, pithily, and concisely. Its land is "strange" and its people are "peculiar"—in speeches in the 1870s and the politics of 2016. Self-identified hillbillies, mountain men, moonshiners, and outlaws are sought to speak for everyone—in penny papers from the 1890s and on reality television today. Serious news stories extrapolate to the whole by focusing in on one industry, and assume that sorting out who is friend and who is at war with it will diagram its complex politics and economies—whether that be timber in 1900, textiles in 1930, or mining through the present day. Media coverage largely portrays one class (poor), one race (white), one religion (conservative Christian), and one world-view (narrow)—and assigns difference to so-called strangers or outsiders. Again and again Appalachia is relegated to the past tense: "out of time" and out of step with any contemporary present, much less a progressive future. Simultaneously, commentators perform sleights of hand to embrace mountain landscapes, sounds, tastes, and fashions as if those have no human lives, trails of earth, or forgotten and erased counterparts behind them. Vacation getaways, popular musicians, newest food fads, and design styles are somehow of but not in Appalachia itself. They are wildly popular and loyally followed by fans around the globe, but they are never reconciled with those other, dark portraits of mountain societies. Whether emphasizing its problems or extracting its products (coal and creative...
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